The dead world had no name.
Its orbit decayed, its sky split by asteroid scars, and its surface scoured by radiation storms. Once, perhaps, it had held civilization. Now it was just rock and silence—and buried far beneath its scorched crust, something slept.
A black drop-ship broke through the ash clouds, silent and sleek. "Veil-2," its call-sign. One of Serion's personal fleet.
It touched down on a windswept ridge, deploying its escort—eight Mandalorians clad in armor unlike anything in the galaxy.
The MJOLNIR Mark VI: a fusion of ancient human warframe philosophy, Cortosis-weave plating, and Mandalorian traditions. Powered servos, adaptive kinetic dampeners, neural-link targeting, and active stealth weave. Each soldier moved like a storm wrapped in silence.
At their head: Jango Fett.
He scanned the jagged terrain ahead, HUD flickering with ambient scans.
"Thermal dead. EM static. But something's here."
A nod from his second. They moved as a pack.
The mission was clear: recover the third Seed, a relic not of Rakatan make—but something deeper. Serion had traced its signal across a dozen ruined systems. The first Seed had unlocked the forges on Zereth Prime. The second, tested on Dathomir, had proven its power—though it corrupted as much as it enlightened.
This one? Serion called it "the Heart."
They found the vault buried beneath a collapsed mesa. Cyclonic charges breached the outer defenses, and as they descended into the dust-choked interior, the Seed pulsed like a heartbeat heard through the stone.
It hovered at the center of an atrium built from obsidian—impossibly smooth, etched with unreadable code. Unlike the other Seeds, this one was shaped like a lattice—a crystalline sphere locked in a spiral of quantum filaments.
Jango's visor adjusted to its glow.
"Is it active?"
"No sign of defensive systems," came the reply.
Still, they didn't touch it.
Instead, a retrieval drone—cloaked in shielding and anti-Force suppression fields—was deployed. Within minutes, the Seed was secured in a magnetic stasis field and brought aboard Veil-2.
Above, the drop-ship cloaked and vanished.
Far across the stars, Serion stood in silence as the Seed arrived.
His war-mask was removed, his robes laced with circuitry flickering in response to the artifact's energy. Taliya Marr, cloaked in black and bearing the scars of her mission to Tatooine, stepped forward.
"No resistance," she said. "No guardians. It wanted to be found."
Serion said nothing at first. He studied the Seed like a sculptor might study the flaw in marble—an anomaly that promised deeper truths.
"This one connects," he said softly, "not just to machines… but to memory. It holds a lattice of forgotten AI minds. Lost protocols. Dark echoes of what came before the Rakata."
Taliya stepped back. She didn't dare touch it. Not after what she'd seen the second Seed do on Dathomir—how it twisted life and machine into something new.
Instead, Serion raised his hand and spoke a single phrase in a language that seemed to warp the air.
The Seed responded.
A low, harmonic pulse filled the forge. Across the hidden station's AI network, Keshl, the Overseer, stirred.
"Connection expanded," the AI intoned. "Seed lattice recognized. Forge protocols: evolving. Autonomous fleet synthesis available."
Serion smiled.
—---
Meanwhile, in the Galactic Core, chaos brewed.
The Senate chambers had barely recovered from the failed peace talks. Palpatine—stoic, composed, wounded but unshaken—now pushed for full military escalation.
"The Separatists attacked during peace discussions," he declared, voice steady but cold. "This act of betrayal cannot go unanswered."
Clone production was doubled. Shipyards on Kuat and Corellia were reactivated at maximum capacity. Worlds once neutral sent militias to support the GAR. And behind the public fervor, Palpatine met with the leaders of the galactic arms industry.
"We will not win with numbers alone," he said in private. "We need supremacy. Innovation. Total war."
New prototype destroyers. Atmospheric walkers. Biomechanical stealth scouts. All were commissioned under emergency wartime contracts.
But Count Dooku, watching from his hidden base on Serenno, understood something the Senate did not.
"The weapon Serion gave me," he told his inner circle, "is changing the battlefield. Jedi are faltering. Clone divisions report sightings of machines that do not register on scanners. Worlds fall before they even realize they've been invaded."
Grievous, his cybernetic general, had already deployed Serion's prototypes on Felucia and Jabiim. Jedi there encountered war-droids with predictive counter-maneuvers, echoing their own fighting styles. Some never returned.
And yet… Dooku did not trust Serion.
"He plays his own game," the Count whispered to one of his aides. "Even Sidious watches him with caution."
Unbeknownst to Dooku, the Herald—a silent observer, hidden on Kamino—watched the Republic's clones as they evolved. It never interfered. Its directive was clear: observe, report, adapt.
In the shadows, the true war moved like a phantom.
And in the Jedi Temple, Yoda meditated. He had seen echoes in the Force. Hints of technology laced with unnatural presence. He spoke little of it, but to the Council he said:
"Find Zereth Prime, we must. Old secrets there lie."
A small team was dispatched. Jedi knights, brave and skilled. But they never reached their destination.
As their ship entered hyperspace, it vanished.
Not destroyed. Not found.
Consumed by Oblivion.
On Coruscant, emergency lights flooded the Senate chambers.
Palpatine had called for a peace summit with Separatist leaders—a calculated gesture, meant to show willingness. The summit was sabotaged. A massive explosion tore through the negotiation vessel before talks could begin. Blame was traded. Fear escalated.
Public calls for full mobilization roared through the Core Worlds.
Palpatine convened his inner circle—not the Senate, but the manufacturers.
Kuat Drive Yards. Rendili Stardrive. Rothana Heavy Engineering. Techno Union defectors. He met with them in private bunkers, behind closed blast doors, with war plans projected in blood-red light.
"We will double the output of capital ships," he said. "The Clone Army is only phase one. You will prepare for phase three."
"And phase two?" asked a defence baron.
Palpatine's smile was thin. "Already underway."