Chapter 1
Red Dust Run
The explosion hit before Jax could finish swearing.
The convoy vanished in a bloom of fire and sand, flipping the lead truck end over end like a toy. Jax slammed the accelerator of his hoverbike and felt the engine scream in protest as shrapnel whistled past his helmet.
“Ambush! Ambush!” someone yelled over the comms—then static.
The Red Wastes didn’t forgive mistakes. They buried them.
Jax leaned low and cut hard left, skimming a dune at ninety kilometers an hour. Behind him, raiders burst from the dust—six of them, black armor, skull visors, pulse rifles already glowing.
He laughed. Not because it was funny. Because fear wasted oxygen.
He hit the boost.
The hoverbike leapt, clearing a ravine just as plasma fire ripped through the air where he’d been. Jax twisted mid-flight and fired a grappling line backward. The hook caught a raider dead center, yanking them clean off their bike and into the ravine with a distant crunch.
“One down,” Jax muttered.
The ground shook.
From beneath the sand, something massive moved.
A Sand Leviathan erupted in front of him—hundreds of tons of armored flesh and teeth, roaring like the planet itself was angry. Raiders scattered. One wasn’t fast enough. The beast swallowed bike and rider whole.
Jax didn’t slow.
He raced straight toward the monster.
At the last second, he ejected.
The hoverbike slammed into the Leviathan’s open maw and detonated. Jax hit the sand rolling, came up firing, and sprinted for the wrecked convoy. Bullets scorched the ground at his heels.
He slid behind the shattered cargo truck and ripped open a steel crate.
Inside: the Core.
A glowing sphere, humming with unstable energy—the reason the raiders came, the reason the convoy was dead.
A shadow fell over him.
Jax looked up to see the raiders’ leader drop down from a ridge, blade crackling with blue electricity.
“End of the run,” she said.
Jax grinned, blood on his teeth. “Funny. That’s what I was thinking.”
He hurled the Core into the air.
Time seemed to freeze.
Then the Core exploded—not outward, but inward—collapsing space in a violent implosion that ripped the sand, the raiders, and the screaming Leviathan straight into nothing.
When the dust settled, the wasteland was silent.
Jax lay on his back, laughing hoarsely, staring at the stars burning through the clearing storm.
Convoy gone. Raiders gone. Monster gone.
Run successful.
He tapped his comm.
“This is Jax,” he said. “Package delivered. And uh… you’re gonna need a new map.”
