The cloning process was progressing smoothly.
Shepard stood before a massive curved viewport in Kamino's Prime Cloning Chamber, watching row after row of developing clone embryos suspended in nutrient-rich cylinders. The hum of machines, the rhythmic pulses of life support, and the muted chimes of console alerts formed a strange symphony—one of science, order, and impending war.
He had spent the last month running thousands of simulations.
Accelerated cell division. Behavioral imprinting. Memory loop implantation. Growth-to-deployment scaling. Fail-safes. Internal inhibitors. Each algorithm, each parameter, had to be perfect. One mistake at scale could destroy the entire army. But Shepard's modifications to the cloning matrices—subtle but powerful—streamlined the process far beyond what the Kaminoans expected.
He wasn't just replicating soldiers.
He was rewriting the foundations of war.
But even as he guided the Republic's forces into existence by day, his thoughts remained far from Kamino.
A soft ping echoed from his wrist console.
Shepard stepped away from the viewport and moved into his private data alcove. A secured feed blinked to life, displaying real-time telemetry, vitals, and atmospheric data.
Location: LehonUnit Seraph Status: ActiveMission Phase: Execution
He smiled.
Far across the stars, on the ancient, half-submerged world of Lehon, once known as Rakata Prime, seven shadows moved through the darkness of a ruined temple.
Unit Seraph—black-armored, silent, lethal—descended deep beneath the surface of the ancient structure, their HUDs displaying cryptic glyphs etched into the walls, half-erased by time. The deeper they went, the more the Force itself seemed to hum in the air—something twisted, buried, and hungry.
"Area clear," whispered Seraph-3, his voice muffled by rebreather filters. "Echoes of movement ahead. Heat signatures minimal. Looks like beasts."
Seraph-1 gave a signal. The squad moved forward.
Beasts indeed.
The deeper levels of the Rakatan temple were infested with mutated guardians—flesh twisted by ancient Sith alchemy and centuries of exposure to dark energies. They moved like shadows through crumbling halls, leaping from columns and snarling with acidic breath.
The Seraphs engaged swiftly. Blasters, blades, and nanite-augmented reflexes turned the would-be ambush into a massacre. Within minutes, the team reached the Core Archive Chamber—a sealed vault beneath the temple that hadn't been touched since the fall of the Infinite Empire.
"Target acquired," Seraph-4 said, placing the black canister at the base of the supercomputer.
The canister hissed, then bloomed open like a black flower. Inside, billions of Shepard's nanites surged forward, flowing across the console like a river of mercury. They didn't just download data.
They consumed it.
Layer after layer, ancient databanks were stripped, parsed, duplicated, and stored within the nanite memory lattice—compressed into structures Shepard could later integrate into his own network.
The stream of data was endless—schematics of long-lost battle stations, droid armies that could rival anything in the Republic, hyperspace manipulation technology, and the blueprints for the legendary Star Forge itself. But most disturbing of all was the knowledge of the Force—not as religion, but as formula.
Mathematical approximations of Force powers. Genetic drift theories. Early Rakatan attempts to replicate midichlorian behavior synthetically.
Seraph-5 explored a side chamber while the nanites worked.
"Command, we've found a hidden compartment. Concealed door. Biometric lock. Old blood still present—Rakata."
"Open it," Shepard's voice crackled through.
With some work—and nanite brute-forcing—the compartment creaked open. Inside lay a single object, resting on a pedestal of ancient obsidian.
A Sith holocron, glowing faintly red.
Unlike others, this one pulsed violently. Its design was jagged, almost predatory, as if it resented being looked upon.
Seraph-2 reached for it.
The second his fingers touched the pyramid, an agonizing pulse of dark energy shot through the chamber. Stone cracked. Dust fell. All seven Seraphs felt it—like a scream through the Force.
Seraph-2 grunted but held on. "It's active. Alive."
"Bring it," Shepard ordered, calm but cold. "Secure it. Return immediately."
Back on Kamino, Shepard ended the transmission and leaned back in his chair, mind racing.
That holocron… that data cache… the Sith records it contained were said to be outlawed even among the Sith themselves. Forbidden rituals. Flesh-warping. Thought domination. Eternal binding. Dark clones. Force-grafted armor. The kind of knowledge lost or buried on purpose.
And soon, it would all be his.
He didn't believe in the Force—not like the Jedi or the Sith did. But now, with this, he could study it. Quantify it. Use it.
He could build a Force-user from scratch if he understood enough.
Clone it. Control it.
No more mystery.
Just systems.
The future wouldn't belong to Jedi or Sith.
It would belong to Shepard Kael.