Books Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars

Eighth Brother only fell apperently to his death but I don't see a body so of all the Inquisitors, he might still be alive

 

He fell to the subterranean depths of the temple complex and was able to break his fall, as a Terellian Jango Jumper, but he had the misfortune of running into Maul soon afterwards. While we never saw a body, the implication is that Maul killed the weaponless Eighth Brother and took his ship.

 

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We don't know that for sure.

 

With new trailer for Jedi:Survivor. I wonder if this book will explain away why Cal and Cere might not be with Merrin and the alien pilot. Maybe they have to split up during the 5 years.

 

That would be logical. I mean, I am sure the game will explain as well, but we will probably see the catalyst here.

Looking at the cover again, it is interesting that the characters all look like their first game appearance, but the Purge Troops look more like the Survivor/Kenobi ones. Guess they changed out their armor faster than Cal's crews changed clothes ;p

 

i'm going to get this just for some nightsister content.wish there was a series just about the nightsisters tho.

 

hope she's just bi because I really want Cal and Merrin to be together!!

 

I would say that she may be closer to lesbian because in The Dark Side (2018) it is said that Nightsisters made more of themselves through I believe technology and alchemy. The writer confirmed this in a tweet as well. Tricia Barr? But, hey, maybe she has a thing for redhead twinks? Either way, I find it interesting that they did a five year skip between the games. A lot can happen in that time. Then again, it has been about 4 years since FO came out.

 

That seems to contradict TCW's where they state that the Nightsisters enslave the Nightbrothers and use them to mate and than to kill them afterwords?

Well anyways besides Merrin and Cal's where they or won't they. I do find it ironic all the attention that Fifth Brother is getting considering how many fans kept calling him a dumb muscle. I just remmber how Seventh Sister use to be more popular than him back in those Rebels days. Now your seeing a lot of him and barely her (she appeared in the Vader comics but that was more of cameos than anything.)

 

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-jedi-battle-scars-excerpt

Spoiler

Today was going to be a good day for the Jedi.

Jedi Knight Cal Kestis was going to make certain of that.

Sure, it was possible that he was one of maybe only two Jedi left.

But those Jedi? They were going to have a good day.

“Hey, buddy, things looking clear?” Cal asked, his voice reverberat¬ing in his ears inside his helmet. From his back, Cal heard two little taps from his droid, BD-1’s way of communicating with him while on a stealth mission. Cal could hear BD-1’s trills via comms, but sound was risky while sneaking and the droid often preferred to communicate by a more rapid and tactile method, knowing the rest of the crew couldn’t understand him anyway. “Thanks, Beedee. Have I told you lately you’re the best?”

A pause. Then:

Tap.

Cal laughed. “Well, this is me telling you. I won’t slack off on it again.”

Tap tap.

A damn good day.

Which wasn’t usually the case, when a guy was crouched on a small, fast-moving space rock hurtling around a large asteroid in the middle of deep space, but Cal’s life wasn’t usual, and he preferred it that way. Kit¬ted out in a full space suit, Cal took stock of his surroundings, breathing in recycled air slowly and steadily so as not to waste it. The orbital de¬bris field circling the asteroid was dense; Cal had to make his way, leap¬ing shard by rocky shard, each one a step closer to the main asteroid at its center, a massive excavated rock, home to a Haxion Brood base Cal and his crew were currently attempting to infiltrate. Ironic, considering the last time Cal had been around a Brood base he’d been trying to break out of it. That time, on Ordo Eris, he’d been captured. This time, the better move was to get someone on the rock first in order to disable the security systems so that nothing would pick up the Stinger Mantis, Cal’s ship, entering from orbit.

And the best way to do that was for someone to hop, from tiny rock to tiny rock, all the way down to the surface of the big rock. From one moving asteroid to the next, flying through space without a tether.

No problem.

Taking a deep breath, squinting his eyes in concentration, Cal bent his knees before pushing off from the craggy rock beneath his boots.

It didn’t take much out here. One jump, and Cal was—airborne wasn’t the right word, without atmosphere or air to be found. It was more like floating. Different from flying, entirely; when Cal pushed himself into the air with the Force, he always felt that swoop in his stomach, the familiar lurch of his still-very-human body alerting him to the fact that he was far, far too high above land for good sense. But out here in space, this felt more like swimming, forward propulsion, his body with no concept of up or down, right or wrong, too high or too low. Forward, floating, only.

He missed the little swoop.

Cal aimed himself toward the next fragment asteroid, soaring straight for it with purpose. Slowly but surely.

The first time his master, Jaro Tapal, had taken Cal out into space, he’d told his Padawan: Once you set something to motion in space, it will continue to move in exactly that way—the same direction, and at the same speed—unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Today, for whatever it meant, Cal was that unbalanced force.

Arms straight out in front of him, Cal’s hands scrabbled for purchase the second they made contact with the next floating fragment. Cal’s impact sent the little asteroid, and him, spinning. He hung on for dear life until, after what felt like ten minutes but was surely just a few sec¬onds, BD engaged Cal’s gription boots and, magnetically driven, they came slamming forward into the rock, stabilizing the Jedi.

Shakily, Cal let go of the rock and slowly returned to a standing posi¬tion. He was glad this was his second-to-last jump. He was used to swinging around from handhold to handhold, making giant leaps of faith first as he worked as a scrapper back on Bracca and then as he in¬filtrated one shady Imperial facility or another over the years, but for some contrarian reason, the pull of gravity was a comfort to Cal. Did it mean, if he missed a jump or his climbing claws failed him, that he’d go plummeting to the ground in almost certain death? Sure. A little bit, probably. But it also meant that he wouldn’t be condemned to die float¬ing away alone in the void until he became a dried-out but freakishly well-preserved Jedicicle.

That was way, way worse.

“Did you live?” Merrin’s voice crackled to life over Cal’s comms. Her accent and often wry way of speaking made the question come off glib, like she didn’t really care about the answer one way or another.

“Did you hear something, Beedee?” Cal asked his droid rhetorically, knowing Merrin well enough to know that the sound of his voice over comms would be enough of an answer to satisfy Merrin’s sarcastic but still genuine query. “Sounded almost like . . . someone who was worried about us?” he added in a sing-songy voice.

“Must have been your imagination,” Merrin responded contempla¬tively. There was a beat of silence as though she were deep in thought. “Yes, next time we’re hard up for credits we’ll just drop you in a cantina. You’ll survive.”

“Hey,” a voice interrupted—Greez. “If anybody’s gonna be makin’ tips for their looks around here, it’s me. You bipeds don’t appreci¬ate what a catch I am to those with real taste out there.”

A flurry of taps was the response from Cal’s back. He made sure to momentarily turn off his comms before he let out his laughter.

“If we’re done, crew”—Cere’s more cere-ious (Cal’s favorite way of thinking of his mentor and Jedi Master) voice commanded attention, even over the comms—“Cal, how long until you make landfall and can grant us access?”

Back to business, then. Always.

Now on the precipice of entering the Brood base, Cal took another moment to survey the situation in front of him. This wasn’t a typical mission; none of the Mantis crew’s exploits were, he supposed. But even for them, this was a bit of a reach.

He stood on a small, spinning rock in the middle of open space, sur¬rounded by the debris of a ruined planet. What was once, Cal had been told, a verdant, bright home to millions had been chewed up and spit out at the hands of one Empire or corporation or another; it was hard to keep track, after a point. What remained were only the fragments of what once was, shards and dust and islands in the void, orbiting the former planet’s solid-iron core.

It was the core Cal set his sights on now, directly above him—the core, and the Haxion Brood base dug directly into it, surrounded by a hastily assembled outer ring with an assortment of hastily assembled shacks and market stalls, and covered by a vacuum-proof bubble of shielding, with sensors to detect ships of any size.

But not, conveniently, to detect anything human-sized that happened to be equipped with a jetpack.

Or in Cal’s case, equipped with enough foolhardy bravery to float in without one.

Greez had explained the mechanics of the base’s sensor system dur¬ing a pre-mission briefing. The shield’s sensor field swept the asteroid just fast enough to detect anything bigger than a person, but just slow enough to allow bounty hunters individual access to their base without being monitored.

But the Mantis crew were the best at what they did. And they were doing it right now.

And that’s why Cal was having such a damn good day.

“Eyes on the landing pad,” Cal responded to Cere. “Launching in three—two—”

For the—blessedly—last time today, after what had felt like hours of leaping from rock to rock across the asteroid belt, Cal felt BD disengage his boots and he pushed off from the final rock, launching himself straight up. He experienced a brief moment of disorientation approach¬ing the base headfirst: Up was down and down was up and did anything really matter in space? This was why Cal preferred gravity.

“Greez, you better be right about this,” Cal muttered, mostly to him¬self, but without turning off his comms, as his head approached the magnetic shield at a rapid pace.

He felt his helmet make contact with the shield bubble and, for just a second, he felt resistance—like when you pushed on Greez’s infamous Gelatin Surprise (the surprise was that it was full of salt) and it kind of, weirdly, pushed back. But it was only for a moment, and then Cal was through.

And suddenly there was his old friend, gravity, to meet him.

Cal took back everything he’d just thought about missing gravity. He would actually have preferred to be back in the void, thank you very much, because now he was plummeting headfirst toward the ground, which was approaching his face very rapidly, and—

Focus.

He heard the voices in his head—not voices, really, but more of a feel¬ing, and a memory, and a ghost, all at once.

And himself.

Cal had no idea if the Force felt the same to everyone; he’d read and heard all sorts of descriptions since he was a kid. From his first teacher, Jaro Tapal. From his most recent master, Cere. From the other young¬lings he’d trained with, before—

Before.

But for Cal, it was always the same. It was like a deep pool, blackest in its deepest fathoms, swallowing him whole as he dived down, down into it and emerging into a void where color and sound became muted, distant. It was an expansion of his consciousness; a brief direct connec¬tion to the source of all things. Like stretching his arms forward into meditation, settling into and moving through the void that connected every living being, his ripples spreading out concentrically like inter¬locking circles affecting the world around him. This had been harder, once; he’d had to suppress his abilities for so long that the void had felt stagnant, empty. But now years later, with great practice and focus and peace with the present . . .

Now Cal reached out to the Force, and the Force reached back.

With speed and balance most beings wouldn’t—shouldn’t—normally have access to, Cal managed to land arms-first, tucking and rolling flawlessly. A move that would, under other circumstances, have snapped his neck.

He jumped back to his feet before he could consider it much further.

“Landfall,” Cal reported quietly over his comms. He tucked himself into the shadows at the corner of the closest building.

 

I don't play the video games so I never got the Battlefront books, is this accessible to those who don't play?

 

You should fix that, Twilight Comoany requires no knowledge of the game

 

https://ew.com/books/star-wars-jedi-battle-scars-excerpt-fifth-brother-attacks/

Spoiler: Synopsis

"Cal Kestis has built a new life for himself with the crew of the Stinger Mantis. Together, Cal's crew has brought down bounty hunters, defeated Inquisitors, and even evaded Darth Vader himself. More important, Merrin, Cere, Greez, and faithful droid BD-1 are the closest thing Cal has had to a family since the fall of the Jedi Order. Even as the galaxy's future grows more uncertain by the day, with each blow struck against the Empire the Mantis crew grows more daring.

"On what should be a routine mission, they meet a stormtrooper determined to chart her own course with the help of Cal and the crew. In exchange for help starting a new life, the Imperial deserter brings word of a powerful, potentially invaluable tool for their fight against the Empire. And even better, she can help them get to it. The only catch—pursuing it will bring them into the path of one of the Empire's most dangerous servants, the Inquisitor known as the Fifth Brother.


"Can the Imperial deserter truly be trusted? And while Cal and his friends have survived run-ins with the Inquisitors before, how many times can they evade the Empire before their luck runs out?"

Spoiler

STAR WARS JEDI: BATTLE SCARS EXCERPT
When a mission goes awry, Cere and Cal find themselves face-to-face with the Inquisitor known as the Fifth Brother.

Reaching out through the Force was second nature to Cere at this point in her life. It was as much one of her senses as sight or smell, a constant input and output from her energetic body that pulsed into the world around her, flowed through her mind, seeped out of her pores. She let her mind roll out through her palm, across the rapidly closing space between herself and the onrushing Inquisitor, into his lightsaber, and all at once time slowed.

Her nerves felt electrified as she rushed down each side of the sword, its blazing atoms searing her brain, and she willed it, just enough, not too much to get her into trouble, to hold.

She knew what Cal would see, from where he was getting back on his feet. He would see the Inquisitor slow like he was hitting a wall of water, his feet betraying his own orders to continue their forward motion. He would see the red lightsaber and its circular threat halt, frozen mid-spin, returning to its less dangerous form. He would watch the Inquisitor sweat as he tried to push back through the Force, to regain control over himself and over his lightsaber, and he would see the dawning fear on the Inquisitor's face as he realized he was outmatched.

Cere had faced down Darth Vader himself and lived. She had come the closest any living soul ever had to ending the Sith's reign of terror over the galaxy. She was possibly the most powerful remaining Jedi in existence.

And she wasn't going to let this punk forget it.

She felt the pushback through the Force, the Inquisitor's attempt at ruining her control, and bit down on her bottom lip. There was a way to end him through the Force, just like this, and it would be so easy. It would be an assured victory. To flow up from his lightsaber over his arms, to spill over his shoulders and creep around his neck before he even became suspicious, before he was even able to notice. All she'd have to do was curl her fingers into a claw as she squeezed the Force around his neck. She would watch the light drain from his eyes and she would know that the Mantis crew would be safe, that the future of the Jedi Order would be one step closer to assured.

Connecting to that energy—to the dark side—that was how she'd held out for so long against Vader.

She knew it, and Vader had, too.

But that was a slippery slope to nowhere good, and Cere didn't have to go there ever again. Not against someone who pulsed back at her through the Force with raw emotion, all rage and spite and lack of control.

And, of course, one of the ways the dark side lied to you was by trying to convince you it was the only way. For in truth, it was Cere connecting to the light again that had allowed her to defeat Vader in that moment, after all.

She could feel that the Fifth Brother was getting ready to break. But she would use the light to break him first.

With a yell, Cere dropped her hand and the control over the Inquisitor's lightsaber and movement and flung herself toward him, launching herself forward with her blue blade. It took him too long to realize he'd been freed; he wasn't ready for her when she came at him in a flurry of swipes that put him on the defensive. With each clash of their weapons, Cere hit again and again, matching his style almost exactly, knowing that it would disconcert him and keep him off balance to see his own technique mimicked back at him, and more effectively.

"Want to finish this together?" Cal was beside her, lightsaber out and up at the ready, and the Inquisitor's eyes were wide at the challenge of two Jedi at once, both bearing down on him with a ferocity he clearly hadn't been expecting when he showed up to take down Cal on his own.

The Inquisitor was clearly infuriated by this development; all his energy was now focused on the fight at hand. He barely managed to dodge a swing from Cal's blade without going reeling into Cere's, and she knew they had him.

If they kept on like this, they could destroy him.

But Cere knew that wasn't always the way. She had to try.

Just as with Trilla, she had to try.

Using the same energy she had a moment ago, Cere threw up her other hand as she blocked an attack with her lightsaber—but this time, she stopped Cal and his lightsaber in their tracks.

The Inquisitor paused in surprise as Cal, too, gurgled his shock from next to her, the only sound he could manage while frozen.

"This isn't the only way," Cere said through gritted teeth, holding back his weapon with hers, arms straining in the effort of it. "You can leave them. Come back to the light. It isn't too late."

The Fifth Brother paused, for just a moment. Cere watched a shadow pass over his eyes, reflected in the red light of his blade.

And then he laughed, breaking away from Cere's lightsaber, lunging backward, and swinging madly toward Cal.

Cere dropped her hold on Cal just quickly enough for him to throw up his sword in defense, which infuriated the Inquisitor no end. With a snap, the Fifth Brother disconnected the two sides of his lightsaber, wielding one in each hand. Cere focused on his right while Cal bore down on him from the left. The Inquisitor was strong, but it was two against one, and Cere could still manipulate some of his movements through the Force, could still anticipate his next move before he made it. Together, Cere and Cal pushed forward, keeping the pressure on the Fifth Brother, meeting and matching each one of his blows with one of their own. He was outmatched and overpowered but his stamina was endless; he met each of their hits with one of his, both of his hands moving at lightning speed, rarely reaching for the Force, relying purely on his skill with the blade to try to keep them on the defensive.

The question, the wondering, even for a split second, was a distraction Cere couldn't afford. The Fifth Brother saw his moment through the sweat dripping into Cere's eyes and he took it, lunging forward with both swords as Cal rebounded from a parry, and Cere was just too slow by just a fraction of a second, and one of his red lightsabers burned into her shoulder before she could spin away.

It was the worst thing that could have happened in that moment. Cal looked over in shock, worried about Cere—he was too attached, would always protect his allies over everyone else at all costs, even if his ally told him to do otherwise. It was always going to be an issue with him, but it was also what made him so good, and Cere wasn't ever really sure what to do with that, how to handle it, and right now it looked like it would be his own downfall. The Inquisitor threw out a hand, shoving Cal back off his feet and up into the air, slamming him into the ceiling with so much speed that Cere winced when she heard the concrete crack under the force of it.

She had to make a split-second decision as Cal, unconscious from the hit, came tumbling back to the ground, and there was no choice at all, not really, even though she knew she would be leaving herself vulnerable. Cere pulled her focus back from the Inquisitor just long enough to cushion Cal's fall with the Force, to catch him and place him gently on solid ground.

It was enough of an opening for the Fifth Brother to regain control over the situation, just as Cere knew it would be.

And there would only be one way out.

Cere had less than a second before the Fifth Brother's lightsaber was slicing up toward her abdomen with every intention of cutting her in two straight up the middle, ruthless and unstoppable.

For anyone who wasn't Cere.

Reaching deep into the Force had a feeling to it, a rush that Cere knew would be addicting if she gave in to it one too many times, if she let that channel stay open longer than was absolutely necessary. It felt like triumph and glee, spice and starfire skee, like there was something telling her she was meant to feel this way and wasn't everything better like this and didn't she want to stay here forever, couldn't she just live in this right here and never leave?

That's what it felt like.

There was a time when Cere would have reached out to the dark side of the Force in a moment like this. Had done so, first to save Trilla, then to save Cal from Vader. But she knew better than to go there again. Would never go there again.

Cere saw Cal hit the ceiling, watched the twitch of the Inquisitor's lightsaber as it changed course to gut her, and all she felt—all she allowed herself to feel—was empathy.

Empathy for Cal, and for everything he'd lost. For this poor Inquisitor, and for the Knight of Good he was supposed to be. For herself, and the way she'd had to run from everything and everyone in this damn galaxy for her entire life, if only to save it. But most of all, empathy for even the Sith; for the people who would misunderstand and misuse their galaxy-given purpose to destroy balance in the Force, to bend it to their will alone, all for the glory of power and empire and personal gain. That seemed so very lonely.

Cere let her empathy flow through her, and the Fifth Brother's lightsaber shattered wide into its component parts.

Not like an explosion, nothing so uncontrolled. It was more like an unmaking, an unraveling, each piece of the lightsaber separating itself from the next, spiraling outward into a little galaxy itself, orbiting the now exposed kyber crystal at its core.

Cere looked up into the Fifth Brother's shocked eyes as the tiny pieces of what was once his lightsaber clattered to the floor.

She saw awe in his eyes, and in that moment—all Cere wanted was to see more.

She could help this man.

She could help them all.

 

Well, that are the most ... complimentary words about the Fifth Brother so far.

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-w...xclusive-preview-of-the-jedi-survivor-prequel

 

Now that is an interesting moment, don't remember that it was established before.

Merrin's thirst for killing stormtroopers is creepy.

 

no reaction to the stormy being a Keshiri ?

 

Doubt that it will play a big role.

 

She is a darksider, even if she is on the hero's side.

Is this our first non-human stormtrooper in canon?

Also, I wonder if Merrin's diminishing abilities will explain why she is not with the Mantis crew in the sequel, that she needs to go back to reconnect with the planet or something.

Spoiler

....wait, this implies that Merrin knows that the Sith were behind the separatist attack on the Nightsisters and connected to the Empire...but how does she know that? In general I think even most anti-imperial people didn't know that Palpatine was behind both sides of the clone wars and more saw him as a opportunist, and for Merrin in particular I remember the first game portraying her as not remembering the attack that well, in particular mistaking Grievous for a jedi - for matter, Cal didn't seem to know what she was talking about so how does a random stormtrooper know about the separatist attack on Dathomir which I can't see being a big news story in universe - and not knowing much of the wider galaxy.

Hmmm...maybe I am overthinking it and the Mantis crew learned enough to guess at the truth.

Oh, interesting. I got she was non-human, but I missed where it established her exact species. Huh, a Keshiri out and about in this time period implies planet Kesh had a very different history in this version of the universe. Which isn't a huge surprise in retrospect, but still interesting to think about.

But anyway, between her, and the Pantoran and Zeltron imperial pilot skins in Squadrons, it seems like near-humans have more presence in the Empire than other species.

 

The excerpt didn't use the name, just the description, but one of Del Rey's editors confirmed it on Twitter.

 

DO YOUR MAGIKS MAN

 

Ah, very cool. Thanks!

Writer: "You know what? Kriff Sinrebirth in particular."
Editor: "Yeah, fight the One Canon!"
Both: *laugh evily as they plan a contradiction between continuities.*

Though more seriously, One Canon starts with trying to reconcile two very different sequels, so this seems easier to deal with by comparison. All one needs is an excuse for a breeding group of Keshiri to get off Kesh and establish themselves somewhere else.

Like, Kesh actually got incorporated into the SWTOR Sith empire but got isolated again after that fell and eventually knowledge of that was lost on Kesh or covered up out of shame.

 

Turns out she is pan. Ship away!