The electrodrivers powering Grievous’s mechanical arms let each of the four attack thrice in a single second; integrated by combat algorithms in the bio-droid’s electronic network of peripheral processors, each of the twelve strikes per second came from a different angle with different speed and intensity, an unpredictably broken rhythm of slashes, chops, and stabs of which every single one could take Obi-Wan’s life.
Not one touched him.
After all, he had often walked unscathed through hornet-swarms of blasterfire, defended only by the Force’s direction of his blade; countering twelve blows per second was only difficult, not impossible. His blade wove an intricate web of angles and curves, never truly fast but always just fast enough, each motion of his lightsaber subtly interfering with three or four or eight of the general’s strikes, the rest sizzling past him, his precise, minimal shifts of weight and stance slipping them by centimeters.
Grievous, snarling fury, ramped up the intensity and velocity of his attacks—sixteen per second, eighteen—until finally, at twenty strikes per second, he overloaded Obi-Wan’s defense.
So Obi-Wan used his defense to attack.
A subtle shift in the angle of a single parry brought Obi-Wan’s blade in contact not with the blade of the oncoming lightsaber, but with the handgrip.
—slice—
“The blade winked out of existence a hairbreadth before it would have burned through Obi-Wan’s forehead. Half the severed lightsaber skittered away, along with the duranium thumb and first finger of the hand that had held it.
Grievous paused, eyes pulsing wide, then drawing narrow. He lifted his maimed hand and stared at the white-hot stumps that held now only half a useless lightsaber.
Obi-Wan smiled at him.
Grievous lunged.
Obi-Wan parried.
Pieces of lightsabers bounced on the durasteel deck.
Grievous looked down at the blade-sliced hunks of metal that were all he had left in his hands, then up at Obi-Wan’s shining sky-colored blade, then down at his hands again, and then he seemed to suddenly remember that he had an urgent appointment somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
Obi-Wan stepped toward him, but a shock from the Force made him leap back just as a scarlet HE bolt struck the floor right where he’d been about to place his foot. Obi-Wan rode the explosion, flipping in the air to land upright between a pair of super battle droids that were busily firing upon the flank of a squad of clone troopers, which they continued to do until they found themselves falling in pieces to the deck.