Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure by Baron Sord (mobi ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Mira had dropped to the bottom of my list of worries because the only bottom on my mind was Mira’s.

Such was my life.

The assassin, on the other hand, was most definitely not distracted by Mira’s ass.

—: Chapter 72 :—

“What’s taking so long?” Hade grumbled.

“Should be any second now,” Kroach splorched excitedly.

The rest of the bridge crew on Hade’s warship were on the edges of their seats, their mutant eyes glued to the holographic monitors floating over their workstations, waiting to see what sort of destruction the assassin had planned.

—: Chapter 73 :—

“Mira to Crown. Are you ready to fly, my king?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I chuckled. “Can I at least do a test flight before we do our bet?”

“It won’t make any difference, buuuuut, sure. Be my guest.”

“We’ll see about that. Crown to Control. Please tell ATC I’m going flying. Out.”

“Control to Crown, I’ll notify Space Traffic Control as well. The sky is yours, my king. Ursa out!”

“Thanks, Ursa.”

I jumped up as high as my mech would go, and thought about engine assist. Specifically, I thought, I want maximum vertical acceleration.

KROOOOOOOM!

Instant insanity.

“Shiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

The landing deck and jungle floor practically disappeared below my feet. Turned out the engines on my mech were a weeeee bit more powerful than my power armor thrusters.

The insane G’s of upward acceleration crushed me into my seat. I wasn’t sure of my current G-load, but it felt extreme. For reference, if you normally weighed 90 kilograms at rest (200 pounds), at 10 G’s of acceleration, obviously your body weighed 900 kg, or 2,000 pounds.

Before the intense kinesthetic sensation of my now-insane body weight could confuse my SR Interpreter, and before the G’s could crush me with my own acceleration-increased body weight and cause a blackout, stroke, or heart attack, I quickly activated POSITION in my ring’s HUD to compensate with an upward vector arrow. It lifted every molecule in my body simultaneously, eliminating the overwhelming compressive forces, and reducing my effective weight back to normal. At this point, it was habit. I’d done it enough times on the Artemis, I barely needed to think about it.

While gaining incredible amounts of altitude, I waited for the expected pressure change and popping ears I associated with flying, but there was none. Probably because the Dragonfire was fully pressurized for high-altitude flying — and space flight — unlike commercial airplanes, which were only partially pressurized. For you aspiring aviation nerds, the air pressure in most commercial flights decreased slightly with altitude gain. You started with local air pressure at ground/sea level during takeoff, and reduced to the equivalent of between 6,000 and 8,000 feet — 12 and 11 psi — at cruising altitude. Obviously, there was an inverse relationship between altitude and pressure. Nerdy lecture over.

Anyway, it also helped I wore power armor, which was fully pressurized for space walks and such. I was double pressurized.

That would soon play a critically important role in my survival when I reached space and the stakes for this blackout bet went from who I had sex with first, to life or death danger for me and every woman at the outpost.

That was assassins for you.

When you were the acting king of any planet, let alone King of Harem Planet, which was apparently the most desired prize in the entire universe, you were always a target for someone’s knife.

—: Chapter 74 :—

“What happened?” Hade asked, somewhat confused. He was watching several different 3D holographic windows floating around him on his elevated dais. Some windows showed satellite video of the jungle outpost. Others showed scanner data tracking moving objects outside the outpost. “They left the landing deck in their Dragonfires. Shouldn’t there have been… something?”

“Yeah,” Kroach said. “There should have…”

“Then why wasn’t there?”

“I don’t know, Boss,” Kroach said absently, focused on adjusting the holographic controls of his comms workstation. He muttered under his breath, “Try asking the assassin.”

“I can’t ask the assassin, you fool! You’re the comms man! You ask the assassin!”

Still trying to fine-tune the feed. Kroach said, “Could be the signal delay. Almost four seconds from here to Zalaxia. For all we know, the king is dead already.”

“Imposter king,” Hade grumbled and counted to 4,000 milliseconds. “Is he dead yet?”

“Doesn’t sound like it. But I’m getting a lot of signal feedback. Hard to say.”

“Fix it, Kroach,” Hade growled. “Or I’ll fix you.”

“Working on it, Boss.”

A general sense of disappointment settled over the rest of the mutant bridge crew.

—: Chapter 75 :—

A second later, Mira went blasting past me, her Dragonfire now in fighter jet mode and flying straight up vertical like a rocket. The crackling sound of her turbine engines firing afterburners in my face rattled through my cockpit louder than cannons as she sped ahead.

Clearly, she had the aerodynamic advantage in jet mode.

Meaning, I’d lose this bet if I remained in mech mode.

I was more than ready to try jet mode. Only question was, how did I know if and when I had managed to transform?

There had to be an indicator panel or gauge for it.

My eyes darted around my HUD windows until they landed on a 3D diagram of my rig that showed a slowly-rotating miniature version of my YX-37. Then I thought about transformation.

Jet mode. Transform into jet mode.

The diagram changed and I felt myself rotate 90 degrees in space from sitting upright to sitting in a chair lying on its back. At the same time that was happening, the rotating 3D diagram went from mech to jet. Not as awesome as seeing the transformation from the outside like I had on the battlefield twice already, but it got the job done.

I also noticed the kinesthetic information coming from the SR Feed had changed. It was… less. I no longer felt like my body was the mech, which made perfect sense because the mech was now a fighter jet. Obviously, the kinesthetic cues you needed to pilot a jet through 3-space without crashing were very different from the cues you needed in mech mode to