Yoda rose.
A gesture opened the grating of the vent shaft where he had waited in meditation, revealing the vast conic well that was the Grand Convocation Chamber of the Galactic Senate. It was sometimes called the Senate Arena. Today, this nickname would be particularly apt.
Yoda stretched blood back into his green flesh. This was his time. Nine hundred years of study and training, of teaching and of meditation, all now focused, and refined, and resolved into this single moment; the sole purpose of his vast span of existence had been to prepare him to enter the heart of night and bring his light against the darkness. He adjusted the angle of his blade against his belt. He draped his robe across his shoulders. With reverence, with gratitude, without fear, and without anger, Yoda went forth to war.
A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful.
"The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition, Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader—I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps...
"How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan... "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had...redecorated...the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste...
The holding office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic comprised the nether vertex of the Senate Arena; it was little more than a circular preparations area, a green room, where guests of the Chancellor might be entertained before entering the Senate Podium—the circular pod on its immense hydraulic pillar, which contained controls that coordinated the movement of floating Senate delegation pods—and rising into the focal point of the chamber above. Above that podium, the vast holopresence of a kneeling Sith bowed before a shadow that stood below. Guards in scarlet flanked the shadow; a Chagrian toady cringed nearby.
"But the danger is real; be mindful."
"I will, my Master. Thank you."
The holopresence faded, and where its huge translucency had knelt was now revealed another presence, a physical presence, tiny and aged, clad in robes and leaning on a twist of wood. But his physical presence was an illusion; the truth of him could be seen only in the Force. In the Force, he was a fountain of light. "Pity your new disciple I do; so lately an apprentice, so soon without a Master."
"Why, Master Yoda, what a delightful surprise! Welcome!" The voice of the shadow hummed with anticipation. "Let me be the first to wish you Happy Empire Day!"
"Find it happy, you will not. Nor will the murderer you call Vader."
"Ah." The shadow stepped closer to the light. "So that is the threat I felt. Who is it, if I may ask? Who have you sent to kill him?"
"Enough it is that you know your own destroyer."
"Oh, pish, Master Yoda. It wouldn't be Kenobi, would it? Please say it's Kenobi—Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him..."
Behind the shadow, some meters away, Mas Amedda—the Chagrian toady who was Speaker of the Galactic Senate—heard a whisper in Palpatine's voice. Flee.
He did.
Neither light nor shadow gave his exit a glance.
"So easily slain, Obi-Wan is not."
"Neither are you, apparently; but that is about to change." The shadow took another step, and another. A lightsaber appeared, green as sunlight in a forest. "The test of that, today will be."
"Even a fraction of the dark side is more power than your Jedi arrogance can conceive; living in the light, you have never seen the depth of the darkness." The shadow spread arms that made its sleeves into black wings. "Until now."
Lightning speared from outstretched hands, and the battle was on. In the Senate Arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness. Then there were only the two of them.
Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the Master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh. A thousand years of hidden Sith exulted in their victory.
"Your time is over! The Sith rule the galaxy! Now and forever!"
And it was the whole of the Jedi Order that rocketed from its huddle, making of its own body a weapon to blast the Sith to the ground.
"At an end your rule is, and not short enough it was, I must say." There appeared a blade the color of life.
From the shadow of a black wing, a small weapon—a holdout, an easily concealed backup, a tiny bit of treachery expressing the core of Sith mastery—slid into a withered hand and spat a flame-colored blade of its own.
When those blades met, it was more than Yoda against Palpatine, more the millennia of Sith against the legions of Jedi; this was the expression of the fundamental conflict of the universe itself.
Light against dark.
Winner takes all.
There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark. It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though these were traded, too.
It came as the battle shifted from the holding office to the great Chancellor's Podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the Podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laserpoint of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the Senate Arena; it came as the Force and the podium's controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones crashing and crushing against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed the Senate's cheers for the galaxy's new Emperor.
It came when the avatar of light resolved into the lineage of the Jedi; when the lineage of the Jedi refined into one single Jedi. It came when Yoda found himself alone against the dark.
In that lightning-speared tornado of feet and fists and blades and bashing machines, his vision finally pierced the darkness that had clouded the Force. Finally, he saw the truth.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most implacable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known...
just—
didn't—
have it.
He'd never had it. He had lost before he started. He had lost before he was born. The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years' intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves. They had become new.
While the Jedi—
The Jedi had spent that same millennium training to refight the last war. The new Sith could not be destroyed with a lightsaber; they could not be burned away by any torch of the Force. The brighter his light, the darker their shadow. How could one win a war against the dark, when war itself had become the dark's own weapon?
He knew, at that instant, that this insight held the hope of the galaxy. But if he fell here, that hope would die with him. Hmmm, Yoda thought.A problem this is...
The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength. The shadow released its power for an instant, long enough only to whirl away through the air and alight upon one of the delegation pods as it flew past, and the creature leapt to follow—
Half a second too slow.
The shadow unleashed its lightning while the creature was still in the air, and the little green freak took its full power. The shock blasted him backward to crash against the podium, and he fell.
He fell a long way.
The base of the Arena was a hundred meters below, littered with twisted scraps and jags of metal from the pods destroyed in the battle, and as the little green freak fell, finally, above, the victorious shadow became once again only Palpatine: a very old, very tired man, gasping for air as he leaned on the pod's rail. Old he might have been, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight; he scanned the wreckage below, and he did not see a body.
He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor's Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his pod streaking in a downward spiral to the holding office at the base of the Podium tower. Clone troops were already swarming into it. "It was Yoda," he said as he swung out of the pod. "Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building." He didn't have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger. Mortal danger.
Clones scattered. He stopped one officer. "You. Call the shuttle dock and tell them I'm on my way. Have my ship warmed and ready." The officer saluted, and Palpatine, with vigor that surprised even himself, ran.
With the help of the Force, Yoda sprinted along the service accessway below the Arena faster than a human being could run; he sliced conduits as he passed, filling the accessway behind him with coils of high-voltage cables, twisting and spitting lightning. Every few dozen meters, he paused just long enough to slash a hole in the accessway's wall; once his pursuers got past the cables, they would have to divide their forces to search each of his possible exits. But he knew they could afford to; there were thousands of them.
Source: Revenge of the Sith
He's also sensed Anakin's pain from across the galaxy, as well as the death's of many Jedi, lifted an X-Wing easily years after his prime, utilized Battle Meditation, Force Light, Force Concealment, and Immovability, caught Senate pods thrown at him from Sidious, caused avalanches, caught multiple large chunks of debris, deflected lightning from the most powerful Sith in history, etc.
All that done without prep, a ritual, or a nexus.
It's simple logic. If Sidious > Vitiate, and Yoda = Sidious, then how can Vitiate be > Yoda if Yoda is an equal with someone stronger than him? Same goes for Revan.
All credit to: okayalright_44, Silver2467, and Wollfmyth209.
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