The shapes ca out of the stormclouds in a loose formation, banking left before splitting apart as they selected targets in the airspace below.
Fortunately, they were not dragons.
The wings were narrow and elongated, crested at the top, rigid mbrane stretched between long finger bones. Their beaks were long and toothed. Their necks were too short, their bodies too compact, and the screech they made as they dove was high and piercing in the way of sothing that reaches your sinuses before your ears have finished filing the report.
"They’re pterodactyls," Nyx said.
"Pterosaurs," Proxy said. "One is a genus. The other is an order."
"Ughhh," she said, and watched one drop onto the truck directly ahead of her.
The talons hit the truck’s roof at full dive speed. Three claws, each the width of a fist, punched through the sheet tal with a sound like a can opener dragged across tin, only worse because it did not end. The roof caved inward along three ways.
The truck’s front pitched down hard under the creature’s weight, thirty degrees in under a second, and the driver’s chest hit the steering wheel with a short, blunt impact audible even across the airspace, like a fist finding a heavy bag.
The creature shoved off, spread its wings to brake, and scread. The truck fell twenty ters in altitude before the driver recovered the nose, and when it leveled out the roof had four concave dents in a row and the integrity of a stepped-on can.
"Out the way loser!" Nyx said, steered around the descending truck, and looked for the next one.
The second pterosaur ca at her from above and to the left, talons already extended, the dive coming steep and fully committed.
She banked toward it. The talons caught the left side of her roof instead of the full top, a grazing drag rather than a grip, and the tal tore along a thirty-centiter line from front to back, a strip of roof panel peeling back and flapping in the airflow. The creature’s montum carried it past her and below.
She went after it, and the very high acceleration closed the distance before the pterosaur finished braking from its dive. She put her front bumper straight into the back of the creature’s left wing joint.
The joint buckled on contact with a crack that ran up through the steering column and into her palms. The pterosaur went into a counterclockwise spin, one wing nonfunctional, screaming and dropping out of the race space fast.
"Get extinct you bitch ass flying lizard," she said after it.
"That happened approximately sixty-six million years ago," Proxy said.
"I’m telling it personally."
Then, a pressure wave ca, a column of displaced air rolling outward from sothing with a wingspan larger than the zone’s airspace seed built to accommodate. It hit the field the way a shockwave from a distant detonation hits a building, everywhere at once, with force and no direction worth naming.
Three trucks at different altitudes were knocked simultaneously. One flew sideways forty ters and hit a second truck with a full-body impact, the right panels of both crumpling on contact, a short violent report like a car crash from the outside, and both trucks going into a corkscrewing descent tangled in each other’s montum.
The third truck pitched nose-up and then imdiately nose-down as its lift failed, dropping twenty ters before the driver caught it.
Nyx’s truck took the wave on the nose. The front end pushed left six ters. She steered right against it and kept her position while the wave passed.
A Thunderbird ca through the stormclouds partially. Its wingspan was the width of the cloud formation. Lightning moved between its feathers in constant arcing threads, not separate bolts but sothing integrated, the way veins are integrated. Then it aid one.
A bolt detached from the Thunderbird’s left wing and crossed two hundred ters in nothing. It hit the lead truck on the cab roof.
The engine cut, and the truck went ballistic, still carrying forward montum, but no longer under control, traveling forward and slightly downward like a thrown stone before the driver got manual control back.
"Hm. It’s kinda cute." Nyx said to the Thunderbird, at whatever distance separated them.
It did not respond. It did not need to.
Then harpies ca from the right in a cluster of three. Person-sized, winged, faces human enough that their expressions were readable. The one that reached her truck first tore the right side mirror off with both hands, the mount bolt sheared and the mirror spun away into the airspace behind her.
The harpy turned and looked at her through the right window with an expression she found genuinely horrendous on a personal level.
She rolled the window down and kept her left hand tight on the wheel.
I am detecting multiple hostile entities of unclear classification engaging the vehicle exterior.
Clippy materialized in the passenger seat with the calm of sothing that had categorized this situation as manageable.
I have four recomndations regarding counterasures for humanoid aerial threats. Shall I begin?
"You are so good to ."
Nyx said with warmth, and leaned out the window at the harpy. "Hey. You. I want you to know personally, from , specifically, that you picked exactly the wrong truck in this entire race. I am not in a patient mood and you took my fucking mirror."
The harpy cawed at close range.
"Well, fuck you too!" she said.
[ Slip ]
The field discharged around the truck. All three harpies were knocked away from the surface, one tumbling backward, one rolling sideways, one blown clear and dropping ten ters before catching the air. They regrouped at distance and appeared to reconsider their target selection.
If the monsters weren’t enough, the ex-bower ca from above and behind, having climbed to altitude during the Thunderbird attacks. Ram’s flat white intake glow was already visible and charged. From his height and line, the strike would land on Proxy’s driver side.
He had observed the path carefully. It was a good one.
She saw it. Proxy saw it.
"Left," Proxy said.
"Already on it," she said.
His truck banked left, drawing the ex-boxer’s locked path. The ex-boxer adjusted aim, tracking the bank. He had the path and the montum and the patience behind it.
She ca from below.
Her very high acceleration covered the distance from beneath his truck in under two seconds. Her front bumper hit the ex-boxer’s undercarriage on the right side, a hard tallic bang, fra on fra, a true collision rather than a graze, the force of it traveling through her steering column and into her shoulders.
The ex-boxer’s truck pitched right from the impact, the Ram’s locked aim rotating with the chassis.
Ram fired mid-rotation. It hit the empty air where Proxy’s truck had been half a second ago. The ex-boxer’s truck, carrying the montum and pitched thirty-five degrees right, went into the spiral that montum had always implied.
It corkscrewed twice, the driver fighting the rotation, the right panel striking a passing pterosaur by accident on the second rotation, and then the spin went too wide to steer and the truck dropped below the race space and did not co back.
"This trash really dared to target my Proxy," Nyx said after him with disgust.
The zone boundary arrived, and through it the light changed.
Colors ca through it, saturated and vivid. Reds and purples and sharp greens at the boundary, and beyond them, visible at a distance that was real and crossable, the finish line.
Nyx looked at it.
"Proxy," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Our bet," she said.
"It’s only us now," he said. "Ga on."
She smiled at the windshield and held the accelerator down.
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