With only two shadow goblin cores remaining in his inventory, Tatehan realized he needed to move with extreme efficiency and speed if he was going to reach the spaceship before completely exhausting his power supply.

He pulled up his inventory display to confirm:

[Shadow Goblin Cores: 2]

He sighed, frustration mixing with determination. He needed to be very fast now, pushing the dust rider to its absolute limits for the remaining journey.

Initially, encountering more shadow goblins along the way hadn't been his primary concern, he'd actually expected to run into some, maybe even hoped for it as an opportunity to replenish his core supply. But right now, that hopeful expectation sounded more like a desperate alternative than a reliable plan.

He had two cores. Each core powered the dust rider for approximately one hour of operation. That gave him two hours of travel time maximum before he'd be stranded on foot in the deep wastelands.

The shadow goblins territory was still far from where he currently was.

According to the map, he still had significant distance to cover. The spaceship was deep in the wastelands, far from any established territories or settlements. He'd made good progress, but not good enough.

The mathematics were simple and unforgiving: he needed to cover more distance per hour than he'd been traveling so far, or he'd end up walking the final stretch.

Walking through the Martian wasteland in full armor, exhausted, with night potentially falling? That was a death sentence.

No. He needed speed. Reckless, dangerous, absolutely insane speed!

Tatehan checked the dust rider's speed controls. He'd been pushing it hard already, but there were levels beyond what he'd attempted. Settings that probably came with warnings he was choosing to ignore.

He made his decision.

For the next hour, he would ride at maximum velocity, the kind of speed where a single significant obstacle could send him flying to his death, where reaction time was measured in fractions of seconds, where the margin for error was essentially zero.

It was reckless. It was dangerous. It was probably stupid.

But it was also necessary.

Tatehan pushed the throttle to absolute maximum, and the dust rider screamed forward.

The acceleration was so intense it actually forced him back slightly in his seat. The wasteland became an incomprehensible blur of red-brown terrain streaming past at physics-defying velocity.

Everything around him lost definition—rocks, boulders, distant formations all merged into a continuous streak of color and motion. The wind roared around his helmet with such force that he could feel the armor vibrating from the air resistance.

At this speed, individual details were impossible to discern. But occasionally, larger shapes would blur past in his peripheral vision, things he could barely process before they were already behind him.

Skeleton remains. Massive ones.

The bones of creatures that had died here, in this wasteland, their bodies picked clean by the nightmarish creatures living here. Some looked like they'd been enormous—creatures that would have dwarfed the Hexapod Mauler. Ribcages the size of buildings. Skulls with multiple eye sockets. Spine sections that stretched for dozens of meters.

'Wait! Creatures that would have dwarfed the mauler? Impossible!'

The Hexapod mauler was really enormous.

His mind went back to the bones. What had killed them? Age? Starvation? Stronger predators? Or had they simply been victims of Mars itself, a planet that killed without mercy or discrimination?

Tatehan didn't have time to contemplate the questions. At this velocity, even a moment's distraction could be fatal.

The dust rider's engine maintained its screaming pitch, the vehicle designed for exactly this kind of punishment. Whatever engineering had gone into these Martian vehicles, it was impressive. On Earth, this kind of sustained maximum-speed operation would have caused catastrophic mechanical failure within minutes.

He remembered researching that cars on Earth, moving at too much insane speed could topple over themselves and perhaps kill (surely) the rider.

Here, it just kept going.

An hour passed in what felt like both an eternity and an instant.

The dust rider began to slow automatically as the shadow goblin core's energy depleted, the vehicle's systems preventing a sudden stop that would throw Tatehan from the seat at lethal velocity.

He brought the vehicle to a complete stop and immediately dismounted, his legs slightly unsteady from the sustained high-speed vibration.

Without wasting a second, he opened the power compartment and removed the exhausted core, now just a dull, lifeless crystal. He pulled his second and final shadow goblin core from his inventory and inserted it carefully.

The dust rider hummed back to life, ready for one more hour of operation.

One hour. That was all he had left.

Tatehan remounted the vehicle, but before accelerating, he pulled up his map display to check his progress.

The glowing overlay showed his current position relative to the spaceship, and what he saw was... actually encouraging.

He'd covered an enormous amount of distance during that insane-speed hour. Far more than he'd expected. The reckless velocity had been worth it, he was now significantly more than halfway to his destination.

Better yet, according to the map's territorial markers, he was now approaching the edge of what was designated as "shadow goblin territory"—the region where those creatures were most commonly encountered.

If he was going to find more cores, it would be here.

But that presented a dilemma: should he maintain maximum speed and hope to reach the spaceship within the final hour? Or should he slow down slightly, increase his chances of encountering shadow goblins, and potentially secure more cores for future use?

The spaceship was the priority. Getting stranded out here would be catastrophic.

But having a stockpile of cores was also important. He couldn't keep making these desperate journeys where he barely had enough power to reach his destination.

It was dumb of him to even think he'd arrive to the Spaceship with just this cores, stupid even. What was he, The Flash?

Tatehan made a decision: he'd increase his speed beyond anything he'd attempted before, pushing into territory that was legitimately dangerous even with his enhanced reflexes. He'd aim to reach shadow goblin territory as quickly as possible, then reassess based on how much core power remained.

It was a compromise between speed and opportunity.

He pushed the throttle beyond maximum, into what was probably an emergency override setting.

The dust rider responded like a caged animal finally released.

BOOM!

The acceleration was violent and instantaneous. Tatehan actually felt his enhanced durability ability activate(for the first time) automatically to prevent whiplash as his body was thrown backward. If he was a normal human, he would have fallen from the insane pull the speed created.

But this body he held the handlebar tightly and zoomed away.

He was now moving like the Flash—like a comic book character he'd read about as a kid, the speedster who could literally outrun anything.

The places he passed didn't just blur, they…Thoooom!.... vanished. One instant he could vaguely perceive a rock formation ahead, the next instant it was gone, somewhere far behind him, accompanied by a cloud of displaced dust and dirt.

THOOM!

VROOOM!

The sound of his passage echoed across the wasteland, the sonic disturbance of air being violently displaced by his velocity.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.