Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure by Baron Sord (top inspirational books .txt) 📗

and used it to make this dragon man’s skin. Incredible and scary as hell. I’d never seen anything like it, but it wouldn’t be long before nobody ever saw him or the other three pirates again.

Still in the shadows, I lowered myself flat on the ground and placed my palms on the dirt to do a wireframe ground scan. No sign of other humanoid lifeforms in the vicinity.

“Did you hear something?” the sapphire dragon man grunted.

The serpentor’s tail instantly rattled an agitated warning louder than a pair of maracas.

The space gorilla lifted his big bolt rifle and racked the bottom slide. Looked like he had two barrels on that bad boy, possibly a grenade launcher on the bottom?

No matter. Before any of them could take action, I extracted their MASS in quick succession. Each pirate winked out of existence with an audible Pop! Two seconds later, all four were gone.

It was that easy.

I smirked smugly for my own benefit.

When my rings actually worked and were charged up, taking out four unwitting mutant pirates from close range required less effort than breathing.

Still being cautious, I vectored myself toward the cannon, still low to the ground and snaking just above the red dirt. To my surprise, the design details of it reminded me of the D8 Death Die. Not the overall shape, just the surface details on the various components that made up the cannon. Almost like whoever had built one had built the other. That was interesting but not surprising.

What mattered most was getting rid of it.

I was about to extract the cannon’s mass to destroy it when I changed my mind. I used my ring’s COPY function to scan the entire weapon, then SAVE its design to my ring. Then I extracted the mass until it disappeared. If I needed, I could recreate it later. Almost like having a Bag of Holding or a Portable Hole in D&D, except better. I could make as many copies as I had ring fuel to spare. Call my rings a Quiver of Ehlonna, the Unearthed Arcana edition. If I ever had to fight an army of guardswomen wearing rings, I’d have the perfect weapon to shut them down.

Just as I was about to turn and start my journey back to the Cage Root grove where Captain Theia, Corporal Syx, and the Shock Knights were waiting, something stunning caught my eye and stopped me short.

What have we here?

—: Chapter 114 :—

There, on the far edge of the shadowy plateau.

A tumble of large, stacked stones.

They were so overgrown by encroaching jungle vines, I almost missed them. If not for my enhanced night vision I definitely would have glossed right over them and gone back for Captain Theia and the others.

I hovered toward the strange stones to get a closer look.

Some of the vines tangled around the stones retreated, coiling away because of my presence. I used POSITION vectors to push aside more. The stones weren’t just stacked. As rough and rain-pitted and moss-covered as they were, it was clear they had been cut, carved, and carefully arranged eons ago. I got the sense this had been an ornate archway of some kind before age and weather had toppled it to the ground.

These were ruins of some kind, but what?

A temple?

A fortress?

An entire city?

Unable to restrain my curiosity, I lowered to the ground and placed my hands on the dark red soil.

Ring, do a scan of the surrounding area. Highlight stones in light gray, plants in dark green, dirt in dark red.

A wireframe diagram expanded in my HUD.

“No freaking way,” I muttered to myself.

Although there were plenty of random rocks buried in the dirt surrounding me, the crumbling stonework of the ruins stood out in stark contrast. Jutting above ground, the stones continued from my position out to the edge of the plateau to what appeared to be a broken, fallen bridge, and then on to another larger plateau adjacent this one. There, the stones spread out to form a massive settlement. I was reminded of the stepped layout of Machu Picchu, but instead of high, arid mountains with minimal vegetation, here the dense jungle strangled the stonework into near-obscurity.

I had to go see it with my own eyes.

Not necessarily the brightest idea after the night I’d had, but I couldn’t resist, and it was probably safer for me to do this by myself than drag the Shock Knights into it without their power armor or functional bolt rifles.

Yeah, the safest thing was for me to do this alone.

I hovered up a few meters off the ground and followed broken stones that became a series of mostly-intact steps, somewhat obscured by jungle overgrowth, but clearly leading up to the broken bridge.

The bridge was a sight to behold.

I felt like the first person discovering long lost ruins.

My very own Indiana Jones moment, sans dysentery and scimitar-wielding swordsman.

The crumbling or missing sections of horizontal bridge spans between the vertical support piers had fallen into the deep chasm between mountain plateaus long ago. But the remaining ruins were still huge. In its heyday, this bridge must have been an impressive sight to behold. Even now, I was in awe of the engineering required to build it on the treacherous terrain between the two plateaus. After a short medium-grade slope, the plateau walls on both sides slanted steeply and plummeted into the chasm far below. One large central span had bridged the gap in ages past, but was broken away now.

In the bridge’s ruined state, crossing it would be impossible without climbing gear or a jet pack, but my rings were better than both. I hovered across the broken bridge to the other side. There I found another broken archway and overgrown stone staircase continuing up the side of the plateau. I followed it to the top. Any reaching vines that tried to snag me along the way I avoided or MASS-extracted.

The higher I went, the more I felt an ominous uncertainty, like I was treading on hallowed ground