“Wow, how reassuring.”
We were walking through a corridor. We weren’t being sucked through the wall.
“Why are we walking instead of going through the wall?” I asked.
He sighed loudly. “This is why I didn’t want you to see anything. Too many questions, Love.”
“Then gag me.”
He laughed. “I fully intend to. But only after you beg me for it.”
I raised an eyebrow, trying to understand how a gag could possibly be construed as something sexual. Would he gag me with his fingers, or—Oh,Oh,Goddess, he really was a filthy man.
“So I like your voice,” he said, “which means I’ll answer your question. I usedWrath’sslip tunnel system to get to you, but after those two blokes burst in and got themselves shot in the brains, the ship has deemed me a ‘hostile presence,’ and I can no longer use the slip tunnels. So we’re walk—”
We turned a corner, and two teal-skinned warriors armed with bladed guns and powered armor were standing right in front of us.
Only one of them moved fast enough to get his weapon halfway up. Tschenkar’s fist was fast, and it hit the one who was moving in the neck. The armor wasn’t enough, because a long blade burst out the back of the teal alien’s throat. The metal was soaked through with blood, and Tschenkar struggled to pull his bladed fist out of the dead foe’s throat.
It looked like the blade was stuck on some bone or thick flesh, because when the second Khetar got his gun up and pointed at Tschenkar, he threw the dead alien forward—his blade still lodged through the slain foe’s throat—and absorbed what looked like a blast of plasma or high energy using the corpse as a shield.
As the energy blast melted the dead body, I was thankful that none of the smell got through the power armor that Tschenkar was holding me inside.
Tschenkar threw the burning corpse—his blade finally sliding out clean—and the impact threw his opponent off balance. Tschenkar lept, and even with my weight added on, he flew through the air like some kind of frenzied animal. Two blades swept through the air, but right before they sunk into the final teal alien, another plasma blast erupted from the gun.
I shrieked, because the plasma hit me directly. I tried to remember Tschenkar’s assurance that I was not actually outside the armor, and so when it looked like I was getting hit right in the face by the energy blast that had just melted a huge alien warrior, I tried to tell myself it was the armor getting hit and not me.
It got hot though, and I closed my eyes to avoid seeing Tschenkar chop the warrior apart with his blades. Sweat dripped down my face as an agonized grunt filled the armor. Tschenkar’s grunt turned into a growl, and he fell to his knees. His whole body trembled, shaking me with it inside his armor.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
I shouldn’t ask him that! He just killed two of Thuliak’s men. He was kidnapping me, for Goddess’s sake!
I didn’t get an intelligible answer from Tschenkar anyway, instead there was just more grunting and trembling. Tschenkar dug his elbows down into the floor as his body was wracked with pain. I wasn’t just sweating anymore either, I could barely breathe. The air was hot and stifling, and it hurt my throat and tongue as it went down. It was like breathing inside of an oven.
Then I fell and rolled, and a big swirl of mist filled the entire corridor. The mist was like steam at first, scalding my skin, but within a few fractions of a second it was cooling down, and when it finally cleared I saw Tschenkar standing. He was naked, but covered in burns. His purple skin had become lobster red in places. The skin on his chest was peeling off and bleeding. The burns were worst on his chest, shoulders, and arms. He had some redness and swelling on his six-pack, but below the waist he was…well he wasnaked,and his cock was somehow half-erect despite being nearly burned to death.
He smirked at me. There were no burns on his face.
I was terrified to look down at my own body. Was I burned like this too? I looked down, and I was naked too, but I didn’t have any visible injuries.
Covering my breasts with my arms and pressing my legs together, I looked up at him and narrowed my eyes. “I took the shot directly. How did you get burned and I didn’t?”
“I told the suit to prioritize protecting you,” he said. “It redistributed the heat from the plasma blast to me.”
He reached down and touched his balls, then his hand slid up along his semi-hard shaft. He grinned. “I also told it to prioritize protecting my cock, second to you, of course.”
“Lovely,” I said. “My clothes…”
“Gone,” he said, “the suit depleted their matter to mitigate some of the heat.”
“Can you just mist me up something new to wear? Anything?”
He shook his head, but he was grinning wide now. “Like I said,Wrathhas me flagged as hostile. I can’t get anything to happen now. My armor’s gone too. Damaged irreparably from the plasma. It’s just me and you now, Adam and Eve, alone against theWrathof God.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Adam got us kicked out of paradise. You can’t blame Goddess for that.”
He cocked his head at me. “Is that what they told you? According to the Lexikon—cross-referenced from twelve different human worlds—Eve was the one who ate the apple. And God is a man.”