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

Nice.

Now for the wall. Time to cut my way out.

Using thrusters, I hovered toward it and wound up to swing.

As soon as I did—

KRACK!

Blinding bolts of lightning struck me from every direction.

Everything went dark. My ring HUD was still active, but the HUD for my YX-37 and my power armor had both blacked out. I felt the SR Feed disconnecting from my mind. My only view outside my rig was through my rig’s emergency view port.

The rumble of my Hellblades flickered to a whimper before they sputtered out completely. My reactor core’s turbine whine faded down and down and dooooooown.

Silence.

What happened?

When I imagined myself looking around, turning this way and that, my mech didn’t respond. It was dead in the inky black water of wherever the hell this prison was. The only way to look around my dark cockpit was to physically move, but that didn’t move my emergency viewport any.

It seemed like I’d been hit by a powerful EMP that had wiped out the electronics of my Dragonfire and power armor.

That wasn’t good.

Then—

Visible through my emergency viewport, the spherical walls flickered with arcs of electricity. The walls also intensified their transformational movements. I could imagine the malicious whirring and whining sounds as the components spun up faster and faster. Felt like I was trapped inside either the DeWALT or the Craftsman power tool factory the night it got possessed by the devil, every evil tool spinning up to kill you.

I could also imagine ratcheting thunks as I watched the spherical walls slowly press toward me like the inside of an industrial wood-chipper with thousands of shredding and cutting surfaces spinning and slicing blindingly fast.

Definitely not good.

Not good at all.

—: Chapter 84 :—

The deadly walls of the devil’s Death Sphere sparked with great arcs of electricity, closing tighter and tighter around me. With my Dragonfire dead, my first thought was to bail out and start extracting MASS from the metal walls. Do my own Makita-style makeover and drill my way out this cage.

Step one: I thought about retracting my seat harness and opening the Dragonfire’s hatch. Neither happened. Of course not. That EMP or whatever it was had fried everything.

No problem.

My rings were still almost half-charged.

With the death walls closing in around me, I extracted the MASS of my harness and extracted a circular hole in the chest of my Dragonfire. Knowing my cockpit was pressurized, and assuming I was still in a vacuum, I started with a small hole — a few millimeters — to allow the outflow of cabin pressure. Feeling the outflow of air pressing against me, I braced my hands and feet against the cockpit walls while the air drained. After two seconds, I widened the hole to a few centimeters. At that point, most of the cockpit air had escaped and I widened the hole to a full meter. That took another three seconds and it instantly expanded my view, revealing more widely the impressive lightning storm coursing across the grinding demonic walls as they crushed toward me.

I couldn’t hear any electrical crackling, or screeching electric motors, or screaming saw blades and growling drill bits, but I could imagine them.

Jumping from the safety of my mech into that mess wasn’t my preferred option.

I hesitated.

Waiting made me realize the oxygen in my power armor was going stale. Of course it was. Life support systems had died with the EMP.

Again, no problem.

As long as I had ring fuel, I was good to go.

I started the familiar process of stripping carbon atoms from my blood and consuming the mass, which I added to my ring fuel. I did the same for the oxygen inside my power armor, which allowed me to breathe evenly instead of forcing myself to resist the bodily urge to inhale and exhale. That was something I had done successfully before, but it required a lot of concentration and wasn’t ideal for a hair-raising escape like this.

Before stepping out of my mech, I turned on my Sphere of Absorption in case the lightning storm forked into me. Didn’t want to get fried, and I could always use the extra energy. Then I used a POSITION vector to ease myself out of my mech. I could’ve pulled myself out using my arms. Would’ve been easy in zero G. But it might have sent me flying into the deadly walls of this death ball if I unwittingly applied too much force.

I couldn’t overstate how dangerous this metal cage felt.

One wrong move could end me.

Floating next to my soon-to-be-shredded mech — the spherical walls had already collapsed to within 5 or 6 meters of it — I looked around for a potential escape route. Didn’t see one. Everything was spinning or grinding blurringly fast.

Death in every direction.

Forward was the only option.

Using another POSITION vector, I floated slowly toward the nearest section of whirring wall, hands extended while telling my rings to extract MASS straight ahead. The results were instantaneous but unexpected.

A hole opened up where I was focusing my attention. Or should I say, the wall withdrew like a metal bubble inflating outward and away from me.

Question was, had I removed any mass?

Or was the mechanical cage merely retracting away from my area of effect? Because I got the distinct sense that was what happened, almost like the cage could sense my MASS extraction field and knew to avoid it.

Whatever the explanation, a short tunnel had opened up leading out of the main spherical cage.

Time to move.

I hovered toward the tunnel entrance, moving gently via my POSITION vectors. Behind me, the whirring walls had closed down enough to hit the corner of my mech. Like throwing a marble into a running garbage disposer, the Dragonfire went spinning, then it bounced violently off the nearest wall section and ricocheted into the opposite side. It bounced again and again, faster and faster. Within seconds, it was ripped to shreds. Chunks of mech shrapnel went flying