Lance stepped off the lift and walked down the long, ornate corridor, nodding to familiar Jedi and Padawans as he passed, pausing here and there to trade a few words.
Ten minutes later, he finally reached the training room.
The war had stripped away every ounce of pride he once carried.
The Order’s assessments for Padawans had always been a little too easy, a little too forgiving.
In peacetime that had been enough.
But the moment war broke out, that kind of training proved hopelessly inadequate against what the galaxy actually threw at them.
Against an endless tide of enemies, the Jedi had bled and bled.
The entire Order numbered barely ten thousand, Padawans and younglings included, and with no real preparation for a war of this scale, they’d fallen one after another.
These were the backbone of the Order.
Every death was a wound the whole galaxy would feel.
The high marks he’d once been so proud of now looked like nothing but self-deception.
Looking back, it was almost embarrassing.
If this was what survival on a real battlefield demanded, he simply wasn’t strong enough yet.
Lance understood his own weaknesses clearly now.
Of the seven lightsaber forms, shaped and refined across generations of Jedi, he knew Form I, Shii-Cho, best of all.
Every Padawan learned it first; it was the foundation the other six were built on.
Simple, flexible, and effective against multiple opponents, but it lacked precision, unsuited for either careful strikes or tight defense.
So even while he was still healing, Lance had kept up his meditation and his lightsaber drills every single day.
And to his own surprise, the improvement had come fast, fast enough that he could actually feel the difference within days.
Maybe it was that brush with death that shook something loose in me.
There’s an old saying: between life and death lies great terror, but also great opportunity.
His midi-chlorian count sat at 16,385, a number that would mark him as a prodigy almost anywhere in the Order.
And yet his gift, Force Augmentation, was about as plain as Force talents came.
It let him draw on the Force to enhance his physical body across the board: strength, speed, stamina, defense, agility, perception, flexibility, coordination.
Useful, certainly, but nowhere near as remarkable as Master Quinlan Vos’s psychometry, which let him read the memories and lingering Force impressions left on an object simply by touching it.
Or Master Oppo Rancisis’s battle meditation.
Or Master Shaak Ti’s gift for healing through the Force.
His talent made him look more like a soldier than the kind of wise, extraordinary Jedi the holonet loved to talk about.
Now that his body had fully healed, he decided to push the training harder.
At the console, he bumped the number of remotes from twenty to thirty and set the firing rate and difficulty to maximum.
Settings locked in.
He shed his outer robe, walked to the center of the room, and let his breath settle, his mind quieting with it.
The overhead lights dimmed until only a single beam remained.
White training remotes rolled out from their housings and hovered in the air, their shells studded with coin-sized sensor eyes that could fire blaster bolts.
Not lethal, but painful enough to matter.
Lance lifted his right hand in a loose grasping motion, and the lightsaber at his hip trembled once before flying into his palm.
The Force flowed from his hand into the hilt.
Click.
Hum.
A blue blade snapped to life, its plasma edge cutting a bright line through the dim air.
He held it high beside his head, blade angled forward, his other hand extended with index and middle fingers pressed together, body angled, feet planted wide.
The opening stance of Form III, Soresu.
A defensive form built on patience: absorb, wait, and let the opponent’s own momentum create the opening.
Like Shii-Cho, it handled multiple attackers well, but it was especially suited to blaster fire.
Its weakness was that it could be too cautious, too slow to finish a fight.
Still, against droids, Lance figured caution was exactly what the moment called for.
The thirty remotes began circling him with no discernible pattern, firing from every conceivable angle, their speed climbing steadily.
Bolts rained down on him like a storm.
Hum.
Hum.
Hum.
He swung the blade, deflecting bolt after bolt, but gaps kept opening in his defense, and the remotes found them without mercy.
Stinging pain bloomed across his skin each time, forcing his body to hitch for half a second.
He gritted his teeth and tried to bring the blade up in time.
Too slow.
The bolts swallowed him whole.
Training halted automatically.
Thud.
Lance hit the floor, gasping, every muscle twitching from the aftershock of impact.
He kept his grip on the hilt even as the blade folded back into the emitter.
The cold durasteel floor pressed against his spine, and sweat soaked into the metal beneath him almost instantly.
After a minute, he found the strength to move again.
He sat cross-legged, spine straight, eyes lowered, palms cupped in front of his stomach, and drew the Force in from everything around him.
Cool relief washed through his limbs, settling into muscle and bone.
Ten minutes later, he opened his eyes, something bright flickering behind them.
The exhaustion and pain were gone, his energy fully restored.
Even without actively channeling Force Augmentation, his body already felt tougher than before.
He got back up and reignited the blade.
Training resumed.
The remotes drifted at uneven speeds, sometimes slow, sometimes fast.
Watching them directly only made it easier for them to throw off his focus, so he shut his eyes instead, letting the Force map their movement for him.
Swish.
A bolt shot toward the back of his head.
His blade was already there to meet it before it closed the distance, deflecting it clean.
More followed instantly.
With Force Augmentation sharpening his senses, he read each attack a heartbeat before it landed and answered every one.
Soon the blade moved so fast it seemed to form an unbroken wall of light, swallowing every bolt that came near him.
Once thirty remotes stopped being a challenge, he raised the count to forty.
Hours later, he collapsed, chest heaving, muscles twitching involuntarily from the accumulated hits.
No matter how solid Soresu is, one blade can only defend so much.
He thought of Ahsoka.
She’d started with a single saber too, just like him.
Now she carried two, one long and one short.
Maybe she figured that out a long time ago.
Catching his breath, he dragged his tired body back toward his quarters.
Jedi Temple Archives.
Changed into clean robes, Lance walked slowly into the great hall.
The Archives stretched on and on, its arcades perfectly symmetrical, its domed ceiling catching the last light of the setting sun through a circular skylight overhead.
Tall shelving lined both sides of the hall, rows of holocrons glowing with a soft blue-white light, the whole space wrapped in a hush that felt almost sacred.
Every day, without fail, Lance carved out time to come here and search for the planet from his dreams.
He pulled a data terminal from one of the racks.
A galactic star map bloomed to life the instant it opened.
He searched, patient and thorough, and found nothing.
Again.
He shook his head and slid the terminal back into place.
“Still looking for that planet?
The one you call Earth?”
The voice came softly from just behind him.
He turned to find an elderly human woman standing there.
Master Jocasta Nu, chief librarian of the Jedi Archives and a Jedi Master in her own right, wearing robes of faded brown, her posture thin and upright, her expression composed and serious.
Gray hair coiled neatly at the back of her head gave her a look of quiet precision.
Stern on the surface, but Lance had come to know the warmth underneath it.
She’d helped him more times than he could count.
He bowed his head quickly.
“I want to try again.”
“Perhaps it simply hasn’t been catalogued yet.”
To Master Jocasta Nu, the Archives were beyond question.
Across the Order’s long history, generation after generation of Jedi had gathered nearly everything worth knowing about the galaxy within these walls.
She lifted her chin slightly, her voice calm and certain.
“If it isn’t in the Archives, it doesn’t exist.”