Twenty years after accepting Darth Zannah as his first apprentice, Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane began to perceive Zannah as weak; she had not yet decided to attack him and take up the mantle of Sith Master. Bane began to wonder whether or not Zannah was worthy to be his apprentice, and decided to search for Darth Andeddu's holocron, which was said to hold the secret of eternal life.
Bane sent Zannah on a mission to the planet Doan to search for Sith artifacts while he secretly searched for the holocron. However, during her mission Zannah decided that the time had come for her to challenge her master. On Doan, she found evidence that a Dark Jedi was also searching for Sith artifacts. Zannah tracked the Dark Jedi, whose name was Set Harth, to Nal Hutta, where she confronted him and offered him the chance to become her Sith apprentice; and Harth accepted. Meanwhile, Bane returned to his home on Ciutric IV, where he was ambushed by an assassin, the Huntress and about twenty mercenaries hired by Princess Serra to capture Bane, as she mistakenly believed he had killed her father. The group captured Bane and the Huntress took his lightsaber. Zannah and Harth then returned to find that Bane had been captured by the Doan Royal Guard.
Bane was taken to the Stone Prison on Doan, where he was kept incapcaitated and tortured by drug injections. Serra interrogated him, but Lucia, Serra's bodyguard—who had previously served under Bane, then known as Dessel, as a member of the Brotherhood of Darkness's Gloom Walkers—realized that Serra had become corrupted by her desire for revenge, and secretly freed Bane. Meanwhile, Zannah and Harth arrived and Zannah began to search for her master.
Bane attempted to find and kill Serra, but he was confronted by Lucia, who attempted to convince Bane that Serra was actually a good person. Bane began to gather his power to kill Lucia, only to be hit by a powerful blast from Zannah, who had finally found him. Lucia was killed, but Bane threw up a shield which protected him from damage; and he quickly jumped to his feet. Zannah and Bane began a heated argument in which Zannah accused Bane of defying the Rule of Two by trying to extend his life, only to have him chastise her for waiting until age weakened him before challenging him.
Bane managed to dodge Zannah's initial strikes, but was in a full retreat, shooting bolts of Force lightning at Zannah's boots to hold her at bay. Bane jumped over her and she kicked at him; however, he caught her boot and attempted to break her leg. She rolled with the move and struck at Bane with her lightsaber, but he dodged the blow. She cornered him and moved in for the kill, but he shot a particularly powerful blast of Force lightning at her, causing her to stagger back a few steps and giving him room to escape from the corner.
She rushed back in, striking with her lightsaber again, but Bane threw up a purple cocoon of dark side energy. As her blade hit the cocoon it released its energy, throwing Bane back into the wall and sending Zannah ten meters across the hall. An alarm then signaled; Serra had activated a series of detonators set to collapse the entire prison. As she moved back in toward Bane, he shot two bolts of lightning past her ear into the wall; they hit a demolation charge. Zannah used the Force to shield herself from the resulting explosion, which caused the stone walls and ceiling of the passage to collapse between them, separating them with stones that would take hours to clear, even with the Force. The two then fled the prison; as Bane left he met with the Huntress, who returned his lightsaber to him and submitted herself to his teachings.
Bane's new apprentice tracked Serra through the Force and discovered she had returned to her father's home on Ambria. Bane sent out a distress call to Zannah's ship in an effort to lure her to the farm and kill her, and Bane had the Huntress kill Serra. Zannah then arrived, and she and Bane engaged in another duel.