Pixie Hazard by Archibald Bradford (top young adult novels .txt) 📕

don’t know! It’s north but it’s huge and moving fast! Like armoured or something!”

Billy sucked in a breath when she saw the inbound problem.

“I have eyes! Heavy coming in hot! Sledge I need you!” She cried out as she rolled to one side.

Several familiar blinding green bursts tore apart the desk she was hiding behind, narrowly missing her armoured hiney as she abandoned it.

A brute of a man in an aging suit of combat armour crashed through the hatchway she had been covering two seconds later; his rig didn’t look nearly as new or advanced as theirs, but the rust-coloured hulk lit up the room with a plasma repeater that was basically a rapid-fire version of Donnie’s shotgun.

In other words, OP as fuck.

Evidently Donnie wasn’t the only one who had been keeping cards close to her chest.

Eva and Billy both had to dive for cover while the captain smashed into the console in a bid to protect the suddenly exposed Bryan.

Without the forewarning it would have been curtains for all of them at that point, instead the brutish Junker’s horrifying onslaught only lasted for a couple seconds before Maria was on him.

Exo-suits served to enhance the abilities of the soldiers wearing them: strength, speed, stamina, reflexes.

Mediocre became good, good became great.

Donnie and her crew could run a marathon in their rigs and come away better off than any unequipped people running with them. And a marine like Eva could be shooting the wings off a fly one second then the next she could turn a perfect one-eighty and throw a knife with equally deadly accuracy.

But for a tank like Maria it was all about one thing: Power.

With a capital ‘P’.

She didn’t even try to hit the guy with her repeater, knowing full well how many hits his armour could take before he started to feel it, instead her weapon was forgotten as she collided with him in the middle of the room.

Two titans, having a good ol’ fashioned throw-down.

Maria held the advantage at first: the goliath she was up against hadn’t expected her to charge him so she was able to tear his outrageously dangerous weapon away and cast it aside.

But he recovered fairly quickly.

With a flurry of resounding smashes he drove his fist into the side of her helmet again and again.

“I see some tiddies hiding in there!” He taunted with a roar; “I’m going to enjoy peeling that suit off you and fucking ‘em RAW!”

Maria had lost the initiative but she was adaptable, smashing a beaker of thick blue fluid into the Junker’s face-plate.

If the professor was alive he’d be screaming at them to stop fucking up his lab; tables full of medical equipment, test-tubes, data-analysers, all of it was getting smashed to pieces as Maria and the Junker spun each other around crudely.

Even half-blind the brute fought on, and despite the heavy blows to the head Maria wasn’t finished either.

When he swung for her helmet again she shifted her arm around his and locked it in place with a screech of straining metal, pulling him over with a mighty cry and flattening what was left of the desk Billy had been using.

“Fuck him up Sledge! Show me you haven’t gone soft!” Eva ordered.

With the two heavies occupied she refocused her repeater fire on a trio of Junkers trying to take advantage of Maria’s abandoned position in the chaos.

She took two of them down, but she had to turn on her hip and duck down to catch the third, her aim taking out one of his legs and causing him to crumple to the floor, by that point she had her own problems to deal with as her corridor was filling up again.

While his Junker buddies tried and failed to follow through with his assault, the enemy heavy tangled his legs with Maria’s, dragging her down to join him on the flattened desk where the pair were soon locked in a brutal grapple.

“Gunna fill up your cunt!” The taunting humour was gone from the bulky pirate’s voice as he struggled to regain the upper hand.

He never got it back.

Instead he ended up flailing beneath her like a turtle, the powerful blonde’s knees pinning his shoulders and rendering him harmless; her armoured hands then formed a hammer-fist and brutally slammed down into the top edge of his faceplate as she began to return the favour from earlier.

“This is why I hate guys my size!” She grunted out, then annunciated each word with heavily augmented blows of her fists; “They- are- all- fucking- PIGS!”

With her last strike the Junker’s helmet buckled, and she followed up immediately by drawing one fist back and plunging it down with all of her strength.

The faceplate crumpled inwards and she felt the man’s face do the same, but for good measure she gripped the inside rim of the broken helmet and tore it free, half of his skull coming with it.

In the shocking silence Maria stood and towered over her fallen opponent, his helmet gripped in one hand, dripping with his blood and brains.

She threw it in Eva’s direction.

“Tell me I’m soft Hooker!” She roared over the coms; “Go ahead and say-”

She didn’t finish her sentence.

Maria might not have gotten soft, but Eva was right: she had gotten sloppy.

With the adrenaline pounding through her veins from the brawl with the enemy tank she had lost her situational awareness.

And in that opening the Junker that Eva had winged and thought was dead had taken up his buddy’s plasma repeater and gotten off a single devastating shot.

A brilliant burst of green plasma particles tore through Maria’s armour under her left arm, knocking her to the floor and out of the fight.

Chapter 34:Dying Stars

As Maria toppled Eva lit up the guy that had dropped