Dawn was just breaking over the Juarez desert as the black beast—the **H2R**—tore through the dust at an insane 320 km/h. Directly ahead sat Draco's primary border checkpoint. Heavy razor-wire barricades blocked the entire stretch of asphalt, backed by a defensive line of five armored Land Cruisers. Twenty elite mercenaries stood with heavy automatic rifles leveled, waiting.
"They're inbound! Shoot to kill!" a command echoed in Spanish across the tactical radio network.
Within a heartbeat, a wall of lead rained down on them. Hundreds of high-velocity rounds chewed through the air. But tracking the trajectory of a supercharged H2R at full tilt was a human impossibility. Abir cut the machine left and right in a vicious, blinding zig-zag pattern, causing the mercenaries' bullets to strike empty asphalt, sparking violently against the road.
"Abir!" Arisa screamed through the helmet comms over the engine's roar. "There's a two-foot gap in the center barricade, but it's rigged with proximity claymores! If we trip the sensors, we're history!"
"They won't get the chance to detonate, my Queen. Just hold on tight!" Abir growled back.
Keeping his right hand locked on the throttle, Abir used his left to unholster a heavy tactical grenade-launcher pistol from his rig. When they were barely fifty meters away from the kill zone, he fired a single, calculated shot. The explosive round slammed directly into the fuel cell of the central armored cruiser.
*BOOM!*—A catastrophic explosion ripped through the checkpoint. The armored vehicle flipped entirely into the air, creating a massive curtain of black smoke and twisted metal.
The mercenaries were thrown back by the violent pressure wave. Using the flash of fire and smoke as a tactical screen, Abir pinned the throttle into overdrive. The H2R launched off the burning debris, airborne for a fraction of a second like a wingless demon before slamming cleanly back onto the highway on the other side. The moment the tires touched down, Arisa spun around on the pillion, triggering a relentless, heavy suppression spray from her sub-machine gun into the disoriented survivors.
In a matter of seconds, the first defensive perimeter was reduced to a graveyard of burning steel. Not a single mercenary had managed to lay a scratch on them.
The H2R was already miles past the checkpoint, accelerating hard toward the concrete jungle of inner Juarez. Abir flipped his visor up slightly, glancing at the massive column of black smoke fading in his rearview mirror.
"Draco thought his border was impenetrable," Abir whispered, his voice dripping with arrogance. "He forgets that when the H2R roars, borders are just lines on a map."
Arisa checked the telemetry, her expression hardening. "Abir, we just cleared the first tier. 'The Dragon's Den' is fifteen kilometers out. But our signature just triggered their secondary radar—they've deployed an attack helicopter. We've got a gunship tracking us from above!"
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