DE Luke vs Reborn Krayt

Title says it all.

krayt, imo

Prolly luke tbh

Krayt, obviously.

Luke might be the best pure duelist ever, even by DE, but I would side with Krayt in an all out, due to greater command of the Force.

Basic Points About Abeloth, Beyond Shadows, and Different Types of Attacks

Consider this: Abeloth is meant to be a dozen times more powerful than FotJ Luke (likely hyperbole and definitely not linear, any more than Vitiate's lightning is "infinitely" more potent than Nyriss', but the point remains), and was even well above cell-bursting FotJ Luke. We have two potent demonstrations of how much more powerful she is than both Luke and Darish Vol, who has "much the power" of Luke himself by Abeloth's reckoning. Firstly, we need to quickly establish the medium: we're talking about two telepathic attacks (by Luke and Vol respectively), which through the medium of Abeloth's mind (which is attached to the "essence", the energy that makes up a Force user, with the mind and essence together creating a "spirit"), are able to damage her essence, including any power she receives as a result of assimilating other beings. So, Abeloth had assimilated Callista into her power, and by using a re-engineered telepathic therapeutic technique designed to remove harmful memories from the mind (Mnemotherapy), Luke virtually takes a psychic ax to Abeloth, cutting Callista out of her "body" of power, like cutting a limb from a many-tentacles eldritch monster.

And he tore at her.

It was an act of brutality, a perversion of the mnemotheraphy technique. It was like performing a surgical amputation with a dull stone ax weighing ten kilos. With all the strength he possessed in the Force, he yanked her away from her body, away from Abeloth.

He could not have done it to a living being. But Callista did not belong where she was. The body she now inhabited, the broad life force that was Abeloth-they were not her true home. She had no true home. And Luke tore her free of the things that anchored her to the physical world.

It was a physical effort, too. Luke staggered free of Callista's body and fell to his knees, drained in an instant of all his strength.

It took all of Luke's strength to do this, although I question if that's because he needed all of his strength or if he simply hedged his bets and threw all of it into this attack. Nevertheless, the point is, the breadth and scope of Abeloth's power is such that Luke thinks it warrants throwing all of his available power into an attack that simply separates Abeloth from one avatar, a fraction, of her power. Meaning, Abeloth proper would no-sell this kind of direct attack from Luke, and we kind of saw that with her tanking an attack from cell-bursting Luke. However, I digress, because now we get to Vol:

He threw everything he had into the attack, slamming his Force self into the psychic, oozing wound as if he were punching a lacerated torso.

NO!

Her pain exploded and hurled him back, releasing him, but causing the most exquisite agony Vol had ever experienced to race through every part of his being.

Vol surged forward out of the dream so quickly that he hurled himself from his bed and landed hard on the floor, where he lay gasping, weak, so weak, sweat-soaked and terrified. He-used to manipulating objects in the Force, leaping great distances, crushing things with a thought-had not the strength of a new-hatched uvak. It was an effort to lift his head, to push himself up off the floor, and the muscles quivered from that simple strain.

To cut a long story short, because we've all heard it already, Vol used the Mnemotherapy technique in an even more perverted and directly violent manner than Luke had, again, throwing everything he had into the attack, throwing his "Force self" into Abeloth's most vulnerable "psychic wound", basically trying to destroy her mind directly. Despite this attack, she breaks the connection between her and Vol, then proceeds to get so angry that she melts a city just through a subconscious expression of her rage. So now we have a few examples in mind: cell-bursting Luke, Mnemotherapy Luke and Darish Vol, all using as much power as they could possibly muster, in two cases bypassing Abeloth's active defenses to take a clean shot at her spirit-via-mind, and only really reducing her full power by a small percentage of the whole.

This is what I want to stress: Abeloth's breadth and depth of power is such that she can tank several full-powered-FotJ Luke esque attacks and only lose a small portion of her total power. These Mnemotherapy attacks in particular are even more devastating than the physical: for instance, nexus-amped Vestara and Oneness Ben Skywalker were throwing everything they had at an Abeloth avatar, mutilating her and smashing what should have been her brain to pieces, but it just kept regenerating: the underlying power that animated the physical avatars (her spirit) was still keeping her body intact. It's not at all dissimilar to what Darth Maul did: far, far greater scale, but the same principle:

“My hatred kept my spirit intact even though my body was not."
―Darth Maul (The Clone Wars Season 4 Episode 22: Revenge)/Shadow Conspiracy

What I'm saying is this: if you told a Force user to stand perfectly still, and let their opponent do whatever they wanted to harm them, e.g blast them with lightning, smash them with a maglev train at 400mph, you name it... that would still be a lesser form of attack than what Luke and Vol did to her. What they did to her was so damaging, so violent, so fundamental that it went completely beyond the physical... and while definitely hurt after these attacks she was still in possession of most of her power. For someone of Luke's tier to actually kill Abeloth would then require more than just a free, fully-powered attack but rather a sustained effort over time.

So now we get to the Beyond Shadows fight. Hopefully we know by now what Beyond Shadows is: a realm of pure Force energy, where Force users leave their physical body altogether and exist as a spirit of pure Force essence. It's important to establish something: in this realm, Abeloth's essence, her spirit, is even more vulnerable than it was with the Mnemotherapy attacks. Because while the Mnemotherapy attacks got to her essence by means of attacking her mind (think Wyyrlok killing Andeddu in their telepathic fight), this is, quite simply, the core of Abeloth's power smashing into the core of Luke and Krayt's power: no middlemen, no special techniques, just pure, raw power at it's most fundamental level. This goes way beyond the physical and even the psychic. There has never been, in the history of Star Wars, a truer, more fundamental representation of power being pitted against power devoid of external circumstances, personal fighting styles and any other mitigating factors.

Luke rose out of his body with a jolt, then hung floating above it, staring at the underside of the bunk above. A week passed, or maybe it was a second-he had no idea. Time had no existence outside the body. A heartbeat lasted a week, a lifetime flashed by in an instant. But Luke Skywalker remained, a manifestation of Force essence that embodied mind and form, more real than the material husk he had left strapped in the bunk below.

He exhaled, or imagined himself exhaling, and his connection to his body grew more tenuous. There is no life, there is only the Force. It was the code of the Mind Walkers, an assertion that the corporeal was illusion, that a living being was nothing but a luminous swirl in the Force. And perhaps they were right.

Luke exhaled again, and a purple radiance appeared above, shining down through the crude matter of the upper bunk as though it were a hologram. He reached, and the light came flooding in, filling him with a calm as deep as space. He became the Force, and the Force became him, and he knew only the pure, eternal joy of existence.

Moreover, this is not an avatar of Abeloth: this is Abeloth in her true form. I daresay we have never seen Abeloth more powerful or motivated than we have seen her in this fight. This is the command centre of her power, where she is both at her strongest and her most vulnerable. Luke was fully motivated to kill her, so there is no scope to argue he was hindered in any way.

There's three main points that I think are pertinent:

The Fight Was a Joint Effort

1. This was very much a joint effort between Krayt and Luke. Luke provided the "crowd control" so to speak, by initially striking Abeloth repeatedly then keeping her in a choke hold. However, Abeloth was about to kill Luke for doing this by shoving her tentacles inside him.

Tentacles began to lash at his face, probing for his nose and ears and mouth. A pair of gray tips shot into view, blurring and growing large. Luke closed both eyes and turned away, but not quickly enough. The right eye socket exploded in pain, and everything went dark on that side of his head.

Luke only had the opportunity to do this in the first place because after a combined barrage of Force attacks from himself and Krayt, Abeloth finally lost her balance, giving him an opening. I've seen it argued that Luke being the one to land the first attack to off-balance Abeloth is proof he is carrying the fight, but if that's the case, why were all of his prior attacks ineffective? Unless he received a mid-fight Zenkai, it's obvious that the sustained barrage of attacks from him and Krayt weakened her enough that eventually one got through, which happened to be Luke's.

Now, instead of Luke being killed, Krayt steps in and plunges his essence into Abeloth's, trying to tear her apart from the inside. Abeloth tries to Force-blast Krayt off of her, but he holds tight, and now himself, Luke and Abeloth are caught in an energy knot the latter cannot free herself from.

The tattooed stranger stepped in from the left, then slid to the front and drove his stiffened fingers deep into the pit of Abeloth's stomach. A black spray erupted from the wound, and she writhed in pain as the stranger probed for something to grab.

Abeloth loosed a Force blast, trying to drive the stranger off. He held tight. So did Luke, and all three went tumbling across the lake in a snarled mass of limbs and tentacles.

From this point Krayt starts to drain Abeloth at great cost to himself, while Luke holds her in place. The crucial point here is this: it is made extremely clear from the text that, again, this is a joint effort and not a result of Luke carrying the fight. Krayt needs Luke to hold Abeloth in place so he can continue to drain her, but equally, Luke needs Krayt to keep draining Abeloth so that he can continue to keep a hold on her, which is demonstrated below when Abeloth nearly breaks free of Luke, and Luke urges Krayt to keep draining her:

Abeloth whipped her chin free of Luke's hand, ripping the energy knot where they had joined and sending a sparkling line of both of their Force essences splattering across the surface of the lake. She began to roll her head around, gnashing and spitting, trying to sink her fangs into Luke's arm or the stranger's-anything she could reach.

Luke slipped his arm down around her throat and pulled hard, merging his form into hers, doing his best to keep her under control.

"Keep going," Luke urged the stranger. "Pull harder!"

Right? Abeloth shoved a tentacle into Luke's eye faster than he could close it and caused his vision to darken in that half of his head within moments of him trying to choke her. How much longer before he is goosed? We've already seen and heard on numerous occasions that Abeloth is exponentially more powerful than Luke individually. So Krayt was essential to her containment and eventual death.

Sidenote: when we're talking about stuff like vision going dark, limbs punching through torsos and so on, it's important to remember that these are just representations of energy. There are no literal limbs or eyes or punches or kicks, it's all just energy. I've elaborated on this before at great length with citations made to the source material and can link this if needed, but it's literally stated during the fight numerous times so it's not exactly something that is up for debate. This further highlights how f*cked Luke was without Krayt's help if his vision was going dark, considering the fact they were in a realm beyond space and time, beyond physical sensation, where the only perception is pure Force energy, and by Luke's reckoning, he was one with the Force just as a result of being in this realm. I'm not sure exactly what "vision" was going dark, but it seems related to the "cold" feelings he gets when Abeloth drives a tentacle inside him later - pretty synonymous with being killed.

Force Essence Reserves Are a Measure of Force Power

2. It's been established that Abeloth is more vulnerable here than she is anywhere else, even more vulnerable than she is psychically. Indeed, she is exponentially more vulnerable here than she is if she took a defenseless pot shot in the physical world from a maglev train, or a direct assault on the weakest part of her psyche with a psychic chainsaw. It stands to reason, then, that the same is true of Luke and Krayt - they are just as vulnerable as her. It is also a fact that the measure of Abeloth's power is how much damage she can take: for every avatar she loses, she loses power, like losing a limb. Ergo, Abeloth can take a lot more damage without dying than others can, and this is fundamentally even more true Beyond Shadows: she takes far, far more cumulative damage than she dishes out to Krayt and Luke combined before she eventually dies. Ergo, the same applies to Luke and Krayt: their essence, their reserves, the wellspring of their power, can be measured by how much of it they can lose before they die.

Now, as we well know by this point, Luke was left on the brink of death after this fight: his physical body which was only loosely tethered to his spirit and howled a "death" scream at the very moment Abeloth used her last attack on him, and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious, after this attack. He was even ready to drift off and join Mara in the netherworld: sure, it's an attractive prospect, and it's also granted that he could have gotten back to his feet more quickly if he wasn't so tempted, but the fact remains that Luke would never have been in the position to contemplate this if he wasn't so close to death.

So... it stands to all reason and evidence presented in the source material that, were an individual to absorb the same level of attacks from Abeloth that left Luke on death's door, lose a comparable amount of essence, and survive, that they would then be within Luke's own range of power. Right? Because as we know, a measure of Abeloth's power is that she took far more damage, and lost far more essence than would have been needed to kill Luke and Krayt several times over. Unless this principle is somehow different for Luke and Krayt, then it stands to reason that if one could demonstrate that Krayt's Force reserves are comparable to Luke's, then so too would be his power in the Force. Now, just to quickly demonstrate this, I'll point out the most significant attacks Abeloth landed during the course of the fight, those that caused by far the most damage and had a lingering effect on Luke a year after the fight (he had a "fist-sized" wound in the chest of his Force essence and his physical body in Crucible).

Namely, the first Force Lightning blast Abeloth lands, which first goes through Krayt and then through Luke, at the start of the fight.

Luke turned to follow-and there she was, a gray silhouette just emerging from the Mists of Forgetfulness, her long saffron hair cascading almost down to the water, her tiny pinpoint eyes shining out of sockets as deep as wells.

Luke's hand dropped to his hip, automatically reaching for a lightsaber that did not exist beyond shadows. He tried to continue the motion and bring it up to deliver a blast of Force energy, but Abeloth had already launched her own attack by then, delivering a bolt of Force lightning that blasted straight through the stranger into Luke. He felt himself fly backward, consumed by pain, his entire being a column of blue, crackling Force flame.

This was the result of that initial blast:

Luke's chest was a searing ache around a fist-sized scorch hole, and his Force essence was bleeding out from a dozen smaller wounds, leaving a crescent of twinkling light spread across the dark water.

The second, and by far most potent attack sustained by Luke and Krayt, was Abeloth's final, suicidal kamikaze attack she made, knowing that she was going to die anyway:

Abeloth did not come dancing in to counterattack, did not even try to stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning. She did not have time for such tactics. Luke doubted she would have fled the battle in the first place if she were not already dying, and with her Force essence gushing out of her like a geyser, she had to attack now.

And she did.

In the next thought Abeloth was simply there in front of the stranger, driving a ball of tentacles deep into him. Luke sprang forward to help-and felt a blistering iciness slide deep into his own chest. His entire right side flared into cold anguish, and the tentacles began to dig and grab, tearing him apart inside in a way no lightsaber or blaster ever could.

Key points:

1. Abeloth was not counterattacking, or trying to "stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning" - this was exactly what she was doing at the start of the fight, meaning, that Luke and Krayt's combined prowess is such that f*cking Abeloth has to use a degree of tactics and skill to weaken their defenses before she tries to attack them.

2. This is another demonstration of how Beyond Shadows goes well beyond the physical. She was "tearing [Luke and Krayt] apart inside in a way no lightsaber or blaster ever could". Meaning, what Abeloth was doing here was a more devastating kind of attack than a lightsaber through the chest.

3. This attack was fully sustained by Luke and Krayt, they had no defenses erected against it: Abeloth went straight through their existing chest-essence wounds, plunged deep inside them, and ripped them apart at the most fundamental level. This attack, in terms of the damage it causes to a Force user, is up to this point in time the most devastating kind of attack we have ever seen. Nothing in the physical or psychic universe of Star Wars can really compare to this. So it stands to reason that as a test of pure Force reserves, this is as good as it gets. And the result of this attack...

Luke attacked anyway, driving an elbow strike into the side of her head. As before, there was no crunching, no physical sense of impact, only Force energy plowing through Force energy, sending waves of pain and damage rolling through them both. Luke sensed his elbow come free as it pushed out the other side of Abeloth's head. Then she simply fell away, her still-balled tentacles tearing free of both Luke and the stranger...each clutching a handful of dripping, pulsing Force essence.

The stranger collapsed with a gaping hole in his chest. Luke felt his own form grow limp and weak, and he sensed his mouth falling open to scream, then his whole body was falling, weak and aching for breath.

Key points:

1. Something I only just clocked now, but when Luke is elbowing Abeloth, it is "only Force energy plowing through Force energy, sending waves of pain and damage rolling through them both". Meaning, that when one attacks another in Beyond Shadows, it actually harms both of them.

2. Yes, it's been argued before that Luke landing the final elbow that finishes Abeloth is proof he carried the entire fight... and yes, that argument still as asinine as it has always been. For starters, Abeloth caught Krayt by surprise by attacking him first, so if we're going to play the nitpicking game, she attacked Krayt first, spent longer attacking him than Luke, and obviously gave him less time to prepare a counterattack, because by the time he knew what was happening Abeloth was already balls-deep inside him. Luke, on the other hand, was allowed a valuable moment to see what Abeloth was doing and rush in to help. It stands to reason that Abeloth would have both caused more damage to Krayt and would have gotten more deeply enmeshed in his Force essence than she did Luke, since she started with him first and caught him totally off-guard, ergo it makes sense that Luke would be in a better position to land an elbow. Moreover... why does this even matter? Arguing that Luke carried the fight because he landed this one elbow is similar to arguing that the guy who puts the last brick in a building is responsible for the vast majority of its construction, despite the sustained and multi-faceted contributions from the rest of his team and other contractors... moreover, if Abeloth is so weak by this stage that landing one elbow is enough to finish her off, then clearly what happened leading up to the elbow is infinitely more important than the elbow itself, no? Moreover, we just established that attacking someone's essence also hurts the attacker, and considering Abeloth had just lowered her defenses, and plunged into a suicide attack, driving her essence deep inside not one but two individuals, it stands to reason she'd be pretty f*cking weakened by this, no?

And the final third point I alluded to earlier:

Krayt's Power Relative To Abeloth

We can forget about Luke for a moment and just discuss Krayt as he compares to Abeloth. I'm gonna bring up several sub-points here, in this order:

-Abeloth does not at any time treat Krayt like fodder
-Abeloth received the vast majority of the damage needed to kill her from Krayt
-By all reason and evidence, one's offensive power can be translated into their defensive power, rather than held in a vacuum: so the sheer magnitude of damage Krayt does to Abeloth is reflective of his overall power
-Krayt only grows more powerful in every sense after this point in time: literally every catalyst of growth we use to create >/>/>/>/> type scaling chains happens to Krayt: bodily health, mental resilience, spiritual power, healing old wounds, gaining more knowledge of the Force, not to mention the constant endurance training his willpower received over the next century from fighting off the Vong Coral seeds...

So for the first point, this is really self-explanatory.

Luke turned to follow-and there she was, a gray silhouette just emerging from the Mists of Forgetfulness, her long saffron hair cascading almost down to the water, her tiny pinpoint eyes shining out of sockets as deep as wells.

Luke's hand dropped to his hip, automatically reaching for a lightsaber that did not exist beyond shadows. He tried to continue the motion and bring it up to deliver a blast of Force energy, but Abeloth had already launched her own attack by then, delivering a bolt of Force lightning that blasted straight through the stranger into Luke. He felt himself fly backward, consumed by pain, his entire being a column of blue, crackling Force flame.

Luke hurled another blast of Force energy in her direction, then braced himself to take the most devastating counterattack yet. The counterattack never came.

Instead, the Force blast rocked Abeloth up on one leg, where she hung teetering over the Lake of Apparitions for a thousand heartbeats. Luke's chest was a searing ache around a fist-sized scorch hole, and his Force essence was bleeding out from a dozen smaller wounds, leaving a crescent of twinkling light spread across the dark water. He sprang anyway.

Abeloth only seemed to sag, and it appeared that she might tumble into the water in the eternity it was taking to reach her. But that would have been too easy. Luke and the Sith stranger had been hurling Force attacks at her for a lifetime-or perhaps it was a mere eyeblink-and this was the first time she had shown any reaction.

[...]

Abeloth did not come dancing in to counterattack, did not even try to stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning. She did not have time for such tactics. Luke doubted she would have fled the battle in the first place if she were not already dying, and with her Force essence gushing out of her like a geyser, she had to attack now.

So again, just to remember the scope we are dealing with... Abeloth, godlike dark side monstrosity whose casual expressions of the Force dwarf that of the most extreme expressions by any mortal Force user in history, including DE Sidious and Luke, dovin basals being moved, the Jade Shadow feat etc etc, melts cities accidentally, facetanks Force attacks from Luke while every cell in his body is bursting with Force energy... feels that Krayt should be dealt with by using tactics, counterattacks and be weakened over time before she goes in for the kill. This being a realm where the environment plays very little role in how fights play out because the environment is the Force and the combatants are balls of energy that have gained sentience and fight by smashing into each other... I'm fairly certain if Krayt was way weaker than Luke, being carried by him and was fodder to Abeloth that she'd have dispensed with such tactics and singled him out. Again, this actually makes no sense anyway, because were it the case that Krayt was fodder and much weaker than Luke, then that also means that Luke was the vast majority of the reason Abeloth was held in place long enough to be killed, and yet, Luke by himself can be killed by Abeloth in short order if he is simply singled out. It's clear Luke and Krayt are more than the sum of their parts in this fight, and that merely having one another nearby is enough to give Abeloth extreme pause before rushing in to kill them.

But then we go further in, where still near the start of the fight, before Abeloth has lost the majority of her life force, Krayt facetanks a blast from her and maintains the energy knot between them...

The tattooed stranger stepped in from the left, then slid to the front and drove his stiffened fingers deep into the pit of Abeloth's stomach. A black spray erupted from the wound, and she writhed in pain as the stranger probed for something to grab.

Abeloth loosed a Force blast, trying to drive the stranger off. He held tight. So did Luke, and all three went tumbling across the lake in a snarled mass of limbs and tentacles.

The blast was strong enough that it sent the three of them flying across the lake... to put that in perspective, Luke and Krayt's sustained Force blasts, resulting in Luke's putting Abeloth off-balance, merely caused one of her legs to come up and teeter over the edge of the lake. Meaning, Krayt tanked a blast (and held onto Abeloth) at point blank that had enough force to send all three of them flying across the lake... meaning, a more powerful blast than anything Luke himself had conjured up to this point, or indeed ever would in the fight. If Krayt was not a viable threat to Abeloth, he would have been sent packing by the blast, and it's evident from the fact Luke also needs to brace himself and hold on that the blast was strong enough to get his full attention as well. It's honestly kind of strange the lengths I have to go to point stuff like this out, since we normally take it for granted given how obvious it is, but there it is - Krayt tanks point blank Force blast from highly motivated dark side demigod in literally the most fair form of combat in the mythos.

Next point... Krayt is essentially the one who killed Abeloth. The two attacks which did this were 1. Krayt draining Abeloth, and 2. Krayt impaling Abeloth with his arm, and then telekinetically ripping it out of her. I've expounded on both at length before and would be much happier to just link to those posts than repeat them here. But again, just to consider the scope: Abeloth, who has vastly more Force reserves than someone like Luke or DE Sidious, and certainly more than Luke and Krayt combined, was killed by Krayt's Drain in an amount of time which, in real-time for Saba was a short skirmish with a few ghouls. Indeed, if we cut to just the time Krayt starts draining Abeloth, and finish with the moment he rips his arm out of her, very little real time has passed. And it helps that not only does damaging another's Force essence damages the attacker as well, as established already, but Krayt was further being damaged by having to take Abeloth's essence into himself. It was described as causing him to scream in pain, and rather than absorbing the essence to power himself, the black liquid poured out of the wounds in his own spirit-body and caused the lake's spirit-water to spirit-boil and emit steam. Because Drain is, as described by plenty of sources, an extremely taxing ability to use, it is usually necessary that the attacker receives compensation in the form of the enemy's life force to sustain the attack: this was the case with Nihilus and Bane, and IIRC Vitiate's ritual backfired on a similar principle. The principle being, if you are going to expend large amounts of energy towards some end, in order for that to be sustainable, one must be replenished with a similar amount of energy.

And so Krayt drained some of Luke's energy to compensate. Right? They have equal jobs, Luke holds Abeloth, Krayt uses the drain, both are very taxing. Krayt has the added burden of taking her damaging essence into himself, and so to compensate, he drains some of Luke's energy. Luke chooses to attack Krayt while he does this, and so Krayt lessens the drain on Luke and keeps pulling harder on the drain he has on Abeloth. Luke later realises he is not being betrayed but that Krayt was suffering from draining Abeloth as much as Luke had suffered from Krayt draining him. This feat has been overlooked for so long, I think, simply because of how unprecedented it is: it's absolutely ridiculous that Krayt both caused so much damage to Abeloth and managed to sustain an attack that did so much self-inflicted damage - this feat should really be the standard upon which we base other combative-draining feats between Force users.

The second part, then, is Krayt TK ripping his arm out of Abeloth, which had been amputated from himself. Again, I've been over this at length already, but essentially, this is not a simple case of Krayt making a hole inside Abeloth for her essence to pour of out... you might be inclined to think that Abeloth's "spirit body" has an exterior, inside of which her essence is held, like a jug of water. But that's not the case... Abeloth is the essence. There is no bifurcation between protective outer layer and vulnerable inner layer, like having internal organs inside a ribcage. In this realm they are made of pure energy through and through, and all of the descriptions of punching, kicking, stabbing, blasting "through" your chest with lightning, are not literal - they are just representations of what is happening that is easy to understand. Meaning, the measure of how powerful an attack is, in Beyond Shadows, is how much damage it has caused to the essence of the opponent. In this case, Krayt's impalement, tearing apart, and then ripping out his arm from Abeloth was so devastating combined with his drain that she would have died even if she had fled the battlefield. Yes, he mortally wounded her. Luke points this out, stating that the only reason Abeloth suicide attacks himself and Krayt is because she knows she will die anyway:

Abeloth did not come dancing in to counterattack, did not even try to stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning. She did not have time for such tactics. Luke doubted she would have fled the battle in the first place if she were not already dying, and with her Force essence gushing out of her like a geyser, she had to attack now.

Meaning, sustained over a relatively short period of time, with help from Luke holding her in place, Krayt mortally wounded a being who, in the past, has tanked:

-Direct attacks from cell-bursting Luke
-An even more devastating, full-powered psychic attack from Luke
-An even more devastating psychic attack from a full-powered Darish Vol

...and the result of those attacks ranged from being sent off-balance, to losing a fraction of her power from losing an avatar, to being weakened, but being so angry she could still melt a f*cking city. So yes, while Krayt needed a sustained attack, the fact remains that he mortally wounded her rather than removing a fraction of her power, and therefore encapsulated within that attack was an amount of offensive Force energy exponentially higher than some of Luke's most powerful attacks, ever. You would need to multiply several of Luke's most powerful attacks which have drained his energy completely in order to fit the same amount of damage that Krayt caused to Abeloth. And while it's clear Krayt received the opportunity to do this from Luke helping him, I am simply making the observation that in order to do this at all, you need to be ridiculously powerful. The feat is unprecedented in the lore.

There might be an issue of how Krayt would be able to express such power in the physical world without destroying his body, much like how Sidious' spirit is so powerful that it is constantly ravaging his flesh. I think there are two fairly satisfactory answers to this: firstly, while the Vong coral seeds were the bane of Krayt's existence for over a century, they were initially used to augment his body to better withstand the strain of their experiments on him, and also to extend his life beyond it's natural limits. It stands to reason, then, that with such amplifications Krayt would not deteriorate as quickly as Sidious. This would satisfy the answer of why despite being less midichlorian abundant than others, he can circumvent this and express the full might of his spiritual power physically. However, I can also buy the idea that Krayt, at this time, is more powerful Beyond Shadows than he is physically, since physically he's missing a human arm (which applies to Luke too), and is also pretty old and damaged. However, when Krayt is Reborn, using dark transfer, the most powerful healing ability in the mythos combined with Shatterpoint, Krayt is given the opportunity to build his body back up from the building blocks, regrow his arm, and achieves "peak human" physical health. Moreover, as seen with Cade, Krayt can instantly purge his body of toxins, even passively, which allowed Cade to abuse deathsticks for 7 years straight without suffering any of the "life shortening" effects. Krayt was stated to be in full control of his body, at his peak physically after being Reborn, and so I think it's likely that the kind of power he had Beyond Shadows could be brought to bear much more readily when he is Reborn, because he doesn't have to worry about destroying his body. If you could go inside yourself and fix every tiny, minute flaw in your cellular makeup, and could from there passively keep yourself at the peak of human potential, then it's gonna take a long time for wear and tear to set in.

So... yeah, long story short, Reborn Krayt would probably take DE Luke down simply due to the fact he's closer in power to FotJ Luke, and I'm led to believe that there is a healthy power difference between these two Lukes.

Luke

Krayt.

Luke sweeps krayt s dead body