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

“Is it?”

I chuckled nervously, “Maybe we better leave it in the dirt. Please back away, Sergeant.”

She did.

I set the agitator down gently and backed up several steps. “Go get the bomb squad.”

“You got it,” Kane said. “My king.” She was always adding that like an afterthought. That was soldiers for you. Far from formal.

I didn’t care.

While Kane called it in over comms, I joined the loitering crowd of power-armored guardswomen surrounding Titano. He’d shrunk slightly due to my MASS extraction thus far, but it was slow going. At least my energy doughnut was climbing. That was always a plus.

To speed mass extraction — otherwise it might take all day — I strolled closer. One group of guardswomen stood near Titano’s sleepy head, chatting amongst themselves. I explained how I was shrinking Titano to a manageable size. At the moment, he was still huge. Several guardswomen respectfully observed that it didn’t look like he was shrinking.

“Just watch,” I said confidently. “He will. It might take an hour.”

While we continued making small talk, everyone left their helmets on and visors down, communicating using our helmet loudspeakers. It was an oddly Star-Wars-Stormtroopers Troops moment — the COPS parody — but with sexier power armor, and no thieving Jawas with their stolen Tom Servo droids trying to lie their way out of a citation.

Just me and the armored babes.

Obviously, their theme song was:

“Bad girls, bad girls!

“Whatchoo gonna do-oo!

“Whatchoo gonna do?

“When they come for you?!”

If I had anything to say about it, they would come for me first, then I would come for them. Inside, outside, wherever it landed.

Trying not to laugh lest I incriminate myself, I mostly kept quiet while listening to the guardswomen chatting.

Because of the sheer number of guardswomen standing around — dozens — I only saw tiny thumbnails of their faces in my comms windows. But I already knew they were hot. Every woman in the outpost was hot. I’d seen a thousand or more of them with my own eyes. But I did hear dozens of melodious female voices as we traded stories about how insane combat against Titano had been. I got heaps of humorous praise for saving the day by turning him into the Dinosaur Blimp. There was a tinge of sadness when word came from Control that ten women had been chomped to death by Titano during combat operations.

“That’s ten too many,” I muttered somberly.

Grumbling agreement from the guardswomen.

I briefly wondered if I could piece together the body parts of the dead guardswomen. Pull a Dr. Frankenstein and resurrect them like I’d considered with that deer carcass that may or may not have been Violet. Would that end well for the ten guardswomen? Or would I make ten undead zombie guardswomen with mismatched body parts? It wasn’t a thought I wanted to entertain. There was only so much I could do with my rings. As Captain Theia had said, sometimes death was the best thing.

That made me sigh.

Lavender sunlight glinted off the metal of Titano’s cyborg spinal attachment. It was an intricate piece of engineering. Analyzing it would get my mind off more morbid thoughts.

I said over loudspeaker, “Do any of you ladies know what that thing is on Titano’s back?”

A chorus of no’s.

“I’m going to check it out.” I hovered up using my armor’s thrusters to look down at it.

Someone had clearly fabricated the cyborg spine with advanced tools and tech. But who? Titano clearly hadn’t built it himself. Not with his tiny Tyrannosaurus hands.

What did the cyborg spine do? I wasn’t sure. The emotional agitator obviously made him angry. But the spine? Why was it there? Easy way to find out. Remove it. I was pretty sure Titano wouldn’t care if I did. He’d probably thank me with a series of booming bellows.

While consulting my HUD’s diagrammatic scan of the spine’s insertion pins, I applied a series of POSITION vector arrows, one to every segment and one to every pin, and starting pulling upward gently. I had to fine-tune a few vectors here and there to get the angles ideally situated, but it didn’t take long.

After a few minutes of effort, the entire cyborg spine separated completely and smoothly from Titano and floated upward. As I prepared to lower it to the red dirt for closer inspection, it—

ZHWHIP!

Titano shrank instantly to a third his size.

1/3 his length.

1/3 his width.

1/3 his depth.

So did the segmented cyborg spine.

What. The. Skruck.

—: Chapter 24 :—

Shocked, every guardswomen jumped back from Titano’s suddenly shrunken body or rocketed away using their armor thrusters. Many gasped audibly over their loudspeakers. With our sensitive external helmet microphones, it was easy to hear them. Many women were demanding an explanation.

“What the skruck?!”

“How did he—?!”

“No way…!”

I chuckled over my loudspeaker, “I take it this isn’t normal?”

A chorus of no’s.

I reiterated my point, “To be clear, Titanosaurs don’t normally shrink suddenly?”

“Never,” several guardswomen answered.

“They never get that big either,” another said.

I asked, “Is his size now more normal? Smaller than normal?”

“Just normal, my king,” someone said.

“Good to know,” I grumbled.

I lowered the segmented spine to the red dirt using my POSITION vectors. Once I released the vectors completely, the spine violently twisted and curled into a segmented metal ball, resembling a cyborg snake twirling around itself, or maybe a cyborg armadillo balling up.

I stared at it and Titano’s smaller form thoughtfully.

The guardswomen continued to marvel about the insanity of what we’d seen. Some of them called it magic.

I’ve quoted Arthur C. Clarke before and I’ll quote him again, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That was how I thought of my True Ring and my Bombshells Ring.

Technology masquerading as magic.

And that was how I’d describe what I’d just witnessed with Titano, his shrinking cyborg spine, and the shrinking of the emotional agitator when I had removed it earlier. Not magic, no.

Technology.

And if there was one thing about technology we all knew, it was that anyone with a big enough brain could use it. Sure, it