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

“Yeah. Go ahead. I don’t care.”

Theia smoothed sweaty hair from my brow.

Our eyes met.

She asked gently, “Is this the first time you’ve lost someone?”

“It’s not her,” I said, shaking my head in denial and glaring at Theia. “It’s someone else.”

Theia pursed her lips but said nothing.

I grunted, “Maybe it is her. I don’t know.”

“It might not be. The jungle is filled with animals of every stripe.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled, hating the uncertainty but appreciating her optimistic suggestion.

Theia gently squeezed my armored forearm with her gauntleted hand. “Death is a way of life here on Zalaxia, I’m afraid.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I snorted. Sudden hope hit me and I asked, “Do shifters turn back to their human forms when they die?”

Theia shook her head. “They remain whatever form they were when they died.”

“Great,” I groused, my head sagging. “It can’t be her, right? I mean, the last time I saw her was hours and hours ago. Before I met you last night. She’d be long gone, right? She lived out here. The jungle was her home. I mean, is her home. She knows how to stay safe, right?” I looked to Theia for agreement, but she couldn’t know. She didn’t know the first thing about Violet. “She’s fine. Right?”

“For your sake, my king, I want her to be. But my wishes don’t work miracles like yours can.”

I gave her a sidelong look. “Are you saying I should piece her back together? With my ring? Can I do that?”

Theia stared at me for a long time before looking down and saying quietly, “I have seen it done, my king. I have seen kings perform royal miracles such as you describe. But never on one so gone as this.” Her eyes touched on the bloody mess soaking the red dirt redder.

“Should we, I don’t know, take her remains back to the outpost so I can work on them where we won’t get attacked by Terrorsaurs?”

Theia stared at me and said ominously, “Sometimes, my king, death is the best thing.”

I suddenly felt like Victor Frankenstein in the worst possible way. A series of gorey, horrific images flickered through my mind as I considered the fullness of what reassembling and reanimating a ruined corpse would entail.

Then I remembered my time with Violet, the two of us making insistent love in the jungle. How she had kissed me forcefully before demanding more, how I had filled her again and again while she moaned. And how after, just last night, she had pleaded with me to run away with her into the jungle and forget about everything else.

When a woman wanted you that badly, when she looked like beautiful Violet with her athletically tan body and jungle bikini and violet eyes, you wanted her that badly too, and you’d do anything to get her back.

Anything.

I stood up and slowly circled the mangled body.

“I can put her back together. I can do it,” I said insistently, sheer madness taking over. “It’s just copy and paste. I fixed my broken back. I was paralyzed.” I gave Theia a pointed look. “I can do this. It can’t be that hard.”

The green glow in Theia’s kryptonite eyes faded to sadness.

“I’ll fix her!” I said. “I can do it!”

Then my eyes landed on Violet’s head.

Or the deer’s head.

Or whatever this was.

The brain was gone, the skull cracked open and bloody as if a Terrorsaur had savagely torn through it, greedy to eat the fatty delicacy inside.

That did it. My knees buckled. I sat down on my armored ass in the red dirt and wrapped my forearms around my knees.

I couldn’t copy and paste a brain from nothing. Not without a preexisting copy stored in my ring, if that were even possible. Silly me, I had never copied Violet’s brain when I’d had the chance.

As magical as my rings were, they couldn’t do the impossible.

Unless…

I were to use my True Ring to reverse time.

That was it!

Fuck the consequences. I only needed to wind back the clock a few minutes. If it turned out this deer thing was just a deer, I’d kill it and the time stream would be effectively the same.

Then, a horrid thought.

What if it turned out this deer was a shifter, and it wasn’t Violet?

Could I murder that person?

No.

Wait, I didn’t need to murder them. I could wind back the clock a second time and allow the Terrorsaurs to kill it.

Problem solved.

I concentrated on the word TIME in my HUD until it blinked.

Then I thought, Ring, back up time by ten minutes.

A string of blinking purple text appeared:

ERROR_PROCESS_MALFUNCTION!

ERROR_INVALID_COMMAND_REQUEST!

ERROR_INVALID_ACCESS!

ERROR_BAD_OPERATOR!

I tried again.

Same damn result.

No wonder the previous King Sekton Darkstar — the humanoid fish alien I’d killed mere hours ago — hadn’t stopped time to kill my ass when we’d fought on the landing deck last night. This new bit of evidence suggested he couldn’t have even if he had wanted to. Sucks to be him, and now me.

At least I was alive.

But Violet wasn’t.

Grimacing in disgust, I hung my head and snorted back tears because I loved Violet.

Loved her.

At some point, Theia knelt beside me on one knee. She placed her palm on my back while I wept.

The only reason I was crying was because I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept and had gone through hell since crash-landing on Zalaxia less than 24 hours ago. Worse, I had almost lost my beloved Bombshells due to their severe beatings, and Sirius had almost died in my arms after getting stomped by Sekton. And now this. There was only so much one man could endure in such a short time, and with no sleep.

Everyone was emotionally fragile under this level of stress.

Yeah, that was it.

Captain Theia leaned her temple against mine and whispered in my ear, “You’re a good man, my king. If you hold onto your heart, you always will be.”

I looked into her inviting green eyes and sniffed, “Just tired.”

“I’m here for you, my king.” No woman had ever been more beautiful or more sincere or more caring than