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

of me, the blame would rest squarely not on my shoulders, nor on the shoulders of Indiana Jones, but on the shoulders of Tolkien, Gygax, McCaffrey, Anthony, Weiss, Hickman, Martin, Paolini, and the rest of those damned fantasists and their damned fascination with damn dragons!

“PREPARE TO DIE, MORTAL!” roared my saurian assassin.

The only way out of this mess was for me to fight back and slay this thing.

I vectored flying away from the dragon.

He followed, a whirring blur of undulating scales.

I reversed course and rocketed toward him.

POOM!

Punched him straight in the nose. His head spiraled backward on his long neck. I vectored forward to unleash another flying punch.

FOOM!

I hit him again and his head spun wildly. Eat your heart out, Thor. Last time I checked, Jörmungandr never had to fight Triple Mega Beast. And I didn’t even have a hammer.

My second punch had caught this dragon off guard. My ring’s MASS extraction might be ineffective against him, but mass and momentum were effective against any non-gaseous being in the universe. Except for spaceships that had Kinetic Energy shields, ships like the Artemis. Errr, hopefully this dragon didn’t have that, or I was screwed.

“YOU WANT A FIGHT, DO YOU?!” the dragon boomed after coiling back around to face me and flapping his massive wings with casual grace.

“Not really!” I shouted. “Until you came along, I was planning to go home for a hot shower and a snack!”

“I WILL SHOWER THIS JUNGLE WITH YOUR BLOOD, MORTAL!” With an explosive roar, the dragon reared back, opened his jaws, and lunged forward to fire his blazing plasma geyser at me.

I zipped away from the path of his horizontal volcano. Still feeling the furious heat at distance, I laughed, “Not that way, you won’t! If you want blood rain, broiling me will boil away the juices!”

KROOM!

So fast I never saw it coming, the dragon must have vectored himself at me and bashed me square in the chest with his awesome snout. I went flying backward before I even registered I’d been hit by a high-speed freight train with scales (the dragon kind). My vision whited out and disintegrated into red stars. The pain was intense. If not for my hardened Mega Beast body, I’d definitely be dead.

Before I realized what was happening, I was crashing into the jungle canopy and smashing into branches that broke louder than cannons. Eventually, I bounced off a stout trunk and tumbled to the jungle floor.

For a second, all was dead silent.

The branches I’d crashed through overhead still waved slowly as they shook off the shock.

I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when—

KROOOM!

Dragon breath incinerated the intervening trees.

I was already in motion, vectoring myself off to the side.

The dragon’s flame left a ragged corridor of fiery destruction. Call the Forest Service. This place was going up in smoke. I didn’t have time to worry about it. Hopefully the next red rain storm would extinguish the blaze before it got out of hand, because I had my hands too damn full to deal with any other emergencies.

“RUN, MORTAL! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! WHAT LITTLE OF IT YOU HAVE LEFT!”

KROOM!

Another blazing blast tore through the trees around me. It was like the dragon knew exactly where I was at all times, no matter how many trees were in the way.

I vectored frantically forward, trying to escape the dragon’s sweeping line of fire as it chased me. For the sake of the vegetation, I vectored up above the canopy. The second I saw the dragon, I missiled toward him, leading with my fists.

Faster than an asp, the dragon’s tail whipped around and—

FWOOM!

Hit a home run over the left field fence and I was the battered baseball flying helplessly through the air, too stunned to make a course correction with a POSITION vector. Dazed and very confused, I was barely aware of falling, slowly arcing back down toward the ground and—

DA-DA-DA-DOOM!

Plowing through a series of stone walls, sending dust and stone fragments billowing outward after impact. It was only after I came to rest in a long red dirt trench that I saw the stacked stone walls I had just crashed through. It appeared I was back near the ruins where I’d found the stone dragon statue and the real one had found me.

FWOOSH!

The dragon suddenly zipped out of nowhere to appear floating over me, wings beating and clearly gloating. His — or her — eyes burned with hate.

“HAD ENOUGH, MORTAL?!”

“Never,” I grunted under my breath. If I was in pain, I couldn’t feel it yet, or my Mega Beast body was more resilient than I gave it credit for.

I launched myself forward with the biggest POSITION vector I’d ever created. I had never really pushed the limits of my acceleration capabilities. Not even with that D8 Death Die. Then, I’d been too worried about burning through my available ring fuel faster than the Death Die burned through its fuel. But that was in space. Here on the ground on Zalaxia, I could refuel if needed, and I didn’t have to worry about suffocating or freezing in the vacuum of space.

As I built up the acceleration vector before launch, both my rings burned on my fingers and sent intense energy blazing through my body in a tornado of rage. I felt like an F-18 waiting on an aircraft carrier catapult, engines revving up to full afterburner just before the catapult hurled me forward. Only difference, I was revving up to shoot through this dragon with 500 G’s worth of acceleration. Or something equally insane.

It only took a half second to build up enough energy.

Go time.

Roaring, I launched forward, crossing the gap between me and the dragon in a fraction of a millisecond, accelerating from zero to insane speed even faster. I would say the jungle was a blur around me, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t even register a blur, I was moving too fast.

Then, the impossible.

I screeched to a teeth-grinding stop.

In midair.

Hanging there only inches in front of the dragon.

I felt myself