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

was some jungle denizen like Goldie the Former Gargantua to blame? He was the red-skinned and golden-haired brute who had thrown his exploding bolas necklace at me the other day. It would be easy for a hunting party of his people — or some other tribe of tool-making mutant primates I had yet to meet — to be hiding in these trees with blowguns and simultaneously shoot four or more poison darts at these four pirates. The pirates did have their helmets off, leaving their necks exposed and vulnerable. Well, Qrudge and Skok did. The two others wore their helmets. But for the sake of argument, four blowdart marksmen with powerful enough blowguns, or no, crossbows, could easily take out four unwitting pirates. Yeah, with heavy crossbows and poison-coated iron-tipped bolts, it would be easy to pierce power armor.

Then again, wouldn’t four big mutant primates like Goldie show up on my HUD wireframe scan?

Presumably they would, as would smaller primates of some other species, but I wasn’t seeing a damn thing.

Unless it wasn’t tree-swinging primates. That brought me back to carnivorous plants shooting poisoned needles.

Ring, highlight carnivorous plants in my HUD as bright white. Fade everything else back to dark purple.

The entire jungle lit up.

That couldn’t be right. Or, I didn’t know squat about Zalaxian botany, or my rings knew as little about Zalaxian botany as I did.

Or worse, my rings were malfunctioning somehow. There was no telling what damage might have been done to them when I got shot down by that neutralizing energy beam earlier. If that was the case, there was no way to know if there were snipers waiting in the surrounding jungle or not. An even more chilling thought came crashing into my brain: if the pirates had tech that could neutralize my rings, they might also have tech that could fool my rings.

Despite being Mega Beast big, I suddenly felt very vulnerable.

I waited for more sniper fire.

Didn’t hear any.

I waited some more.

Still nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t enemy snipers who had killed the pirates. Maybe it was my Shock Knights and they weren’t showing up on my scan for whatever reason.

“Theia?!” I hissed in a loud whisper. “Is that you?! It’s me! Are you up there?! Anybody?”

No answer.

I was back to assuming pirate snipers were lying in wait to shoot me with rifle bolts the second I did something stupid. For all I knew, they were just waiting for me to get careless. That was what snipers did. They waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until you did something stupid.

What I needed to do was draw their fire.

—: Chapter 109 :—

My instinct was to pick up a rock or broken branch and toss it where the dead pirates were laying. That’s what they always did in movies, and some hair-trigger gunmen would inevitably start shooting and reveal his position. But that wasn’t necessary when everyone had night vision, was it? Nobody was going to shoot at a thrown rock. Especially not a highly trained sniper hiding in the shadowy jungle.

But I had options.

Using a POSITION vector, I levitated one of the pirate bodies to standing. Made him dance. Spun him around. He dropped his rifle and his arms flailed limply.

Nobody shot his dancing body.

Thinking more movement might startle any snipers into firing, I lifted three other pirate bodies and made them dance with the first. They too dropped their rifles until all four corpses rag-dolled randomly around.

Still no shooting.

I let three of the bodies drop. Concentrated on the one standing. Vectored one of the bolt rifles off the ground. I was going to put it in his hands and make him shoot it, but that required too many vectors to move his arms, wrists, fingers. The easy option was vectoring the bolt rifle to the general location of where the body would hold it if conscious.

I pointed the limp body and his rifle angling up the slope in the opposite direction of me, at the high ground. I vectored the trigger.

BRIIIP!

A short burst of red bolts sprayed uphill.

I waited.

There was some rustling from what I assumed were angry jungle plants, but no return fire from snipers.

On the off chance some sniper with nerves of steel was up there waiting for me to show my face and blow a bolt hole in it, I decided to brush up on my puppeteering skills.

Call me Master of Puppets as I pulled this pirate’s strings.

For the next several minutes, I went through the laborious and difficult process of making one of the other prone pirate bodies pick himself up off the ground, pick up a bolt rifle as if he were actually doing it himself, walk behind a tree, and crouch down. It required dozens of POSITION vectors to make happen. The results were not smooth. A 3D animator would be embarrassed by how jolting and unrealistic the jerking movements were. A true puppeteer would be ashamed. But I got it done.

I had my man-marionette fire another short bolt burst uphill.

BRIIIP!

Then he crouched low and hurried over to the next nearest tree.

At no point did Super Sniper or his team lose their cool and shoot back.

Or, there were no snipers.

I was going to assume nobody was up there.

Any sniper must have moved on. Or who knows, maybe it had been some strange plant like a Shockthorn Root all along. You never knew with the Zalaxian jungle. Or poisonous insects. Or venomous snakes. Or whatever the explanation might be. I didn’t care as much now because my rings were working.

But I needed to be careful.

To reduce my target area, I shrank myself back to normal Mega Beast size, between 2 and 3 meters tall.

I crept out from my hiding place to investigate the carnage.

Mace was where I’d left him with a ragged hole in his skull.

Creeping closer, I noticed glowing red slits in the inner corners of the right eyeballs of Qrudge and Skok. The two other pirates wearing helmets had glowing red slits in similar locations in their visors. By glowing, I meant