Missiles shot out of the strider’s launcher, then split into three different directions. Each missile tracked them individually.

  “Shit! Incoming,” Adam shouted through the channel.

  Sprinting at full speed still wouldn’t do a damn thing if that missile hit him. Dan waited until the missile racing toward him arced and descended downward. He grabbed the hilt of his Conservative.

  Warp dancer activated.

  The missile that would have blown him up hung in the air above his head, still slowly descending down toward him. Dan jumped upward eight meters and performed a draw cut on the missile, slicing it in half. As his feet landed back into the sand, he rushed over to Adam and also chopped apart the missile coming toward the skull-faced agent.

  Time resumed back normal as Dan tackled Adam out of the radius of the exploding missile. The missile that streaked toward Li hit nothing but sand as the stealth specialist used his death step and teleported himself out of the way. The missile smashed into the ground and exploded with a splash of sand and smoke.

  “Shit, we would have been dead if you didn’t have those powers,” Adam said, frantically getting back up.

  “Li, can you use your death step to get behind that tank?” Dan asked.

  The silver-clad agent glanced at him then back at the hovering tank. “Let’s try it. Keep that strider busy for me.”

  The strider was still approximately eighty meters away from them. As Li flashed out of existence, the strider charged its main energy cannon again. The sudden bright energy from the tank's cannon released its glowing red beam. Adam dived out of the way while Dan briefly activated his warp dancer for a quick burst and dashed out of the way.

  The energy beam smashed into the sand a dozen meters behind him, kicking up a geyser of sand. The impact of the beam left behind a shimmering and glistening texture in the ground.

  Li was nowhere to be seen and the strider still hovered toward their position. Dan drew his nailgun and fired armor-piercing bolts at the hover tank. The bolts either harmlessly smashed into the tank’s armor or pinged off. He had nothing that could get through the floating vehicle.

  But then the tank abruptly halted. The strider floated above the desert sand and didn’t advance any further. Neither its main energy cannon nor its missile launcher shot anymore ordinance their way.

  Dan heard faint cracks of gunfire in the air and realized it came from the direction of the tank.

  “Li, was that from you?” he asked over the channel.

  “Who else?” the stealth specialist replied. “The driver is dead. You can rest easy now.”

  “Huh, not bad. Not bad at all,” Adam said. “Usually, hijacking a tank isn’t a trivial matter. It’s especially suicide trying to pull it off in open terrian like this without any cover or elevation to take advantage of.”

  Dan and Adam ran over to the now captured strider tank. When Dan got closer, he could see the tank’s design up close. Even though he was already aware this was a hover tank, he was still in awe of the technology on display. The vehicle probably weighed tens of tons worth of metal alloys and yet it floated on invisible cushions of air. He crouched down and looked underneath the tank, only seeing the slight distortions between the underside of the tank and the sand beneath.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He checked out the exterior of the strider and saw various spiked jutting out of the armor along with an entire plough at the front with serrated edges, presumably used for ramming other vehicles. Even in the dimly-lit desert under a blood red sky, Dan could see various artwork on the armored hull, most skulls and clenched fists. It screamed what he had come to expect from Kodak-Cresh.

  Dan walked around to the back where he found an open hatch. A body flew out of the opened door of the strider and Li hopped out.

  “Not much of a fight,” the stealth specialist said. “Strider is ours now.”

  Dan opened the back door of the strider all the way and climbed inside. He felt the immediate difference with the cool, filtered air that hit his sweat-drenched and sand-ridden face. The interior was tightly crammed with two seats in front of the controls. There was only a bit of space behind the seats that could barely fit a third agent.

  Dan saw a strange helmet attached to the ceiling that hung over the driver’s seat. He glanced to the side and saw a weapon rack that contained a bulky rifle with an elongated barrel. Dan got himself in the driver seat and reached for the helmet above him. He pulled it down and onto his head.

  Interfacing with Kodak Strider tank…

  Initializing. Please wait…

  For a moment, Dan only saw darkness. Then, a grid of red lines lit up in his vision before each individual square resolved into a high resolution image of the desert wasteland outside the tank. He wasn’t viewing the world through his own eyes anymore. His view zoomed out significantly and he saw the rear of the strider with its back door still open. The strider was near the bottom of his vision while the rest of the desert was a wide, almost panoramic view through the strange device on his head.

  “Woah what the hell,” Dan said. “It’s like I’m viewing this shit through a drone in the air.”

  “Not a surprise,” Adam interjected. “Such a light and nimble vehicle requires you to be aware of your surroundings at all times. You can’t zip around and be a nightmare to your foes if you don’t have the perception and field of view to back you up. The zoomed out view is the only solution to that little problem.”

  “Let me do a quick test drive of this thing,” he said.

  The controls of the strider were remarkably easy for a tank. Dan assumed that tanks required an entire crew of operators to properly drive. There was one commander who gave orders, a driver, a gunner and someone to load the ammunition if the tank was old enough. But this tank was capable of being operated with just one person.

  Thanks to the lack of wheels, Dan had a much easier time moving the strider around. The tank glided smoothly over the sandy terrain. He felt the faint vibrating hum from the tank powering… whatever technology it used to float so easily off the ground.

  Faint white outlines of his controls popped up over the expanded view of the environment. His steering wheel, the levers and various buttons and switches showed up as simple white illustrations. He pressed his foot onto the gas pedal and steered in varying directions to varying degrees. The tank rushed forward, then instead of needing to turn it strafed to the sides. Dan then put the tank in reverse.

  Firing the strider’s main energy cannon was as simple as willing his mind to mark a target with a red triangle. His steering wheel had its own buttons and switched in the center pad along with a switch that felt oddly similar to a gun trigger on the back of the wheel. After selecting a random section of the desert to target his cannon, his readout flashed that sam trigger on his wheel. When he squeezed the fire trigger, the cannon charged its beam for a second then shot a red beam of energy and blasted the desert ground fifty meters away. A readout in his peripheral vision showed his cannon’s energy reserves sat at eighty-four percent.

  The missile launcher was just as easy to control. Instead of the red triangle, the missile’s path was determined by a green marker in the shape of three small circles. The outlined readout of his tank controls at the bottom of his vision flashed the second trigger on the other side of his steering wheel. Dan decided not to test fire his missiles, since the ammo count directly below the energy cannon’s reserves read only ten missiles left.

  “Okay,” Dan said. Being inside the strider and driving it seemingly replaced his exhaustion and irritation of sand on his face with excitement. “This is fucking awesome.”

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