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

Did my best to not inhale more than a thimbleful of air with every breath.

Inhale, STAB!

Exhale, STAB!

Inhale, STAB!

Exhale, STAB!

It was overwhelming agony.

Tears squeezed from my eyes.

At that point, I did what came natural.

Collapsed to my hands and knees.

Someone used a sledgehammer to drive a red-hot iron spike into my shoulder and placed the barrel of a .357 magnum against the back of my other elbow and fired.

Translation: I had forgotten about the damage to my arms.

Unable to support my chest, I did a face plant in the red dirt. The natural next move would be to roll onto either side but my arms were warning me not to. So I slumped down and let my legs slide out behind me until I lay face-first in the dirt.

More blinding pain screaming through my body.

Lying on my ribs only made it worse, but I couldn’t support myself with my arms because my entire world was pain, every breath fire.

Using one leg, I rolled myself onto my side — INCREDIBLE PAIN! — and from there flopping flat onto my back.

I had no idea how badly my ribs were broken or what had happened to my elbow and opposite shoulder. Without any ring fuel, I couldn’t check.

I needed to charge them. Thankfully, I was surrounded by dirt just waiting for me to take it. I started a MASS extraction. It took less than a minute to remove several cubic meters of surrounding dirt. My HUD lit up after the first cube of dirt. While siphoning more mass, I scanned my ribs and found them completely shattered, every one broken in multiple locations. It took nearly fifty excruciating minutes of intense focus to repair them with my usual COPY and PASTE process. The entire time, I was wincing and hissing with every breath.

Eventually, I fixed my ribs.

The pain slowly faded and breathing became easy.

That was a huge relief.

Next was the burning furnace of agony in my elbow and shoulder. I checked for breaks. Didn’t see any. Ah. There’s your problem. My shoulder seemed to be dislocated, and the attaching muscles of the rotator cuff were strained, sprained, or torn. Or all three. I used a POSITION vector to pop my humerus back into the socket on my scapula — PAIN! — then I used COPY and PASTE to fix the tendons and ligaments based on the relatively uninjured ones in my opposite shoulder. My elbow was a different story. The joint capsule was swollen to the size of an orange. It must have been compressed beyond its functional limits. Again, I was able to repair it with COPY and PASTE from my opposite elbow.

Now in less pain, I decided to rest a bit.

I remained where I lay, watching my dual-fuel doughnut charge up to 8 o’clock on the dial. In that time, I’d eaten away a huge portion of hillside, leaving me on a pedestal of dirt surrounded by an empty red dirt moat. My dredging efforts sent dozens of carnivorous trees and shrubs scattering out from where they’d been rooted. At least there were no electric blue-and-red giant ants like last time when my back was broken and my legs were paralyzed.

While my energy dredge continued, the echoes of my agony and the dragon’s warning were a writhing war of nausea in my guts. If I was being honest, I felt more than a little bit traumatized. I kept hearing the dragon’s warning over and over and over.

—LEAVE ZALAXIA IMMEDIATELY OR DIE!—

He’d made himself crystal clear. Shattered crystal, that is.

But… I couldn’t leave Zalaxia.

Not while the Bombshells were still here.

I’d never fought so hard for anything in my life. By comparison, the countless all-nighters at Caltech and Rolbotics barely scratched the surface of hard work required when fighting off space pirates and dragon assassins. Going without sleep while studying for finals or testing a new upgrade to an exosuit was nothing compared to being nearly crushed to death by an angry telekinetic dragon.

More importantly, no one had ever threatened my life if I didn’t drop out of Caltech or quit working at Rolbotics. Quite the opposite. Bad things only happened in college or at a job if you didn’t perform.

Here I had a dragon telling me to quit or die.

My dilemma?

The determination I had that got me through Caltech and sustained me at Rolbotics never let me quit at anything. That part of me said now, “Fuck no! I’m not leaving Zalaxia ever, motherfucker!”

The animal instinct in me screamed, “Run away, Tim! Don’t be an idiot! Run away now!”

What a miserable choice I had to make.

Although my injuries had been magically fixed, there was some low-level nagging fear that I was living on borrowed time until the dragon decided to kill me dead, and there was nothing I or a thousand or a million guardswomen could do to protect me from certain death.

—LEAVE ZALAXIA IMMEDIATELY OR DIE!—

I heaved a sigh.

I didn’t have to decide now, but I would soon.

When I finally felt ready to sit up slowly, I rolled carefully onto my hands and knees instead, expecting the searing pain of broken ribs or my battered elbow and shoulder to return. It didn’t. Thank fuck for these rings.

I sat back on my heels and held up my hands. They were both quivering. Shock had certainly set in when my ribs had been cracked and arms smashed. The adrenalin hadn’t quite bled from my system.

For once, I wondered if it ever would.

My mammalian brain was screaming at me that I was in grave danger.

I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact I’d just gotten my ass handed to me by an opponent who wasn’t even trying. Not only had my beating been intensely painful, it had also been extremely humiliating. I had no doubt that dragon could kill me with a mere thought. This wasn’t like the situation with the pirates earlier tonight. Not even close. Despite the trauma I had been put through by Mace, Qrudge, Skok, and the other two, I