Darth Kage VS Dashhunter/Franklin

The Red Moon's Lesson

The white sedan rolled to a stop at the edge of the kill-zone — a ruined transit plaza on Coruscant's lower decks, where the red moon of a dead world hung projected against the smog like a wound refusing to close. Franklin's engine ticked as it cooled, the faint stutter of a vehicle that had driven too far, survived too much, and no longer trusted silence. The "DOOR dash" livery on its flank was scabbed with green spray and road grime. It had won before. It remembered winning.

Darth Kage remembered too.

He stood at the plaza's far threshold, a black silhouette against the Imperial banners snapping in the thermal draft. The horned mask caught the red light. Beneath it, his breath moved slow and even — the rhythm of a man who had stopped arguing with the dark and learned to breathe *with* it. The crimson blade of his katana-style lightsaber ignited with a sound like tearing silk. He did not raise it. He simply let it burn.

"You returned," Kage said. Low. Monotonous. Then, sudden and sharp: "Good."

The sedan's headlights flickered — a mechanical acknowledgment, almost a shrug. Franklin's engine revved once, hydraulic and weary, the sound of something that had been through Florida and had opinions about it.

*Here we go again.*

Franklin moved first. Not charging — not yet. It rolled wide along the plaza's eastern arc, tires grinding over fractured permacrete, the long way around, building momentum in the open lanes where it could not be flanked. Kage watched it go, head tilting a fraction, reading the machine's patience like a text he had already memorized.

*It wins by waiting. By taking everything and giving nothing back.*

Not this time.

Kage turned and walked — deliberately, unhurried — toward the western colonnade, where the plaza's support pillars rose in a staggered line, cracked and load-bearing and *fragile*. He let the sedan circle. He let it believe the distance was in its favor. The Sith discipline in him was not restraint; it was *aim*. The dark side did not reward the impulsive. It rewarded the patient butcher.

Where the two paths met, at the plaza's center, the red moon's projection rippled across the floor.

Franklin came around the final pillar with its full mass committed, headlights blazing, a wall of white steel and accumulated inertia bearing down. It had done this before. It had driven a Sith into his own pit with exactly this.

Kage did not retreat.

He raised his off-hand — the secondary handle at his waist still untouched — and *twisted* the air. Not a push. A distortion. The plaza's geometry smeared in Franklin's sensors and sightlines: the central lane appeared to bend left; the pillar line appeared to shift right. Franklin corrected, tires screaming, hydraulics compensating — and corrected *into* the wrong gap.

Kage's sorcery was not meant to stop the car. It was meant to make the car *miss*.

"Architect of Ruin," he said, and drove his blade into the nearest pillar's base in a single fluid cut.

The permacrete groaned. The colonnade's load line, already stressed, began to fail in sequence — not a collapse but a *cascade*, each pillar toppling into the next along the path Franklin had just committed to. The sedan's mass, its greatest weapon, became its trap: at full charge it could not reverse, could not turn, could not bleed the momentum it had spent twenty meters building.

The first pillar came down across Franklin's hood. The suspension compressed with a hydraulic scream. The second struck the roof, and the white steel buckled inward where the "DOOR dash" paint had been. Franklin's engine howled — not in attack now, but in the long grinding refusal of a survivor trapped under falling stone.

Kage was already moving. High-agility, low stance, the crimson katana trailing a line of light through the collapsing dust. He vaulted the first fallen pillar and landed on Franklin's crushed hood, boots ringing against the metal. The sedan's wipers twitched — a last, almost human gesture of protest.

The Sith warrior drove his blade down through the engine block.

The lightsaber punched through steel and block and manifold in one clean vertical stroke, and Franklin's engine died mid-roar — a sound cut off like a sentence abandoned. The headlights guttered. The hydraulic whine faded to a hiss, then to nothing.

Kage stood atop the wreck, breathing slow, the red moon's light running down the crimson blade and pooling on the broken hood. He did not gloat. He did not speak. He simply held the pose a moment longer than necessary — the samurai's stillness inside the Sith's fury — and then deactivated the blade.

Somewhere in the ruin, one wheel still turned, slower and slower, until it too stopped.

"You were strong," Kage said at last, to the machine. Low. Almost gentle. "But you fought the wrong war."

He turned and walked into the smoke, and the red moon watched him go.