illphated

The Silent Hunter
We called it the Ghost. For three weeks, it had been haunting the sector, leaving a trail of wreckage that made no sense. We’d find entire enemy patrols melted into slag, their tanks fused to the desert floor. There were never any blast craters, no signs of artillery or air support. Just silence and ruin.

I was part of the scout team sent to figure it out. Four of us in a light recon vehicle, armed with more sensors than weapons. Command thought it was a new type of energy weapon the enemy had developed. Command was wrong.

We found it at dawn, half-hidden in a dry wadi. It was an Abrams, one of ours, but it was… wrong. It sat motionless, but the air around it shimmered with heat haze, and a low, electric hum vibrated through the soles of our boots. Strapped to its turret was a colossal battery pack, a sleek white-and-green monstrosity that looked like it belonged on a spaceship, not a 60-ton tank. The letters LOLA-CORP were stenciled on the side.

“What in God’s name is that?” whispered Miller, our driver.

The tank was a scavenger. It was surrounded by the husks of three enemy T-72s. Thick, glowing green cables snaked from the Abrams, latched onto the wrecks like metallic leeches. It was draining them, we realized, sucking the power from their systems.

Our orders were to observe, but our captain, a man who believed regulations were written for other people, decided on a closer look. “It’s one of ours,” he said, his voice tight with false confidence. “Let’s make contact.”

That was his last mistake.

As we approached, the humming intensified. The cables retracted into the Abrams with a pneumatic hiss. The turret, which had been still, began to rotate. It moved without a sound, a fluid, unnatural motion. There was no grinding of gears, no whine of hydraulics. Just silence.

It wasn’t looking at us. It was looking through us.

Our vehicle’s systems flickered and died. The radio hissed static. The engine choked. We were dead in the water.

“It’s an EMP,” the captain stammered, his face pale. “It’s—”

A beam of pure, green light, no thicker than a pencil, shot from the tank’s main cannon. It wasn’t an explosion. It was a surgical strike. The light hit our vehicle’s engine block, and the entire front half of the truck simply vanished, vaporized into nothing.

We scrambled out, choking on the smell of ozone and hot metal. The Ghost didn’t fire again. It just watched us, its invisible sensors tracking our every move. It wasn’t hostile. It was… indifferent. We were insects, irrelevant to its purpose.

Then, it turned its silent turret toward the rising sun and began to move. It glided over the sand, leaving no tracks, a silent, unstoppable predator on its way to its next feeding ground.

We were the only survivors. We walked for two days through the desert. When we finally made it back to base, no one believed our story. A silent, electric tank powered by a giant battery? A ghost that feeds on other machines? They logged it as combat fatigue.

But I know what I saw. I know that the old wars are over. The conflicts of nations and ideologies are just noise now. The real war is the one we don’t even know we’re losing. It’s a quiet war of acquisition, waged by a silent hunter and the green-eyed stranger who pulls its strings. And her posters were right. All our lithium, all our power, already belongs to her.

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