The fur-covered Nightmare Beast came straight at him: four massive legs supporting a seven-tonne body mostly covered in battered blue composite armor decorated with scratched and gouged advertising logos. Its rider, a tiny Quyth leader dressed in matching blue armor and carrying a long lance, was screaming at the creature. The beast’s hooked, armor-covered pedipalps were almost as big as the legs. Those pedipalps reached forward, twitched, ready to grab prey and drag it to the vertical maw of jagged, black teeth.
Beneath his black and crimson helmet, Poughkeepsie Pete smiled. Most people said Nightmare Beasts looked kind of like spiders or crabs. To Pete, the thing looked like a giant tick.
Ticks ... nasty somethings born to be squished.
This was the moment the stadium crowd had waited for, thathe had waited for — one heavyweight squaring off against another in a battle that might leave one of them dead. That might prove true, but if so, it wouldn’t be Pete’s mount left broken and bleeding on Smithwicks Arena’s packed dirt.
Kill one of mine, will you? Let’s see how you bleed.
“Bess,rush.”
Pete’s thighs pressed in against the leather saddle. He felt the power generated by the 6,500 kilos of muscle and bone beneath him. Ol’ Bess quickened her pace. The T-Rex — the only one of her kind in the sport of Dinolition — leaned into her sprint and roared. Pete’s fingers tightened on the war hammer in his left hand.
The nightmare beast closed in for a head-on collision, its single eye looking out through the thick bars of a protective visor. Pete unhooked his armored left boot from the saddle’s stirrup.
In that moment before contact, Pete knew the crowd ate up the spectacle: an alien creature bedecked in sparkling blue armor collision-coursing toward a thirteen-meter-long beast covered in glistening red composite plate.
Scant meters before the crushing impact, Bess effortlessly shifted right so the two monsters would pass side by side. The little Quyth Leader reacted well, swinging his lance to drive the point into Pete’s red-armored chest.
Pete swung his left foot back and over Bess’s body, coming out of t
