He will try to absorb it with the Force like Yoda taught him, and when that only mostly works he'll step neatly around the snarled position -

It's really very simple. He's not a great swordsman. It's an extremely basic style in which he's cultivated some proficiency. Nowhere is easy to strike, his blocks aren't truly fast but always fast enough, and it simply doesn't cost very much energy to gently turn blows aside and calmly lean out of the way as they land. 

Do not fear the man who has practiced a thousand strikes one time.  Fear the man who has practiced one strike a thousand times.

She throws a rock at him.

He elegantly moves to intercept it - 

- obviously lightsabers set for duelling don't slash through solid stone. Too many real fights and not enough duels, recently. 

That disturbs his defensive velocity and he has to flip away backwards to recover. 

Even if it did cut, lightsabers can't stop a slugthrower (or other sufficiently accelerated massive object).  You have to deflect that yourself.

"Your Soresu is impeccable, though perhaps practicing to deflect slugthrowers is advised.  I doubt your Darth will have them, I don't," swipe, "always carry one - but who knows?"

Slugthrowers? Those are admittedly a little trickier in some ways - it needs to be a perfectly clean block to vaporise the whole slug and not make superheated fragments - but the tiniest nudge in the Force would suffice, and he was not expecting the Confederacy to be that impoverished. That's only a step above pointed sticks. 

Possibly Darth Mourne also carries pointed sticks. 

"That's kind of you to say." Parry, sidestep. "How would you expect a Sith Lord to kill me?"

She doesn't have pointy sticks, but she does have a last-ditch stillblade hidden away for when she really can't sneak a powered weapon through at all.  Also, he has not seen a high-caliber rifle melt a Sith's face.

"Surprise, obviously."  She almost idly clashes with his defenses.  "Poison.  Sufficiently stealthy explosives.  Throwing an entire army at you.  If they're smart they'll try offense-in-depth - setting up a bunch of smaller traps to obscure the big one that's actually meant to kill you.  This one might be that smart, because ten creds says he's absolutely left some kind of hook in the army he gave you, but he might not be quite that smart because he thought that that was a good idea."

It's almost meditative, to converse like this. It's a mildly interesting exercise to control his breath enough to talk evenly and maintain his defence. 

"I do have to say, it's an impressive trap if so. We did not have much of a choice in accepting the clone army, or so it seemed at the time."

He parries, sidesteps, sways backwards so tightly that if it were a real blade it would have crisped his beard, and smiles.

"And how would you do it?"

"Of course not, that's why it works.  You have to avoid being drawn in at all, because then you will keep getting caught out."

Her blaster, still on her hip, fires a stun bolt at his legs as she launches another flurry of blows - in a much different form, one that feels a lot more natural than the Juyo she's been using, for all that elements of that form are evident in her style.  It's much more...  Graceful, perhaps.  Fluid.  Adaptive.  Less like a relentless hammering, more like someone peeling apart flaws in real time to find or make the right opening.  She's constantly moving, but it's not Ataru - it's very grounded.

"This is how I'd do it."

Ah, now he sees. 

He has to hop back to dodge the unexpected stunbolt, and that puts him off-balance in a way that quite possibly wins her the duel if she presses just the right way, it's a real weakness he has and it shows, in some of the branches of the way this duel could go in the vast tree of possible outcomes. 

Turning his concentration away from his limbs and his stance, he lets the Force flow through him and guide each block, focusing instead on the shape her form takes. It's familiar in some ways, but a largely novel style. His blade can weave an intricate web, following a bewilderingly complex set of points in space and time, and that's how he can defend from surrounding blasterfire; the same fundamental principle applies here. 

In a sense, the conventional contest comes down to how difficult she can make it for him to plot and execute a path that deflects her strikes, compared with how much he can disrupt her technique by making her do something unaccustomed.

Her style - vaguely reminiscent of the second, but not quite - introduces a complication: he doesn't have as good a reference for exactly what strikes chain together and which ones clash. He also has to learn in real time; she can predict him. 

This is not one of those few outcomes - but she becomes even worse to defend against once she actually draws the blaster and starts pairing 'saber strikes with shots fired.  Worse, this pistol can block a lightsaber.  It's not necessarily meant to, but it can, and she knows how to use that.  If he's not careful, she'll shoot him right through his block, no matter how good it is.

It's no three-in-one specialized hand cannon of a blaster, to make it impossible to parry - but it doesn't need to be to get one shot off at just the right moment.

This really is a rather challenging exercise. Worse than Maul by a long way.

Using the pistol to block nearly catches him out, in fact, and all that saves him is a sudden impulse for his legs to buckle and push him into a backward handspring he barely lands while continuing to parry. 

But costly though it is it does shift his balance back, across the possibilities, and he has done his best to eliminate at least the obvious flaws from his defence, in full generality. 

It is then that she reveals that no, she has not forgotten she can use Force Lightning, a wave of it searing out in a crackling slash from her blade even as she fires more stunners.

It hits him like the feeling of a clever plan coming together, with a soupçon of 'Got you.'

Which is to say, politely enough to not do more than leave surface marks, but firmly enough that he feels it.

He didn't know Force lightning could do that. 

Catch all the stunbolts, yes, block the slash, yes, fully absorb the lightning at the same time, no. His defence collapses and in fact so does he.  

That hadn't actually been one of the possibilities. 

He picks himself up, deactivating his lightsaber, and bows. 

He would quite like to see Anakin try. 

Through the will of the Force, all things are possible. 

(She wondered, once, what happened if she tried to channel Force Lightning through a lightsaber's focusing crystals, and this happened.  It never seems to work with a crystal that's bled, though, or, probably, otherwise particularly unhappy with you.  It just backlashes.  Nearly got her killed, finding that out live.)

She grins irrepressibly, helping him up if he'll let her, and bows back.  "Well fought, truly.  You don't give yourself enough credit."

"I might have a few tricks for redirecting or grounding Force Lightning that could help you, by the way - it seemed to be giving you the most trouble, of everything."

"That would be most appreciated, thank you." Jedi are not strangers to less-than-gentle lessons. Master Yoda once threw him through a wall. 

Oh, no, this one ramps up slowly.  It does no good to just shock someone half to death and then complain they haven't learned anything, Academy instructors.  (Though that was half the point, she's sure.  Feh.)

A thin wall, it was. 

He was busy. Doing- something he can't talk about. They didn't have an excuse prepared this time. Didn't think they'd need one. He is allowed to be on leave sometimes. He's a Knight now. But apparently this is an urgent summons from the Council.

At least it wasn't any earlier. 

He feels irritated, and crushes it down hard, enveloping that feeling in the Force like a fist. 

The show, to be fair, is almost worth it. 

"Nice try, Master."

Are they maybe finally going to let him learn Force lightning. He's heard the rumours, he knows Masters have used it sometimes. He can handle it.

Oh.  Oh dear.

That is...  Not a remotely healthy-looking Force presence.

(None of this, of course, shows on her face.  Or in her presence.)

How much are they saying about her origins, to this guy?

It is a difficult decision to make. Master Windu's concerns about the boy are well noted. 

But even though this is a war, and keeping secrets is not dishonest, this could be dangerous if he found out later. They are not going to enter into an intrigue with Darth Mourne against a fellow Jedi at this time. And while they are worried about Master Kenobi's stance, in light of all these new perspectives, perhaps they should err a little on the side of taking them seriously.

...Tell him the truth. 

"Knight Skywalker.  A pleasure to meet you, I'm sure.

"My name is Ophelia Vaudelle, no matter what others have tried to make me be."

She's not, quite, sure why these are the words she is choosing, but the Force stirs behind them with all the power of the sands of Korriban - something not even the overseers would face, for it had power beyond them.

"It would, however, be rather misleading to avoid the fact that in my time, some several thousand years ago, those parts of the galaxy that knew me, knew me as Darth Mourne."

...She doesn't feel like a Dark Lord. 

"Who... tried to make you something else?"

He isn't sure why those words were the first to come to mind. Darth Mourne. Several thousand years-

In the Force now he radiates confusion and wariness and irritation, just for a moment before it's gone, like the briefest flash of lightning, so fast it's easy to miss if your vision is clouded. 

Her vision is not clouded.  She cuts through the web of fog like a knife, so sharp you won't even notice it cut you.

"Depur, to start with.  The Overseers of the Academy at Korriban.  The Sith who thought he had my gratitude for gilding the chains he tried to bind me in, through poisoned gifts of knowledge.

"The man who called himself the Emperor, even, until he was done using the Empire itself as a pawn in his convoluted schemes."