Alex chuckled and shook her head. “You’ve been hanging out too much with Jollies. I don’t think I know enough pixie slang to make sense out of that,” she replied.
“No, I mean, there are pixies down there. And they look like they might be in trouble.”
Alex looked down. She didn’t have the benefit of Jim’s mech’s surveillance tech, but she had something that a lot of other people would have envied: magical dragon eyes. She was still learning how to master them, but every day was easier than the previous one. Focusing on things beyond human capacity was a parlor trick now.
Alex closed her eyes, took a quick breath, and opened them, looking down thousands of feet in perfect clarity. It was a feat that would have given her a migraine for days a few weeks earlier.
Jim was right. There was a group of pixies near the surface who were fleeing from something. Alex looked back a little way and could see that the pixies were trying to avoid a group of giants. “Great,” Alex moaned. “Not even a full day off.”
“We could just postpone until later. You know where I live.”
“You live across the hall from me.”
“And yet you never try to sneak in.”
Alex blushed, remembering a few nights ago when she had snuck out of her room and stood in front of Jim’s room for nearly five minutes, debating whether or not she should knock. She stood there until Gill passed by, smirking a little but remaining silent. “Oh, come on! Pack up the jokes and let’s go help those pixies before they get crushed.”
Chapter Two
The pixies Alex and Jim were worried about were currently flying through a forest, trying to take advantage of the trees as cover. They were nearly a hundred of them—a small tribe, since woodland pixies tended to keep their tribes smaller. The trees were not doing much to hide the pixies, though, since their anxiety and fear could easily be seen in their glowing, changing pigment.
There was a good amount of distance between the pixies and the giants, but it was being closed fast. Although the pixies were fast, the giants had the benefit of being huge. These giants were larger than any Alex had seen so far. As she’d learned through her studies, there were dozens of different species.
These seemed to be yhomir or forest giants. They usually kept to themselves and avoided conflict whenever possible. But as Alex had learned, a creature under the Dark One’s sway rarely acted as it should. Creatures and sentient beings would behave in ways contrary to their ideals or traditions. Alex was terrified of what would happen if the Dark One were to ever take control of humanity.
The yhomir were closing on the pixies as the seconds ticked by. The giants were now running nearly on all fours, their lanky, muscular arms almost touching the ground as they ran forward, their mouths foaming and eyes red. They looked as if they’d been reduced to some feral pre-giant form, devoid of intelligence or understanding.
The pixies were no longer trying to hide. They were screaming and flying as fast as they could.
Alex and Jim descended into the forest. The trees were a problem Alex hadn’t had to deal with yet. Generally, the battles she had fought had taken place in the sky or open spaces, since her enemies usually were riding something as well. Today, that was not the case. The farther the pixies ran into the forest, the thicker the trees became.
The forest was almost dense enough to block out the sun. As Alex got closer to the tree line, she commed Jim and asked, “You got any ideas on how to deal with this one?”
Jim shrugged as he steered away from Alex. “There’s no way we can take on all those giants head-on. We need to cull their numbers. Did you count how many of them there were?”
“At least thirty. I don’t know why they’d need that many to go after those pixies. You think it’s the Dark One? What would he want with a bunch of woodland pixies?”
“What does he ever want? Seems like the guy wants to dominate just for the sake of it. There doesn’t seem to be any reason behind this whole war, or none that I can figure out. None that anyone is telling us.”
Alex directed her thoughts toward Chine. Do you think you can maneuver through the trees?
Chine replied, I will be able to move more easily on the ground. The trees are too close together for flying, but I won’t lose any speed on my feet. It would be a more effective strategy.
Alex commed Jim again. “Hey, how’s your ground game look in that thing?”
Jim flipped a couple of switches and brought up his holoscreen. “Should be good. Faster than a giant. We’re supposed to be getting these things upgraded later this week. That nerd-farmer we went on that mission with is supposedly a genius. Convinced Roy to let her take a look at the mechs.”
Alex was interested in what the nerd-farmer (Alex knew the kid’s name was Abby, but nerd-farmer sounded kind of endearing in her head) had in store for the mechs, but now wasn’t the time to talk shop. Those pixies were going to be dust if Alex and Jim didn’t move in fast enough. “All right, I say we take a stealth approach. See if we can sneak up behind them and thin the ranks a little,” she suggested.
Jim hit a button on his dashboard and his mech faded from sight. “When the hell did you figure out you could do that?” Alex exclaimed.
Jim’s head popped back into visibility for a second, just long enough for Alex to see his smug smile. “Got a new batch of augments earlier today. Didn’t think I’d get a chance to try this one out, but now seems like the
