Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) (2 page)

And by that she and the others weren’t referring to
sex, which was now no longer an issue for the mages. They’d figured out how to
deactivate her menstrual cycle genetically, rather than using surgery or
chemicals that could be undone with a regenerator treatment. Jenna and the
other females, she assumed anyway, were now sterile by choice and she didn’t
miss the occasional bleeding, but for her it wasn’t an opportunity to reengage
in sexual activity without the risk of producing offspring.

It was the opposite for her and the other Archons, a
sign of total commitment and saying that reproduction had 0% to do with their
priorities. The sterilization could be undone with another genetic alteration
if needed, so it wasn’t permanent
permanent
, but it
was something that set her apart from the rest of Humanity and made her feel a
little more badass than the rest.

As for her sex drive, that remained intact. They
hadn’t messed with it, and amongst the Archons it was seen as kind of a test.
It was said that sexuality had a strong influence on the weak minded, which was
basically saying that any Archon who had sex was admitting to being a loser.
That wasn’t necessarily true, but that’s how she and the others decided to view
it.

Which was why she didn’t tell Levi to keep his
distance from those thoughts and feelings within her mind. It was very exposing
for him to go there, let alone prod around, activate, or even amplify that part
of her, but Jenna didn’t like the idea of having a no-go zone. She was an
Archon, she had nothing to hide, no shame, no embarrassment, and if she did
that would have been a sign that she had something to work on.

Jenna also knew that an enemy wouldn’t hold to a no-go
zone anyway, so if she was really serious about learning how to defend herself
she had to get hit in every which way during training, holding nothing back.

It was awkward at first, because since becoming an
Archon she hadn’t really dealt with that part of her in any significant way. It
was always riding in the background, but it was things like that that could be
used against you, so she welcomed the challenge…and that fact that Levi’s
mental prodding felt
really
good.

But therein was the trick of it, because if she let
herself enjoy it her defenses would lapse and he could gain further access to
her mind and circumvent her blocks. The Farchor especially could be partially
disabled if she went into ‘pleasure’ mode, which was why Levi hit her with that
attack often, because it had offered him the most success in the past.

And that was the way it worked with Archons. Sexual
pleasure wasn’t a bad thing, but pleasure for pleasure sake without a purpose
was the sign of a junkie-style loser. If you wanted to reproduce it served a
purpose. Archons didn’t and therefore sex had no purpose. The rest of the Human
population still didn’t seem to understand that simple principle, thinking that
the Archons were emotionless monks or just downright crazy. After all, what
would it hurt to have a little fun during downtime?

Except that Archons never had downtime in that way.
Everything they did, including sleep, had a purpose, as did this mental
training. Orgasm for the sake of fun was stupid. Orgasm for the sake of
training…just an added bonus.

Jenna knew that was sound thinking, and prided herself
on being a step ahead of a lot of the others in that regard, for her mind would
be a bit more shielded in the aftermath of the training than theirs would be.
The ironic thing, in this case, was that she was resisting the pleasure rather
than embracing it, and only when she failed royally did she end up in a state
of euphoria.

At which point Levi would just stare at her with a
‘you are weak’ look of victory on his face. She hated that smirk, but even more
so the fact that he was right. She shouldn’t have a part of herself that she
couldn’t control, and it goaded her into working even harder to put some armor
over that vulnerability.

Which was why now when Levi tried that tactic he
didn’t get far. Resisting pain was a unique skill, but resisting pleasure was
wholly different…and it was a skill that Jenna was proud to have learned, for
now Levi couldn’t get her awash with that type of distraction anymore, but he
could still throw it her way for a momentary quiver, during which he’d try and
penetrate somewhere else before she could fully react.

Like her Tier 2
Snu
ability,
which offered an immunity to Fornax, an opponent could no longer disable her
with it…with the difference being that this wasn’t a skill she’d unlocked, but
rather one she’d constructed herself. And the more little advantages like this
that she could create, measureable or not, the more powerful she’d become.

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.