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

couldn’t jump my way out of this situation. A Mega Jump to safety was still 1.5 seconds away from crossing my mind and those four trigger fingers were only a half second away from completing their deadly journey.

Sad fact was, the only thing I had time to do was wince.

I didn’t even have time to consider I’d be dead before my body hit the—

Fick!

A quiet, slicing sound stopped everything.

Less than a-second later…

Thu-thu-thu-thud!

All four remaining pirates dropped. Crumpled into humanoid heaps, laid out on the dark dirt, painted over in splotchy purple highlights from the moon, or shaded by black shadows courtesy of the cage of jungle brush overhead.

Me?

Complete disbelief.

“What the…” I muttered to myself.

The pirates had just dropped.

I had no idea how.

Had I done that?

No, I hadn’t done anything except wince.

Had someone killed them?

Multiple someones who had shot them with silenced rifles from a distance while hiding behind cover? Entirely possible. In this jungle, there was cover everywhere. And danger.

I glanced around frantically.

Didn’t see anyone. Obviously. That was what cover was for.

Without any visible shooters, I was instantly afraid I’d get killed next.

I lunged left and grew myself to Triple Mega Beast size, exploding up to 5 or 6 meters in height. My naked body rippled with gigantic muscles. Instant, volcanic rage burned through my bulging veins, incinerating the residual fear from what surely would have been the most traumatic experience of my life, had Mace gotten his way. Or I was shoving it down to join the rest of the PTSD memories I had picked up in recent weeks. There was a good chance another army of sinister nightmares from tonight would haunt me for months if not years to come. But for now, the only thing on my mind was murder, and my rings gave me an arsenal of tools ready to make it happen.

The only thing I didn’t have was target acquisition.

I spun around searching for the shooters, knowing there could be four or more snipers hiding in the darkness, training their sights on my Triple Mega Beast skull from every direction.

However badass my mega-body might be, invincible it was not.

I dove behind the nearest tree on the down-slope below my position and laid low, taking cover as best I could while scanning the foreboding darkness closing around me from all sides.

Ring, give me night vision! Amplify available light!

The purple moonlight suddenly became quite bright.

Ring, show me infrared light! Overlay it on top of my night vision! 50% transparent! Make warmer objects red, orange, and yellow. Make cooler objects green, blue, purple!

Suddenly, I had Predator vision.

It was different from the color-coded vision I had used earlier to search for Violet. Now a rainbow of colors were spread evenly across the entire temperature spectrum. Nothing warm and moving immediately jumped out from the jungle brush, which was a fairly uniform wash of greens and blues. At that point I realized that pirate power armor might have thermal camouflage as well as visible light camouflage.

My heart pounding in my ears, I continued my visual scan.

Nothing warm was moving.

Then again, smart snipers didn’t move either.

Remembering that my ring had better scanning methods than heat-based Predator vision, I turned it off. I also remembered that my rings could do a more precise scan — and a wider-range scan — if I was touching the ground as opposed to flying in the air. Something about direct contact and conductance, if I had to guess. So I planted my hands flat on the dirt and thought, Ring, show me a wireframe schematic of the surrounding area. Highlight any human or humanoid forms bright white. Fade everything else back to dark purple.

In my ring HUD, a 3D wireframe model of the surrounding jungle quickly spread out from my position in a roughly circular pattern. The first humanoids to appear where the five prone pirates. Mace lay dead where I’d left him and the other four hadn’t moved from where they had dropped. Were they dead? They seemed dead, but that was a guess. They could be unconscious.

The 3D wireframe continued to expand farther and farther afield. No other humans or humanoids appeared that I could see. I zoomed out my HUD view and started scanning for any distant bright spots. Didn’t see any. What had happened to Captain Theia and the Shock Knights? Or Corporal Syx? The wireframe map went out hundreds of meters, but there was no sign of them anywhere. Were they out of range? That seemed unlikely, unless they had all fled for their lives? If that was true, were they not showing up because they had all been killed?

50 Shock Knights — 52 counting Theia and Corporal Syx — with functional power armor and bolt rifles could easily handle hundreds of Terrorsaurs. Possibly thousands. But 52 naked women — 47 if you counted out the 5 injured — without armor or functional rifles?

Even with enhanced strength and night vision, what could 47 unarmed women and 5 injured do against hundreds of 500 kg flying velociraptors with poisonous tail quills that could punch a hole in your heart? Those 52 women could die a gruesome, horrible death getting eaten alive, that’s what.

I grimaced sickly at that horrible thought.

Losing Captain Theia would be… I didn’t want to think about it. She couldn’t be dead. Not her and not the others. If they were dead, they’d show up in my HUD like Mace and the other pirates, right? But the women didn’t. They must have fled. Run off to somewhere safer than here.

Yeah, that was it.

Had to be.

As much as I wanted to drop everything and go make sure the women were safe, I had snipers to worry about. Or whatever it was that had taken out Skok, Qrudge, and the other two pirates.

But I wasn’t seeing anything out there.

No snipers, nothing.

That made me twice as nervous as I was already.

I had to wonder, had some nearby carnivorous plant shot these four other pirates with poison darts without me noticing? Entirely possible. Or