AUTHOR NOTE: Just a quick little chapter to add some extra to this story before the battle starts.

Studied up on pre-Disney cannon (the REAL stuff back when George Lucas was running things) with and at the behest of fellow author "Axccel". Turns out, Dark Side Force adepts of any prior era are radically more powerful than those of the Galactic Republic's time. Even the weaklings of the Brotherhood of Darkness would be terrifying compared to the Jedi and Sith of later. Those of The Great Galactic War's time were practically godlike. Hell, just a few centuries prior to that war, stars went supernova just by PROXIMITY to Sith and Jedi fighting on Ossus. The planet Kesh was devastated by simply a few Sith and a few Jedi duking it out on the surface. The guys of the Sith Wars were all terrifyingly powerful.

And Naruto's a full-fledged Darth from the KOTOR era and was RAISED as a Sith! Tell me all that put together wouldn't mean he's brutally powerful!

ALSO...AS MUCH AS I WANT TO CONTINUE THIS, WHENEVER I TRIED, I KEPT SEEING THIS STORY EVENTUALLY TYING INTO THE DAMN DISNEY BULLSHIT, ESPECIALLY WITH HOW THEY KEEP RESETTING THE SERIES SO IT FITS THEIR VERSION OF STAR WARS RATHER THAN LUCAS'! MAKES STAYING INSPIRED HARD. BUT NOT QUITTING IT! PLEASE FORGIVE ME!

Book One: The Return

Chapter 8: Before the Storm

After the unlikely duo of Jedi and Sith got Naruto's fighter up to what Skywalker deemed optimal, the pair made their way to the command bridge for a briefing on how their operations would go.

All in all, the Darth found it absurd. "The enemy won't follow any plans crafted by the ones they're fighting against, after all. Just improvise and slaughter them all to the last, I say."

"How typical of a Sith; unnecessarily brutal and wants as much conflict as possible." Anakin glared out of the corner of his eye.

Naruto shrugged, taking the words in stride, "Like my master Malgus used to say, "I fight because that is what I was made to do. Want is not the point. I serve the Force. The Force is conflict. The Jedi understand the Force only partially. Some of them are even powerful in its use. But they fail to comprehend the fundamental nature of the Force, that it is conflict. That a light side and a dark side exist is proof of this."...I just wish I was fighting enemies that could actually bleed."

As he spoke, he unclipped his primary weapon from his belt and spun it casually between his fingers. The lightsaber had a solid, heavy-duty hilt that favored maximum strength. The weapon featured a solid casing, thick, ridged handgrip, a high-output diatium power cell, a dual-phase focusing crystal, forward mounted adjustment knobs, and a beveled emitter shroud, as well as a "throttle-style" activator. However, the grip was considerably thicker and longer than most other lightsabers. That said, Naruto didn't care how the weapon actually looked, he just wanted practical functionality.

Seeing it, Anakin snorted, that weapon was inelegant to the point of being ungainly. Yet still...as he looked at it, it unsettled him for some reason. "Crude excuse of a lightsaber you've got there."

Naruto shrugged, "Saw it in a Force Vision. The Sith who topples the Jedi Order uses this. Big guy, black armor, masked helmet. Based off the one they used."

"And you think you're that Sith?" Anakin snapped at this unwanted company.

Again, Naruto shrugged, "That's actually up to the Force. If it is me, great; if the Force decides otherwise, oh well, nothing I can do about that."

"You do realize you've practically deified the Force, right?" Anakin pointed out, disgust creeping into his voice, considering who he was speaking to.

"And what's wrong with that? The Force is the reason the Jedi AND Sith have their power, after all. Without the Force, both orders are nothing. Therefore, because of that fact, service to the Force is the correct path for sides, is it not?" Naruto countered smoothly.

Anakin blinked. Sheesh...! That sounded just like something Qui-Gon Jinn would say! As soon as that thought crossed Anakin's mind, a ripple of anger at the idea of the man who Anakin admired and owed his freedom to having anything in common with this Sith scumbag welled up within him.

A ripple Naruto noticed. It made him grin. A chink in the armor, huh? He'd need to wear down that spot and see just how long it took Skywalker to snap, then. That would be fun, if nothing else.

"Instead, the Jedi have stopped listening to the Force and have made themselves devolve to tools of politics. They serve at the whim of the Supreme Chancellor, not the Force. They've allowed themselves to become glorified diplomats and negotiators, now warriors and generals. And the modern Sith are no better, choosing to devote themselves to obtaining and maintaining political power rather than devoting themselves solely to the dark side, having merely become Jedi-obsessed weaklings...and yes, the irony of my saying that isn't lost on me, but keep in mind that I'm from another time period before this absurd "Rule of Two" existed. The Sith Empire of my time was always looking for ways to dive deeper into the Force."

Anakin's hand twitched for his lightsaber, but before he could make up his mind on what to do, he realized they had reached their destination. Stepping into the command center of the ship, they were greeted by Askoha and Admiral Wullf Yularen, a by-the-book officer who commanded the Jedi Cruiser "Resolute" in the Republic's service. Added onto that were a pair of communication holograms depicting Obi-Wan and Mace Windu, the later of which frowned at the sight of the Darth, much to Naruto's amusement.

Seemed someone was still testy over their little spar back at the Jedi temple and exposing he used the Dark Side in front of a courtyard full of Jedi younglings. HA! The blond loved it! And he would admit, that "Vaapad" variation of Form VII, Juyo, DID interest him, still.

"Good; we're all here. Now—" Obi-wan said, only to be cut off.

"Cut to the chase. What are we up against?" Naruto rolled his shoulders, "If you're worried about ground forces, I at least know the verbal half of the Twi'lek language, and can understand the signals of the body language the lekku are used for. But gotta get to the surface and make contact with the Twi'lek first."

Obi-wan and Mace's holograms nodded. "Good. That's going to be useful once our troops land. But, as the Sith said, we still need to get through the blockade around Ryloth." Windu said before a hologram of the planet surrounded by ships appeared.

"That?" Naruto snorted as he tried not to laugh, "Oh please! I've seen far worse, like when the Sith forces laid siege on Corellia. This excuse of a blockade is a joke."

Everyone turned to him. "Confidant you can help us get through, are you?" Obi-wan asked.

"I can do it, but flying's for droids if you ask me...Never was too much of a space battle guy...liked a more up close and personal killing. Give me melee combat any day."

Obi-wan rose his brows at that before rubbing his eyes, muttering something about space trenches.

"Do you have any possible insight? Tatices that might be employed by the Sith on what orders they could relay to the Separatists?" Askoha asked, turning to the blond.

"I'm from an era where the Sith were openly warriors, any of the modern ones you're use to are from an era where the Sith are more about scheming from behind the scenes to manipulate events while using others to do so." Naruto pointed out. "Not to say I'm bad at that either, but just that I much rather disembowel personally than misdirect from the background. Besides...doubt you Jedi would ever willingly listen to me."

"True." Obi-wan confessed. "So with the Separatists in control of the planet, odds are when we get down there, we'll have to deal with hostages."

"If the hostages are a factor, remove them." Naruto said simply, completely straight faced.

"We will attempt to do so, but it will be difficult to launch a rescue of that many."

"Rescue?!" Naruto balked, "Hell no! I mean if we can't fight the way we need to because of the hostages, I say we go with the pragmatic approach."

The Jedi all stared, horrified by realization.

"You're talking mass murder! Genocide even!" Obi-wan objected.

At the moral posturing, Naruto scowled. "And I suppose you rather the alternative and let this Separatist faction win? Because if they do, the Twi'lek are dead anyways, so do we take this world or are you going to preach? I swear, you Jedi...utterly spineless! You cling too much to your unsustainable delusions of storybook notions about decency and fairness and wanting a clean, neat, honorable conflict without slaughter to have the stomach to do whatever's necessary for a real war! You're soft!"

At that, a blue lightsaber's blade was ignited and hovered ominously close to his throat. Naruto met the glares of Windu, Kenobi, and Skywalker with apathy. "You know, I was trained as both a Sith Juggernaut and Sith Marauder. Fearing pain or death was beaten out of me a long time ago...trained specifically for war, know and accept that I'll more than likely die in battle, but I'm meant to take as many of the enemy with me as possible. It's my purpose. So having weapons aimed at me is just a typical thing. Pointless to expect me to change my mind just because I have a chance of my head being cut off."

"Wait!" Ahsoka called, drawing attention to herself as she turned to Naruto, "Look, Strakh...I know this goes against the way that you do things, but...well...with how well the natives know their own world, wouldn't it be better if they were able to help us fight? I mean...how much use is a dead body compared to those who can help give us an advantage with how well they know the terrain?"

Naruto frowned. All in all, he saw the point she was making. One didn't survive dealings with Sith or being in wars by just sheer brute force, you couldn't afford to be stupid or make incautious mistakes like preemptively removing what could aid you later, "Hmmmm...true, "Never underestimate the usefulness of others.". Old Sith lesson..." he mused. Then tsked, "Fine...I'll do it your way this once, but don't blame me when every death in these battles is on your heads for it because you can't accept the reality that you can't save everyone in a warzone. But for the record, you Jedi need to keep something in mind: your Order hasn't seen the nature of war in a thousand years, but for me, it was pretty much yesterday. The Jedi have forgotten what war is like; but I haven't, and I never will."

With that, the blond spun on his heel and walked out, aiming to find the hanger and spend some time on his ship, away from the philosophy-spouting bleeding hearts that were the Jedi.

"Sith brutality...trusting him was a mistake." Anakin frowned.

Ahsoka winced.

"Harsh, but reality often is...he knows what war is like." Admiral Wullf pointed out. He didn't like agreeing with such a brutal individual, but as a military officer, he understood what the young man was saying and why he was saying it...focusing on the big picture.

Marching back to his ship, the Dark Side radiating off of him in his sheer frustration, making the clones give the time displaced Sith a wide breadth, Naruto scowled. "Fools...blind fools, the entire damn Order of them!" he growled. Oh, if he didn't need those idiots to flush out the current objects of his vengeance...! And yet, having to put up with Jedi without wanting to kill them was an utterly grueling hell all it's own! Especially when they preached morals during kill-or-be-killed situations like a war!

And he thought his time under his master was torture! At least he knew the reason for that was to become as powerful as he possibly could!

If you weren't sleeping, you were training.

If you weren't eating, you were training.

If you weren't dead, you were training.

At least the one time his old Master had allowed him a break from things was when Naruto had meditated on his lightsaber's crystal. Come to think of it...Naruto had spent days—even months—at a time, sustained by the Force and forming a link so strong that the Sith and the crystal responded instantly to one another with one mind. Their link was so deep that the blade, regardless of hilt type, felt weightless in Naruto's hands, and the crystal would anticipate, accentuate, and extenuate Naruto's movements as he made them.

And that was just the tip of things.

Recalling how channeling his emotions and experiences into the crystal had not only strengthened it, but had been the closest thing to "therapeutic" he ever did, he made his way into his ship and sat down. Reaching out with the Force, Naruto systematically deconstructed his lightsaber; taking the black metallic casing from around the saber's traditional internal components, then carefully having those levitate away from the red crystal to orbit him. As it hovered in front of his face, the Darth poured his frustrations into the crystal, it starting to glow in response, bathing everything around it in a soft, vivid red light that made everything it touched appear stained with blood.

His sheer hate for the Sith Order that had betrayed and attempted to kill him...

...the confusion of finding out he had been thrust a thousand years through time and into an era where the Sith Empire was little more than dust and ashes with no explanation as to why or how...

...his outrage over learning his trip through time meant he was unable to avenge himself against Malgus and the others who turned on him, having to merely settle for the current generation of those who called themselves Sith...

...the stifling confinement in the Jedi Temple...

...the disgust for the Jedi's moral grandstanding...

...his starvation for the blood of those who stood in his way; a thirst no droid could slake, a hunger which metal, wire, and circuits could never appease...

...and of course, his feelings on the current situation befalling both Ryloth and those on it, given his past experience with a certain Twi'lek Malgus had been fond of...

As all of these emotions swirling around within him like a storm flowed into the crimson gem, the tension went with it, allowing him the razor sharp clarity that had permitted his victory in so many conflicts, and the singular, ruthless focus to destroy all that stood between him and his ability to survive and triumph in the end, at any and all costs.

Naruto had the feeling he was going to need to do this constantly for as long as he was fighting alongside these Jedi...

His eyes snapping open, he reassembled his weapon and reconnected it to his belt as he sensed the familiar presence the Togruta Padawan as she barged into his ship.

"Let me guess: Master making a nuisance of himself to you again?" The blond said.

"No. I actually thought you were different. But what you planned to do to Ryloth's people..." she said, eyes narrowed in contempt as he stood up.

"I know...just it's all frustrating for me...confused. Don't like it..." the Sith confessed, sighed, looking at nothing in particular, "...Eleena Daru..."

"Huh?" Ahsoka wondered.

"Eleena Daru. She was a female Rutian Twi'lek. Few things are as graceful as a female Twi'lek in motion, given how you've worked with that Jedi Aayla, you know that. But that beautiful image doomed generations of young Twi'leks into servitude, as the wealthy and corrupt have taken to brandishing Twi'leks as badges of prestige. Eleena was no different...She was originally a slave in the slave pens on Geonosis, until she was saved by my master, Darth Malgus...she was good to me, so much so that I saw her as a foster mother..." Naruto grinned nostalgically. "...Called her "mom" once...oh man, Malgus was PISSED at me that day...!" the blond snickered.

"Anyways, it started when she did me a service: made sure I got my biological mother's holocron...when I found out about my mother...the kind of person she was, the good deeds as well as the ill ones, how she and my father met and fell in love, my birth...everything about her end to end, even how she died...I had a nasty habit of not only blowing my instructors apart if they insulted her, but nearly leveled everything around me...nearly destroyed the Sith Academy more than once...couple of business and living sectors, too...wherever I was, everything around me was demolished or damaged, and people's lives were either ended or damn close...The Sith Emperor and Dark Council at the time actually deemed me too volatile to be permitted to continue my training to be a Sith...which was exactly the kind of dangerous individual that Malgus wanted in an apprentice..." he chuckled.

"So you're willing to replay how this Eleena person was like a mother to you by slaughtering her people?!" The young Togruta was appalled. So this was a Sith?! Moreover, this was what the Sith of Grand Master Satele Shan's era had been like?! It was disgusting!

"I...!" Naruto started to say, then stopped and sighed, "...I...I don't know...I was trained to be that way, especially in war. Brutality and ruthlessness is something that's become my nature, but..." he shook his head.

"You don't want any of the Twi'leks to die since the race reminds you of her...?" Ahsoka's words were half inquiry, half statement of realization.

"No, I don't..." Naruto confessed. "Truth is, I've always been super emotional, even by Sith standards. Was taught to embrace that, since the more and stronger of an emotion a Sith feels, the more power they release. We Sith are taught to embrace our passions, so our being emotional to the extreme is common...sometimes, since the Sith are highly emotional to an extreme extent, we're ruled primarily by that rather than logic. And the thing is, hate can't be reasoned with. Neither can love. They're almost identical emotions. They both set a similar kind of fire in a person's head that blots out everything else, so unless we focus on negative emotions, we have problems with sentiment and our own emotions, the things we draw on to fuel the Dark side, drag us into the Light you Jedi revere so much...was where the Sith practice of killing off your own loved ones came from. So try and guess what this battle is doing to me as far as how I actually feel...if Jedi are even capable of emotion at all, much less comprehending them!"

"Hey!" She snapped, offended.

The user of the Dark Side chuckled, "Still...I find it funny Jedi acted like that...They utterly reject emotion. So how can they find choices made by cold, calculated logic appalling? Logically, if we disregard hostages and focus on pushing this droid army from Ryloth, there will indeed be casualties, but not so many as to warrant extinction, and they can rebuild."

Ahsoka shivered. "That's just evil..."

Naruto shrugged, smirking now, "That's one of the nasty truths about your Order's code. It's a double-standard to reject emotion yet say that you care about others, since by its nature, caring requires emotion."

The Padawan backed away, shaking. The horrible thing was...she could see his point. It was something she constantly struggled with. It just didn't make sense, the Jedi wanted you apathetic yet have you care for others at the same time. How was that even doable?

Naruto's smirk evolved into an icy smile upon seeing her face. "Ah...you get my point, eh? Look at it like this: how much...good...could the Jedi do, but let the Republic and it's politics tie their hands? They can actually go make a much bigger difference, but are too complacent and indolent to commit themselves to the galaxy as a whole. They've turned the Force into nothing but a tool to be used to expand and maintain the Republic's hold over the galaxy."

Ahsoka gulped, feeling herself shake as that single golden eye of his gleamed as he questioned her.

"So...if it came down to it and you, would you help the Jedi demolish the plans of the Sith, or turn on us to help the Sith, then?" she asked, despite for a shift in topic.

That question caught him off guard for a second. On one hand, he was taught to defeat the Jedi so the Sith could claim power; on the other was the fact that the Sith kill whoever betray them and he was betrayed by the Sith as an Order.

It was actually relieving for the both of them when they were called to get ready for launch, giving Ahsoka an excuse to run from the ship, ribbing her arms to rid them of the goosebumps the chill speaking with him had given her, while Naruto made his way to the cockpit and scowled as he maneuvered his Fury-class interceptor into position next to Ahsoka's own Jedi fighter and a squad of pilots. Even after getting more ships on their side, not to mention a better plan, the Sith still felt like too much was left up to chance. It also didn't help that Obi-wan and Mace wouldn't be joining the fight until after Anakin's forces managed to bring down the blockade. With an uninterested grunt, Naruto punched in a few commands on the console Anakin managed to put together, extending the strike-foils on his ship and preparing all weapons for combat.

Oh, how he missed his old crew, they could make any engagement short and simple.

Still, while he may not be the best pilot in the world, he had the Force on his side and a shit ton of heavy weapons to blast his enemies with.

Enemies...Naruto fought a snort. That was another thing that bothered him...theses weren't really enemies, just droids. Droids were boring! They were programmed to fire at weak points in armor or for critical targets on their targets' body and had no ability to improvise or adapt. They could only simulate emotion, so they couldn't really feel fear. And they could't feel pain when you hurt them! No Sith could really enjoy, or show off their brutality, fighting droids! The thought almost put him to sleep out of sheer boredom!

"Strakh. You ready for this?" the young Togruta in the ship next to his asked over the com system, apparently over her unease enough to focus on the task at hand.

"Yeah, just annoyed...Droids bore me as opponents, and it doesn't help that these ones are apparently so stupid to begin with." Was the blond's dry response.

Ahsoka laughed, "I hear you. Just don't throw your back out, old man." she said, poking fun at how he had come to the current era from a thousand years ago.

Naruto actually cracked a grin at that. Padawan had some sass to her. He liked that. "In that case, you better not wet your diapers, junior!" he heckled back before shutting his comm off. "Shame she's a Jedi..." he admitted to himself with a chuckle. Naruto took a deep breath. Space combat...Naruto wasn't as bad as someone like Obi-wan (from what Naruto heard, the guy could barely fly straight without an astromech to babysit him!), but he also wasn't as skilled as he'd heard Anakin was. Pretty much, Naruto was able to get by in a fight, but don't ask him to play chicken with a capital ship all on his own.

"Well...time to get this show on the road. Man, get so much more into things when my enemies can actually bleed..." he muttered, after hearing the sirens go off, Naruto activated his ship's thrusts and the ship began to hover in the air as he saw Ahsoka and the clones do likewise as the hanger doors opened and Naruto was the first to fly out, and then he activated his ship's cloaking shield as he flew through space.

"Time to blow stuff up."