Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams

afar, chanting for one side or the other. Starkiller wondered if it mattered to them exactly who was fighting, and why. The promise of violence was all they cared about.
    Well, he could give them that.
    The Gorog hadn’t given up on him, either. It had broken half of its chains during its frenzied writhing, and it pulled free of the rest to follow him into the seating. The few spectators who hadn’t already fled Starkiller’s vicinity now did so, fearing what might come next. The stadium’s walls shuddered as the huge creature applied its full weight to them.
    Starkiller took a moment to look for Kota. The old man was neither lying squashed on the arena floor nor foolishly rushing in to help, and both relieved him. He needed Kota alive, if he was going to find Juno soon, and he didn’t want to be distracted by keeping the old man that way. But he didn’t want to lose him, either.
    A quick search through the Force revealed him to be climbing upward through the stands, slashing at anyone who stood in his way. Settling that score he had mentioned, Starkiller assumed. Then there wasn’t time to ponder the matter any further.
    The Gorog approached, dark blood running down from the gash on its scalp and dripping into its gaping mouth. The taste seemed to enrage it.
    One arm swept across the stands, destroying hologram generators and snapping pillars by the dozen. Starkiller ran in the opposite direction. Someone was shouting orders from the skybox above, but he didn’t pay any notice.
    The creature followed him around the stadium, making it shake and reel.
    A huge slab of stone, dislodged by one of its wild grabs, came down just in front of him. Starkiller leapt higher, to the very top of the stands. There he found a ramp along which the very last of the spectators were fleeing. He followed it to the roof of the stadium, and waited to see if the Gorog was following.
    It was, using its arms to drag itself higher and kicking out with its legs to gain extra thrust. Through deep rents in the stone floor of the stadium, Starkiller could see the open air below.
    He ran from the ramp onto the roof. The Gorog followed without hesitation, shouldering through an opening barely wide enough for its arm, let alone the rest of its body. It blinked in the daylight. All the lights and buzz of the suspended city meant nothing to it when its quarry stood just out of reach, tantalizingly still.
    It lunged, and missed. Lunged, and missed. It didn’t care what damage it caused. Metal supports bent. Guy wires snapped and whipped away. A handful of jetpack-equipped stormtroopers buzzed about its head, trying to bring it back under control, but it had eyes only for Starkiller.
    He led it halfway around the arena before he felt the first lurching from below. A number of supports and stanchions were broken, ruining the integrity of the entire arena. The Gorog just kept on coming. Only when they had returned almost to their point of origin did it seem to notice the way the surface beneath it was sinking, beginning to drop.
    The broad disk of the arena roof shuddered. Starkiller jumped to the only structure still attached to the city above: the skybox from which the potentate, he assumed, had enjoyed the best possible view. He landed on the roof just as the last support for the arena gave way and began the long tumble to the sinkhole below.
    The Gorog howled as it, too, began to fall.
    Starkiller cut a hole in the roof of the skybox and jumped nimbly inside.
    There he found the potentate standing his ground in front of an ornate gold throne. A half circle of slain Neimoidian aides lay at his feet. He held his blaster on Kota, who was approaching with lightsaber at the ready, unhindered at all by either fatigue or blindness.
    Starkiller’s arrival distracted the potentate, who snapped a quick shot at him, easily deflected.
    Before Kota could strike-settling the score for a week of endless slaughter-the whole skybox lurched, sending all three of them