Vol 2: Chapter 58

The figure on the outcrop went rigid.

One second it stood motionless, arms loose at its sides, the same stillness that had unsettled Rhian a moment before. Then its head turned toward them, sharp, with none of the calm left in it. Something about the shift hit Alex like a gauge redlining before the machine actually failed.

The Petras didn't wait to explain what came next. It broke from its hover-hold above the outcrop, wings tucking in tight, and dove, not toward the pinned Ashwing, but straight across the gap toward the ledge where the group stood watching.

KREEE-KRAK!

Okay, that's not good.

Rhian's hands snapped to the controls, the Arosaurer already breaking stride under her.

"Incoming! It's coming right at us!"

He had no time to ask what she meant. Alex's hands moved on their own, hauling the Liger Zero's weight back into a defensive crouch, servos whining under the sudden reversal.

GRAHHR-VRRM!

Around him the open channel filled with noise: boots scraping against loose rock, Ziya's report cutting off mid-word. Anya's command landed a half-second too late to matter.

Rhian peeled the Arosaurer wide, putting distance between herself and the line of the Petras's approach instead of trying to meet it head-on, a smarter opening move than anything Alex had time to call out himself. The Liger's stabilizers fought to find purchase on the shifting rock beneath its feet while he tracked her clear.

On the ground below, Fia broke for a cluster of boulders at a dead run, shield already coming up off her back. Lyra went the opposite direction, low and fast, rifle already swinging toward a firing line. Seraphine hesitated half a step longer than either of them, glancing between her teammates before choosing a direction, and that half-step cost her something she didn't have room to spare.

The Petras hit the space where the group had been standing seconds earlier, talons raking through empty air, and pulled up hard into a climbing bank. It hadn't connected. Nobody had connected with it either. The Liger's claws swiped through nothing but the wind off the Petras's wingbeat, close enough to feel the pressure of it through the cockpit but not close enough to matter.

Then the ground shelf below erupted.

Both Boars launched from their positions at once, abandoning whatever hold they'd kept on the outcrop entirely, and came up the slope fast, spines already rising along their backs, timed too closely to each other for it to be coincidence.

SKREE-HUFF! SKREE-HUFF!

Great. Now there's two of them.

Ziya's report cut across the channel again, tighter than before.

"The Boars! Both of them, incoming!"

Alex tracked the Boars' path up the slope. Fia's boulders sat directly in one Boar's line. Lyra's firing position put her closer to the other. Between the two paths, Seraphine had nowhere left to go that didn't put her nearer to one of them. No direction on that hillside counted as safe anymore.

Ziya's readout blinked amber across his own console, a warning she must have pushed through manually.

"Alex, don't waste the missile pods! You've got sixty rounds between both racks, that's it. That's not going to last if this turns into a real fight."

"Noted."

Alex didn't have anything better to offer than that. The Liger's HUD backed her up without being asked, heat-vent readings creeping past the yellow band on a display that had looked fine twenty seconds ago.

Below, the Lanstag drove itself between Seraphine and the nearer Boar, Anya's frame absorbing a glancing hit off one shoulder plate that would have taken Seraphine's head off if it had landed anywhere else.

KRRNCH. GROOOAN.

The impact staggered the Lanstag half a step, servos compensating hard, and Anya was already turning to cover the next angle before the shudder finished traveling through the frame.

She couldn't be in three places at once, not from up here and not from down there either, one Zoid trying to shield three unarmored people spread across open ground. The math didn't close, no matter how good she was.

It happened too fast for Alex to do anything but watch it unfold on the edge of his own fight.

One of the Boars adjusted its angle mid-charge, tracking Seraphine through a gap in the rocks she hadn't finished crossing yet. The volley caught her along the side, not a clean hit, but enough to knock her flat, her medic kit skidding away from her outstretched hand across the loose stone.

No, no, no.

Lyra's rifle swung wildly off its line as she turned to look.

"Seraphine's down!"

Fia didn't wait for an order. She broke from her own cover at a dead sprint, shield already angled, and planted herself between Seraphine and the Boar's next line of fire. The impact rang off her shield hard enough to crackle static through the comms, but she held her ground, and Seraphine started dragging herself back behind the nearest rock instead of staying exposed.

Above them, the Petras came around for another pass, and something in its rhythm had changed. It checked its dive a half-beat later than it should have, wings correcting hard against a line it should have already committed to. Alex didn't have time to wonder why any of that mattered right now. He barely had room to react to it at all, throwing the Liger sideways to avoid a strike that arrived off-angle and late, close enough to feel but not close enough to land.

Nobody had room to notice the pattern breaking down, least of all Alex. Fia stayed braced behind her shield, and Seraphine kept working her way back from the rocks. Somewhere past both of them, Lyra's rifle tracked a Boar that hadn't stopped coming. A half-beat of hesitation from the Petras didn't change any of that. It just meant the next strike missed instead of landed, and the one after it would try again.

Further along the ridge, on the outcrop where she'd gone down, the Ashwing's wings twitched wider than the stillness pinning her should have allowed. One wingtip scraped stone, then lifted, then dropped back, like something in her was testing weight it hadn't been able to move a minute ago.

Rhian's telemetry jumped, her attention snapping toward the outcrop instead of her own fight.

"Guys. She's moving. The Ashwing's moving."

Nobody answered her. Nobody had the room to. The fight in front of them kept coming whether anyone processed what that meant or not.

The Ashwing's wings spread further, unsteady, and she lifted off the outcrop in a hard, uneven climb, one leg still dragging beneath her from whatever had kept her pinned. For a moment she only gained altitude, directionless, and Alex let himself hope that was all it would be.

Then she turned toward them.

KRIEEE-AHHH!

Oh, hell. Not her too.

Nothing about it read as patient, nothing like the glide-and-snatch hunting pattern the Combat Analysis had prepared him for. She came in low and fast, wings beating hard enough to kick loose scree off the ridge below her, aimed straight at the cluster of Zoids and Wardens already stretched past their limit.

Rhian wrenched the Arosaurer back around, a proximity warning already screaming across her own display.

"She's coming for us!"

Alex didn't have time to ask why, or to guess whether anything of her own will was even left in the choice being made for her. He hauled the Liger's arm up to meet her, claws bracing for an impact he wasn't positioned to absorb cleanly. Too late to reposition. Below, Fia turned her shield from the Boar to the sky, a choice that left her back open to the exact threat she'd just stopped covering. Lyra's rifle swung upward, tracking a target three times the size of anything she'd trained to bring down. Anya's Lanstag pivoted hard, trying to put its bulk between the Ashwing's flight path and Seraphine, who still hadn't made it fully upright.

The Liger's HUD threw a heat warning across the lower edge of his vision, red bleeding into a display that had no more room left to spare. Nothing about the fight offered a clean read anymore. The Petras, the Boars, and now her, four fronts where there had been three a breath ago, and no way to know which one would reach someone first.

VRAHH!

The Liger's roar cut off mid-sound as Alex braced for the impact, claws raised, and the last thing he registered clearly was the shadow of her wingspan swallowing the cockpit whole.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.