The Silent Sands (Border Sector)
Ciro was bored.
He sat in the gunner's seat of the lead Manticore tank, his boots resting on the console. The AC was blasting cold air, a comfortable hum that drowned out the hellish 40-degree heat of the desert outside.
Behind him, his patrol convoy moved in perfect formation. Two Manticore tanks and fifty Centurion Droids.
"Commander," the young pilot's voice crackled over the radio. "Engine temps are stable. No enemy signatures within ten miles. Honestly, sir... it's too quiet."
Ciro yawned, spinning his deactivated energy dagger in his hand.
"Enjoy the quiet, kid," Ciro replied lazily. "Ever since we scrapped the Sky Fleet and butchered Krog's army, nobody is stupid enough to come near us. We aren't prey anymore. We are the apex predators."
He believed it.
Elara had built a monster. With plasma tanks and fearless droids, Ciro felt invincible. They had conquered the sky and the land.
What was left to fight?
"STOP."
AURA's voice cut through Ciro's daydream. It wasn't her usual polite tone. It was urgent.
"ANOMALY DETECTED. SECTOR 9."
The convoy slammed to a halt. Dust billowed around the tracks.
Ciro sat up, activating the tactical screen. "What is it? Bandits? Sandworms?"
"No," the pilot replied, his voice trembling. "Look ahead, Commander. Twelve o'clock."
Ciro peered through the digital periscope.
In front of them, in the middle of the black dunes, lay the wreckage of a Scavenger convoy. Three armored trucks.
But they weren't burning. There was no smoke.
Ciro popped the hatch and stood up to look with his own eyes.
The sight made his skin crawl, even in the heat.
The trucks were... erased.
Half of the lead truck was simply missing. The cut was impossibly smooth, as if a giant eraser had been dragged across a drawing. There was no melted metal. No explosion marks.
The metal just stopped. And where it ended, a layer of white frost covered the remaining chassis.
In the middle of the scorching desert, the truck was frozen.
"AURA," Ciro whispered. "Analysis."
[ANALYSIS: NEGATIVE.][MATERIAL DATA: MISSING.][LOCAL TEMPERATURE: -200 DEGREES CELSIUS.][CONCLUSION: PHYSICS VIOLATION DETECTED.]
"Physics violation?" Ciro frowned. "What does that mean?"
Suddenly, the ground didn't shake.
The ground went silent.
The wind stopped blowing. The roar of the tank engines sounded muffled, as if the air itself was being sucked out of the world.
The sunlight dimmed.
A shadow emerged from behind the wrecked truck.
It wasn't an animal. It wasn't a machine. It was a hole in the fabric of reality.
It stood three meters tall, vaguely shaped like a wolf, but made of shifting, swirling darkness that looked like oil smoke. It had no eyes. It had no mouth. Only absolute emptiness.
The light around it bent, sucked into its body.
[WARNING: HOSTILE ENTITY. THREAT LEVEL: OMEGA.]
The monster—the Void Beast—turned toward Ciro's tank. It didn't see with eyes. It sensed energy sources.
It sensed the fusion reactor pulsing inside the Manticore.
"Contact!" Ciro screamed, dropping back into the hatch and slamming it shut. "All units, fire at will!"
The fifty Centurion Droids raised their heavy pulse rifles.
PEW-PEW-PEW.
A rain of blue energy bolts hammered the monster.
Ciro expected the creature to explode or burn.
Instead, he saw the impossible.
The energy bolts hit the monster's black skin and... vanished. There was no impact. The monster absorbed the energy like a dry sponge absorbing water.
The creature's body pulsed, growing larger and denser.
"Rifles are ineffective!" the pilot screamed. "It's eating the shots!"
"Use the main gun!" Ciro ordered. "Tank Two, burn that bastard. Use the Plasma!"
Tank Two, flanking Ciro on the left, swiveled its massive dual barrels.
THOOOM.
A ball of superheated plasma—a miniature sun—streaked toward the monster.
That blast was enough to vaporize ten inches of reinforced steel.
The plasma ball hit the Void Beast.
VWOOOP.
The sound wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of a candle being snuffed out by a vacuum.
The plasma ball was sucked into the monster's chest. The darkness swirled, swallowing the blue light in a single second.
The monster roared. It wasn't an animal roar; it was the sound of radio static shattering eardrums.
Now, it had doubled in size. It had eaten the sun, and it wanted more.
"Retreat!" Ciro realized the horror of the situation. "Back up! Now! Our weapons are feeding it!"
Too late.
The Void Beast moved. It didn't run; it teleported in a flicker of shadow.
It appeared right in front of Tank Two.
It didn't strike. It simply touched the front armor plate with a smoky claw.
There was no sound of metal clashing.
Only silence.
Where the claw touched, the Manticore's armor—the strongest ceramic alloy Elara could create—dissolved into black dust. The armor unraveled at a molecular level.
The monster tore through the front of the tank like wet paper.
"Commander! Help! Systems failing! Reactor breach!" Tank Two's pilot screamed.
The monster's claw reached the core reactor.
It squeezed.
Tank Two didn't explode. It imploded. The sixty-ton vehicle collapsed inward, crushed into a tiny black dot before vanishing completely from existence.
The tank was gone. The pilot was gone.
Only a crater of frozen sand remained.
Silence returned to the desert.
Inside his own tank, Ciro froze. His hands shook over the controls.
He had just watched their peak technology—the pride of the Empire of Rust—deleted as easily as a smudge on a whiteboard.
Plasma was useless. Armor was useless.
"Ciro?" Elara's voice came through his earpiece, panicked. "AURA detected the loss of Tank Two's signal. What happened? Ciro!"
Ciro swallowed, his throat dry as sandpaper.
"Elara," he whispered, his eyes locked on the monster that was now turning toward his tank. "Shut down the reactor."
"What?"
"Shut it all down!" Ciro shouted, twisting his own ignition key, killing the engine. "Kill the lights! Kill the shields! Kill anything that emits energy!"
The lights inside the cockpit died. Ciro sat in absolute darkness, holding his breath.
Outside, the Void Beast sniffed. It was looking for heat. Searching for light. Hunting for power.
Because Ciro's tank was dead, the monster lost its primary track.
It turned toward the line of Centurion Droids that were still active.
It was a massacre.
The monster moved like a black storm, tearing through the droids one by one. It didn't destroy them; it canceled their existence.
Ciro watched through the manual periscope slit. He watched his squad get annihilated by an entity that didn't care about the laws of science.
"This isn't a normal monster, Elara," Ciro whispered into the dead radio, hoping the passive emergency recorder was still working.
"It's Anti-Matter. And we just served it lunch."
The Void Beast stopped. It had finished the last droid.
It looked up, staring to the East. Toward the horizon.
Toward the City of Glass Bones.
It could feel the pulse of the city's main reactor from miles away. It was a beacon. It was a buffet.
The monster howled again, then started to run toward the city.
Ciro restarted his engine with trembling hands.
"Elara," he said, his voice grim. "We have a massive problem. Prep the lab. We need new weapons. Old physics just died."