LOTF Kyle Katarn vs Darth Vader

Corvinus wrote:@IG You actually did. Even though we've seen Vader perform better in worse conditions.

The Ellimist wrote:Civility everyone please.

BoD wrote:

Has Vader shown anything on that level?

Duelling evenly with Roan Shryne - a Jedi considered a swordsmaster in a period where beings like Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace and Yoda lived - barely 2 months (if that) after Mustafar after toying with 2 knights at once and one-shotting 3 padawans. He's also toyed with an assassin who could blitz a group of a dozen or more mercenaries in a few seconds. He then received massive growth after killing Shryne and has feats like holding the upper hand against SK on Kamino (twice), with SK admitting he can't beat Vader. He's also stomped 4 knights simultaneously. All of these feats are pre-ESB, when he became "far more formidable". So yes, Vader has shown feats on that level long before his prime. This is Vader before going through repeated immense power and skill growth.

Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:"Tell my mom I'm sorry I failed her," Jacen whispered.
"She knows," Mara said, and squeezed the trigger.
...
They said that the human body was capable of extraordinary feats of strength when in extremis. For a Jedi, it was something else entirely.
Jacen Solo wasn't ready to die, not now, not so close to his ascendance, and not in a stinking drain like vermin.
He deflected the energy bolt with one last surge of the Force and sent the rubble erupting off his crushed and bleeding body like a detonation. Bricks hammered the walls and rained fragments, knocking Mara flat like a bomb blast. She made an animal noise that was more anger than pain and flailed for a moment as she tried to get up.
The effort froze Jacen for two vital seconds. But he knew if he didn't get up now and fight back, Mara would come in for the kill, again and again, until he was worn down and too weak to fend her off.
He scrambled to his feet, staggering more than standing, and suddenly understood.
It was Mara who had to die to fulfill his destiny.
Killing her was the test: the words of the prophecy were meaningless, and at a visceral level he knew that her death was the pivotal act. He didn't know how, and this wasn't the time to stop and think about it. He surrendered totally to instinct for the first time in ages. Whatever guided a Sith's hand had to guide him now.
But he was hurt, and badly.
Ben ... he didn't know where Ben fitted into this, but now he knew he did, as surely as he knew anything. Jacen didn't care, because he knew he had to kill Mara now and nothing else would make sense until he did that.
He fumbled for his lightsaber and thumbed it into life again. Mara was already back on her feet, coming at him with the shoto and vibroblade, brick dust and black-red blood snaking down her forehead from a scalp cut. She leapt at him with the shoto held left-handed, fencing-style, seared the angle of his cheekbone, and caught him under the tip of chin with the vibroblade as he jerked back.
She shouldn't have been able to get near him. He had total mastery, and she was just athletic and fast. He pushed back at her in the Force, sending her crashing against a wall with a loud grunt, but she kept coming at him, one-two, one-two with the shoto and the blade, and he was being driven back, his strength ebbing. He needed space to fight.
He drew his dart gun and fired one after the other, but Mara scattered all four needles in a blur of blue light. They fell to the ground. He turned and scrambled through the collapsed brick, using the Force to hurl debris up at her from the floor of the passage while she leapt from block to boulder to chunk of masonry, until she Force-leapt onto his back and brought him down.
They rolled. This wasn't a duel: it was a brawl. She thrust her vibroblade up under his chin and he jerked his head to one side, feeling the tip skate from his jaw to his hairline as it missed his jugular. He couldn't draw the weapons he needed. He was losing blood, losing strength, waning, flailing his lightsaber to fend her off. It was almost useless in such a close-quarters struggle. Mara, manic and panting, flicked the shoto to counter every desperate stabbing thrust.
"Ben . . . I'll see you dead first. . . before . . . you get . . . Ben."
Jacen was on the knife-edge between dying and killing. They grappled, Force-pushed, Force-crushed: he threw her back again, trying to Force-jolt her spine and paralyze her for a moment, but somehow she deflected it and bricks flew out of the wall as if someone had punched them through from the other side. She almost Force-snatched the lightsaber from his hand, but even with his injuries he hung on to it. He wouldn't die. He couldn't, not now.
"You can't beat me," he gasped. "It's not meant to be."
"Really?" Mara snarled. "I say it is."
Then she launched herself at him—unthinking, a wild woman, hair flying—and he Force-pushed to send her slamming against a pillar in midleap. But the battering he'd taken and the ferocity of her relentless attack had blinded him to danger from another quarter. As he lurched backward to avoid her, his legs went from under him and he stumbled into a gaping crack opened up by the subsidence. He fell badly: red-hot pain seared from ankle to knee. His lightsaber went flying. Pain could be ignored, but the moment it took him to get to his feet again was enough for Mara to right herself and come back at him with the shoto and plunge it into the soft tissue just under the end of his collarbone.
Lightsaber wounds hurt a lot more than he ever imagined. Jacen screamed. He summoned his own weapon back to his hand and Mara crashed into him, knocking him flat again and pinning him down. Her vibroblade stopped a hand span from his throat as he managed to grab her hair and drag her face nearer and nearer to his lightsaber. She struggled to pull back, hacking at him with the shoto but blocked by his dwindling Force power each time.
Her vibroblade grazed his neck. He fumbled in his belt for a dart. She jerked back with a massive effort, leaving him clutching a handful of red hair, and the only thing that crossed his mind as she arched her back and held her arms high to bring both shoto and vibroblade down into his chest was that she would never, ever harm Ben.
Jacen stared into her eyes and instantly created the illusion of Ben's face beneath her. She blinked.
It gave him the edge for that fraction of a moment. It was long enough to ram the poison dart into her leg with its protective plastoid cone still in place.
It was just a small needle, ten centimeters long. He stabbed her so hard that the sharp end punched through the cone and the fabric of her pants.
Mara gasped and looked down at her leg as if she was puzzled rather than hurt. The dart quivered as she moved, and then fell to the floor.
"Oh . . . it's done . . ." Jacen said. The shoto fell from her hand and she made a vague and uncontrolled pawing movement with the vibroblade. It caught him in the bicep, but there was no strength behind the blow, and she dropped the weapon. "I'm sorry, Mara. Had to be you. Thought it was Ben. But it's over now, it's over . . ."
"What have you done? What the stang have you done to me?" But she was already losing her balance as the poison paralyzed her, and she slumped to one side as he got to his feet, staring up at him more with shock than rage or fear.
"The prophecy." It didn't matter now: the toxin—complex, relatively painless—was circulating through her body. "Don't fight it. No healing trance. Just let go . . ."
Mara tried to get up but sank back to sit on her heels, with an expression as if she'd forgotten something and was trying to remember. She crumpled against the wall. Jacen had never felt such relief. It didn't have to be Allana, or Tenel Ka, or even Ben. It was over, all over.
"What?" Mara said. She tried to put her fingers to her lips, shaking, but her hand fell back to her lap. She looked at them as if expecting to see blood.
Jacen suppressed his instinct to help her. "It's my destiny, Mara—to be a Sith Lord, and bring order and justice. I had to kill you to do it. You're going to save so many people, Mara. You've saved Ben. You've saved Allana, too. It's not a waste, believe me."
"You're ... as vile as he was."
Jacen could hardly understand what she was saying. "Who?"
"Palpatine."
"It's not like that," he said. He had to make her see what was happening. It was important. He owed her that revelation. She'd made the sacrifice, although he was now starting to wonder what that meant for whatever love he had to give up. "It's not about ambition. It's about the galaxy, about peace. It's about building a different world."
She stared back at him, and now he could see—and feel—her disgust. He wasn't sure if it was aimed at him or at herself.
Jacen hurt. He was starting to feel the full extent of his injuries, and he needed to heal himself. He also needed to get out of this tunnel.
Mara was breathing heavily now, one hand slack in her lap but the other still clenching and unclenching as if trying to form a fist to give him one final punch. Her vivid green eyes were still bright with relentless purpose. He knew he would try to forget them every day of his life.
"You think . . . you've won," she said, slurred, but utterly lucid and unafraid. "But Luke will crush you . . . and I refuse ... to let you . . . destroy the future . . . for my Ben."
Jacen sat and waited, almost expecting a prophecy from her to help him make sense of what he'd done. But after a few moments, he felt the final discharge of elemental energy that every Force-user would notice and comprehend.
Ben was the last word she ever spoke.

Essential Reader's Companion wrote:Jacen feels his power in the dark side swell, unlocking new powers, including an unparalleled ability to command and coordinate fighting forces as the former Emperor once did. Fully committed to the Sith path, Jacen assumes the title Darth Caedus.
...
Jacen has reached a threshold in his Sith potential. He has sacrificed a loved one and the bond of trust between himself and Ben. Lumiya senses this shift in power and decides a further sacrifice is needed to cement Jacen’s rule.

Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:Katarn ignited his lightsaber as he came to a stop a few meters away. "Care to surrender, Colonel Solo?"
"Not to a traitor." Caedus looked at the other three as their Force-augmented sprints came to an end, leaving them in a semicircle before him. Three Jedi Knights: the younger Horn, the Falleen Mithric, the Bothan Hu'lya. He resisted the urge to snort. Separately or collectively, these Jedi Knights were no match for him.
Katarn, though, was a threat. Still, the Jedi had only moments before GA reinforcements would arrive. Their attack was already a failure.
He sensed Katarn's attack, threw up his blade in a block so well practiced that his muscle memory could have performed it while he slept. With his free hand, he gestured at the Bothan Jedi. She was suddenly airborne, hurtling sideways to slam into the Falleen, knocking them both down.
Katarn's blade struck his, rebounded with a snap-hiss. and came around from the other side as the Jedi Master executed a lightning-fast spin. Caedus stepped back from it. not engaging the blade. He watched the blade flash harmlessly past him.
He stepped forward again into a side kick, aimed not at Katarn but at the onrushing Valin Horn. His boot heel caught the Jedi Knight on the point of his chin, knocking Horn backward off his feet. Two seconds had passed since the attack began.
...
Only Seha's head protruded from the pavement hatch as she watched her four companions assault Colonel Solo.
In one sense, it was a beautiful and brilliant thing to see. The five combatants moved as though they'd been choreographing this event for years and had planned, all along, that the two sides would somehow be even. Each time the lightsabers came together, the resulting flash of light, slightly greater than two glows by themselves, cast the five combatants into relief. Around them, blinded GAG troopers withdrew, finding one another by touch, keeping their blasters up and at the ready, waiting for the moment when their sight would return and allow them to open fire. Above, though at a distance from the Senate Building, the trails of airspeeder lights glimmered in their passage.
And Seha still had one task to perform.
In her free hand she held a patch of black cloth. It was square, five centimeters to a side, and very soft and pliant, despite the fact that its center layer consisted of circuitry embedded in a flexible polymer.
One side was covered by a transparent layer of flimsi. With her teeth, she worried an edge of the flimsi free, then pulled the whole layer off, dropping it into the access hole she occupied. The removal of the flimsi exposed a layer of adhesive.
With her own Force powers, so much less subtle than those of her allies, she sent the cloth patch flying, centimeters above ground level, toward the fight.
But she couldn't send it on to her target, not yet. Master Katarn had been clear about that. She had to wait until things were at their most chaotic, their most distracting.
So she guided the patch ever closer to the fight, but waited, waited...
...
Ten seconds.
Caedus rolled out of Katarn's kick to his head, catching a scrape along his cheek, and swung at the Master's leg, but Kolir's blade intercepted his before it bit into flesh. His strength batted her weapon away, but she had deflected his blow and spared Katarn an amputation.
They're coordinating. Good for them. Bad for me.
Caedus heard a siren-an oncoming GAG vehicle. No, two-maybe three.
He allowed himself a certain satisfaction at their speed of response. He hadn't expected anything of the sort for another half minute.
Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the first oncoming vehicle, an aging Sentinel-class armored shuttle. It was yellow, with spots of rust. He could not make out its markings without looking at it, but he knew it was not in GAG or Alliance colors. Entering airspace above the plaza, it began a dangerously steep and fast repulsorlift descent. Behind it came three GAG airspeeders, one of them firing a top-mounted laser at the shuttle.
Ah. So they were not responding with brilliant speed to an alarm. They were chasing the Jedi escape vehicle. Caedus swung at Horn, a blow meant not to connect but to cause the young Jedi to flinch away into the path of the Falleen, which he did. While they were interfering with each other, Caedus gestured at the Bothan Jedi, hurling her toward Katarn.
Katarn hurled his lightsaber off to the side and caught Hu'lya with both hands, preventing her from falling, prepared to pull her out of harm's way if Caedus followed through.
Caedus did not. He kept his senses on Katarn's light-saber, and, when it vectored to fly toward him from the side, he negligently swatted it away with his own blade.
Fifteen seconds.
Caedus gave Katarn and Hu'lya a little smile. "You could save yourselves a lot of pain by telling me now where Luke has set up the new Jedi headquarters. I swear, when you are in my hands, you will answer that question."
The Bothan got her feet back under her and stood at the ready.
Katarn caught his returning lightsaber. "Meaning you will torture us to death. Are you listening to yourself, Jacen? Do you even know who you are anymore?"
"I do. It's you who have no idea who I am."
He felt Force energy growing within Mithric and Horn. He gestured, telekinetically yanking the Bothan forward, positioning her between him and them. He felt their Force exertion as it was suddenly cut off.
Katarn advanced, lightsaber at the ready. Caedus withdrew before him. With part of his awareness, he was keeping track of the four inbound vehicles, plotting their trajectories. . .
One of the GAG vehicles was circling ahead and to starboard of the descending shuttle. Its arc, intended to put it toward the bow of the shuttle so it could fire on the cockpit, would bring it near the combatants, just a few meters above them. The pilot's maneuver was smooth, the vehicle clearly under control. Caedus could see the Jedi barely registering its presence, since it did not figure into the combat.
Caedus reached out a hand as if intending to hurl Katarn away from him. The Master raised his own hand, a deflecting gesture. But Caedus exerted himself against the oncom-ing GAG speeder, yanking it down and toward all of them.
A moment's inattention or focus elsewhere. That's all it ever took. By the time Katarn felt the speeder coming toward him-spinning, its stern a mere two meters from his back-it was already too late for him to send a command even to Force-augmented nerves and muscles. His face changed with the awareness of danger.
Then the speeder's port quarter hit his back, hurling him forward to slam into Caedus. The speeder, continuing its out-of-control motion, slid through the location of the other Jedi, knocking Hu'lya to the permacrete, causing Horn and Mithric to leap to safety.
Katarn now stood so close to Caedus that every facial feature was visible, every scar and line in his weathered face, every hair on his brow, mustache, and beard.
Caedus felt a rush of satisfaction, enjoyment, as Katarn's expression turned from one of surprise to pain. Katarn looked down to see Caedus's lightsaber buried to its hilt in his chest.
A noise, something halfway between a groan and a death rattle, emerged from Katarn's lips. Smiling, Caedus yanked his lightsaber free and let the stricken Jedi Master fall face-first on the pavement.

The Ellimist wrote:To be fair that fight would've ended at around the ten second mark had one of the knights not saved Katarn.

Why is dueling and defeating fodder so far beyond Kyle exactly?

Let's begin this case with a few simple facts. Mara Jade is described as the "Empire's deadliest agent", a statement that excludes Vader because he is no mere "agent" of the Empire, but does include Jerec, a contemporary of Vader, described as having powers that "rival Vader's". 

In that particular instance, Bane and Sidious were foiled, but Sidious' basic aims remained. He sought to create a network of Force-wielding agents loyal only to him. None would be trained sufficiently to be a threat to Darth Bane's insistence that there only be two Sith, nor would they be a threat to Darth Sidious or his apprentice, Darth Vader. The most powerful of these agents were "only" Sith adepts but would appear almost as dark Jedi - the likes of Asajj Ventress, Mara Jade, or Inquisitor Valin Draco (in fact, a fallen Jedi). The lesser agents were reduced to still-deadly faceless minions. Among their ranks were the Shadow Guards

Mara then grows for 40+ years

before losing in a close fight to an injured Jacen Solo:

Like, why does Vader compare to this? Kyle is a contemporary (possibly even a superior of) a character that while 40+ years post prime is > a rival of Vader, and is described as "Luke Skywalker's most powerful ally" during the Yuuzhan Vong war, including the Kyp Durron. 

Vader, to contrast, has what, possible superiority to Old Ben Kenobi? Being pressed by his son, a character that had around what, a month of training? A far lesser prodigy than even Vader's own self in Attack of the Clones.

lorenzo.r.2nd wrote:Vader stomping aurra in 19 BBY vs caedus, who had some trouble with her. the same ceadus who is above kyle.... hmm tough one

HeartoftheForce wrote:Katarn never taxed Caedus. 



The context of the quote is clearly addressing Valin Horn and Katarn, by definition  

both
/bōTH/
predeterminer · determiner · pronoun



"Both" only refers to two making it abundantly clear it's not referring to Jacen but rather the two men highlighted at the start of and the subject of the paragraph. Further emphasized by Solo being referred to separately directly following that.

Further emphasized by Solo being referred to separately directly following that.

Blade_of_Dorin wrote:

lorenzo.r.2nd wrote:Vader stomping aurra in 19 BBY vs caedus, who had some trouble with her. the same ceadus who is above kyle.... hmm tough one

Lorenzo really ragdolling this time

The Ellimist wrote:To be fair that fight would've ended at around the ten second mark had one of the knights not saved Katarn.