The attackers burst from the jungle ahead, huge forms tearing through thick-packed plants and trees like twigs and leaves. One came straight on, the other two came at intersecting angles from either side of the middle one.

Bipedal, black and green tiger-striped skin stretched tight over massive muscles, gaping mouths filled with vicious flesh-tearing teeth. Omega simply lifted his drone upward, the alien powered battle bot going from zero to sixty in a split second before coming to an instant stop forty feet up.

The trio of thundering carnivores ran right through the space it had just occupied, their reptilian brains unable to process the speed of the reaction.

“They look like dinosaurs,” a voice back on Earth said, the vampire Lydia Chapman.

“At first observation, they share many features with the allosaurus of Earth’s primordial past,” Omega replied in that other location, his drone staying silent on Fairie. “They can’t harm my drone, but I think the attack is more of an intelligence gathering one. Reconnaissance by fire, as Mr. Deckert might say.”

The drone suddenly emitted a sound pitched higher than human ears could detect, but apparently well within range for dinosaurs, as all three snarling carnivores shrieked and ran. They stumbled and snapped at each other in their frenzy to leave behind the painful sound.

A humanoid figure stepped lithely out of the jungle and fired a glittering crystal arrow at the drone.

A respectable explosion flashed across a suddenly visible arc a foot from the sphere’s surface, the power of the blast directed away and elsewhere by the force field of energy.

In return, a thin, sharp lancet of blue light stabbed out, surgically removing the archer’s legs at the knee, the wounds fully cauterized.

The archer never stopped moving, his hands reaching for the quiver of arrows now spilled by his prone body. The energy bean snapped out again, removing one hand, but the other hand grabbed the crystal arrowhead on one shaft and snapped it sideways.

Omega’s drone shot backward as the elf’s fingers touched the crystal, clearing a hundred and fifty yards by the time the explosive shock wave reached it, fire and jungle plant debris bouncing to the side of its protective force field.

“Father?” Omega asked, replaying both the initial arrow shot and the explosive results of the elf’s suicide bombing.

“Some kind of crystal imbued with unstable quantities of what I would call magical energy. Similar to the big crystal Zinnia used as a final measure back on that little island off the coast of our realm. Only, I would say they’re much, much smaller. Pretty cool. Omega, play that again. I want to see if I can figure out how they’re made,” his father replied.