"Sniper! Sniper on you!"
"Blast it!"
...
"Thermal detonator, DOWN! DOWN!"
...
"For the MANDALORE!"
"For the MANDALORE!"
...
Gunfire, explosions, shouting—wave after wave, without end—finally dragged Ethan out of sleep, leaving him half-awake and half-dreaming.
("Who's the jerk watching a show on full blast…? Wait—since when is my English this good? I'm catching everything without subtitles!")
("English? What even is 'English'?" // "Huh?! English… English, obviously.")
("Is this Galactic Basic Standard?!")
("I'm on Concordia—this is a battlefield?! I'm Max Vizsla?!")
Hnh—Ethan sucked in a sharp breath and snapped his eyes open.
Shattered walls. Burning wreckage. Severed limbs. Beyond the T-shaped visor, the ruined world was on fire—so real it was almost too real. Was this a lucid dream? A dream inside a dream? Ethan had no idea what was going on.
Then, at the edge of his vision, a shadow moved.
Pew—pew—pew—
Hands faster than thought, Ethan's twin Westar-35 blaster pistols spat bolts. Max Vizsla's warrior instinct—or maybe just muscle memory—made the right call in an instant.
("What did I just do? I fired… I killed someone?!") Ethan stared at his hands, his blank confusion evolving into pure disbelief.
"Good shooting, Mike!" A thrilled voice crackled in his helmet comms. "You okay?"
"I…" Ethan paused. "Took a concussion rocket—got rattled. The beskar held. I'm fine."
"Death Watch is pulling back! We won!"
"Dank farrik… those bastards don't deserve to call themselves Mandalorian."
...
After reflexively brushing them off with a throwaway reply, Ethan stopped engaging on the channel and fell into a long silence. It was obvious he still couldn't accept the absurd fact that a simple nap had turned into this.
He sifted through the leftover memories in this body. Max Vizsla—thirteen years old. A Mandalorian kid who was either fighting, or on the way to a fight.
That's it? This is a "highly advanced" interstellar civilization? Looking at it like this, it felt more like he'd been dumped into a primitive age of nonstop warfare.
No… even the old war-torn eras weren't like this. Ethan let out a long, bitter sigh and tilted his head back. Above the battlefield, the sky was dim and heavy, smothered in gray.
What was that? A faint black speck knifed in from the distance at high speed. When the craft came into view again, every hair on Ethan's body stood on end. He screamed at the top of his lungs:
"Take cover! Kom'rk-class inbound! Find cover!"
It never ends.