Hooking her fingers around it as if she were about to pull herself up on a ledge instead, the halfling took a lunging step back and pulled with all her strength. The ground trembled in protest, groaning and shivering even at her enhanced speed. Something like a scream erupted from the crevasse and startled Cheyenne out of her concentration.
“Cheyenne!” Maleshi shot a bolt of silver lightning into the second machine, lighting the digger up with jolting electric sparks. The second tank rose a foot off the ground and sprouted unfolding metal legs, using the two in the front to bat the nightstalker aside. Maleshi flew sideways and skidded across the grass, crouching to keep her balance.
The second war machine launched a massive ball of sparking yellow magic from an open hatch in the dome on its top. The attack struck Maleshi squarely in the chest and blasted her backward. This time, she landed on her back instead of her feet and snarled.
“I almost had it,” Cheyenne shouted back, reaching out with her magic to feel for that ledge of the earth’s energy so she could grab hold and try again.
“And these things might almost have me.” The nightstalker scrambled to her feet as the diggers advanced on her again. “In case that wasn’t clear, kid, yes. This is me asking for your help.”
“Right.” Cheyenne darted toward the machines, the activator lighting up their scrolling lines of code she now knew were O’gúl workings scrambled with Matthew Thomas’ program. That asshole’s got a lot to answer for.
The weakest parts of both diggers flashed the brightest in her vision, side panels, undercarriage, two small nodules on each of their fronts just above where the corkscrewing spirals emerged from the metal body. Cheyenne reached out for the first tank’s closest side panel, her telekinetic energy heightened by the activator’s precision as it peeled the side panel away with a shriek of ripping, buckling metal. The second tank’s rotating dome swiveled toward the halfling, blinking in alternating blue and red, and opened five hatches to sprout five metal rods that looked way too much like gun barrels.
Shit. Cheyenne abandoned the telekinetic destruction and threw up a massive shield in front of herself as the tank opened fire with fell-green rounds of light. The rounds exploded on impact, blasting heat and a thick wave of green energy over Cheyenne’s body as she fought to hold up the shield until the attack ended. We’re screwed without being able to move faster than these things.
Maleshi ducked a swinging blow from the second tank’s protruding legs, which had now rearranged themselves into long black blades with serrated edges. She brought her four-inch bladelike claws swiping up against the legs, only to be met with instant resistance and a shower of sparks. “Seemed a lot easier for you to rip these things apart yesterday!”
“It was easier yesterday!” Cheyenne gritted her teeth against the last of the green explosions, then darted around the shimmering black wall of her shield and sent two black energy spheres at the closest digger. The gun barrels swiveled again to face her. “Blast out what’s inside.”
“Inside what?”
“The part I just ripped off! And go for the head.” The halfling ran back toward her shield, feinted away, and slid forward on her knees beneath the extended barrels stretching over the tank’s body. The activator centered her telekinesis on all five rods, and she flung them aside, ripping wires and metal bolts and something that looked like a potions vial out of the digger’s swiveling dome.
Maleshi ducked the hurtling gun barrels flying toward her and snarled, “That’s the best thing you can come up with? Just get through the armor?”
“No.” Cheyenne slapped her hands on the tank’s side panel and felt a stronger burst of connection from the activator and her magic before she tried to haul the side panel away from its brackets. The metal body lurched away by half an inch and stuck fast again. “Go for the head!”
Maleshi leaped atop the digger attacking her, slashing at the metal spikes now pumping up and down along its back like motor pistons as she rushed toward the swiveling dome. She sent a bolt of silver lightning at the swiveling dome spinning fully around to lock onto her new position. The dome sparked and sputtered with yellow and red lights. “That’s the head, right?”
“Yeah!” The halfling roared when the metal hull of the digger shifted its composition in tiny unfolding pieces and pierced her palms pressed against it with hundreds of needle-thin points. A burst of heat flared from her belly and the base of her spine as the activator flashed brighter and showed her the command to put everything she had into ripping off the panel. Like I need prompting.
With a shout of effort, Cheyenne torqued her body sideways and ripped the panel free with her telekinesis. Blood sprayed across the grass when the hundreds of needles peeled away from her hands and the panel hurtled away from her toward the crevasse in the earth. The ground wobbled under them in their enhanced speed. Staggering to her feet, she reached with her lashing black tendrils into the exposed innards of the tank. The coils of her drow magic bursting from her fingertips wrapped around the thick cables and razor-thin wires to rip them free. Green and orange sparks flew, and the small explosion at the digger’s center rocked the machine sideways off one set of rolling tracks. The resulting magical shock jolted back up through Cheyenne’s whipping tendrils and flooded her body with a sizzling burst.
“Ah!” She withdrew her tendrils and hissed, blinking against the minor static in the activator coil blurring her vision before it settled.
On top of the other tank, Maleshi leaped from one section of the machine’s top panels to the neck, dodging the swiveling dome’s attacks and sending bolts of silver lightning at the machine’s head between intermittent
