- 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦.
For as long as Kasia Torelo can remember, luck and survival have gone hand-in-hand.
Kasia was only seven years old when the Empire attacked her planet. Singled out for their telep...
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As Din stepped through the blast door, a nearby Stormtrooper's plasma bullet ricocheting off his Beskar with a soft ping, Kasia shot two more troopers over his shoulder, stepping out from behind his body a moment later as he kicked the remaining nearby Stormtrooper to the ground with ease.
The world around her seemed to slow down as she simply gave herself to the rhythm of easy death, to the never-ending dance of shooting and ducking and scanning for nearby life forms and doing over again. Distantly, she was aware of Greef stepping out from the doorway she and Mando had just vacated and Cara continuing to mow down Stormtroopers with her big ass gun—Gods she loved that woman—from inside the cantina, though she paid both little heed.
A familiar grunt sounded from her left, and Kas turned to see a Deathtrooper shove Din to the ground, her breath catching in involuntary worry. Still, she ignored the feeling as she slipped into Din's mind with ease, seeing what he planned to do and shooting precisely where he sent the Deathtrooper careening backwards a moment later. Not even bothering to watch as the trooper crumpled to the ground, Kasia shifted to shoot at a different soldier aiming at Karga's exposed back.
It was chaos, this battlefield, the world in this moment nothing more than gunfire and blasters, plasma and Beskar, friend and foe. It was a calamity waiting to implode, death looming behind the barrel of every trooper's blaster—and yet Kasia found that she was afraid only of a stray bullet finding a chink in Din's armor or of IG-11's mechanized reflexes being too slow, unused to the weight of the child around his neck; she was afraid only of losing either of the two who meant the most to her.
Shaking away the scatterbrained thoughts, Kasia forced her mind back to the battle unfolding in front of her, rolling away from a bolt of screaming plasma that darkened the ground she had been standing a moment before and throwing one of her few remaining knives into the helmet of another Stormtrooper as she rose again to her feet.
A sinister smile rose to her lips as she took a split-second to stare down her next target, recognizing the pattern of mud splattered across his armor, identical to that which she had made a mental note of earlier.
Too late, the Stormtrooper raised his gun, but Kasia was no longer there, her last knife now plunged into the man's throat as she whispered in his ear, "Pay me double for that, bitch." With a smirk, she pulled her knife from his throat as he fell into a puddle on the ground, her smirk falling into a small frown at the splatter of blood that rained down on her clothes at the action.
Turning away from the asshole, Kasia's eyes widened as she beheld IG-11 fall to one knee while a group of Stormtroopers fired relentlessly at his exposed metal back. On instinct she raised her blaster, giving the droid and child some—though not much—cover.
Gritting her teeth, she ducked as one of the troopers fired back at her, the bullet whizzing past her face so close that she could hear its crackling and feel its heat singeing her skin.
