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

advantage, but I’d been ambushed and this was happening too fast to strategize or consider untested options. In the deadly heat of battle, casually exploring new ring functionality was beyond my comprehension.

As for my MASS extraction, it was unclear if I’d stolen any from Crackfang or not.

He suddenly released his talons from my torso, whooshed his huge wings downward, jolted upward, spun, and whipped its tail around in the air.

Whu-CRACK!

It smacked my chest so hard it felt like I’d been hit with four simultaneous sledgehammers.

Crackfang screeched and flapped hurriedly away, swooping around a blue-green tree before I could take a bead on him. That was the last I saw of him.

Drifting along in the air thanks to my armor thrusters, I struggled to draw a breath. My wind was gone. Or my lungs had exploded. I looked down to check.

No, four quills as thick as rebar jutted from my chest.

Perhaps my lungs had been punctured.

Thank goodness I was armor-plated.

That said, my chest was suddenly on fire and my diaphragm hadn’t recovered enough to draw breath. I was going to suffocate where I floated motionless above the jungle.

“My king! Are you hurt?” Captain Theia asked as she flew up beside me and hovered. The other Shock Knights closed in around us again in a protective spherical phalanx.

My answer was strangled silence. I couldn’t get any air.

“My king! Say something!”

I couldn’t.

“We need to get him back to Medical!”

I shook my head, thinking of Violet. She needed me.

“No?” Theia asked, worried.

I shook again, still unable to speak.

The fire in my chest was spreading. The muscles in my torso were spasming. Had I been poisoned?

Ring! I thought, show my body in my HUD as an MRI image! Show the quills in pink! Show any poison in yellow! Make the rest of my flesh dark blue!

Fortunately, thanks to my armor, the quills had barely pierced my skin. One had stopped at my breast bone. The three others hadn’t gone in more than a half centimeter.

Unfortunately — fire!

My lungs were on fire!

I needed air!

The pain was too intense to think. My entire body shook from shock.

I’d definitely been poisoned.

I could deal with that easily. I’d done it when the Slasher Bats had attacked me and Violet.

But I needed to breathe first or I’d pass out.

I remembered back to my first spacewalk without a space suit. I had traveled from the warship of Blorgo the space pirate to the Artemis. I’d made that journey naked. I’d used my ring’s POSITION function to pressurize my skin, and PATTERN to strip carbon from the CO2 in my bloodstream, and consumed the MASS of the free carbon molecules so it didn’t build up in my blood.

I started that same scrubbing process now.

The sense of immediate suffocation slowly faded, but I wasn’t inhaling or exhaling. My ribs were locked up tight.

Still floating above the jungle, I performed the next step.

Removing the poison.

In my HUD, the poison appeared as small yellow clouds spreading through the capillaries near the puncture wounds in my chest. The poison had yet to hit any major blood vessels, but it was getting close.

I focused on MASS in my HUD and used it to shrink the poison away to nothing. It disappeared almost instantly. The pain did not. Probably had something to do with having 5 mm diameter quills stuck in your chest.

I used my ring’s POSITION function to apply a small vector arrow to each one. The second the vectors tugged, agony.

I zoomed in on one quill in my HUD.

Barbs.

Lots and lots of barbs.

When you’re under pressure and suffering intense pain, you forgot the basics. I stopped the POSITION vector arrows and consumed the quills’ MASS instead. They quickly shrank to nothing.

Problem solved.

Except my chest was throbbing painfully and I still couldn’t inhale or exhale.

Then, suddenly—

GASP!

Another gasp, and two more.

I could breathe again.

After a dozen more breaths, each one smoother than the last, I ended my ring’s CO2 scrubbing process. I still had three holes in my chest and a fourth in my breastbone, but I’d had worse. This was nothing compared to getting bounced around the Artemis when it had crashed into Zalaxia hard enough to break my back. And that brought my mind racing back to…

Violet.

EEEEEEEE!

As if on cue, she screamed.

I could clean and close the puncture wounds in my chest later.

Saving Violet’s life took priority.

“Let’s go!” I shouted. “Follow the sounds of the screams!”

“Are you sure, my king?” Captain Theia asked. “You were just impaled by a Terrorsaur tail!”

“It’s fine! I’m good! Let’s go! Move, people!”

Again, the Shock Knights opened their spherical phalanx and I flew forward, heading in the direction of Violet’s scream.

Less than a minute later, I realized there were Terrorsaurs shadowing us in the air and from the sides, flapping furiously along at the same rate of speed as us, but keeping their distance and staying behind cover. They were fast. Their shadows would snap by in the corner of my vision. Whenever I turned to look, they would be gone. Just as quick, one of the Shock Knights would lay down fire, but I never heard a single rattling death cry from a Terrorsaur. The Shock Knights were missing because the Terrorsaurs were too quick. This was their element, their terrain, their advantage.

There was no telling how many were chasing us, but it was a lot.

“Ladies,” I said over comms, “keep your eyes and ears open. They may try and ambush us.”

“Yes, my king,” Theia said absently, her eyes intent in the floating window in my visor. She was clearly thinking ten steps ahead of me.

We continued flying forward, our progress slow. The jungle around us had gone silent, the only sound the crackling sizzle of our plasma thrusters and the emptiness of impending death.

Eerie was the only word.

Eeeeeeee!

“There!” I shouted and rocketed forward, banking left and right around several trees.

EEEEEE!

The sound was directly below me, but a screen of giant leaves blocked my view, and my ring scan revealed only a confusion of moving shapes my brain couldn’t decode