Her powerful flight and skillful evasive maneuvers immediately cut down on the amount of firepower that hit her wings and body, the small, powerful beams of energy burning tiny, painful, but ultimately unimportant wounds through her limbs, torso, and wings when they could catch her twisting, diving form. She shot upward then suddenly spun in place, pulling her wings in tight around her body, thus increasing the force and speed of her spin like an Olympic figure skater floating in midair. Suddenly she spread her wingtips, the single-point talons at the end of each finger-like pinion slashing through the air in an eighteen-foot arc around her. Two of the diamond-hard claws ripped into a pair of the computer’s advanced drone orbs, shredding the tough outer skin and knocking them out of the air.

The remaining drones opened fire, but the witch’s mini dragon, which swooped, dove, and flapped around her, actually impeded the energy blasts of the micro machines while at the same time ineffectively blasting flumes of fire across the sky.

She moved the fight sideways through the air until she was over the adjacent property’s rooftop. Her research into the supernatural school property had included detailed information about the surrounding real estate. So she knew that the building below her had once housed a small manufacturing company but had since been repurposed into an artist’s cooperative studio and retail space. The roof was a flat rectangle over a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. A perfect space for her getaway exit. Flapping in place, she extended her right thumb and index finger talon and without hesitation drove them deep into the center of her torso, in the spot where a human’s solar plexus would reside. Ignoring the sharp bite of self-inflicted pain, she rooted around until her claws felt a hard, round object the size of one of those white dimpled balls that humans struck with clubs and then chased over many acres of heavily groomed grassland.

Three of the mini machines dove at her and she was forced to dive and swoop, all while pulling and digging at the spherical object within her, engaging in her own self-mutilation. Her greasy black blood made the orb slippery, but her diamond-hard claws dug into the shell of the object, allowing her to get a solid grasp on it.

A flare of scalding heat brushed her back, the flames licking though laser-burned holes in her wings, shifting her pain level up several notches to excruciating in a split second. She tucked one wing in tight to her body, pulling a multi-g turn that would have crushed a human pilot. Her big left foot shot out and slammed into the dragon, knocking it backward, its wings collapsing inward.

It should have fallen, as any aerial flyer with wings would have, but it didn’t. Instead it hovered in place without flapping, easily finding the time to bring its wings back out to full extension.