The shapes came 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 membrane 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 something 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 metal 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 screamed. The truck fell twenty meters 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 came 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 metal tore along a thirty-centimeter line from front to back, a strip of roof panel peeling back and flapping in the airflow. The creature’s momentum 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 came, a column of displaced air rolling outward from something with a wingspan larger than the zone’s airspace seemed 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 meters 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 momentum.

The third truck pitched nose-up and then immediately nose-down as its lift failed, dropping twenty meters before the driver caught it.

Nyx’s truck took the wave on the nose. The front end pushed left six meters. She steered right against it and kept her position while the wave passed.

A Thunderbird came 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 something integrated, the way veins are integrated. Then it aimed one.

A bolt detached from the Thunderbird’s left wing and crossed two hundred meters in nothing. It hit the lead truck on the cab roof.

The engine cut, and the truck went ballistic, still carrying forward momentum, 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 came 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 something that had categorized this situation as manageable.

I have four recommendations regarding countermeasures for humanoid aerial threats. Shall I begin?

"You are so good to me."

Nyx said with warmth, and leaned out the window at the harpy. "Hey. You. I want you to know personally, from me, 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 meters before catching the air. They regrouped at distance and appeared to reconsider their target selection.

If the monsters weren’t enough, the ex-bower came 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 momentum and the patience behind it.

She came 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 metallic bang, frame on frame, 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 momentum and pitched thirty-five degrees right, went into the spiral that momentum 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 come 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 came 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. "Game on."

She smiled at the windshield and held the accelerator down.