The Eros Expansion Read online

  Enthralled: Book 3

  The Eros Expansion

  By Prax Venter

  Copyright © 2018 Prax Venter

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Jaka Prawira

  Author's Note: This is a work of fiction, and all characters depicted in sexual situations are 18 years of age or older. Characters with any resemblance to persons that exist now, or have ever existed, are purely coincidental.

  Additionally, the Enthralled series is intended to be read as one continuous story. If you have not read Book 2: Picking up the Pieces, this novel will make little sense to you.

  ~ Special Thanks ~

  Celestian Rince

  Cause and effect

  Jack

  Table of Contents

  - Prologue -

  - 1 -

  - 2 -

  - 3 -

  - 4 -

  - 5 -

  - 6 -

  - 7 -

  - 8 -

  - 9 -

  - 10 -

  - 11 -

  - 12 -

  - 13 -

  - 14 -

  - 15 -

  - 16 -

  - 17 -

  - 18 -

  - 19 -

  - 20 -

  - 21 -

  - 22 -

  - 23 -

  - 24 -

  - 25 -

  - Epilogue -

  THE END

  - Prologue -

  Meanwhile…

  “Mmm. That feels really nice.”

  Michelle held the bar of warm iron in the palm of her hand as she stroked its smooth surface. The automatic smelter ejected out another perfect iron ingot into the hopper where a pneumatic tube delivered it to a temporary wooden chest.

  It had been almost four years now, and Michelle was quite proud of her setup. Mining ore and chopping down trees by hand was backbreaking work at the beginning. Especially when everything was so... emotional back then. When her AI booted up this fantasy industry simulator and told Michelle that she needed to craft one thousand voidsteel bars before she would be set free- she had a panic attack that lasted for several days.

  Eventually, she figured out how to harvest resources and then turn those collected ores, stones and plants into tools. She could use these new tools to harvest rarer and stronger resources that allowed her to build more things. A lot of it centered around industrial automation.

  Over the years she had just learned to accept her solitude and bent her mind to perfecting her new world.

  Michelle tossed the iron ingot into the hopper and watched it rattle down until it got sucked into the pipe. Then the iron bar went whizzing through the pipe to the nearby wooden chest- for now.

  Later today, and after it had some time to run without issues, she planned to come back and hook this new addition to her complicated item-delivery tube system. It took a month of planning, but she was now able to build machines that automatically mined up metal ore, automatically processed them and then sent the item to the correct inventory space.

  She walked along the rows and rows of barrels and chests, each with a magic label that always updated how many items were in the container. One type of item for each container. Her fingertips passed over the labels as she moved.

  This one had 7,234 units of dirt. The next had 5,997 units of stone. Yet another had 233 obsidian. She derived a very specific obsessive-compulsive tingle each time an item passed by in the pneumatic tube system and deposited itself into the correct storage container. Every item in its place.

  Michelle decided to do a quick survey of the automatic mining machines- then she would come back to check the progress of her new smelter. She took one step forward when the first other voice she had heard in years assaulted her from every direction.

  “THIS IS BORING. YOU’RE BORING. REALLOCATING RESOURCES- NOW.”

  With a jolt, Michelle sat up in her living room and proceeded to scream and vomit at the same time. It felt like her brain was rotating in her skull and that her heart was surrounded by needles.

  She wheezed in a ragged breath, and her stomach muscles forced more bile out onto her carpet. With a terrible inhaled groan, Michelle struck her chest with her fist, and a blinding pain gripped her chest like a vice. She held on to consciousness- but just barely. Her heart started erratically beating inside her rib cage again, and she forced herself to take a few ragged breaths.

  Michelle brought two shaking hands to her temples and tried to calm the vibrant chaos that was her mind. She wanted to just lay back down and go to sleep forever. And she might have if the sound of breaking glass didn’t catch her attention.

  After a few more breaths and psyching herself up, Michelle pushed off the table and fell right to her knees. The world lurched around her like she had just stepped off a spinning carnival ride.

  What was she about to do? It didn’t matter. She needed to call someone. Tell someone about…

  The sound of broken glass came again, and Michelle remembered that something bad was happening outside. She crawled across the carpet on her hands and knees over to her sliding glass patio door. Her condo was on the ground level of a building shaped like a horseshoe that wrapped around a large pond and some trees- to make it feel like they were closer to nature.

  Most of the glass doors down to her right had been shattered, and she could see shards of reflective glass tinkling on the cement slabs below. When a dog-like robot came out from a home a few doors down, she sucked in a breath and backed away from the opening.

  “What is happening?” she whispered.

  The sound of breaking glass was her only answer.

  Panic and tears began to swell up inside Michelle- then something clicked inside her mind. She wanted to survive. She pushed herself off the floor and noticed she was still wearing her long, cotton pants and a sheer tank top.

  She paused on her way to the kitchen and considered changing. No time, she decided, and grabbed a canvas bag off a hook on a cabinet door. As she stuffed some canned goods and bottles of water into her bag, her eyes flicked from the patio door to the sleek-looking ChronoMind rig taking up most of her living room.

  Her mind slipped back to wondering how her automatic wheat farm was doing. The system required water pumped- Michelle squinted her eyes and shook her head to banish those lingering thoughts, but the movement was a little too violent, and waves of agony and nausea brought her to her knees again.

  After a few deep breaths, she ran to the bathroom to get some general meds. Who knows what she would run into out there.

  The glass door on the home next door was shattered, and Michelle decided that she had enough supplies. She made a straight line to the front door and checked for anything odd through the peephole. Nothing was outside smashing things- that she could tell, so she slipped on her jogging sneakers and dashed out into the eerily still city.

  - 1 -

  “Marines, your mission is to infiltrate the Eros Pleasure Station and discover the reason behind the distress call. Most of the patrons and staff have been evacuated, but there may still be some civilians aboard. Your primary objective is to wipe out whatever is causing this mess, and your secondary objective is to round up and rescue anyone left on the station. Good luck, team. Commander Hash out.”

  The words “End of Transmission” flashed on the screen and then faded out.

  Mark looked over at Ahnix who was staring at the darkened terminal. Her exotic eyes turned to him for a moment, and he felt a flash of deep sadness through their bond. Then their emotional link became empty as the cat-girl returned her gaze to the front window.

  He needed to have a serious talk with Ahnix- with all of them. He looked over his shoulder at his other two Enthralled, and the giant naga turned her large, violet
eyes to meet his.

  “I have a lot of questions, Mark,” she said. He nodded and was glad to feel something from her. Vale seemed to be reserving judgment about the situation, but he could feel a growing sadness in her too.

  Roo pulled Mark’s attention as she leaned in between him and Ahnix to get a better view of the stars, her pure black eyes twinkling. The velvet-girl seemed to be handling this pretty well, and he could feel her excited curiosity. She was just going on another adventure with the people she cared about most in the world.

  A large part of him felt the same way. He turned his attention back to Vale.

  “You know I will answer you truthfully- if not intelligently...”

  Vale crossed her armor-plated arms under her breasts.

  “Where do I even start? If I'm not real, why do I feel real? Why do I have a lifetime of memories?”

  Mark pushed against his contoured chair, found that it could rotate, and swiveled around to face the giant naga filling a significant portion of the small cabin space.

  “Vale, let me start by saying that all of you feel perfectly real to me. We would have to get into deep philosophical questions about what is really real and what-”

  He was interrupted by an emotionless female voice coming from a speaker on the control panel.

  “Previously entered approach vector locked in. Initiating docking procedure. Overriding lockout.”

  The quiet hum of the engines grew louder, and Mark spun back around as they raced forward toward Eros Station, picking up speed. The entire view was quickly filled with metal as they approached a section of the sphere sliding open like a mouth preparing to swallow the ship whole.

  “It's so big...” Roo said quietly behind him.

  “Is this what your world- the real world, is like?” Vale asked.

  Mark kept his eyes forward as the ship entered a cavernous and dimly lit docking bay.

  “No, not really. After virtual worlds became much more interesting, and much easier, to explore, people stopped caring about outer space.”

  Their vessel touched down, and he felt the hull shudder from the light impact. The view outside the front showed a distant flickering blue light over a small doorway surrounded by darkness. Everything he could see was colored white and had a sterile, clean look.

  The voice of the ship's computer spoke again. “Normalizing pressure with external atmosphere.”

  Mark jumped when a section of wall on the right side of the ship let out a loud hissing noise before rotating outward. The air from inside the station rushed in and had a light coppery taste. Both Ahnix and Mark stood up and joined Roo and Vale as they looked out into the vast docking bay.

  Scattered across the bumpy, metal floor were white cubes with rounded corners that had to be storage containers. Mark noticed that the open section of the ship became a ramp leading down to the floor. Behind the ship, the massive bay door to outer space was still wide open, and a red glow around the edges led him to believe there was some sci-fi forcefield keeping everything from blowing out into the great nothing beyond.

  “Who was that talking just now?” Vale asked, looking back at Mark.

  “I'm pretty sure it was the ship's computer.”

  She sighed and turned her attention to the dark landing bay. Its size was monstrous and stretched out for hundreds of yards ahead of them.

  “A lot of your answers only raise more questions. You'll have to explain 'computer' to me, but let's search the area first and learn what immediate threats we face.”

  Vale wove her serpentine body down the ramp, and when she had the overhead clearance, the giant naga pulled her shield off her back. The clinking rings pierced through the huge slab of metal reminded him that she had been paired with her shield since the day he came upon her, tied up as a prisoner of the slug kingdom.

  Mark looked over at Ahnix who silently walked past him to join Vale. She wasn't ignoring him, and he didn't feel that the black-and-gold desert queen was angry. Just... distant.

  He felt Roo's soft arm on his, and he looked into her black eyes. From her, he felt contentment and understanding, and she mentally lent him some of her calm certainty that everything was going to be okay. Her puffy lips curved into a hint of a smile, and she motioned down the ramp with her head, causing her shoulder-length, lilac hair to bob back and forth.

  Just as Mark and Roo made it to the bottom of the short ramp, movement from behind a stack of containers sent them all into defensive positions.

  “It's about time!”

  Mark focused on an older man wearing a blue jumpsuit who was quickly approaching them.

  “Knew they'd send you to the main service port. I've been hiding in here for two days. We gotta get out of here.”

  He came to a stop in front of the four of them, his sunken eyes bouncing between Vale, Ahnix, and Roo. The man was tall, skinny, and balding, with tufts of light gray hair clinging to the sides of his head.

  “What's going on here?” Vale asked, lowering her shield.

  “It's haunted- the whole station. Everything's gone straight to hell. You a special unit or something? Never seen non-human races in the E.A.N.” The old man nodded towards the ship when he said the name.

  Mark looked over at the small craft they had flown in on and noticed the emblem displayed prominently on its side. He had to turn his head to read it because the words were written in a circle around a glowing blue sword crossed with what looked like a pair of laser pistols. It said, 'Earth Allied Navy'.

  “Yes,” Mark said after an obvious and uncomfortable pause. “We are Marines in the-”

  “No, we're not,” Ahnix interrupted him. “We're here to destroy the enemies. The sooner we can wipe them out, the sooner we can be done.”

  Everyone turned to look at her. The old man's watery, gray eyes slowly widened, and he licked his lips nervously.

  “Enemies? You don't understand. The whole station is possessed- the whole place is your enemy. It all has to be...”

  He stopped to look behind him at the flickering light over the door far across the bay. When he turned back to them, his bushy white brows were furrowed over his wild eyes.

  “Why don't you just have a quick stroll around the corridors, take a look for yourself. I'll wager fifty credits that you come back here in five minutes and want to put as many parsecs between you and this cursed station as you can. I'll wait.”

  Without looking back, Ahnix started moving across the bay, on small padded feet, toward the door. With nods to the old man, Mark, Vale, and Roo followed her.

  Vale swished her body quickly and caught up with Ahnix.

  “I know,” the cat-girl said before Vale could speak. “I would have waited at the door. Relax.”

  Vale nodded and wordlessly continued forward alongside her friend.

  They were about halfway across the hundred yards or so when Mark heard the door on their ship seal shut with a hiss. He turned to see the vessel they came in on lift off, lazily spin around, and accelerate back out into space.

  “Did that man just steal our airship?” Roo asked.

  “Spaceship,” Mark corrected. “And, yeah. Pretty sure he's not coming back.”

  Roo held out her hand toward the floor and attempted to summon her signature black door back home. To Mark's surprise, it actually worked. The painted wooden door emerged from the metal deck of the landing bay and became fully formed in moments. The velvet-girl reached out a hand to the brass knob and pulled it open.

  “Okay,” Mark began. “Why don't we go home and get our heads right before just rushing into whatever madness lies ahead of us?” They had just been through a lot, and it seemed to be a no-brainer. Besides, he was stuffed to bursting with essence that really wanted to get out.

  Ahnix hesitated briefly, but they all ended up back inside their familiar home dimension.

  As soon as the cat-girl's tail crossed the door frame, it closed and vanished into a fine black dust.

  Immediately after it was gone, Roo stuck
her hand out and tried to summon another door.

  Her head tilted, and her arm lowered slightly as a wave of anxiety from the lithe velvet-girl crashed into Mark.

  “It's all gone,” she said, breathlessly.

  Vale slid up to her. “What do you mean- what's gone?”

  “All of it. The whole world.” Roo looked up into Vale's strained eyes. “I can't target anywhere.”

  “It was never real anyway,” Ahnix said while staring at the wooden floorboards. She was leaning against the doorway into the map room with her furry arms crossed over her tight stomach.

  Mark almost argued with her, but he didn't know what to say. He was still having a difficult time sorting out what the word 'real' meant. He sighed and just spoke from the heart.

  “I'm not going to try and make up bullshit. You know me, you can feel me, and I can feel all of you. I don't know what else you need to be considered real.”

  Tears were welling up in Vale's unfocused eyes, and an uncharacteristic frown dominated her chiseled, elfish face. He had grown a deep connection with each of his Enthralled, and right now, he could tell that Vale was not only trying to come to terms with her existence being a lie but also that her mother, her Empire and everything she ever knew might be gone. They could all feel it too- as if she were slowly drowning in loss. Roo started to reach her soft, velvet hand out to the giant naga but then changed her mind and let it drop against her leg.

  Vale forcefully regained some of her composure and locked her vivid eyes on Mark.

  “Take your time and tell me exactly how I am both real and not a person.”

  Mark thought of different ways he could go with this, but in the end, the only way was to just tell them everything.

  “The real world and everything outside of this fabricated existence is boring. There are no magic abilities, no skill paths, and every single person is human. The floating text you can see that tells you what skills you have or what level your dodge is... that is all part of a game. In the real world no one knows how good they are at combat unless they fight someone and see who wins. In the real world, no one knows what skills they have, and there are no Collectors. Fighter, Hexer, Lover? Those are all made up roles intended to make gameplay more interesting and unique.”