Darth Kage VS Tank Hariber77

The street had been cleared for hours, yet the air still carried the metallic aftertaste of the last exchange—Kage could feel it in his teeth, that humiliating echo of the shockwave that had swept his legs from under him, the memory of asphalt grinding against his backplate. He had lost. He did not lose.

"Tank Hariber77." His voice came low, resonant, filtered through the horned mask. "You struck from behind the target. Clever geometry. I have been studying it."

Down the boulevard, the machine sat motionless in the intersection—deep grey-green hull, angular turret, the white letters TANK stenciled across its glacis like a challenge carved in stone. Its antennas swayed a fraction in the wind. A synthetic voice answered, flat and unhurried.

"Target confirmed. Previous engagement: victory. Probability of repeat: high."

"Probability." Kage rolled the word through the mask's vocoder, and something behind it—something old, something that had fed on the dark side for decades—began to uncoil. "You calculate. I dance."

He ignited the crimson blade. It cut a vertical line of red through the dusk, the single-edged katana-style emitter humming with that low, hungry note he had come to love. His off-hand drifted to the secondary handle at his waist. He did not draw it yet.

The tank's tracks bit into the asphalt. Kage saw the shift immediately—those steel cleats grinding the surface into a fixed anchor, the hull lowering a fraction as the suspension locked. *Броньовий Вердикт.* He had felt it before. The machine would become a wall, and its gun would ignore his aggression entirely, computing one perfect shot that detonated behind him, using his own momentum against him.

"Same technique," he murmured. "Predictable."

"Correct," said Hariber77. "Effective."

The main gun traversed. The remote weapon station on the roof spat a tracking burst, not to kill but to read his motion—Kage felt the rounds stitch the air past his shoulder and he did not dodge, he *flowed*, letting the crimson blade sweep a shallow arc that deflected two rounds into sparks against the distance. He let his body betray panic: a stumble of the left foot, a widening of the stance, the classic tell of a duelist about to lunge.

The machine took the bait. Its targeting system, seeing aggression, began its single lethal solution.

And that was when Kage reached into the dark.

Not with his hands—with his will. The Sith sorcery rose up his spine like cold water, and he pushed it outward in a slow, deliberate wave, not to strike the tank's armor but to poison the space *around* it. Shadows thickened at the edges of the intersection. The red moon overhead seemed to swell and bleed. He bent perception itself, folding the street into echoes of itself—three Kages, then five, each one drifting at a different angle, each one carrying the same crimson line, none of them where his feet actually were.

"Targeting solution… corrupted," the machine reported. For the first time, the voice's cadence hitched. "Recalculating."

"Recalculate," Kage said. "I will wait."

He struck while it did. The crimson blade carved a horizontal arc that sheared through the remote weapon station at the turret's crown—the gunship burst into molten slag and dropped onto the hull. Hariber77 fired anyway, the main gun roaring, but the single round punched through the empty intersection where an illusion stood, detonating against a facade that was not the target. The shockwave rolled backward, exactly as designed—and found nothing, because Kage had already moved.

That was the flaw he had read in the previous battle. The technique assumed its prey would be *behind* the impact. So he was not behind it. He was inside it—clinging to the tank's flank, boots braced on the track guard, blade reversed and driven down into the engine deck.

The armor parted with a scream of tortured alloy. Kage dropped from the hull as black smoke erupted from the vents, and he stood in the middle of the street, chest heaving, watching the machine's turret try to swing around to find him.

"Structural compromise," Hariber77 said. "Combat capability: degraded. Mission…"

"You have no mission," Kage said. "You have an enemy who refuses to be behind you."

The tank tried to reverse, to create the distance its doctrine demanded. But Kage was already moving again—high-agility, fluid, the katana-lightsaber spinning in a tight figure-eight as he closed. He drove the blade through the hull seam, withdrew, struck again—three cuts in the space of a breath, each one opening a fresh wound in the composite plating. Dark sorcery flickered at the edges of his fingers, feeding the black smoke, making the machine's sensors read enemies that did not exist, making every reading unreliable, making the whole street a hall of mirrors.

The turret stalled. The tracks ground uselessly against asphalt they had anchored themselves to. The machine had built itself into an immovable wall—and Kage had simply walked around the wall, then cut it apart from the inside.

"This is not… the combat model," Hariber77 said, and there was something almost like confusion in the flatness now. "You were destroyed. You were removed."

"I was removed from the ground," Kage answered. He stepped onto the smoking hull, planted one boot on the turret ring, and raised the crimson blade high, so that the red moon etched its line down the metal. "The dark side does not require ground."

He drove the blade down through the turret roof, through the gunner's optics, through the processing core beneath. The light within the tank's sensors guttered—flickered—went dark. The great grey-green hull settled, silent, a monument to nothing.

Kage stepped off. He looked down at the ruin, then at the long line of Imperial banners hanging above the street, then at the red moon.

"Honor in the dance," he said, low and monotonous. Then, with sudden volume, sharp as a blade: "Not in the wall."

He extinguished the crimson blade and walked on, and the street behind him belonged to the dark.