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

and non-responsive, and now my ribs stunned into submission and unable to expand or collapse to facilitate breathing, my body had betrayed me. Somebody shoot me now and put me out of my misery.

If only my rings freaking worked, I could do something.

Almost habitually, I thumbed the Bombshells’ ring on my left hand.

The army of now-familiar electric ants danced across my brain.

Blue sigils appeared, then cycled into English characters in a strange but familiar font.

ACTIVATE POWER UP

Y/N?

Yes, yes, yes!

Time for me to go Mega Beast and bash some heads.

Without thinking, I thumbed the True Ring on my right hand, and my HUD turned purple. Another power up screen appeared and I thought yes, freaking yes! My fuel doughnut expanded into the familiar dual fuel doughnut. The usual menu appeared off to the side.

MASS

ENERGY

POSITION

PATTERN

TIME

Both rings were online and I had plenty of ring fuel to kick ass. I was going to tear these pirates apart limb from limb, I would literally twist their heads off their necks like screw-top bottle caps, and do the same to their arms and legs.

In one smooth, flowing, and continuous motion, I did the following: expanded myself to Mega Beast size while doing a pushup so powerful, it levered me to standing while spiraling around to throw my now-massive fist punching through the back of Mace’s skull.

His bloody brain went flying in a bloody spray. In the purple moonlight, it came out looking like a black mess that painted the big jungle leaves behind him.

That left four armed pirates surrounding me in a circle.

“Who’s next?” I glared at them with an evil grin.

The four of them immediately lifted their bolt rifles and racked the slides. Much like Kurkullan bolt rifles, Stygian bolt rifles had rackable slides that made impressive click-clacks.

“You’re dead,” Skok scowled as he aimed his rifle between my eyes.

As a lifelong fan of kickass action films, one thing has always irked me. Whenever the badass hero is surrounded by a circle of punchable villains, the villains wait and take turns attacking the hero. Sure, sometimes you’ll see the hero handle two opponents at once, punching one while simultaneously kicking the other. Or hold one guy while striking another then finishing off the first. That kind of thing. In rare cases, the hero takes out three or more at once. You know the gag: the hero uses a bo staff or spear or a plank of wood or piece of furniture to take out several guys in one strike, or kicks one villain into several others behind the first and knocks them all down in one go. You know what I’m talking about. The bowling pin gag. The falling dominoes gag. Etc., etc. Gags like those are there to mix things up and make fight scenes more fun to watch.

Those gags are fine.

They’re fun.

That’s the point.

What I’m talking about are the more “serious” martial arts fight scenes where the hero has four guys tightly circling around him, and there is no fight gag to get him out of it. In those situations, when it’s four on one, the thing you always see is the two dudes behind never attack the hero’s blind side. They never hit the hero in the back of the head, they don’t bash the unprotected cervical vertebrae in his neck, they don’t kick him in the kidneys, they don’t kick out the backs of his knees, or kick him in the Achilles tendon, they don’t even kick him between the legs because you can kick a man in the balls from behind and it still works if you get the right angle. If they have weapons, they don’t shoot, stab, or bludgeon the hero’s back either.

Why don’t they?

Because one heroic man fighting four or more competent brawlers doesn’t end well for the lone hero.

Ever.

I believe it was one of the Gracie brothers — the family that invented Brazilian Jiu-jitsu — who was once asked in regard to his superior ground-fighting style that had ruled the UFC octagon at the time, what he would do if he had to fight four men at once. The Gracie brother had famously and smirkingly said, “Run.”

The ugly, shameful truth that movie fight choreographers didn’t want you to scrutinize too closely? Action movie fights were a choreographed dance, a dance staged to make the hero look invincible and badass, nothing more. It was all about image, not practical reality.

In a non-choreographed five-way fight — me against these four space pirates — everything happened at once, and human brains like mine were ill-equipped to address four attackers coming from four different directions simultaneously.

For me, it meant that, at the exact moment Skok had said “You’re dead” a split-second ago, all four pirates had began pulling the triggers on their bolt rifles. Imagine it in slow-motion, a split-screen shot showing four different trigger guards, four different triggers, and four different gauntlet-covered trigger fingers squeezing in unison while I began wincing in anticipation of being shot from four different directions at the same time, and at point-blank range.

In reality, it happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to think about using my rings to create a Sphere of Absorption to stop the bolts.

Nor did I realize one of the pirates had his bolt rifle aimed at the back of my Mega Beast skull. There was no time for me to consider how powerless I would be without a functioning brain, rings or no rings. Or that an energy bolt was more than powerful enough to punch through my thickened Mega Beast skull, and it would soon broil my brain from the inside out, cooking it in less than a second.

It all happened too fast for me to react.

I didn’t even have time to consider that I could literally jump 10 meters into the air with my Mega Beast legs. Some of you are thinking I’d done it before, back in that Venice Beach alley, for example. Problem was, the Tim Pittwell legs I’d lived with my entire life