Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) Read online

  And the more powerful she became, the bigger the difference she could make when a time of crisis came, which was the motivation driving her every waking moment.

  2

  The sexual ‘prods’ were only one tactic that Levi was using, knowing that he had to hit his master from different angles and keep up the frequency of rotation. His Ikrid skills had advanced to the point where he could manage two or three different avenues simultaneously, but if he wanted a blunt force attack he could only focus on one area. That wasn’t going to work with Jenna, for her mental strength was far beyond his, but if he wasn’t going for a break and just a distraction it could still be useful.

  Which is what he hit her with after getting her a bit loopy with a bit of euphoria. He expected the pushback, which came after only a little hesitation, but Levi didn’t wait around to fight that losing battle, instead using his Orren to slip a deep strike in past all the mental noise. To his surprise it hit without much resistance, giving him access to her visual processors. Before she could detect that hack and shove him out again he sent a burst of sparks into her eyes and retreated, hoping to make another Orren strike before she recovered from this one.

  The padawan didn’t have similar luck when he tried to access her muscle control, intending to give her a bit of a facial twitch. He didn’t meet up with her conscious effort on this one, but rather her Farchor ‘minions’ which existed as a mass of programming that fought him automatically. He could have got through it with time, but all she needed was the red flag thrown up and a moment to respond to get her conscious power thrown into the fight and kick Levi’s mental tendril out forcefully.

  But she went one further than that. During these drills it was standard practice for the defender not to strike back, for if Jenna did it would make Levi have to play a mixture of offense and defense. The purpose was for him to work on his offensive skills so Jenna would never respond by going into his mind, only defending her own turf, so to speak.

  She did now though, following Levi’s Orren strike and running it right back at him. It caught him completely off guard and suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at Jenna, thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the galaxy.

  The programming spike continued to alter his senses even after she withdrew from his mind, lasting a few seconds until Levi detected it and reset…with the highly attractive Archon sitting across from him returning to her normal aura within his mind, which was centered around strength, wisdom, and not romance.

  “Better,” she said, opening her eyes but keeping hold of his wrist.

  “What was that?” Levi asked, referencing the counterattack.

  “The signal for a time out.”

  “You could have just said something. Did I hit a sore spot?”

  “No…it’s just the cumulative effect. You shouldn’t have got that one through.”

  “So I’m not getting better, you’re just getting tired?”

  “Getting tired because you’re wearing me down. You didn’t use to have this much stamina.”

  Levi smirked. “Is that your version of innuendo?”

  That prompted another strike, this one with Jenna bypassing Levi’s mental defenses on a whim and accessing his arm control. She made him release her wrist and bring his own palm towards his forehead in a slap…but he reasserted control just short of making contact, with the Archon glancing up at his hand just over his eyes.

  “Missed it by that much,” Jenna commented. “You are getting quicker at recovery.”

  “Now I know something is wrong. What’s up? You’re getting punchy.”

  Jenna sighed, with Levi dropping his hand and grabbing her wrist again. “You’re getting to me.”

  “The sexual strikes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You told me to hit those hard.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t have the pleasure endurance. I’ve learned to put up with pain and keep going, but this is totally different.”

  “Maybe you just need to take a break and enjoy it for once.”

  She frowned at him. “Kind of defeats the point of the training.”

  “I didn’t want to say this earlier, because it makes me sound like a junkie, but what if we’re missing something…and be ‘we’ I mean all the Archons. We’ve got a part of ourselves that we’re ignoring, and granted, it’s for reproduction and therefore we don’t need it, but maybe we’re missing something mentally due to lack of experience.”

  “Which is the point of this training,” Jenna reminded him.

  “No, you’re fighting it,” Levi insisted. “Maybe you just need to analyze.”

  “Is this your way of trying to get me into bed?” she asked sarcastically.

  “You know we can do better than that with a direct mental link.”

  “Illusions are not a good thing, youngling. They mess with our senses and dull our reflexes. Learning to see through them is valuable, not embracing them.”

  “Is that your way of trying to get me into bed?” he countered.

  “I’m still trying to understand where you’re going with this.”

  “Sometimes you need to lose in order to reevaluate the enemy. Take yourself out of the picture and just see it for what it is, not how you match up to it.”

  Jenna considered that. “You’ve been working me over pretty hard. Not sure I’m missing that much. You’d have other girls lying in a pool of drool on the floor by now.”

  “Maybe you need to be…maybe we both need to be, at least once, to see it clearly.”

  “You want me to work you over?”

  “That’s why I didn’t bring this up before. But if you really want to develop a defense against this type of attack, it seems logical. And I’m willing to bet that you’re hesitant to actually let yourself like it, the same as me.”

  “If you go down that road it’ll mess with your head,” Jenna reminded him, which was basically Archon 101.

  “Yeah it will, but we know we can reset ourselves afterward.”

  “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. You’re lustdrunk.”

  “You tell me then,” he said, with Jenna feeling the prompt for a battlemeld link.

  She accepted it, and suddenly her thoughts were his, and vice versa, along with their bodies in so far as they could sense what each other felt, though they couldn’t control one another. In what would have taken a long time to explain verbally, Jenna realized that he wasn’t lustdrunk. He was onto something, sniffing out a weakness, and belatedly she realized they were both going about this sheepishly.

  Jenna broke the battlemeld link, but maintained their physical contact so they could access each other’s mind. “I don’t like this.”

  “And we shouldn’t.”

  “But if we’re going to get to the root of this…I guess we’re going to have to take a moment and be stupid.”

  “Better to do it on our terms than have an enemy force us there later, even though the odds of that happening are slim.”

  Jenna shook her head. “No, you don’t play the odds. If there’s a weakness you go after it, whether or not you think anyone can expose it. The odds of anyone getting to us outside our armor and getting past our mental blocks is slim, and even slimmer that they would take this track, but I don’t like carrying around Kryptonite.”

  “To be fair, you’ve reduced it considerably.”

  “But it’s still there, and I think you’ve hit on the piece of it that I’ve been missing. Because I’ve been resisting there’s a piece of me that you haven’t been able to prod. And without that bit getting hit, I can’t learn how to defend it.”

  “It would take a totally different mindset from what we want,” Levi cautioned, “and it would leave you vulnerable for, I don’t know, a day or so afterward. But as long as we’re mid jump I don’t know of a safer time to try it.”

  “Damn it,” she whispered. “You’re right, but my gut still says no.”

 
“That’s what’s been bothering me too, which was why I didn’t mention it. But look at it this way, if it is stupid we’ll learn why. If we don’t go there, we’ll keep wondering.”

  “Ok, fine. But we work through this together and don’t tell anyone until we figure it out. If this ends up just being stupid gratuity then we don’t mention it to anyone. If there’s something valuable we figure out, then we share.”

  “So, we’re calling a mulligan before it’s needed?”

  Jenna smiled. “Well put.”

  “So…you first, I assume?”

  “You have to promise me one thing, Levi.”

  “What?”

  “Damn…I hate even saying this.”

  “Suck it up cupcake, and just spit it out.”

  Jenna knew he said that just to goad her, but like all Archons it worked, for they were more comfortable with conflict than anything else, and it settled her mind.

  “You have to force me to enjoy it. I can let you in past my defenses, but you’ll have to fix yourself there and not let me back out of it. I’ll probably try on reflex, and when I do you’ll have to be strong enough not to let me push you back.”

  “I’ll need some time to put in some programming layers for that.”

  “And you’ll need to keep me…subjugated for a long time. Say at least an hour. You have to get me so out of it that I’m not resisting anymore. You have to turn me into a…”

  “Sex toy?”

  “I am so hating this already.”

  “Do you want this to be a series, or a one off?”

  “I can surrender once. I don’t want to make a habit of it.”

  “As you mentioned before, my endurance has improved greatly. I can keep you hammered for at least two hours, guaranteed. I promise you’ll be drooly by the time it’s over.”

  “No, it’s just…you have to do this so much that I’m not left hanging wanting more. If this were sugar, you have to take me to the candy store and let me eat as much as I want until I’m sick.”

  “Leave no stone unturned?”

  “If this is going to be a mulligan, make it count.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Give me a moment,” she said, letting go of his wrist and standing up, with him releasing hers. She took a few steps over to the nearby wall and leaned against it with one arm. “I don’t like this. My mojo is screaming no, but like you said I can recover from it later.”

  “You’re afraid you’ll like it enough that you’ll want a second go?”

  Jenna’s shoulders sagged. “Actually, I think I might…and that isn’t right either. We should know every piece of our own design inside and out. Being fearful or embarrassed of going somewhere isn’t right.”

  “I’ve had a bit more time to think on this than you have,” Levi offered. “And I’ve had the perspective of pummeling you with assaults and observing how you react. This isn’t combat, it’s something else, which is why I think it’s a weakness for us.”

  “Did you get laid before you became an Archon?”

  “A few times.”

  “Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I never did.”

  Levi shook his head. “With the access we have to each other’s minds, we can do far better than that, so I don’t think that’s really the issue. You don’t get the full picture when you get laid, just a piece of it. I think we need to go through every variation at least once just to become familiar with it, that way we won’t worry about what might happen, because we’ll already know.”

  “But it sounds like you’re just a sex junkie when you say it.”

  “Which is why I didn’t mention it before.”

  “We both know this is a road to nowhere, right? It’s designed for reproduction and we have no use of that.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And that a lot of people indulge in the pleasure, but because it’s an illusion that pirates the rest of our senses we can’t make use of it.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And if we were seeking pleasure in the first place we’d never be able to train, because we have to embrace the pain that comes with it.”

  “Agreed,” Levi repeated again.

  “So that begs the question why am I so weak minded that I’m considering this?”

  “I think that’s the trap for us. This would serve a purpose, though it seems like an excuse.”

  “I’d prefer an opponent that I could just punch.”

  “Or we could just genetically turn it off.”

  “No,” Jenna said quickly, pointing a finger down at Levi where he still sat. “That’s cowardice.”

  “Agreed. This is a challenge we have to overcome, but we can’t fight it. We have to surrender to it in order to gain the information we need to create a proper defense. At least that’s the conclusion I came to. Still sounds sucky when I say it though.”

  “No, you were right earlier. I’m not sure about this, but what’s the downside? A moment of stupidity. I’ll risk that just to keep this from bouncing around in the back of my mind forever. Archons shouldn’t be sheepish about anything, and that fact that I am now is bothering me. But the biggest thing is I don’t need this, and I’m doubting myself as to why I’m considering it…which is a huge red flag.”

  Jenna pushed off the wall and came back over next to Levi and sat down. “Alright, my mind is made up. This may be incredibly stupid, but I’m going to see it through regardless. Just make sure you don’t screw up your part. You have to be relentless and probe every corner of my sexuality multiple times. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

  “I can do that,” Levi said, without any sarcasm or innuendo, which settled her. They were both Archons, and at the end of the day they’d always be. Individuality was the lifeblood of an Archon, and sexual emotions were binary, creating an urge to pair up and surrender that individuality, which was yet another reason why they were a negative if allowed to run their course. But the two of them would never go there, could never go there. Not because it was forbidden, but because it wasn’t them. Such mistakes were the stuff of the young and newbs, and they were far from either.

  She was a girl, he was a guy, and they might as well use those biological attributes to their advantage to help each other. If this worked she’d return the favor and they’d both grow stronger after recovering from the sensory distortion. If not, she’d shake it off and they’d move on, no longer worried about it.

  “You’re not going to make this awkward?” Jenna asked.

  “We passed awkward when we started this training.”

  “For the record, this is one reason why the general population should never have Ikrid. They’d never leave their quarters.”

  “Wow. Death of a civilization via pleasure. That’s a new one.”

  “Sexuality has a strong influence on the weak minded.”

  “Or the ignorant,” Levi added. “Surprise attacks always will be like that.”

  “Do you have these same worries, or is it just a girl thing?”

  “Different version probably, but basically the same thing.”

  “Ok,” she said, interlocking wrists with him again. “This is going to take some time to let you in. Don’t go poking around until you’ve got a lock. My involuntary reflexes could be stronger than you think.”

  “I’m assuming so. I don’t think you realize just how powerful your mind is. Looking from the outside I think I can size you up better than you can.”

  “Be cautious and make this happen the first try. I’m not used to shutting down my own defenses.”

  “Relax, I’ll give you what you need.”

  Jenna smirked, but Levi immediately shook his head. “That’s not innuendo. This is a type of training and I’ll make sure you get what you need. I imagine you’re going to have to do some work on your end to really accept this, so focus on that and don’t worry about the rest. I’ve got this.”

  Jenna sighed. “And here I’m being schooled by the padawan…how embarrassing,” she said, c
losing her eyes and beginning to take down her mental barriers around her sexuality, Farchor included. She sensed Levi ‘knocking’ on her motor control, then got the mental explanation that he needed to hold her body in position himself, releasing her to focus purely on the pleasure.

  And the fact that she was, if he did this correctly, about to become a drooling idiot burned her. Jenna pushed that unwanted thought away and focused on letting him in. However this went down she wasn’t going to let herself be shy. This may be an unused part of her psyche, but she was going to bring it out into the open and get a feel for it. The ironic part was she couldn’t do that herself, which was why it’d always been lying dormant within her mind.

  But no longer. Time to end the mind games once and for all. And she was very glad she had her fellow Archon to help her, for something like this, sexuality aside, required a great deal of trust, for she was opening her mind deeper to Levi than she’d ever let anyone in before. That wasn’t easy to do, but Archons were loyal to the core and Levi’s tone had indicated that he understood the importance of this. She could trust him to help her, and that was the only reason she was able to remove the deepest blocks, for had there been even the slightest bit of hesitancy those would have remained no matter what her conscious mind insisted.

  But aside they went, temporarily disabled as Levi’s mind entered those areas and began putting up ‘supports’ to keep the doorway open for when she recoiled later. This was going to be jarring for her, from a pleasure standpoint rather than pain, but it was still going to shake her. How much she didn’t know, but her job was to just ride it out and learn from it after the fact. She didn’t like not being in control, but releasing it was the mission here, so that’s just what she did.

  The two of them sat on the pedestals, arms locked and motionless, with Jenna’s last coherent thought being that it was probably a good idea that she’d chosen the hottest padawan available.

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