Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure Baron Sord (good books to read for adults .txt) 📖

me more resilient to damage, but that would only make me more likely to get sliced up in the tight confines of this unrelenting Death Tunnel.

When I glanced at my ring HUD’s dual-fuel doughnut, I saw that it had steadily fallen since I’d been trapped inside this deadly maze. That confirmed my suspicion that my MASS extraction wasn’t working for some reason. I wasn’t drawing any mass from the walls.

If this grim situation continued too long, suffocation or freezing to death were the only two possible outcomes.

With that in mind, I cut off my POSITION vectoring to conserve fuel and let myself drift in my current direction of travel, not bothering to slow down. I needed a different strategy. The Death Tunnel didn’t, because its walls blurred past me at speed. There was no telling how much fuel it had. My guess would be more than I did.

“Crown to Control,” I called out, hoping my comms might be working again. But they weren’t because my power armor was dead.

If I didn’t figure a way out of this maze, I’d be dead next.

I tried to calm myself enough to think clearly and creatively.

Instead, a hot wave of stress wafted through my body and I started sweating nervously. No joke, I could easily die out here. Might take a few hours to burn through my available ring fuel, or a few days if I conserved it carefully, but it and I couldn’t last forever.

I was literally caught in a death trap.

Panic nipped at my thoughts like a squadron of goblins, the kind with poisoned daggers, poisoned fangs, and poisoned claws.

I tamped them down.

Focus, focus, focus.

Maybe I hadn’t tried to extract enough MASS, hadn’t tried hard enough.

Yeah, that had to be it.

I unleashed a full-force MASS extraction all around me in every direction. Thousands of kilograms per second, or whatever my maximum was.

FOOM!

The tunnel exploded outward around me.

But it didn’t explode literally.

I should say the walls transformed outward — not ballooned, they transformed — expanding away from me so quickly it was almost instantaneous, leaving me centered inside a Death Sphere that was 40 or 50 meters in diameter.

“You don’t like that, do you?” I wondered aloud and chuckled grimly. “You don’t like that at all.”

It now seemed obvious the Death Sphere was smart enough to stay out of range of my ring’s area of effect. Question was, was it quick enough?

The only thing I had to do was outrace it. One way or the other, I was going to beat this devil before it beat me.

“Let’s see how fast you are,” I snarled.

Using a POSITION vector, I hurtled myself toward a stretch of spherical wall and attempted a full-force MASS extraction while moving. Once again, no matter how fast I went, the Death Sphere walls shifted to leave me centered inside a 40 or 50 meter diameter bubble surrounded by Death Walls.

The eerie thing was, the walls reacted so quickly, it almost appeared I wasn’t moving. That was relativity for you. If you and another object — one at arm’s length, for example — were both shooting along at 1,000,000 kph on the exact same course, relative to each other, you weren’t moving at all.

Another factor creating the illusion of being motionless was my ring’s ability to uniformly accelerate every one of my atoms at once. I didn’t feel any accelerative forces compressing any part of my body. No G-load. And no wind resistance either, probably because we were in full vacuum.

The only phenomena suggesting I was moving was the speed at which the walls had to rebuild themselves as they shifted around me and followed along my course of travel. With the vacuum in effect, I couldn’t even hear the rebuilding, which had to be noisy as hell at the rate it was happening. I could only imagine the rapid rattling and clacking and scissoring sounds as the walls reshaped themselves, and the constant screaming and screeching of the whirring surfaces. If not for the visuals, it would be easy to think I wasn’t making any progress other than driving myself quickly down the road to insanity.

“Not gonna happen,” I growled.

I redoubled my efforts, flinging myself faster and faster toward the walls. But, no matter how many times I tried, or how fast I vectored myself — 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 G’s worth of Light Cycle-fast acceleration, the walls always managed to withdraw and avoid having their mass extracted. They too were Light Cycle fast.

Growing frustrated, I tried an intense ENERGY extraction while vectoring myself forward. Didn’t do a thing. When I tried a combined MASS and ENERGY extraction, hoping that might give me the edge, it still didn’t work.

The Death Sphere was always slightly faster than I was.

Worse, all this POSITION vectoring was draining even more ring fuel without gaining me any advantage. Escape seemed impossible.

This was bad.

Very bad.

The cold knife of dread slid slowly into my stomach and cut a long, icy line of terror from neck to navel that then shivered up the back of my spine.

My situation was the same as when the serial killer chained someone to a chair in a gloomy sewer, and the chair was bolted to the ground, and the ruthless killer taped a big plastic bag over the victim’s head. Just a flimsy plastic bag, the kind any kid could tear open if his hands weren’t handcuffed to the rusty steel chair, the kind of plastic bag thin enough to bite through, but the bag was too big and you couldn’t reach it with your teeth no matter where you moved your head, and the bag was too big to inhale all the air surrounding your head so as to get the bag within biting distance. No matter what you did, the bag was always out of reach and you were too bound up and—

you…

just…

slowly…

suffocated…

—while the serial killer watched with a superior smirk on his serial killer face while your legs kicked and rattled your last until they could kick