The dawn was a blade of cold, purple light on the horizon when the desert declared war. There was no horn, no drumbeat. The only signal was a low, resonant hum that seemed to rise from the sand itself, a vibration felt in the bones before it was heard by the ear. From a dozen hidden ravines and from behind the crests of towering dunes, the Desert Folk began their charge.
They did not run in straight lines. They flowed. A young warrior named Khalid, his face a mask of fierce determination, slammed his palms into the sand. Ahead of him, the dune convulsed, and a ten-meter-high wall of swirling, compressed sand rose like a living thing, a temporary shield against the machines of the invaders.
Beside him, a woman with eyes like chips of obsidian wove her hands through the air. The image of their charging war party flickered, shimmered, and then multiplied. A hundred phantoms for every real warrior, a shimmering, heat-hazed army of mirages that stormed the Alliance fortress from all sides, their silent war cries lost in the wind.
Inside the Alliance command center, Commander Valerius watched the tactical display, a flicker of professional curiosity in his otherwise dead eyes. "Crude, but clever," he murmured. "Automated turrets, engage phantom signatures. Designate priority targets based on kinetic energy readings. Jackals, hold the line. Waste nothing."
The fortress responded with the cold, passionless fury of a machine. The automated turrets swiveled, spitting streams of high-explosive rounds that tore through the phantom warriors, the explosions kicking up huge plumes of sand where nothing stood. But amidst the chaos, the system identified the true threats—the handful of solid figures moving amongst the illusions.
The Jackal mechs opened fire. It was not a battle; it was an extermination. The roar of their 30mm chain guns was a continuous, deafening sound like the tearing of a giant sheet of metal. Streams of incandescent tracer rounds turned the pre-dawn gloom into a flickering, strobe-lit hell.
Khalid's sand wall, a testament to his power and will, disintegrated in seconds under the relentless barrage. He watched in horror as the warrior beside him, a man he had known his whole life, was simply erased from existence, his body torn apart by a hail of explosive shells.
With a roar of pure rage, Khalid summoned the sand again, not as a wall, but as a weapon. He thrust his hands forward, and a spear of obsidian-hard, super-compressed sand, ten feet long, shot from the dune and slammed into the leg of a Jackal. It screeched against the armor, gouging a deep scar, but failed to penetrate.
The mech's torso swiveled, its optical sensor a single, red, unblinking eye. It registered Khalid as the source of the attack. Before Khalid could even summon a second spear, a volley of micro-missiles whistled from the mech's shoulder pod.
The world vanished in a flash of white-hot light and concussive force.
From a high ridge, Sheikh Omar watched the slaughter. He saw his people's magic, the sacred arts of the desert, being systematically dismantled by cold, unfeeling mathematics and overwhelming firepower. He saw his brave warriors, who had fought with the heart of lions, being cut down like wheat in a harvest.
The attack broke. The survivors, a mere fraction of those who had charged, melted back into the desert, dragging their wounded, their phantom army dissolving with their broken morale.
Inside his fortress, Commander Valerius looked at the casualty reports. Zero Alliance losses. "Acceptable ammunition expenditure," he said to his subordinate, his voice flat. "Double the patrols. Begin primary drilling operations at sunrise."
Outside, the sun's first rays crested the horizon, illuminating the carnage. The sacred sands of Ain Al-lah were stained with dark, wet patches that were not shadows. The Eye of God was now blind with blood.