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

Air Guard is here!” To punctuate her point, the sleek fighter jets streaked by overhead a second time. “They’ve got heavy weapons! They can take him out! That’ll calm him down skrucking quick!”

“Not over the outpost! I need to move him before I drop him!”

“Oh. Right. What do we do?”

“Wait while I calm Titano! Be ready to move! Get everyone in position!”

“Position where?!”

“His chest!”

“That’s right under his mouth, my king!”

“That’s where you need to push so we move him the shortest distance! It’ll be safe once I calm him down! Get close — but not too close — and be ready!”

“Due respect, I don’t like the sound of this, my king! We should let Air Guard take him out!”

The Air Guard jets continued their slow circling overhead.

“I don’t have time! Stop arguing and get ready!” I shouted.

I concentrated on PATTERN in my HUD until it flickered. I had no idea if this would work. Goldie the Gargantua hadn’t been this damn big. And he wasn’t a mindless reptile. He was a clever primate with complex emotions. I was going to try anyway.

I started talking softly to myself while sending mellow thoughts out to Titano. “Calm down, buddy. Sleepy time.”

It occurred to me I didn’t know exactly where Titano’s brain was. It had been easy with Goldie. He had a primate-style head. Slightly mutant and alien, sure. But generally primate. And he was only 2 or 3 times bigger — 8 or 27 times more massive — than a normal human. I’d had a very good idea where Goldie’s brain was, and how large. But Titano? His brain could be the size of a pea, or a golf ball, or even a football (European or American, your choice) somewhere in his mammoth skull. Or tail. Or hips. Or who knew where. If I was going to be precise, I needed to know exactly where to aim.

Ring! Show in my HUD all neural activity in Titano’s head! Make synaptic firing orange! Fade everything else to deep purple!

Smooooooke on the Waaaaaateeeeeer.

And fire in Titano’s eye. Literally. His giant eyeball was bright orange, whirling around crazily as he thrashed, and he looked very, very angry.

In my HUD, his brain appeared. It was the size of a Volkswagen. Huge. Biggest brain I’d ever seen. No surprise. There were tendrils of neural activity snaking down his spine, tail and limbs. But the majority was concentrated in his big skull.

I breathed deeply to calm myself down and muttered, “Calm down, Titano. Relax, brother. Take it easy. Nappy time, friend.”

KRAIII-OOOOONGK!

He continued whipping and thrashing in the air, his entire body shifting continuously this way and that.

After almost a minute of my calming process, he didn’t seem any calmer.

I had a theory why.

As big as Titano’s Volkswagen brain was, it kept moving wildly and unpredictably in relation to me. I had not been consciously shifting my ring-projected calming focus to coincide with him shifting his head. Sure, it sounded incredibly obvious when you said it aloud, but it was the difference between a beginner marksman popping off shots at stationary paper targets at a shooting range month after month versus your first duck hunt. Or heck, just trying to hit your first moving target like a clay pigeon at a skeet shoot before graduating to real flying birds, duck or otherwise. Hey, look! There goes a condor! Ka-POW! I’m joking! Totally joking. Whatever the bird, shooting moving targets were nothing like hitting a paper target. Two totally different ways of aiming your focus. If you didn’t learn to smoothly shift your focus and your aim — two different things — you’d never hit the clay pigeon or meat duck. Or giant dinosaur. More importantly, I wasn’t aiming a shotgun in a straight line at a pigeon drifting on a predictable glide path. Titano wasn’t some lumbering duck. More like a gigantic but frantic swift darting chaotically in every direction. Almost impossible to track visually with any accuracy. And you can forget aiming. Titano’s head movements were too unpredictable. There was no way to know or even guess where his head would be next.

I already suspected from my previous encounter with Crackfang the Terrorsaur that applying my ring functions precisely to wildly moving targets was a difficult if not impossible task. My challenge with Titano was to precisely imagine a 3D Calming Sphere the size of his brain, but no larger. That was my intended area of effect. I needed to conserve precious ring energy and not explode my heart or brain with energy overload. And as I mentioned, I had to keep my Calming Sphere moving in unison with his actual movements. Relatively easy to imagine in practice if you were an experienced spear fisherman — which I wasn’t — difficult if not impossible to imagine with precision when you’d never freaking spear-fished before! I didn’t have time to practice for months if not years and go all Tom Hanks in the second half of Cast Away. I needed a faster solution now.

My problem was, I was more of a Deadliest Catch kind of man. Tuna trawlers and industrial-sized fishing nets.

Nets!

Would that work?

Casting a very wide “Calming Sphere” net centered on Titano’s entire skull? Or would a bigger sphere slow the rate of calming, or require more energy, which I didn’t have to spare?

Speaking of, my veins were on fire and my blood pressure was pounding in my ears from the effort of holding Titano aloft. The inside of my skull sounded like I had Alex Van Halen kicking a bass drum on one side of my head while Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe kicked one on the other.

Buh-BOOM!

Buh-BOOM!

Buh-BOOM!

When all else fails, ask for help, or give specific instructions to a computer eagerly awaiting your instructions, without which, even an idle supercomputer will sit there blinking its dumb cursor at you.

Ring! I thought. Show my Calming Sphere in green, and show it in relation to Titano’s movement!

In my HUD, the diagram of Titano zoomed out to show his entire