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The 501st had built an entire identity around being the Republic’s problem battalion. They knew exactly who they were. They were the reckless ones, the loud ones, the ones who ignored a quarter of the regulations, outran the other half, and made the remaining quarter cry.
They were the battalion that did ridiculous things under fire and lived to make jokes about it afterward. They were the “how the hell are they still alive?” unit. The proud, chaotic, battlefield-demon unit.
Which was why they looked at the 212th Attack Battalion and saw, at first glance, the opposite. The 212th was polished and formal. Their armor always looked freshly cleaned, even after campaigns. Their medics filed reports in complete sentences and their troopers actually said “sir”. Their General smiled politely at his troops and looked a bit like he might apologize to a wall if he bumped into it.
The 501st, in all their loud, beautifully incorrect confidence, assumed the 212th were the boring ones. The ones who probably made calendars for fun.
Then they began running joint campaigns, and the 501st discovered, with growing and very sincere terror, that the 212th were not boring at all. They were just disciplined enough to hide the madness under manners. Which turned out to be worse. Much worse.
The first sign that the 212th wasn’t quite as they seemed came at the start of their first campaign during planning.
Rex, Captain Vaughn, and Lieutenant Jesse arrived at the temporary command post expecting standard joint-op energy: maps, briefings, tactical exchanges, a little inter-unit posturing, maybe some mild trauma dumping.
Instead, they walked into the room and found the 212th already there with Commander Cody standing at the holo-table with his arms folded, posture so straight it looked like it had been reinforced with durasteel. His armor was clean and he wore a calm expression.
His troopers stood in neat positions behind him, as though they had all agreed in advance that chaos was for lesser battalions. Obi-Wan Kenobi walked in a few seconds behind them, late, but not by much.
He glanced around the room with an apologetic smile, as if he’d merely been delayed by something trivial. Which was obviously not the case as the next words came out of his mouth.
“Sorry,” he said. “There was a slight issue with the north transit route.”
The 212th did not react to this information at all. Not one of them turned or sighed or looked vaguely fed up with their General. Rex’s immediate conclusion was that this battalion was completely made up of terrifying professionals.
Then Obi-Wan added, “Also, a speeder caught fire.”
Cody didn’t even look surprised. “Are you alright, General?”
Obi-Wan smiled warmly. “That depends. Were you worried?”
“Yes,” Cody deadpanned.
Rex turned and looked at Jesse and Vaughn because he was certain he had misheard something. Their body language suggested he had not.
The 212th commander had indeed just traded that line like it was normal and, in fact, happened every morning. As if the General flirted with disaster itself on the daily and his battalion had just grown used to it.
Ahsoka, standing behind Anakin, muttered, “Oh no.”
Anakin, who had not yet quite developed the healthy wariness necessary for 212th exposure, asked, “What?”
Ahsoka slowly pointed at Obi-Wan. “That.”
Anakin followed the gesture, saw Obi-Wan’s smile, saw Cody’s expression of long-suffering fondness, and then visibly started to understand something he desperately did not want to understand.
The briefing itself was where Rex started to remember that Cody was actually a nightmare to deal with under all of his pretending. He had made the poor assumption that the war had changed that. It had not.
The objective was straightforward enough: push through the enemy outer line, cut power to the shield relay, and secure the comm tower before reinforcements arrived. Rex was already planning the 501st’s usual approach—bold flank, heavy distraction, maybe a reckless charge through the battlefield if necessary—when Cody said, “We’ll take the eastern ridge.”
That was fine.
Cody added, “The ridge is unstable, so we’ll hit it hard and fast before the artillery realizes it’s an option.”
Well, Rex supposed that was also fine, in a horrifying way.
Then Obi-Wan, smiling gently at the holo-map, said, “And I’ll lead the infiltration team through the drainage tunnels.”
Those words were not supposed to sound calm, and yet Obi-Wan said them like he was proposing a new dining place on Coruscant for them to try next shore leave.
Rex stared at him. “The drainage tunnels?”
“Yes.”
Rex looked at Cody in desperation. “You know the drainage tunnels are flooded.”
“Yes?”
“And collapse-prone.”
“Yep.”
“And the enemy is using them for biohazard waste disposal.”
“Yeah.”
Vaughn leaned toward Jesse and muttered, “I don’t like this at all.”
Jesse whispered back, “Neither do I. The General sounds like he’s describing a pleasant shortcut.”
Obi-Wan clasped his hands behind his back and studied the map. “Well, the enemy doesn’t expect us to be that unpleasantly committed.”
Rex stared.
Anakin, who had been watching in a stunned stupor, slowly turned to Ahsoka and whispered, “He says things like that on purpose, doesn’t he?”
Ahsoka looked sick. “I think so.”
Then Obi-Wan brightened and said, “Besides, if the tunnels are unstable, that just means we’ll need to be more creative.”
Rex wanted to object. He really did. But Cody was already nodding, as though this was simply the natural order of military planning. He turned to the troopers behind him. “Boil, you’ll take point. Waxer, with me. General, if the tunnel collapses, we’ll need a faster route.”
Obi-Wan smiled. “Excellent. I was hoping you’d say that, dear.”
The 501st collectively experienced the first full-body chill of the campaign. The 212th had not just accepted the mad plan, they had improved it. They had expectations of madness. This was a form of discipline the 501st did not and did not want to possess. And yet, it had worked.
Their first battle after that campaign only made it all worse.
The 501st entered the engagement still somewhat expecting the 212th to be elegant. Instead, the 212th proceeded to fight like a battalion that had spent years collecting all the dangerous ideas in the galaxy and turning them into a battle doctrine.
The first sign was Waxer. Waxer sprinted across an exposed space under direct fire, ducked beneath a blaster bolt so narrowly Rex flinched just watching, and then casually lobbed a thermal detonator at the enemy like he was playing catch with a cadet.
The explosion took out three droids and one gun emplacement.
Waxer, while backing up calmly, said over comms, “That should improve morale.”
Rex screamed, “YOU WERE IN THE OPEN!”
Waxer replied, “Only temporarily.”
That did not help. It somehow made it worse.
Boil leaned out from behind cover, looked at the advancing enemy line, and said with obvious annoyance, “Well, that’s inconvenient.”
Then he proceeded to stand all the way up, fire six perfectly placed shots, and personally ruin the enemy’s afternoon.
Rex watched him and thought, with horrifing clarity, that the 212th were kriffing lunatics.
Cody moved through the battlefield as if he had already memorized where every enemy would be before they got there. He issued orders over comms with the same tone a man might use to correct an error in a supply manifest.
“Left flank, tighten up. Helix, got some men heading back to you.”
“Boil, the tank is yours.”The hysterical laughter he got in return sent chills down Rex’s spine.
“Longshot! Don’t let them pin the General!”
And then Obi-Wan appeared in the middle of a kill zone. That was not metaphorical. He literally walked into the enemy’s firing range.
Rex nearly dropped his rifle. “GENERAL KENOBI!”
Obi-Wan glanced over his shoulder, saw the blasterfire sparking past his robe, and smiled as though he had merely wandered into his own living quarters. “Yes, Captain?
“You are in the open!”
“Yep!”
“That’s a sniper lane!”
“I know!”
“That is an active sniper lane!”
“I was rather hoping the sniper would be more focused on the decoy unit!”
Rex stared. “What decoy unit?”
Obi-Wan pointed to the left. There was a decoy unit. The 501st had not noticed it because the 212th had placed it there that morning with their usual alarming foresight.
Ahsoka whispered, “They planned for that?”
Anakin whispered back, “I think they’ve planned for everything.”
Obi-Wan smiled at a nearby enemy officer, who visibly hesitated under the weight of that expression.
Then Obi-Wan said, conversationally, “You should probably surrender.”
The officer didn’t.
Obi-Wan sighed. “Pity.” Then he redirected a blaster bolt with his saber, stepped forward, and kicked the officer off a ledge.
Rex stared in horror. No one else had appeared to see it happen. “I thought General Kenobi was meant to be diplomatic!”
From somewhere else, Cody’s voice came over comms, maddeningly calm: “He’s efficient.”
The 501st, who had always thought they were the reckless ones, began to understand they were merely loud about it. The 212th were quiet about their crimes, but they were considerably more insane.
The mess hall was where the real cultural collapse happened.
The 501st expected the 212th to eat their ration sludge in dignified silence while filing tactical updates. Instead, Cody walked in carrying three cafs, a tray of rations, and a datapad, all balanced with absurd ease, and said, “If anyone mentions the state of the soup, I’ll be forced to report you for emotional distress.”
Boil looked up from a communal table. “Sir, this can barely be considered soup.”
Cody didn’t even glance at it. “Don’t let the Republic hear you say that. They’ll raise the price and call it exotic.”
Waxer was already arguing with another member of the 212th about whether the caf was “technically edible if one believed in miracles.”
Obi-Wan entered shortly after, looked at the ration tray, and said, “Goodness.” Rex braced himself. Obi-Wan poked the contents with a utensil. “Did the kitchen commit a war crime?”
A 212th trooper answered immediately, “No, General. That would imply intent.”
Obi-Wan nodded thoughtfully. “A fair point.”
Then he sat down and ate it anyway, all while looking directly at Cody as though this were normal dinner conversation.
The 501st simply stopped functioning. Hardcase leaned toward Jesse and whispered, “Are they flirting through starvation?”
Jesse whispered back, “I think yes.”
Ahsoka said, absolutely horrified, “This is disgusting.”
Anakin, who was watching Obi-Wan smile at Cody and had clearly just accepted his fate, muttered, “I’ve never been more uncomfortable in my life.”
Then Obi-Wan looked up and, without missing a beat, said to Cody, “You know, if the food were any less appetizing, I might have to ask you to distract me.”
Cody didn’t bat an eye. “I’m always happy to distract you, General.”
The 501st made a collective noise of revulsion at the thought. Anakin put his face in his hands. “Why does that work?”
Ahsoka stared at him. “Don’t ask the universe questions it can’t answer.”
Rex looked at Cody, then at Obi-Wan. “This is not regulation.”
Cody glanced up. “No one said it was.”
Obi-Wan smiled brightly. “That’s the best part.”
Rex’s soul left his body for a second and came back worse.
By their next campaign, the 501st had begun to fear the 212th in earnest.
They were simply too competent. In fact, that level of competence should have been reassuring. Only it wasn’t, because it always appeared at the exact moment someone decided something ridiculous would solve the problem.
The 212th had a terrifying talent for seeing a battlefield and immediately identifying the most absurdly effective solution.
For example, when pinned in a canyon by artillery, the 501st expected a retreat order. Instead Cody calmly said, “We’ll take the ravine wall.”
Rex stared at him. “The ravine wall.”
“Correct.”
“The wall made of unstable sediment and exposed fossil strata?”
“Is there another wall I’m missing, Rex?”
“You want us to climb it under fire?”
Cody looked at him in that patient, maddening way that suggested the answer was obvious. “No. I want us to use it.”
Then Waxer produced a charge pack. Boil produced a second one. A few more troopers all produced one as well.
Obi-Wan, from behind them, said quite thoughtfully, “The structure is unlikely to survive. That should work in our favor.”
The 501st just stared.
The wall was then detonated. The resulting landslide took out three enemy emplacements, one supply bunker, and a droid command cluster. Rex stared at the smoldering debris, then twisted to look back at Cody.
Cody looked back, perfectly calm.
Rex asked, with the tone of a man hoping to hear a sane answer from a not-insane person, “Was that planned?”
Cody nodded once. “Of course it was.”
Rex felt something in him break with quiet horror. “You planned to blow up the mountain?!”
“It was one plan, yes.”
“You planned to bury the enemy under said mountain.”
“Yes.”
Boil said, “To be fair, it wasn’t a very stable mountain if it took this few bombs.”
Hardcase made a strangled noise in the back of his throat.
Rex turned slowly toward Obi-Wan who was smiling happily at Cody. “General, why didn’t we know that they were like this?”
Obi-Wan’s smile turned deeply, almost cheerfully wicked. “Where would the fun be in that?”
The 501st made a sound that could only be described as a choke of collective outrage.
By the next joint campaign, the 501st had started expecting weirdness from the 212th. They were still not prepared. Because nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared them for the tunnel incident.
The mission was to infiltrate a Separatist command bunker built into the side of a mountain and steal a datacore.
The 501st proposed a direct approach with overwhelming force. It was a normal plan. A sane plan. One with acceptable levels of fire and fewer underground surprises.
The 212th looked at the map and said, “We can use the crypt tunnels.”
Rex stared at the map. “The what now.”
Cody pointed. “The old burial tunnels beneath the mountain.”
Ahsoka, who had come along against her better judgment, made a very small, very frightened noise. “There are burial tunnels?”
Obi-Wan smiled. “Of course there are burial tunnels.”
“Why do you say that like it’s normal?” she despaired.
“Why, because for this planet, it is.”
The 501st continued to understand that the 212th had apparently adopted a worldview in which every horrifying environment could become a tactical advantage if one were committed enough to the bit.
Then Cody added, “We’ll use the tunnels to get under the bunker.”
Rex frowned. “What if they’re sealed?”
Boil answered, “Then we’ll open them.”
“With what?” Boil held up a detonation pack he’d seemingly produced from thin air and Rex took several steps back on instinct. “You people are not serious.”
Obi-Wan gave him a gentle look. “Of course we are, Captain.”
“This is an ancient burial site.”
“Indeed.”
“It’s probably sacred.”
Obi-Wan paused, then replied, “Only if the dead object.”
The 501st and Ahsoka stared openly. Anakin slowly turned his head toward Obi-Wan with the expression of a man realizing, with rising dread, that the person who had raised him had been a menace the whole time.
“That still seems impolite,” Rex said weakly.
Obi-Wan looked mildly offended. “Captain, war has never once been polite.”
The 501st had no answer for that because unfortunately, it was true.
So the 212th crawled into the burial tunnels, and the 501st, who had begun these campaigns assuming they were the chaos specialists, followed behind in creeping, horrified silence while the 212th moved through ancient bones, collapsed masonry, and possible cursef territory with the all the calm of people taking a shortcut through a market.
At one point Waxer kicked aside what was probably a ceremonial relic and said, “Osik, sorry.”
Rex nearly had an aneurysm. At another point, Boil stepped over a skeleton and muttered, “At least they’re out of the way.”
Ahsoka stared at him. “You can’t say that.”
Boil looked genuinely puzzled. “Why not? They’re dead.”
“That’s not the issue!”
Obi-Wan, from the front, said pleasantly, “Oh, don’t fuss. The dead are quite difficult to offend.”
That was when the 501st, in their entirety, achieved a new level of horror. The 212th had the confidence of people who had already accounted for the consequences and decided consequences were negotiable.
The bunker was infiltrated and the datacore stolen. The enemy command line collapsed. The 212th emerged from the crypt tunnels dusty, calm, and mildly annoyed that the route had been “less scenic than expected.”
Rex stared at Cody through the smoke and Cody stared back, calm as ever. Then Rex said, with the tone of a man on the verge of a mental breakdown, “You are all insane.”
Cody considered that, then nodded. “Probably.”
That answer was, somehow, the most alarming one yet.
Finally, the 501st had to face the truth. The 212th were not the neat battalion. They were the battalion whose neatness had become so refined it concealed an absolute disaster of tactical instincts and deeply unhealthy battlefield creativity.
They were the people who crossed lava fields because “the other route was longer,” used tomb tunnels as entry points without emotional hesitation, smiled while committing acts that violated any and all laws of war, and somehow made all of it look like a typical Tuesday.
The 501st were horrified on every available level by the fact that the 212th were better at being insane than they were. They were horrified by the fact that the 212th’s insanity came with forms, schedules, and immaculate boots. They were horrified by the fact that they respected them more with every mission.
They were horrified by the fact that, for all their own reputation as chaos goblins, the 212th were somehow the true unhinged unit in the GAR.
The 501st had thought they were the rebels, the loose canons, the dangerous ones. The ones who broke the rules just because. And they absolutely were.
But the 212th were the battalion who could smile politely, say “of course,” and then commit ten times the crimes with twice the discipline and three times the emotional stability.
Which, in the end, was much more terrifying. Normal chaos was one thing. But disciplined chaos with clean armor, proper posture, and a General who flirted with disaster like it was a hobby was a force of nature that couldn’t be reckoned with.
And the 501st, at long last, were horrified enough to give them the respect they deserved.