At Mile-Marker #65 of the Phase Two highway expansion—deep in the dark inter-galactic void between Galaxy #50 and Galaxy #80—the paving crews had ground to a sudden halt.
Outside the end of the unfinished black-brick tunnel, three colossal Void-Leviathans floated across the construction path like living mountain ranges of purple scales and jagged bone teeth.
Each Void-Leviathan was the size of an entire solar system. Their bellies glowed with corrosive green void-acid, and their six rows of diamond-hard teeth were evolved specifically to gnaw on natural spatial cracks. Right now, the lead Leviathan had its massive jaws clamped around the end of the newly laid highway guardrail, chewing on a stack of Black-Hole Compressed Bricks with a loud crunch, grind, squeak—though the bricks were so tough that the monster had only managed to drool green acid over three of them without cracking a single corner!
Worse yet, bolted onto the armored backs of the three solar-system-sized monsters were five hundred jagged, skull-painted battlecruisers belonging to the infamous Void-Fang Pirate Armada!
Standing on the nose-horn of the middle Void-Leviathan was the Pirate King, Du Gu, a scarred Rank 9 Mid Galactic bandit wearing a cloak made of stitched star-whale hide and resting a heavy serrated bone-axe over his shoulder.
