“Cheyenne!” Persh’al blasted the second orc back with a bolt of green light, then sent his whip after the two disks racing toward him. He only got one, and Cheyenne slipped into drow speed.
The second disk slowed inches from his nose, spinning in suspension and pulsing with blue sparks shooting from the center out to the razor-sharp edge. She released one handful of her tendrils from around the tied-up troll and reached out to grab the disk. It buzzed briefly between her fingers and shuddered.
When she slipped back into normal time, the troll was expecting to see her forehead split by his metal weapon. Instead, he saw her raise the disk in one hand and crush it. Metal shards and hair-thin wires flew out around them, peppering the kid’s face. “Bitch!”
“Hold that thought.” Cheyenne kept him there, wrapped in her tendrils, and launched a volley of purple sparks at the weird yellow guy leaping at her on all fours. Her attack caught him in the shoulder, and he spun out of the air. Screaming, the yellow magical shot both hands toward her, and a spray of metal darts burst not from his hands but from somewhere up his tattered, dirt-crusted sleeves.
She leaped aside and released the kid from her coiled black whips. He spun into the air and raced toward her at the wrong moment. The dozen metal darts from his yellow-skinned friend pierced his back and sent him to the ground, his scarlet eyes wide with pain and disbelief.
“Urae!” The yellow magical snarled and focused on Cheyenne again. “Always takin’. We’ll take back!”
He lunged at her, and Cheyenne lifted a shield. The yellow magical smacked into the shimmering black surface with a clang, his long, dirt-smeared face smashing against it at the same moment that Persh’al’s next attack hit him square in the back. The sandwiched magical slid down Cheyenne’s shield before dropping to the ground, and she stepped back to search for the next attack.
None came.
“Damn.” Persh’al opened his hand. The green whip disappeared, and he took a step back to eye the two orcs he’d taken down. One of them had gotten his own flying metal plate stuck in his neck, and the other had been tossed head-first into the next building over, everything below the waist dangling out of the hole made by his head and shoulders. He grunted, kicked once to find the ground too far beneath him, and passed out.
“Oh, man.” Cheyenne stepped toward the troll kid lying on his side, scarlet eyes still open in surprise and a dozen points of steel protruding from his chest. “I threw him out of the way, and he just kept coming.”
“Not your fault, Cheyenne.”
She grimaced and shook her head. “Yeah, but I was part of it.”
“Sure. Attacked by a tiny group of desperate raiders who relied way too much on broken tech and had no idea how to fight together.”
Persh’al rolled the short-circuited metal ball beneath his shoe. “Junk. That’s what they’re puttin’ their faith in these days.”
Cheyenne pulled herself away from the troll kid’s dead eyes and turned. “Fighting with machines. So, that’s a thing for everyone on this side, not just the loyalists and their shipped crates?”
“Oh, yeah. This is newer tech, but it worked like shit ‘cause they treated it like shit. Looks cobbled together, too. They’d be better off if they learned how to fight without it. Come on. We’ll leave the other two to wake up on their own, but we should hurry.” He stopped by their failed skiff and grabbed his pack, snorting when it lifted freely this time.
Cheyenne grabbed hers and headed past the small farm but stopped when he whistled. “I thought we were going that way.”
“We are. With that much gear on them, I seriously doubt these guys walked all the way out here on their own. If they have a skiff or a shuttle or hell, even extra hoverboards, we could use ‘em.”
The halfling followed him around the outside of the buildings arranged in a horseshoe. The four raiders had built a camp here after going through everything the troll family had and chucking it into piles. Two skiffs were pulled up along one side of the farthest building, and Persh’al turned away from the closest one with another low whistle. “They’ve been out here a while.”
Rubbing his hands together, he summoned the green light between his palms and cautiously set them down on the dented skiff’s control panel. The thing popped and let out a growling cough, then hummed to life and lifted two feet off the ground.
“Excellent.” Persh’al heaved a massive burlap sack out of the back of the skiff and threw it as far as he could. The top burst open with a puff of black dust and what might have been carrion flies.
“Jeeze.” Cheyenne scowled and breathed through her mouth. “They’ve been riding around with a dead body in the back seat?”
“Not a dead magical. Definitely at least one rotting corpse of something in there.” With a grimace, he slung his pack into the back and climbed in. “Come on, kid. We’ve got places to see. I honestly don’t know who we’ll find. We’ll play that by ear.”
The halfling turned toward the last two breathing raiders and shook her head. “We can’t steal their skiff and leave them out here.”
“Oh, yes, we can.” Persh’al patted the bench beside him, glanced at his hand, and wiped it off on his pants. “They attacked us, and they wouldn’t hesitate to steal all our stuff and leave us here if the roles were reversed. Only difference is, they’d slit our throats while we were unconscious just for fun, and who knows what else. I’ve seen raiders and scrappers do nasty shit to anyone who gets in their way.”
She shrugged. “Still.”
“Hey, two of them got taken out, one by the skinny-ass gremlin and the other by his own gear. That leaves two raiders and one skiff.
