Chapter 91

  Yoda floated to my side, giving me tips on how to reach the oneness of the force, pressing me to meditate better and calm my overthinking mind to accept the living force.

  "Wrong, this is" Yoda pointed at my doppelganger as it mediated.

  "We all have our weaknesses, mine is stilling my mind and meditating. Ever since I was young.....boy, have I thought that mediation was a waste of time. You'll get over it, Yoda"

  "A young boy... not a young padawan by any chance?" Yoda asked about my long and mysterious past.

  "I've never been a padawan", I answered Yoda truthfully while looking directly at Yoda with the biggest shit-eating grin I could muster. There was joy in messing with Yoda that would always cause a little chuckle in my heart.

  "Frustrating, you are", Yoda pointed out.

  Yoda changed the conversation by filling me in with what I had missed for the past ten years. Boring rebuilding and handing over of power. Stuff that I wasn't needed for but would have sure liked to be part of. The dismantling of the Death Star would have been a lucrative contract that I could have sold for favours to the right pirates.

  Now and again, Yoda would pause and watch as a new doppelganger drifted out of me and disappeared in a blur of speed to join the war.

  "Hurt, does that?" asked Yoda.

  "Not really. My doppelgangers are part of me but not a crucial part of me. At this point, it feels closer to an expelled breath. It was once part of me, but now I don't think about it"

  I walk opposite my mediating doppelganger and turn the hard earth into a flat surface that a fresh doppelganger quickly occupies.

  "The more, the merrier", I answered Yoda's chewed-up lip.

  I repeat the flating of the earth, and fresh new doppelgangers join the mediating circle and position themselves in a cross formation with a single doppelganger in the middle.

  "Doing, what are you?" asked Yoda

  I chuckle to myself and place my last lightsaber in the lap of the doppelganger in the middle "Just making use of all my resources"

  "Going, where are you?" Yoda witnessed me leaving the cave system. We both met back up on top of a glassed hill where I made myself comfortable.

  Yoda doesn't understand what I'm doing, and I refuse to spoil the surprise. Tucked under some loose earth, I focus on the entrance of the cave system my doppelgangers were in. I wait hours upon hours, all while my doppelgangers meditate and practice.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Yoda complains, but I let him as my plan falls into action. A commando team of well-kitted-out Sith eternal pull up on silent hover tanks. Each Sith is doing their best to compress their force abilities and hide from me as they surround the area, but no matter how quiet their actions are, their position is clear as day to me with their constant overthinking and thoughts of murder wafting through the air. Even droids are quieter with their constant low humming static noise from their minds. Years of battle have passed, and the Sith Eternal still hasn't realised that it's their surface thoughts that give away their positions.

  They invade the cave system like angry ants. My doppelgangers fight back, which causes more Sith to enter. I'm chuckling to myself as I predict what's coming next.

  A Sith runs out of the cave, shouting to his comrades that they need to run. That Sith is quickly killed, and the dead Sith evaporates into the force. It was a doppelganger disguised as the enemy. Tricks like that are an old part of fighting me, and the Sith eternal aren't easily fooled by it. A true Sith Eternal runs out of the cave with his hands raised and loudly announces a password.

  This is what I was waiting for. I'm on my belly with a quilt of earth over me while rubbing my hands like a boy on Christmas.

  "What's going on?" asked Yoda as he watched the whole group of Sith charge into the cave.

  "The Sith have long realised that only one person is attacking them and have developed a kill squad to find and assassinate me. Expensive to make and time-consuming to deploy. They believe that they have found the true me and have deployed resources to deal with me," I answer.

  "Look the same as your doppelganger, you do. How do they know it's you down there?" Yoda leans on his ghost cane

  "They obviously don't know, but they also think that only the real me would have the last lightsaber", I answered.

  "What now?" Yoda points at the twenty hover tanks all pointing at the cave, ready to fire at the drop of a hat.

  "We wait and hope that the Sith have a new toy that they can use, I like to see what new weapon or force powers they pull out of their ass in a controlled environment. If they have nothing new, then the doppelgangers will most likely win"

  To answer my great expectation, I witnessed the Sith use a new grenade that emits an energy shield and fills it with chemical, sticky, poisonous compounds. It's a nice try, but even normal Jedi are immune to poisons, let alone my doppelgangers. But there was a nice touch of viciousness when the Sith detonated the acid-like poison with some heat and caused an explosion that destroyed my doppelgangers. In a closed-off tunnel, my doppelgangers didn't have enough room to escape.

  It was a nice move from the Sith that took advantage of the closed-off space and failed movement. Without the doppelgangers to witness through their eyes, I wouldn't know what had happened.

  A sigh escaped my lips "I guess it's time"

  Before Yoda could ask, I pulled out a detonator and released hell. Getting good explosives was hard when you could only rely on what the opponent had, but with a little bit of hogpog backwater tinkering and super large amounts of energy ammo coming from defeated tanks, you could change the landscape with the earth bluging out like a rising giant turtle. It was costly to lose the stockpile of explosive ammo I had collected from the enemy, but the added benefit was the surrounded hover tanks getting swept up from the overturned earth more than made up for it.

  "What now?" asked Yoda as he watched the earth settle

  "That's a good question," I pondered to myself. Fighting for ten years had made me and my doppelgangers incredibly powerful, but I was still just one person against what seemed like a never-ending army of replenishing enemies. I was no closer to winning than I had been when I first started. An all-out frontal war, while very beneficial to my skills, wasn't my chosen way of fighting. Surprises and shadow warfare where I hid and attacked, deception and misdirection were what I had mastered.

  "I think I need to go back to my roots", and just like that, I dismissed all of my doppelgangers throughout Exegol.