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SW Gray Tales 28: Breaking Point II
🕑 Added 2025-07-24 18:51:31 +0000 UTCThen there was the Force itself.
A bitch. But a lovely, tantalizing bitch.
It had depth I hadn’t even scratched. You didn’t need a saber to bend the universe.
I remembered the World Between Worlds. That strange liminal space. Pure cosmic power layered in sound and time. If I could access that again? I could walk into the past. Raid ancient Jedi libraries. Pull knowledge out of eras lost to ash and legend.
Just had to keep low. Quiet. Hidden. Like Hermione with the time turner. Except, you know, not screwing it up like she did.
Or maybe I could dip into the metaphysical rivers of Mortis and go full demigod. Become the second coming of Abeloth—wait, did Abeloth even exist in canon? I couldn’t remember. She was never mentioned in any show.
But then again, I wasn’t in the Legends timeline.
Those people were on another level entirely. Everyone jacked, Force horrors around every corner, galaxy-ending invasions every Wednesday.
Disney canon? Safer.
Worse writing, sure, especially in the sequels, but at least you weren’t getting war-crimed by the Yuuzhan Vong every year.
In canon, the big villain was a failed emo kid who threw temper tantrums and cosplayed his granddad.
And that “grandmaster” version of Luke? What a joke. All that character development from the original trilogy—just flushed straight out the airlock.
So maybe I should go full preventive strike.
Cuck Han Solo.
No Kylo Ren. No problem.
I could take one for the team. My body, willingly sacrificed to show the Alderaan princess the pleasures of the flesh, distract her from farmboys and scruffy-looking nerf herders. All for galactic peace.
As for Rey? The other half of the franchise's collapse?
If I had my way, she’d stay on that desert planet forever, happily scavenging junk and never awakening a single Force neuron.
Hell, if I could, I’d go far enough back to make sure her parents never even met. Though with Palpatine’s creepy cloning habits, who knows where in the past he planted his weird DNA bombs.
Still—those god-tier options? They were there.
But trying to access the World Between Worlds at this stage?
That was like a level one player planning a solo raid on the final boss.
The Sith way was always an option. Power through passion. Use my anger, my fear. Let the hate flow through me. It was the fast track, the express lane to power. But man, it was bad for the skin. I’d seen what it did to Palpatine. Dude went from a dignified politician to a cackling raisin in a bathrobe. The rage, the constant simmering hatred… it corroded you from the inside out. A funny thought popped into my head: what these guys really needed was the Sharingan. All the power from emotional trauma without the unfortunate side effect of looking like a melted candle.
The idea of mixing Force powers with anime bullshit tickled something deep in my brain. Imagine—Force Susanoo. Or pulling a Kylo Ren and stopping blaster bolts mid-air, but with style, like some JoJo stand. I could already see the possibilities: Force-enhanced genjutsu, chakra-infused lightsaber swings, a Force Chidori through some arrogant Sith’s chest. Yeah, okay, maybe I was spiraling. But the point was: there were ways to be powerful without turning into a Sith gargoyle.
Still, passion had its place. The Jedi preached detachment, but detachment got them a front-row seat to genocide. The Sith overdosed on emotion and blew themselves up with their own ambition. Both sides were terminally stupid in their own ways. Balance wasn’t just some mythical bullshit reserved for Chosen Ones. It was strategy. Take what worked from both sides. Leave the cult-like nonsense behind.
Problem was, I needed knowledge. Real knowledge. Not the garbage half-whispers from Force visions or cryptic ancient droids vomiting riddles. I needed books. Holocrons. Archives. Temple ruins. Dark side vaults. Whatever. Anything that could tell me how the Force really worked—not just what the Jedi or Sith wanted me to believe.
But the Empire had scrubbed most of that clean. Palpatine had a nasty habit of collecting anything useful and locking it up tighter than his wrinkled sphincter. So I needed to get creative. Maybe find remnants—like Jocasta Nu’s hidden archive, or hit up places like Ossus, Jedha, or Malachor. Yeah, they were dangerous. So was everything else in this galaxy. I'd just need a fast ship, a decent pilot, and maybe a blaster or two.
One step at a time. Build the body. Train the reflexes. Accumulate knowledge. And stay the hell under the radar while doing it. No waving lightsabers around like a cosplay reject. No grand Force gestures unless absolutely necessary. Subtle. Quiet. Deadly.
Because while the Jedi and Sith played their stupid game of space chess, I was playing poker. And I was planning to rig the deck.
Besides, their magic had a price. It always did. You didn’t just chant some words and glow green for free—there were spirits involved, blood offerings, pacts with ancient horrors that whispered in dreams. Nightsister “blessings” could just as easily turn you into a meat puppet for some long-dead crone buried beneath Dathomir’s crust. And if I had to choose between a migraine and a ghostly possession ending in ritual suicide? I’d take the migraine. Every time.
Still, the idea of augmenting myself wasn’t off the table. Just—controlled augmentation. Smart modifications. Less “become a monster to fight monsters,” more “hack the game with legal mods.” The Force was part of it, sure, but there were other avenues. Cybernetics. Biotech. Old Republic muscle-stim enhancement protocols. Shit even the Kaminoans cooked up in their weird cloning labs.
Hell, even Mandalorians had a system. Their armor was their Force. They didn’t rely on mystical whispers or emotional tantrums—they trained, they geared up, they fought smart. I could respect that. No robes, no dogma. Just practicality and rocket boots.
But even if I leaned into that, I had to be careful. Power drew attention. Attention meant eyes on me. Eyes on me meant Inquisitors—or worse. I didn’t want a one-way ticket to Palpatine’s hobby dungeon. That man collected Force-sensitive weirdos the way a serial killer collects teeth.
So no, not the Sith. Not the Nightsisters. Not even the ancient Rakatan psycho-tech cults. I’d have to walk a thin line—one foot in knowledge, the other in survival. Gather what worked. Leave
—or worse, a main character in a Disney sequel.
So what did that leave me with? Fringe Force philosophies. The gray stuff. The off-brand, open-source Jedi knockoffs.
The Baran Do sages on Dorin? They used the Force for foresight, taught calm over chaos. Not bad, but their whole culture depended on living in a toxic atmosphere and having lungs like industrial air scrubbers. I liked breathing. Pass.
The Matukai? Now that had potential. Physical enhancement through the Force. They used meditation and body training to push themselves past normal limits. It was basically Force-powered martial arts mixed with monk vibes. No magic tattoos or blood rituals required, just sweat, discipline, and some funky chant-work. Best of all, most people thought they were extinct. Which meant no angry orders or councils telling me what I could or couldn’t do.
Then there were the Jensaarai. Gray armor-wearing weirdos who blended Jedi and Sith teachings. Conflicted, secretive, and probably a little too culty for my taste—but their emphasis on protection and pragmatism could be useful. I’d just have to avoid getting recruited and branded with some ideological dog collar.
And beyond them? Independent Force adepts. Force witches not from Dathomir. Healers. Seers. Smugglers who could twist probability in their favor. There was a whole undercurrent of people out there who touched the Force without ever needing a lightsaber or a master’s blessing. That was my in. Not flashy. Not loud. Just smart. Quiet power.
Step one? Start gathering knowledge. Old texts, fragments, crashed archives. Sith holocrons were a no-go for now, unless I had a death wish, but Jedi ruins still dotted the galaxy—some buried, some forgotten. Even the Empire couldn’t erase everything. I’d raid what I could, digitize what I found, and piece together my own curriculum.
It wouldn't be fast. It wouldn't be clean. But it’d be mine.
Let the galaxy worship their empires, their legends, their destined Skywalker-shaped icons.
I’d build something better. Something that didn’t fall apart the moment someone threw lightning.
Maybe I was going about it wrong. Maybe brute-forcing my way into some flashy Force school wasn’t the only path. What if I leaned into what I already had?
Hyper Perception gave me absurd sensory input within a five-meter radius. I could feel the tension in someone’s calves before they leapt, the micro-adjustments in their balance before a punch, the disturbance in air pressure before a strike even landed. It was like having a proto-Spider Sense—raw, twitchy, and completely unrefined. I was drowning in data, but had no clue how to translate it into reflexes or tactics. It was like reading ten books at once in languages I only half understood.
Then it hit me.
Hard.
Psychometry.
Of course. I’d been using it to absorb knowledge from old tech manuals, pulling half-erased equations and workshop diagrams straight from the page, residual impressions from the people who’d studied them before. So why the hell hadn’t I ever tried that with weapons?
Not tools—I'd already tried hydrospanners, pliers, random junk from maintenance lockers. The feedback was junk: scattered, useless fragments. Just muscle memory of twisting bolts and muttered curses in ten dialects.
But a weapon?
Weapons carried weight. Not just physical mass—emotional mass. Blood, fear, rage, desperation. A blade used in war, or even just in a single kill-or-be-killed moment, would have soaked up all of that. A sword wasn’t just steel. It was a vessel. A story. Sometimes, an entire life.
And stories… stories left echoes.
I’d been a complete idiot.
I’d been sitting on a goldmine of experience—free training—and ignoring it because I was too caught up in schematics and body mods. Like buying an ancient Jedi library and using it to level a wobbly table.
The plan formed itself instantly.
Step one: Find the right weapon. Not a fresh factory-made blade, but something used. A merc’s battered vibroknife. A dueling saber from some dead noble. Hell, even a rusted machete from a backwater militia, as long as it had history soaked into its grip.
Step two: Deep scan. No light brush with the Force—go all in. Push my Psychometry into the object, dig through the emotional sediment, sift through memories burned into every scratch and dent. Feel the muscle memory, the fighting instinct, the rhythm of battle etched into the weapon by hands that lived it.
Step three: Copy. Practice. Drill those ghostly motions into my real muscles. Fuse it with my Hyper Perception and start building true, functional technique—not from scratch, but from the fragments of killers and survivors who came before me.
It wouldn’t make me a master overnight, but it was better than fumbling around blind. I could steal the feel of skill long before I earned it.
Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to think it’d be enough on its own. Even with phantom sword training and hypersense reflexes, the first time I ran into a real Inquisitor, they'd just yoink the blade out of my hand and choke me mid-sentence.
I'd be left standing like a jackass with great form and zero survivability.
That was the wall I kept slamming into, over and over again. The problem wasn’t tactics or talent—it was raw power. I could feel everything, but I couldn’t do anything. Hyper-perception gave me every ounce of detail in a fight, but that was all it gave. My body wasn't strong enough to act on it fast enough. My Force reservoir wasn't deep enough to move the world with my will.
The question came spiraling back to the same bitter center: how the hell was I supposed to increase my Force powers? Especially the kind that mattered in actual fights—externalization, projection, the push-pull-grab-hurl kind. The kind that let you survive an Inquisitor's arrival, not just sense it a second before death.
The default Jedi answer was patience. Growth. Wait until your body caught up, let your midichlorians multiply with age and maturity, and someday you'd bloom into your true potential. That was fine when the galaxy wasn’t actively trying to murder you before puberty.
I didn’t have time. I might not even have weeks.
And sure, there were ruins—ancient Jedi enclaves buried under dust and silence. There were holocrons, lost techniques, even whispers of half-mad hermits or forgotten sects like the Baran Do or the Zeffo monks. Maybe even more exotic ones like the Sorcerers of Tund, or the Silent Path. But they were scattered across systems, buried under centuries of wreckage and Imperial lockdowns. Some might not even exist anymore. Others would take months just to find, let alone study. Even if I left now, what was I gonna do? Hitchhike to Dathomir and ask the Nightsisters to pretty-please teach me blood magic?
Every direction I looked in was a maybe. A gamble. A slow path I didn’t have the luxury of walking. And even if I found one, I’d still be starting from a place of weakness—low potential, low volume, low Force saturation.
That was the part that stung the most. It wasn’t just the clock ticking. It was the ceiling I could already feel above me, even if I managed to get stronger. Even if I pushed myself through every form, meditated till my brain turned to soup, wrung every drop of knowledge from long-dead Jedi weapons or cursed Sith tomes—I'd still be bound by the limits of what I was. The limits of what I had been born with.
And even worse? There was no way to know how far I’d ever be able to go. No readout. No stat screen. Just gut feelings and guesswork. Maybe my potential capped at ‘decent Jedi Padawan.’ Maybe it didn’t. But I couldn’t risk being wrong.
I slumped back against the wall, my thoughts spinning tighter and darker. Vasha was still sleeping beside me, her face half-buried in my neck as she hugged my emerging teenage body to death, unaware(or maybe aware)) of effects she had on me,snoring like she sold her horses in fair, calm in a way I couldn’t afford to be.
That was the truth that sat like a rock in my chest: no matter which path I took—study, training, ancient knowledge, obscure Force cults—it would all still be filtered through me. And what if me just wasn’t enough?
I didn’t want to reach my potential.
I wanted to break it. I wanted to crack it open with a hammer, scoop out the limits, and rewrite what I was from the inside out.
Because if I didn’t, then I was already dead.
Game over. Thanks for playing. Insert credit to respawn as a moisture farmer on Tatooine. Enjoy the sand.
Fuck. That.
Mediocrity wasn’t an option. Survival wasn’t enough. I didn’t just want to be Ezra Bridger with upgraded senses. I wanted to be more. Faster. Stronger. Unignorable. I needed something offensive. Something that could hit back. I wanted to bend the kriffing rules of this game before the Empire decided my player character was glitching and hit the ‘delete’ button.
The question wasn't if I needed more power. It was how the hell to get it without getting myself, or worse, Vasha, turned into a very dead footnote. (Preferably before my hormones staged a full-scale rebellion and I did something monumentally stupid involving that damn shared bed and my newfound, completely useless-for-this-situation Excalibur.)
Comments
Darth Bane
Go 40k and make a chainsword.
