Seeing Vader, the captain shouted, “Where is the Emperor?” Deez just kept firing.
	Vader turned and looked down to the floor below, where his Master, surrounded by a dozen or more lyleks, was spinning, whirling, leaping, his lightsaber moving so fast it blurred. He looked tiny amid their bulk but moved with preternatural speed, his blade stabbing and slashing and severing. He was laughing, the familiar cackle somehow audible above the sounds of the horde.
	But then a score or more of lyleks lurched at him at once from all sides, leaping and climbing over one another, their tentacles a squirming net, their claws slashing, their massive chitinous bodies blocking him from Vader’s view.
	A thought flashed through Vader’s mind, a stray thought, just for a moment: his Master dead, Vader ruling the Empire, the galaxy, unconstrained by the leash of an old man…
	He killed the thought, leapt from the mouth of the tunnel, flipped in midair, and landed hard atop one of the lyleks. It bucked, tentacles squirming. He drove his blade down through its back and out its abdomen, killing it.
Tentacles reached for him from the left and right, and a third lylek reared up over its dead kin to get at him, but he vaulted from the carcass on which he stood and onto the back of another lylek a meter away. Again he drove his lightsaber down and through it.
	“Master!” he shouted, still unable to see the Emperor in the press of the creatures.
	A blast of power from somewhere under the throng of creatures drove four lyleks ten meters into the air, their bodies shattered by the force of the impact, limbs and tentacles showering down in a macabre rain. His Master stood in the center of the circle of surviving lyleks, his hair mussed, his robe torn, his lightsaber in hand, but otherwise seemingly unharmed.
	Vader leapt down to his Master’s side. They took position back-to-back.
	“Master,” Vader said.
	“Lord Vader,” his Master responded, and chuckled. “Enjoyable, no? Did you consider allowing me to die to realize your own ambitions?”
	Vader didn’t even attempt to lie. “I did, but only for a moment.”
	“Good,” his Master said. “Very good.”
As if on command, the lyleks surged toward them from all sides. As one, Vader and his Master channeled the Force and unleashed blasts of power that slammed into the advancing creatures, shattering several and casting six or seven hard against the walls. Still the lyleks came on, chittering and grasping and slashing.
	Vader and his Master stood back-to-back in the center of the press, their lightsabers murderous red lines that lylek limbs and tentacles and bodies could not pass. The carcasses piled up around them, a mountain of the dead, and still they came on. Soon both of them were covered in gore, lost in the Force, in their unbridled ability to kill.