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

it looked like someone had burned slits into their eye sockets with an oxy-acetylene torch. The edges were scorched and glowed red with residual heat. Blowdarts or crossbow bolts damn sure hadn’t done that.

Any thought these pirates were merely unconscious was gone.

They looked dead.

One other strange detail snagged my attention. Glowing liquid dribbled from the slits like molten gold. Did the alien biology of Qrudge or Skok mean they bled glowing golden blood? Possibly, but how likely was it that two completely different alien races both had glowing gold blood? The other two pirates also dripped glowing gold from their entrance wounds. I couldn’t tell their races with their helmets on and visors down, but the four of them having matching blood seemed unlikely.

Wait, was this what happened when you got shot by a bolt rifle with yellow bolts? You bled gold energy or something? I wasn’t sure. For all the bolt rifle fire I had seen in the past couple of weeks, most of it had been red bolts, and I didn’t remember seeing any gold bolts from the bad guys. Always red. Possibly had something to do with their weapons all being Stygian? Could be. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how people bled after being shot by bolt rifles or pistols. They could easily bleed molten gold, or molten red, or molten any color.

But I hadn’t heard what I considered to be bolt fire when the four pirates had dropped. I’d only heard that one deadly sound.

Fick.

A stray thought occurred: could you silence bolt fire? Was that a thing? Theoretically, it should be. You could silence any sound in a variety of clever ways. I’d never seen any silencers used by anyone on Zalaxia so far, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

I looked around warily in the darkness, again worrying about a hidden sniper.

Or four hidden snipers.

No, I had only heard one standout sound.

Fick.

That hadn’t been the sound of four individual sniper shots, that was… I had no idea what it was.

“It’s me,” a voice whispered behind me.

My stomach jumped into the back of my mouth and I whipped around gasping to see two glowing amber eyes blazing in a pool of shadows. The eyes were so bright in my low-light vision, I couldn’t quite make out the form but I recognized the voice. “Corporal Syx?”

She stepped naked into more direct purple moonlight. Her red skin appeared darker than blood and was crisscrossed with shadows from the trees. She whispered, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I snorted and glanced at the dead pirates. “I almost wasn’t. Did you just get here?”

“Um, yeah. Looks like you took care of them good,” she smirked. “Skrucking pirates.”

“Me?” I looked down at my Mega Beast hands and muscled arms rippling with bulging veins. “No, I only took care of one. Someone must have sniped the others.”

“Sniped?”

“A sniper? You know, someone with a long rifle who hides and shoots people from far away?”

“Oh. Is that what happened?” Syx asked.

“I guess.” I looked around again, suddenly worried someone was lining up a shot this second to take me out, and kill Corporal Syx too. I already knew it would only take one Fick! to kill us both. Even with my low-light vision, the weight of darkness and the relative quiet of night made me worry about things jumping out with no warning, especially in this jungle. “Unless it was a plant? Shockthorn Root, maybe? Or some other type of plant?”

“That must be it,” Syx said dismissively.

“We should go find the others. There’s no telling what those Terrorsaurs might do. Is your ring working? Can you armor up?”

Syx concentrated on the ring riding her finger and shook her head, “No. It’s still broken.”

“You better stay close,” I said, offering my muscled arm invitingly.

“What?” Syx balked.

“I’m trying to protect you. In case someone is aiming rifles at us or some plant might shoot us.”

“Oh. I’ll be fine.”

“Is it because I’m naked?” I mentally deployed my power armor and it ratcheted out, covering my Mega Body from neck to boot. “Is that better?”

“I said I’ll be fine,” Syx smirked.

“Suit yourself. We should still find cover. I don’t want either of us getting shot.”

Crackling sounds from up the slope caught both our attention.

“Someone’s coming!” I hissed. “Over there! Behind that big rock!”

The boulder was just below our position on the down-slope and surrounded by trees. It would give us ample protection from anyone coming at us from above. We’d be exposed to anyone coming up from the river, but I was guessing no one was down there other than Froggy. Him I wasn’t worried about, not with my rings functioning.

Syx and I dashed behind the rock and crouched low. I had to shrink myself to normal size to fit behind the rock with her. Conveniently, my armor shrank with me.

I checked my ring HUD’s wireframe radar for any movement in the vicinity. It showed plenty of activity in the surrounding jungle, but nothing humanoid stood out that I could see.

We waited.

I whispered, “Do you think Captain Theia or one of the Shock Knights shot those pirates? If they got their bolt rifles working again and silenced them somehow, they easily could. I’m assuming you can do that? Silence a bolt rifle?”

Syx nodded, “That must be it.”

“Where’s your rifle? Didn’t you have one earlier?”

“I must have dropped it.”

“Do you remember where?”

“Back that way.”

I was trying to make sense of Syx’s odd responses. For a soldier — no, a corporal — she was talking like it was her first day of field training.

After a minute of calm, I whispered, “I don’t think we’re getting ambushed.”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Syx said.

“Probably an animal moving around or something.”

“Or a plant.”

“That’s Zalaxia for you,” I snorted, starting to feel slightly less worried I’d get shot in the back of the head any second. “I should see if my comms work.” I deployed my helmet and visor. “Crown to Control. Anybody there?”

“Control to Crown! Ursa here! Where are you, my king?! You’ve been off scanners for