“They are the descendants of the ones who put us here,” snarled another of the Drengir. “Look at their weapons, the ones that glow. They are the same.”

Jedi trapped the Drengir there? Before Cohmac could open his mouth to speak of it, the Drengir leader said, “Not the same. The other weapons were red.”

Orla and Cohmac exchanged quick glances. They each knew what that could mean.

Sith.

A shiver crawled up Cohmac’s back as he realized that the Drengir must have fought, and been captured by, the ancient Sith. If the Drengir were deep enough in the dark side to have presented a challenge to the Sith themselves…

Then the Drengir leader said, with a widening grin, “Time to eat.”

Cohmac responded to the motion before he’d even truly seen it, a slash-flash of movement at the corner of his eye. His lightsaber blade sliced through what he could only call a whip of thorns, as thick around as a human’s forearm. It flopped to the floor, then kept thrashing, bending, almost slithering.

But there was no more time to analyze what it was or what had happened, because the Drengir were upon them.

Cohmac reached out with the Force, working to sense his opponents’ moves before they made them, which gave him time to dodge one of their whips. For her part, Orla leapt up over them in a wide arc, flipping head over heels to land behind the Drengir leader. Both blades of her lightsaber sparked as they pierced the creature’s trunk with two rotating slashes, bright white spears emerging through its bark skin.

Instead of collapsing, the Drengir laughed. It pulled forward, free of the saber, and turned around to slash its thorn whip at Orla. Cohmac realized that the trunk was already healing itself—growing new tissue to replace what had been lost.

Damn and damn, Cohmac thought. How do you kill an enemy who can’t be injured?

The situation wasn’t quite as dire as that, as she proved an instant later when she severed the lower tentacles of a Drengir, who collapsed, alive and conscious but unable to regenerate quickly enough to get back into the fight. Those tentacles must be critical to their balance, Cohmac reasoned. At least they knew one vulnerability to strike at.

But even those injures were only temporary. More and more Drengir emerged from the vines, revealing that the Jedi were not fighting a mere armed group—but, yes, an army.

Dez’s ears rang. His head ached. The thing in front of him held a fiery saber like his own and kept shouting something Dez couldn’t understand. Only one word made sense: his name.

He didn’t want to hear his name anymore. He didn’t want to hear anything anymore. Dez simply wanted to make everything stop. They said if he killed this thing, it would.