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

While that was happening, I was hurrying down my narrow escape tunnel to avoid getting hit by shrapnel. The tunnel was perhaps 2 meters in diameter, an uncomfortably tight squeeze.

The amazing part was, the tunnel grew longer and longer as I vectored forward, stretching out ahead of me with the end of it always just a few meters out of reach. The surfaces of the ever-changing cylindrical walls were in a constant state of high-speed mechanical transformation. I had the weird feeling I was being swallowed by an interstellar meat grinder.

It wasn’t long before I started shivering from the cold. With my power armor dead, I had no climate control and I was freaking freezing. My teeth clacked together faster than jackhammers. I couldn’t stop them unless I clamped my jaw shut.

My only option was to spend ring fuel keeping my body warm. Heat flowed out from my rings and pushed away the shivers. Instant relief. Fortunately, heating required minimal energy, but it meant I was spending energy I’d prefer to conserve until I had a better sense of the scope of this prison. Unfortunately, when you didn’t know where the finish line was — this Death Tunnel kept getting longer and longer, and might go on forever, for all I knew — it was impossible to properly pace yourself. I did my best to stay calm and conserve oxygen.

For the next several minutes, I continued slowly, drilling ever forward. No matter which way I went, turning here, angling there, the tunnel easily accommodated every direction change I made. No matter how far I went, there was always more tunnel unfolding in front of me with its walls grinding angrily away.

How big was this thing?

My nerves told me it was endless, that I had been transported into some alternate Death Sphere Dimension that stretched out to infinity in every direction. That seemed far-fetched.

So did a Chaos Fold Gate.

And the CyberKnights of the Spacepocalypse.

But those things weren’t fetched at all. They had been in-my-face real.

Clearly, the Death Tunnel was too.

I started a timer in my ring HUD to give myself some temporal perspective. After traveling ten more minutes and covering ten more kilometers at the very least, I stopped in sheer disbelief. I couldn’t fathom the amount of metal it would take to make a Death Sphere ten kilometers in diameter. To be fair, most of what I’d seen had been Death Tunnel, not Death Sphere. But I had traversed ten kilometers worth of tunnel.

That had to be millions of metric tons of metal mass.

Or was it?

The thing was, whenever I looked behind me, the tunnel had closed off, leaving the back end of the tunnel only a few meters behind me like it was chasing me. That suggested one of two nerve-wracking options: either this thing was reshaping itself to keep me trapped no matter where I went, or this really was the Death Sphere Dimension.

Not wanting to believe the worst, I changed course 90 degrees in a random direction. Continued for another five minutes in a straight line, always wary of the thrashing blades, slamming hammers, and spinning grinders on the walls, and the constant flicker of electrical discharge.

Once again, no matter how far I went, I remained surrounded by an endless Death Tunnel, or trapped in a moving metal Death Bubble. I didn’t know which.

Was there any way out of this ever-changing maze?

Didn’t seem like it.

Did I have any options other than hurling myself against the deadly walls and hoping I punched through before the gnashing, shredding slicing spiking walls chewed through my power armor and puréed my flesh and bone?

Because at this point, I was starting to fear I might be stuck here forever.

Heck, it didn’t need to be forever to be deadly.

Just long enough for me to burn through my ring fuel.

I would freeze and suffocate shortly thereafter.

At the rate my escape was going, odds were this demonic Death Tunnel had the upper hand.

I could almost hear its diabolical cackling.

Or that was just me losing it.

I spun around, expecting to see a liquid steel demon with curved chromium horns and a coiling titanium tail lunging at me from behind, claws out, jaws wide and fangs glinting in the frigid glow forking from its tungsten throat in savage electrical arcs.

Nope, nothing but Death Tunnel.

And yup, just me losing it faster than I was losing ring fuel because it was starting to look like I might end up trapped here forever.

—: Chapter 85 :—

No.

There had to be a way out of this Death Tunnel or Death Sphere. I refused to accept the ridiculous notion that I was trapped in some inescapable Death Sphere Dimension.

This maze had to have limits.

My next move was to try a straight line of travel as fast as possible. Assuming the cage had a finite amount of mass, and assuming it was reshaping itself around me wherever I went, there had to be an upper limit as to how quickly it could transfer mass from one side of itself to the other, right?

So I went barreling off on a new course in a razor-straight line, using my ring’s POSITION vector to accelerate as fast as possible. I had no way of measuring my speed other than by eye. With the tunnel walls blurring by, I could be going 200 kph or 2,000 kph or 20,000. My rings didn’t have a top speed.

To make my life more difficult—

LOOK OUT!

Sections of the tunnel would suddenly lunge at me with whirring blades or spinning drill bits or spiked balls or sharp ramming wedges that shot out of nowhere.

Each time, I would dodge frantically left, right, up, or down, several times bouncing off the opposite wall before my ongoing MASS extraction forced the wall away from me.

If not for my power armor sparking on impact and protecting me, I would’ve been sliced to bits several times already. I considered expanding myself to Mega Beast size, thinking that might make