Planet of the Bugs (Unfinished Fiction)

FOREWORD

This is one of my rare, unfinished titles that's never going to get finished.

I'm posting this basically for completion's sake. Think of this like bonus content.

A brief history.

In 2019, I started up a pen name, Crystal Candy, because I wanted to release simpler, more straightforward stories again. Stories I could handle completely on my own. Planet of the Bugs was one of the stories I began writing. Ultimately, I took everything related to this name down and tucked it away for potentially future use.

This is not one of the stories that's getting used in the future.

This one was my first and, so far, only real attempt at LitRPG. I'm sure it will be laughable, but it just goes to further prove my point that on some deep, intuitive level, I just don't 'get' LitRPG. Anyway, I didn't get much written.

Hopefully, if you choose to read it, you enjoy it!

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PART ONE

PROLOGUE

Sitting in the waiting room of one of Virtual Incorporated’s mirrored, monolithic skyscrapers, I found myself tapping my foot anxiously and wondering again if I was doing something stupid, like pissing away a lot of credits.

Looking around the sleek white room, the minimalist-design chairs and table, the holographic display on the wall, didn’t really help alleviate my fears. This place reeked of money. And it had been such an involved process so far…

I reminded myself of why I was here.

A vacation. I was going to take an amazing vacation, unlike any I’d ever taken before, and I had been planning to do this for months now. Almost a year, actually. And wanting to do it since I’d first heard about the breakthrough five years ago.

Virtual Vacations.

From what I understood, basically you got to live an experience in a fully and totally immersive virtual reality, your brain pretty much hooked directly into it. It started out for the ultra rich as basically a ‘vacation cram’, usually business tycoons who didn’t have time to spend three weeks on the beach, but still wanted to do so.

From what I understood, time was a lot more subjective when you were under. You could do a month-long vacation in a few days, and it would be custom tailored. As time went on and the technology got better, people started using them to basically live video games. You could fight dragons and rescued princesses, or fight alien monsters on a distant world, lead a military campaign at any point in history, be a racecar driver, or any of a hundred other fantastic scenarios. And it would feel totally, complete real.

Or, as they liked to say, Better Than Real Life.

Insert trademark logo.

Suddenly, the far door opened up. I resisted the urge to say ‘finally!’. I didn’t want to seem like a dick. I knew this whole thing was incredibly complex, but the entire process had already eaten up three entire days. Endless testing. Testing, testing, testing. My body, my brain, my psychology, my tendencies and preferences and personality. Scans and questionnaires and interviews. But they did need to know all this stuff to modulate the simulation accordingly.

An attractive, slim redhead came into the room, one I had become familiar with over the past three days. She was basically my consultant, the human face walking me through all this. Although I wasn’t ultra rich, or even rich, I had enough money, from both myself and the corporation I was working for (they were helping foot the bill for some political or marketing or image reason or another, I didn’t care, they were covering half the costs), that it warranted being treated like a person. That was getting kind of rare nowadays.

“Mister Thompson, we’re nearly ready. The mapping is finished and the campaign has been generated. It should be suited to your neuro-psychological map. Honestly, all that’s left is to ask a few more questions. You’ve largely indicated that you want to go in blind. However, one thing we typically find that our guests wish to modulate is, basically, how easy the sex comes.”

“I...uh, okay,” I replied, thinking about it, and feeling very awkward at the same time. “I guess, I mean, I don’t want it to be difficult, but I don’t exactly what the women tripping over themselves trying to suck me off...this is kind of weird.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve had this conversation literally hundreds of times at this point,” she replied with a practiced ease. I believed her. “One a scale of one to ten, one being nearly impossible to seduce, ten being so easy you merely have to look at them for a certain amount of time, how does a seven sound? They’ll flirt with you, and they won’t turn you down.”

“That, uh, sounds good,” I replied.

“Okay.” She tapped something into the tablet she was holding. “Also, I want to ask again if you are okay with randomizing the non-player characters you encounter in the simulation?”

“Yes,” I replied. On the one hand, I had fantasies, on the other hand...there was a lot of fun in not knowing. And they’d belabored the point that, based off of the roughly thousand questions they’d asked me about my sexual preferences, they’d be able to create a cast of female companions I’d find very appealing in different ways.

“One more thing,” she said, looking up. “We have found that clients such as yourself statistically enjoy the campaign more, and sooner, if they...get the first encounter out of the way, as it were. Naturally, you find yourself wondering how real it will seem, how good it will actually be, and I can sit here and tell you a hundred times it will feel real, genuinely real, all of it, but you won’t truly believe it until you experience it for yourself. So having a sexual encounter early on in the campaign will help put your mind to rest, and let you truly settle into the role. And further research has indicated that if the first person you encounter is at least somewhat customized by you, you will enjoy the encounter more than if it is randomized. Would you like to do this?”

I thought about it, then nodded, figuring they knew what they were doing. She handed me the tablet. “Answer these questions.”

I ran through, eager now to actually get on with this given we were so close, or so I thought. I punched in the stuff that turned me on. Hair color: red. Skin color: white (pale). Eye color: blue. Height...I thought about it, then couldn’t decided and just went for a little tall, five eight. Body type: curvy. It felt a little weird customizing this fictional woman I would meet and have sex with, but when the thing spat out an image at the end, I was instantly interested in getting to this particular experience. She was fucking hot.

I handed it back. “Okay, Mister Thompson,” she said, accepting it and punching something into the tablet. “Please follow me.”

We went through the door, down a long hallway, and through another pair of doors. Finally, we came to a simple room. All it had was a narrow bed with machinery built into the frame, a complicated looking piece of equipment jutting out of the wall next to the head of the bed, and a single, dark haired woman with an easy smile and a white uniform that made me think of a nurse, a sexy nurse, standing beside it.

“If you’ll lay down, we can get you inserted into the simulation,” she said warmly.

I nodded and laid down slowly on the bed.

“I’m going to inject you with something, and you’ll go to sleep now. When you wake up, you’ll be inside of the simulation,” she said.

“Thanks,” I replied.

She readied the needle and smiled. “Have fun.”

She injected me.

I was out within three seconds.

CHAPTER ONE

I opened my eyes.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

It did feel real. Insanely real. I was strapped into something small, upright, and the only thing I could see was cracked glass inside a steel frame in front of me. Rain ran down the glass, and there was just darkness and the flicker of dying, guttering flames somewhere nearby. It looked real, too. I’d kind of expected something a little more...video game-y. But no, like, this looked like real fucking life. Holy shit, this was nuts.

I tried to move, and became aware of the fact that I was completely enclosed in something. Then I remembered, they’d told me about this: the power armor. I had a suit of power armor on. Something pulsed blue in the lower right of my field of vision. I glanced down and raised my right arm. There, on the back of my wrist, was a little screen. Something pulsed blue on it, there was blue, glowing text. I brought it closer to my face and read it.

Please Reboot ‘Goliath’ Full Power Combat Suit v.5.1.

There was a little button on the screen below the line of text. I reached out with my other hand and tapped it. The whole screen flashed blue, then went dead. A bar appeared and began to fill. I looked back up at the rain, feeling genuine excitement bubbling up in me. Now that I was actually here, actually in the simulation, and seeing just how real all of this looked and felt and sounded, (I could hear the gentle tapping of rain on what I realized was an escape pod), I was so excited to get to it. I loved games, but I’d never lived them before.

Plus, well, the sex was probably going to be amazing.

The bar filled and pulsed blue again. Suddenly, my head’s up display flickered into being. I saw two bars in the upper left hand corner: my own vitals and the integrity of my suit of armor. My vitals were strong, but the suit was down to half. A holographic compass appeared in the middle. A small rectangle marked MENU in sleek white text appeared on the right side. It was pulsing gently. I glanced at it and held my gaze for three seconds.

It expanded to take up my whole field of vision.

There were five tabs. The first was MISS. BRIEF/OBJ., the second INVENTORY, the third SQUAD STATS, the fourth was UPGRADES, and the final one OPTIONS. I checked squad stats, but there was just me, and the inventory showed a big nothing. I checked upgrades, which was one of two tabs flashing, the other being my mission briefing and objectives. Part of me wanted to rush past this, but I knew I’d be doing myself a disservice if I did.

“Please choose your lifetime bonus,” a soft, computerized female voice whispered in my ear. I twitched in surprise, but they’d mentioned that, too. The suit came with a voice, and I could interact with it.

“Show me,” I said.

A list appeared. There were several options. Okay, I thought to myself, looking over them, so basically this is a permanent boost to something for the whole campaign. Unfortunately, I didn’t really know what I’d be needing. They were upgrades for the suit of armor. I could boost my strength, speed, durability, accuracy, my built-in radar, inventory space, or my melee weapon. Which was, at the present, apparently just a simple knife built into my wrist. There were little descriptors that came with each one, and they were all pretty obvious.

The only one that jumped out at me as the radar.

Upgrading your suit radar will grant you additional, unique opportunities for extra content, i.e. side quests, hidden caches, and possibly even unique encounters.

Huh. Well that sounded worth doing. To be honest, I wasn’t really a power gamer. I didn’t min-max everything. I was more interested in the immersive experience, the story and the world and the characters, feeling like I was there. And given that this simulation was all about that, I chose to upgrade my radar.

There were more options available in the Upgrades tab, but they were all grayed out for the moment. I would be able to apply upgrades to my weapons and armor, I remembered. I gained experience from killing hostiles, finding locations, and completing objectives. I wondered if I got any EXP for getting laid.

I doubted it, but hey, maybe.

I switched over to my mission briefing and objectives tab.

The briefing read:

Marines, we are responding to a distress call on Theta Three in Styx System.

United Marine Corps. vessel “Blood and Iron” will arrive in system at 0600 hours, and settle into orbit at 0615. You are to assemble on Deck B by 0620 in full field gear.

Situation is presently unknown.

Threat level is considered high.

Four (4) teams of twelve (12) Marine Corps. personnel will be dropping from orbit to four research sites on the planet and begin conducting investigations immediately.

For further information on Theta Three, review THIS FILE. (Mandatory).

THIS FILE was a hyperlink, so I selected it. The words DATA LOST appeared in red. I sighed. “Of course it’s lost,” I muttered, and kept reading the rest.

The objectives were vague.

1) Secure your designated research site.

2) Assess nature of the threat prompting the distress call.

3) If necessary, gather crucial research data from site.

4) If necessary & possible, extract research personnel.

I checked around for a bit longer for anything else, then shut down the interface. As I did, the voice piped up again. “Make sure to thoroughly check your surroundings. Your Heads Up Display, or HUD, will automatically highly mission-critical and useful items and equipment. Please look around the interior of your pod now.”

I did, not that there was a whole lot to see, and a little flash appeared. Two, actually. Down and to the right, there was a pistol attached to the wall. I grabbed it and held it in front of my face. Stats appeared briefly.

MP-77 PEACEKEEPER Sidearm

Magazine Capacity: 12 12mm rounds

I checked it out, and that was a wild experience. I pulled out the magazine, studied it, and slapped it back in with a quick professionalism that felt alien to me. They said they would add in certain subroutines to my brain to help the game feel more satisfying. I had to admit, that did feel satisfying. I holstered the pistol and looked at the other item, which was a small, rectangular object. I pulled it out of the slot it was sticking out of and studied it.

“Your suit has rudimentary nanotechnology embedded in it,” the voice explained quietly. “These nano-packs are ubiquitous across space, and will serve as a quick means of repair. Simply insert the pack into the back of your left hand, in the slot provided.”

Now the slot on the back of my hand appeared. I did as I was told, feeding the black rectangle into the slot, and watched it disappear. Glancing up, I saw the little bar indicating my suit’s integrity fill back up.

Okay, it was time to really do this.

I closed my eyes and focused. It was time to live this experience. I wanted to just sink into this, to be this space marine. I’d played a lot of video games in my life, so I was glad to see that it wasn’t all that hard to get immersed, get into character.

I opened my eyes. “What happened? Why I am in an escape pod?” I asked as I began hunting around for a means of opening it.

“The vessel suffered a catastrophic failure at 0618 hours, resulting in the forced evacuation of surviving personnel.”

“What caused the failure?” I asked.

“Unknown.”

“What was nature of the failure?”

“Engine failure that resulted in the engines entering a catastrophic cascade feedback loop and detonating at 0622 hours.”

“How many people made it off the ship?”

“Unknown.”

“Where am I?”

“Theta Three.”

“I mean...any more specifics than that?”

“Negative.”

I sighed. “What time is it?”

“0702 hours.”

So I’d apparently made it to an escape pod and gotten knocked out for a little while. Okay. I found the emergency release and hit it. The door popped open and I heard the rain with sudden clarity. Slowly, I stepped out. As I did, something new appeared in my field of vision. In the lower right hand corner of my HUD was a small square. A mini-map, I realized. My radar. I studied it. There was only a single thing on it: a blip pulsing gently green to the east. Studying my surroundings, I saw nothing but dark rock and rain and debris.

The fires had since gone out. My visor cut through some of it, enhancing the area, but it didn’t help. There was just more rainy gloom surrounding me. It looked like I’d come to some kind of mesa or mountainous region maybe. It was hard to tell.

“What is that on my radar?” I asked.

“Another escape pod.”

“Can I contact it? Can you tell if anyone is inside?”

“Negative, you cannot contact it, your radio is damaged, and cannot be repaired by nanotechnology. It must be seen by a technician. One life sign is detected in the pod.”

I sighed softly. Well, it was time to get this show on the road.

Pulling out my pistol, I set off of into the rainy darkness.

CHAPTER TWO

It didn’t take me very long to track down the second escape pod.

The light-amp filter on my visor highlighted it. Why hadn’t whoever was inside gotten out? Well, probably because I was supposed to get them out, that was how it worked in a game-

No, I derailed that thought, because I needed to maintain immersion.

I jogged over and looked inside. An attractive redhead, a very attractive redhead, stared back at me. I felt a pulse of lust. She said something but I could hear nothing. Something flashed a gentle blue and I looked down. There, a manual release for the pod. It must be stuck. I reached down and engaged it, stepping back. The door popped open.

I stepped up and offered my hand.

She took it, smiling gratefully. “Thanks,” she said as I helped her out of the pod. “I didn’t hear you on the radio.”

“Mine’s broken. I think it was damaged in the landing,” I replied.

“Oh, that’s not good. Although it doesn’t seem to matter much right now,” she muttered. Wow, she had a hot voice. “I can’t find anyone. And I’ve only got two hits on my radar. Which I imagine you were one of.”

“Yeah,” I replied, studying my own. I had three hits, actually, besides the pod I was standing at right now. My own pod back the way I’d come, what looked like a structure maybe a mile to the north, and...another escape pod, a quarter mile to the northeast. “There’s another pod not far from here,” I said.

“I don’t see anything,” she murmured.

“I’ve got an enhanced radar,” I replied. “Are you injured?”

“I’m fine,” she replied. “And I’ve already gotten everything from this pod that’s worth getting. What should we do?”

“Hit that pod, then get to that structure. Maybe find a way to fix my radio, then go from there.”

“I can fix it. I’m a technician,” she replied.

“Great. What’s your name?”

“Private First Class Alia,” she replied.

“I’m Sergeant Zak,” I said.

“Oh,” she murmured, “a Sergeant. I guess you have operational command.”

“I guess so. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said, and her voice was suggestive, so was the way she was looking at me. It was hard to get any kind of idea what her body was like under that suit of armor, but it at least gave the inclination of being curvy. I felt a new wave of lust roll over me, already thinking about what it was going to be like to be inside of this beautiful woman Alia, what she looked like naked, what her voice sounded like when she was moaning and yelling.

As we set off into the dark, rainy night, I did worry about some immersion breaking. We were Marines, and I was going to be fucking a lot of fellow Marine women in this scenario. Well...I’m sure the sex would outweigh any of that. I wouldn’t really be caring about ‘realism’ when I fucking Alia’s brains out.

Okay, I mean, I would, just not the realism of breaking rules or any of the crap that went with that. I was overthinking this. Part of immersion, in my experience, was letting it happen. So I let this happen, just keeping up a brisk pace.

“Do you remember anything before landing?” I asked. “What caused the crash?”

“No, nothing,” she replied. “I was knocked out for a little while. I just remember the call coming through and running for the pods. You?”

“Same.”

“This is so fucked,” she murmured.

“Yeah.”

It was so weird how natural this seemed. I felt like I was talking with a real human being and not a simulated being. Man, this was seriously high-tech shit! My focus came back as I saw the escape pod that I likely would have missed if I hadn’t had that radar enhancement. That was cool. Although...I checked the scanner again as I approached, slowing down and staring at it. A little box of text appeared near the pod on the mini-map, indicating that there were zero life signs inside. Not a great sign. I approached and peered inside.

There was no one inside, no body, but there was something inside.

“What’s this?” I murmured as I found the manual release and hit it.

The pod popped open and a pair of items became highlighted. Guns! Assault rifles, actually. A bar of text appeared:

MP-300 PALADIN Assault Rifle

Magazine Capacity: 50 9mm rounds

“Nice!” Alia said as I passed her one and took the other for myself. “Is there any ammo?”

I double-checked the pod, and found a few magazines along the bottom. I took one and passed the other to her. What were we going to face? Obviously something, given the nature of the story line. I’d gone into this about as blind as I could, with regards to actual plot. All I had was the title of the game really: Planet of the Bugs.

So, bugs of some kind, which was kind of a broad range of possibilities.

There was a thrill in not knowing. Even as I thought it, I looked around at the darkness that surrounded us. Just two people among however many miles and miles of rainy gloom. Okay, so, I’d gotten the extra thing. Did I get experience for it? I took a second to check the menu again. They’d assured me that the game froze when I did that. Consequently, I also couldn’t move. It wouldn’t really be fair if everything and everyone else was frozen, but I could still move around. There, in the Upgrades tab, I saw it.

EXP: 500/1000

LVL: 1

So, another 500 EXP and I’d level up. Okay, fair enough. I backed out and checked the map again, then lined myself up with the structure on my radar using my compass. Together, Alia and I set off once more across the landscape.

…

“So, Alia,” I said as he walked along, “what do you think is down here with us?”

“I’m not sure,” she murmured, looking around at our surroundings. “I mean, honestly, it could be anything. With all the weird shit we’ve found out here on other planets, fuck, it could be anything. We never even got a chance to get properly briefed on this place. What is it? A mining planet? A shitty colony world? An industrial planet?”

“Yeah, my data file was corrupted or something.”

“Mine too,” Alia said.

That struck me as odd. What were the chances of that? It could be that whatever malfunction had caused us to need to escape had interfered with our suits, but...well, the suit was otherwise intact. It did seem a little suspicious, but maybe the reboot took care of everything else? It was something to consider, anyway.

“Hey, there it is, I see it,” Alia said, sounding excited.

I’d been looking to my left, hunting the rain-soaked landscape for a threat. The game was touted as horror and action, and this part was definitely horror. The environment was creepy and atmospheric as hell.

I loved it, and hated it.

Actually living an atmospheric horror was a bit different than playing even the most immersive traditional video games.

Up ahead, I could see the structure. It was labeled simply as Outpost, whatever that meant, and it wasn’t very big. Just a single, low structure, really no more than a place to get in out of the rain, it seemed.

“Get ready, there might be something inside,” I said quietly.

She nodded and raised her rifle. We approached what seemed to be the main entrance to the little building, which didn’t seem to be more than four or five rooms, and I felt the anxiety start to build. The rifle felt natural in my gloved hands. We reached the front door and I opened it up. The room beyond was dark, but I couldn’t see any sign of an attack. Slowly, I walked inside, looking around. The room, which looked like just a lobby or something, was simple and straightforward. Some chairs in one corner, a desk in another, a couch in a third. There were three other doors. I pointed to the left while I went right, and Alia silently went left.

I opened the door to the right and looked into a little galley. A compact kitchen area was in the far left corner, the rest of the place taken up by a dining area. It was empty and silent. I moved through the room, checking in any possible hiding places, but it was just empty. Coming back, I saw Alia waiting for me.

“A medical bay. It’s empty,” she reported.

“Let’s keep it moving,” I replied.

The final door led to an area with two bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, and a generator room at the end of a hall. All empty and untouched. The lights even worked when I flicked them on. Weird.

“Maybe no one’s been around for awhile,” Alia said quietly.

“It looks that way.” I looked over at her as we stood in the lobby, and felt another pulse of lust, which pushed away the growing anxiety. Clearly, this was a great place to have sex. “Maybe we should take a short break here, regroup our thoughts.”

“Okay,” she replied, favoring me with a bright smile. “Is there, um...anything in particular you’d like to do?”

“Yes, there definitely is,” I replied.

“Oh? What would that be?”

“It would require taking off our suits.”

She laughed. “I like where this is going.”

“I do too, come with me, Alia,” I said.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

She followed me into one of the rooms. As I stepped into one of the bedrooms, something new popped up onto my HUD, and the game world briefly froze.

“For intimate encounters, you can easily exit your suit by using this command here,” my armor explained helpfully. In the bottom left corner was a miniature version of my suit with an arrow leading away from it. “Entering your suit is just as easy. Simply step back inside, and it will automatically reseal around you.”

I regained the ability to move, and got to a suitable location. I saw Alia doing the same thing. I hit the icon and a little window popped up asking: ARE YOU SURE? With two buttons, YES and NO. I imagined it was there just in case I accidentally activated it in combat. Maybe not the best design, but whatever, it was workable.

I hit YES and the suit cracked open right down the middle along my right side. It swung up, as if on hinges, and I stepped out. Looking down at myself, I was surprised by the change. This body I was inhabiting was probably about six two and built. Awesome. I was wearing generic military fatigues. Looking up, I saw Alia stepping out of her suit.

Holy fuck.

She was really goddamned hot. I was looking a seriously sex, busty, curvy redhead with smooth, pale skin, bright blue eyes, and a look of lust. Staring at me, she reached up and began unzipping her uniform. She pulled it down and off of herself, getting down to a pair of tight black panties and a black sports bra.

I hastily began to undress as she pulled the sports bra up and off, freeing some huge tits.

“Wow, you are so hot,” I muttered as I stripped.

“Thank you. You’re pretty hot yourself,” she replied, then pulled her panties down.

“Turn around,” I said. She complained, showing off a very toned and also very thick ass. Goddamn that was a fat ass! And some beautifully thick thighs. I had a tremendous love of curvaceous redheads. Seriously, they were my weakness. Curvy redheads had talked me into stupid shit before in my life.

She turned back around, and I could see the full glory of her thick thighs, and the smooth perfection of her pussy.

I was going to fucking destroy it.

I finished stripping down and looked down to see what I was working with. I was a little surprised. It was...kind of perfect. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t so big that it just felt stupid. I always had trouble with porn like that, real or fake. Girls getting destroyed by like twelve inch cocks just seemed absurd. This was looked like it might’ve been seven or eight inches, as I was already rock hard. It was time to put it to use.

I walked right over to Alia and kissed her.

She moaned, kissing me back with those luscious, full red lips of hers. I tilted my head, reaching behind her and grabbing her ass. Oh wow, this felt amazing. Her ass was incredible. I was definitely doing her hard in the ass before this was over. She had an ass made for fucking. As we made out, I slipped my tongue into her mouth, my cock got in between her thighs. She twisted her tongue with my and her taste flooded my mouth, it reminded me faintly of honey. Then Alia began to grind her thighs together and I groaned.

That felt good, sending little sparks of pleasure into me.

I let go of her ass with one hand and brought it up between us, getting a grip on one of her big breasts. They had to be like triple-ds. She had some big beautiful tits. We kept making out passionately until suddenly she stopped, then dropped to her knees. I watched intently as she took dick and slipped it slowly into her mouth.

“Oh wow, Alia,” I whispered, putting my hand on the back of her head. “That’s...oh shit.”

She moaned and began to bob her head. Pleasure began a slow burn into me. She stared up at me, directly into my eyes, with her stunning blue ones. It felt like I was living a porn. She sucked me off for another minute or so, then took it out of her mouth and began to massage the head in her fist with a big gob of spit.

“You want me now?” she asked.

“Yeah, right now,” I replied, desperate to be back inside of her.

“How do you want me?”

“Sit on the edge of the bed and lay on your back.”

“You got it,” she replied, and stood up.

She sat down and then laid on her back, opening her legs for me, showing me the smooth perfection of her pussy. I hastily got in between her legs, slipped the head of my cock into her, then gripped her firm, big hips and began pushing my way into her.

Alia felt like a dream, inside. A fantasy.

She moaned loudly and her back arched convulsively as I pushed my dick inside of her all the way. “Oh fuck, you’re so big!” she cried.

I started fucking her, shoving my cock into her deep and hard, completely lost in the feeling our sex. I’d had sex before, and unprotected sex, but this just felt...perfect. It felt better than anything I’d had before. Her pussy was so tight, and she was insanely wet. It felt like I was mainlining pure, uncut pleasure. I gripped her tighter and started screwing her harder and faster. She was screaming in pleasure, gasping, her huge, pale tits swaying and bouncing with the rhythm of our sex. I reached forward and grabbed them, groping them.

“Yes! Fuck me! FUCK ME!” she screamed wildly. “It feels so good!”

“Fuck, Alia...I’m gonna...I’m gonna come!” I groaned, feeling the orgasm threatening to burst out of me at any second.

“Do it,” she moaned loudly. “Do it, Zak. Come inside me. I want you to fucking come in my pussy...” she begged.

I started coming. I reached back down and gripped her hips tightly, squeezing them, as the first of my seed started spurting out of me. The orgasm felt more intense than normal and I cried out, pleasure blasting through my body as I emptied my cock into her. My whole body seemed to pulse in time with my climax and I came hard as hell into her. She was screaming in bliss as I did this and I was staring at her perfect, curvaceous, nude, pale body with my dick inside of her, convulsing as it pumped her full of my stuff.

The experience was truly amazing.

When I was finished, I suddenly knew what the woman had meant about getting the first encounter out of the way. Any lingering concerns or doubts I had about how real and good the sex was going to feel were completely gone. That had been fucking phenomenal. Honestly, it might be a problem, because now I just wanted to fuck again.

Although, I had to admit, I was really excited at the idea of going and finding another woman to have sex with. I focused on Alia again, well, to have a threesome with. Or a foursome. How far could this go?

I really wanted to find out.

I pulled out of her. “We should get on with the mission,” I said.

“Good idea, Sergeant,” she replied, and got up. She headed into the bathroom and cleaned herself up, then pulled her clothes back on with me. Within a minute, we were both back in uniform and in our armor, which resealed around me without a problem.

“What do we do now?” Alia asked, following me back out into the hallway.

“Check the outpost’s computer,” I replied. “Hopefully that’ll give us an idea of where to go from here.”

We went back out to the lobby, where I found that desk again. It looked professional, and probably served this place as a ‘command center’ inasmuch as anything did. I didn’t even know if this was a military outpost or not. The chair was too small for me to sit in, so I just pushed it out of the way and stood in front of the computer.

After booting it up, a few lines of text appeared on the screen.

UNITED MARINE CORPS. PERSONNEL DETECTED

BYPASSING SAFETY PARAMETERS

FULL SYSTEM ACCESS: GRANTED

Then the home screen popped up. I spent a little bit navigating it, then remembered something. “Alia, will you take a look at my radio?” I asked, taking off my helmet and handing it over to her.

“Yes, Sergeant,” she replied, accepting it and moving across the room.

While she did that, I tracked down the outpost’s radio and tried to activate it.

OUTPOST RADIO: ACTIVE

LOCAL TRANSMISSION TOWER: INACTIVE

EFFECTIVE RANGE: 1 MI.

“Great,” I muttered.

“I fixed it. What’s wrong?” Alia replied, coming back over.

I accepted the helmet, thanked her, and put it back on. “The local transmission tower is down. If I get you there, can you fix it?”

“Probably. I’d need to see it,” she replied.

“Okay. Now, to figure out where it is,” I muttered, calling up a map of the local area. It was helpful, at least, even if it didn’t show much. About two miles to the east was the transmission tower. It was on a hill, and there was also what they called a ‘service tunnel’ maybe a quarter mile beyond that, which led to another structure labeled as Emergency Shelter 45. Otherwise, there was nothing else in the region. I pointed this out to Alia.

“So, we’ll hit the tower, fix it, try to get in touch with someone, then make for the shelter. At the very least it should have more supplies for us, maybe even a vehicle,” I said.

“I’m ready to move out.”

“All right, let’s do it.”

CHAPTER THREE

I still didn’t know what kind of dangerous creatures were on this planet.

I kept wondering about that as Alia and I made our way through the rain. It was still pitch black. I wondered what everything would look like when morning finally came. Occasionally, lighting split the sky and lit everything up.

Another thing on my mind was Alia. And her wonderful body.

Her pussy had felt amazing. I still couldn’t get over that. I’d had sex before, but it had not been this good. That had just been fucking phenomenal! It was honestly difficult not to just take another sex break. Although admittedly it was easier out here, because it’d feel really weird to just have sex in the middle of a rainy wasteland.

Studying my HUD again, I saw that we were still several hundred meters away from the radio tower. Well, here was my immersion, trudging two miles through the rain. Although I wasn’t getting out of breath and there wasn’t any real strain to it at all. I wasn’t exactly the most athletic person, so this was a great change of pace.

After another few minutes, I glanced to my right and stopped.

“What’s that?”

“What?” Alia asked, sounding worried.

There was a strange orange glow a little ways away.

“Whoa, what is that?” she whispered.

I waited, raising my rifle, and focused on it. There had to be a zoom feature or something. “HUD, zoom,” I muttered.

There was a pause, and then the light got closer. I studied it. It looked...eerily like a face, an alien face with big, weird-shaped eyes and a small mouth. It was definitely moving, and it was definitely getting closer.

That voice in my head chimed in. “Please hold on target for scanning...” I kept staring at it, waiting, as a little bar appeared and began to fill. I could feel dread beginning to fill me the same way the bar was being filled.

What was it?

The bar finished filling, and an outline appeared around the strangely lit face, and I immediately recognized it.

“What the fuck!?” I whispered.

“What is it?” Alia asked.

“It’s...it’s a fucking ant! It’s a giant ant!” I snapped, raising my rifle.

That’s what it was! It was a goddamned giant ant! And it was coming at us at a decent pace, I saw, now that I had an idea of what I was looking at. Fuck, man, when they said Planet of the Bugs, I didn’t think they’d mean actual bugs! This thing was big! It had to be bigger than a dog, maybe four feet long.

“Like...a bug? An ant?” Alia asked uncertainly.

“Yeah! Is your HUD working?” I asked.

“It’s still calibrating,” she muttered, and then she gasped softly. “Fuck, I see it too.” Suddenly, another orange face appeared, and another, and another, all behind the ant. More ants, for some reason their eyes and mouths were glowing with a wicked inner light. Well, it sure as hell made them easy to spot in the darkness.

“Get ready,” I said, shouldering my rifle. “We’re going to have to fight them.”

“I can do it,” Alia replied, sounding grim.

I felt my heart thumping in my chest. First combat. Time to see exactly how this handled. By the time they reached us, there were half a dozen of them. All were lit up by my HUD, which had since pulled back, and when they were within optimum firing range, as calculated by the HUD, I aimed and fired.

A barrage of bullets tore out of my rifle and smacked right into the glowing orange face of the lead ant. I heard a high-pitched shriek go up as its head was eviscerated by the bullets, spraying the area, and the other ants, with gore. They began coming at us faster. I squeezed the trigger, feeling a bit of panic as I saw just a goddamned wall of giant bugs coming at me, and hosed them down. They seemed relatively weak, and between me and Alia, we murdered every last one of them before they reached us. And then it was silent, save for the rain.

“Holy shit,” I whispered finally.

Something was blinking in my peripheral. The gun in my hands I realized. I studied and saw that it was out of ammo. Slowly, I hit the eject button and reloaded, at least grateful to see how smooth that felt, how natural it was, as if I’d done it a thousand times before. Last magazine. As I replayed what had just happened in my head, I realized something horrifying: those ants that had been ‘appearing’, they hadn’t just been spawning in or something, they’d been climbing up out of the ground. I swallowed and looked all around me.

There was nothing obviously visible, but I no longer felt safe out here.

“Come on, Alia, we need to hurry,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she replied, and followed me as I began to jog towards the radio tower.

…

Nothing else happened on the walk to the transmitter, though that didn’t stop the tension.

Oddly, the more nervous I got about an attack, the more my mind kept sidestepping back over to thinking about fucking Alia again. It was actually getting really goddamned distracting. Especially because I kept looking over at her and she would smile at me, that inviting smile. That smile that invited me to bend her over and stick my cock in her. I was glad to see that it didn’t really matter to me, apparently, that she was fake, all this was fake.

I wanted her all the same.

Maybe I wanted her more, because she was perfect.

The transmission tower appeared out of the rainy gloom eventually, an inert metal tower maybe thirty meters up a path that wound around the side of a hill. We started trudging up the hill, keeping up a good pace, and reached it before too long. Alia took point, and I couldn’t stop looking at her ass. Although most of her armor was about the same as mine, her fat ass was accentuated by that armor. It looked so goddamned good.

When we reached the top, I was deeply grateful to see that there was a little structure next to the tower.

“Let’s check out that building,” I said.

She agreed and we headed over to it. I opened the door and slipped in, weapon first. There wasn’t much to the room. It looked like a little support shed meant to house someone in the event of an emergency. There was a tiny space for food prep, a bed in one corner, a work area with tools and parts that would probably be useful for Alia, and the only door led to a very small bathroom.

“Alia,” I said after we were both inside and I’d closed the door.

“Yes, Zak?” she replied, again favoring me with that beautiful smile.

“I...need you again,” I said.

“Then you can have me,” she replied. “You can have me however you want.”

Oh fuck did I love hearing that. We got out of our suits quickly and stripped of our uniforms once more. Just a quick fuck and then back to it, just to take my mind off of it. I began kissing her again, touching her, running my hands over her beautiful body, her big tits and her thick ass, kissing her luscious red lips.

And her whole body responded to my touch.

“On the bed,” I said after a minute, “get on your hands and knees.”

“Yes sir,” she replied lustily, her voice sultry and slutty.

God, she was so fucking beautiful. She got onto the bed on her hands and knees, showing me her thick, pale, perfectly proportioned ass. I got behind her on my knees, almost trembling with anticipation all over again. I could see the perfect pink slit of her bald pussy, glistening, ready to be fucked and pounded into oblivion.

I put my cock inside of her.

She moaned so loud, throwing her head back, red hair flying, as I put it all the way in. “Oh fuck! You’re so big!” she moaned.

“Oh my fuck, Alia,” I groaned, grabbing her hips and started to just pound that pussy. The sound of our skin slapping together filled the small building, and the bed squeaked as we fucked. I grunted, almost growling as I drove my cock into her again and again, burying my entire length into her. The pleasure was just amazing, burning and sizzling into me, lighting me up and shoving me violently towards an orgasm.

This was going to be a quickie, and that was fine by me.

I just wanted to bang it out with her, blow my load, get back to work. I’d feel a little more guilty about that, but they assured me that the ladies would satisfied regardless of my ‘performance’. I tried not to take it personally, because I’m sure they said that to everyone who ran through a simulation. As it was, I lasted another sixty seconds and started coming hard into her. She moaned and I felt her begin to come along with me, so that was nice.

I groaned, hunching forward, hands going up her back and then around to her big tits, grabbing and squeezing them as I emptied myself into her. Fuck, even my orgasms felt better in here. I came so much in her pussy, the pleasure washing through me like waves on a shore, my whole body trembling and shuddering as we orgasmed together.

When I was finished, I pulled out of her and got up.

One nice bonus of this world: no cleanup, apparently. Although I wondered what would happen if I pulled out and came all over Alia’s face.

Well, that was something I’d definitely want to try.

I pulled back on my uniform and got back into my armor, as did Alia. Now that I’d orgasmed inside of a beautiful woman, I felt a hell of a lot better, clearer. More focused. Once we were suited up and back outside, we moved over to the transmission tower. It was an impressive device, a good forty or fifty feet of solid steel rising into the dark skies. Alia moved over to one of the support struts and opened up a panel.

“I need a minute to run a diagnostic,” she said.

I let her work and looked around, wondering if more bugs were showing up. So was it just ants? Or were there more? Certainly there were more. Fuck, man, how many nightmares could come out of this? Bugs creeped me out. Spiders. Scorpions. Wasps. And I’m absolutely positive they would have dug up other, more obscure creepy-crawlies that I didn’t even know about. Even ants, which normally didn’t bother me at all, had freaked me out, seeing them at that size. They’d been easy enough to dispatch, but…

Weren’t bugs known for their numbers? Their swarms?

This could get bad.

But I guess that was part of the fun.

“Okay, I have something. I’m pretty sure I can fix it. I’ll need a few minutes,” she said.

“I’ll be here,” I replied.

I patrolled around a bit, using my HUD’s vision-enhancement to look out over the area now that we were at a good elevation. But there just wasn’t a lot to see. Miles and miles of rainy wasteland. I saw our pods, and the little outpost we’d visited, and the mountain that the service tunnel was built into farther on, but nothing else. No more bugs, at least.

Finally, Alia finished up.

“Okay, we should be able to tap into the network now,” she said.

I checked my radio and saw that it was indeed hooked into the local network, giving it a broader range. I cleared my throat. “This is Sergeant Zak Thompson to anyone in the area, can anyone read me? Over?”

A response came a few seconds later. “Sergeant Thompson! Yes! This is PFC Fara!” The woman sounded very anxious.

“Where are you, Fara?”

“I’m at, uh...Emergency Shelter Forty Five. Have you seen the bugs? The giant ants?!”

“Yes, we killed some. Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m safe. I had to fight some, but I made it to safety. All I’ve got is my pistol...how many are with you?”

“Just one, a technician. Listen, we aren’t too far away from that Emergency Shelter. I want you to stay put and wait for us, okay?”

“O-okay, I’ll be here. Please hurry.”

“Are you in danger?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so, but...that could change.”

“Understood. I’ll be there. Out.”

I looked at Alia, who was watching me from her position by the strut. “Are you ready to move out?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, though she didn’t look happy.

Had I done something to piss her off? Was that part of the game? It had to be, since this all was the game. By definition anything happening in it was part of it. So what did that mean? I hadn’t really made a decision, other than to go to where we were already planning on going. I almost asked, but held my tongue.

I was a little curious to see how it played out naturally.

“All right,” I said, “let’s go, Alia.”

We started walking back down the hill.

CHAPTER FOUR

We’d hardly made it more than a few meters down the hill before I realized something was gently pulsing on my HUD. I stopped and checked it, opening up the menu. The UPGRADES menu was pulsing, so I hit it.

Hey! I’d leveled up and now had two upgrade points to assign.

Shit, I was always so bad at stuff like this. Well, the game was paused, so I took the time to look over the list. I could upgrade my suit, or I could upgrade the two weapons at my disposal. Well, suit seemed like a smarter choice right now, probably. Or maybe not? Shit. I read over the list of suit upgrades.

• Speed: 0/4

• Strength: 0/4

• Inventory: 0/5

• Accuracy: 0/3

• Durability: 0/4

• Radar: 0/2

• Melee Weapon: 0/3

Well, I always did find myself pining for more inventory space in games, so I put a point in that and, after another moment’s consideration, finally went with speed. The list updated to reflect this, and asked me if I was sure. I thought about it for a moment, then hit YES and closed out of the menu. As I came back to the world and picked back up my pace, I realized that I felt faster. Not exactly a lot, but just enough to be noticeable.

Holy crap, that was so nuts how they could work stuff like that in.

I led Alia back down to the bottom of the path and then we resumed our journey towards the service tunnel. As we walked through the dark, I wondered about the objectives. It’d be a little ways off, I guess. This would all be sort of a prologue as we gathered together again. Where had these bugs come from? Were they native to the planet? That seemed unlikely. The idea of giant versions of Earth ants appearing naturally on another world seemed astronomically unlikely. I guess the only other option was that they were made here.

On accident? On purpose?

So many questions, so many possibilities.

I glanced at my rifle. So little ammo. Just one magazine left and no other ammo in sight. Hopefully that would change soon, although I had to remember that I wouldn’t even have a rifle at this point if I hadn’t found that hidden escape pod. Surely, something would be waiting for us in the tunnel. Although that thought had an ominous ring to it as soon as I finished thinking it. Yes, I’m sure something was waiting for us in that tunnel.

Before long, we reached the base of mountain, which was really more just a huge upthrust of land shooting into the black skies. The tunnel had an intentional look to it, and I imagined it was meant to serve as a simple means of travel between the two outposts. I could envision simple vehicles racing along through the tunnel ahead of us. Right now it was dead and dark, no power on at all. Even with my HUD enhancements I couldn’t see all that far into it. But as we set off and made our way down the roughly square shaped rock passageway, something soon came into sight. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

Then I got the full view of it and stopped in my tracks.

“Crap,” I muttered.

“That can’t be good,” Alia said quietly.

A vehicle was flipped over completely, windows bashed out, tires ripped off, with dents all over it. There was blood on the ground around the windows, blood and glass shards and shell casings, but no bodies. Yeah, definitely not good.

“Let’s check it,” I whispered.

We moved forward, weapons at ready. The thing looked pretty ripped up, and I wondered what could’ve done this. I guess anything. The ants were big enough, and if there were enough of them they sure as hell could’ve done some damage. I got down and looked in the interior, but there was nothing but more blood there, the seats ripped up. Shuddering as I imagined what must’ve happened, I got back up and made a circle of the vehicle’s exterior. Nothing of use...but there was a blood trail, and it led further up the tunnel, off to the left.

Where I could just make out an offshoot passageway.

“Side mission,” I muttered.

“What?” Alia asked.

“I think we should check down that tunnel,” I replied, pointing at it. “There could be survivors...or at least supplies.”

“I guess so. I’ll follow your lead.”

I nodded and set off. We made for the tunnel, which was far narrower, maybe four feet across, and deep. There were basic work lights strung up along the ceiling, but they were dead. Again, my HUD only pushed back the darkness so much. The blood trail continued on into the gloom. I sighed and set off after checking my radar and seeing nothing. The tension kept rising as we made our way down the tunnel. God, I could hear my boots squelching in the blood. Really not something I wanted to hear. I could feel my heart in my chest.

The tunnel felt claustrophobic and the walls seemed to be pressing in.

I heard something after about ten seconds and froze. Something shifting.

“What?” Alia whispered.

“I heard something,” I replied. We waited, and it happened again a few seconds later.

“Fuck, what is it?”

“I don’t know...come on.”

We kept going. After another few seconds, the tunnel suddenly opened up. It ended in a decent sized room. I could see a few stacks of crates, and several scattered across the floor, like something big had crashed into one of the stacks and scattered it everywhere. Some of the crates had even busted open and several tools now lay across the rocky ground. The blood trail split and went off in several different directions, where they all terminated suddenly at seemingly random points. Although the ground around those areas looked disturbed.

I saw some rifles scattered around, and several magazines of ammunition for both my rifle and my pistol. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.

“Watch my back,” I whispered, and set off towards the nearest one.

“Affirmative,” Alia replied tightly.

I moved slowly forward, my footsteps sounding way too loud, listening and watching for the slightest hint that this was a trap. Because it felt like one. I got right up to the rifle and began to lean down to pick it up.

That’s when the metaphorical jaws of the trap snapped shut.

All around me, the ground began to shake angrily, and I shouted in surprise and irritation. A half-dozen ants burst up out of the dirt and rock, spraying the stuff everywhere.

“Fuck!” I snapped, hosing down the nearest thing with a good barrage of lead. It let out a high-pitched scream as it was cut down, and I immediately turned the chattering gun on the next thing, mowed it down, and repeated the process. I could hear Alia opening up as well. As I turned to blow away the fourth ant, I heard Alia shout a warning and suddenly the thing was on me. I was thrown off my feet and landed with a hard grunt on my back.

“Oh fuck!” I screamed in pure shock and fear as I saw its snapping mandibles clacking together against my faceplate. I suddenly knew what to do and punched up into it while making a fist. I heard a little snick as the blade in my wrist came out and the thing shrieked and jerked. I did it again, and again, and again, gutting it with my wrist-blade, and finally it was weak enough that I could roll and throw it off of me.

Alia appeared over me.

“That was close,” she said, offering me a hand.

I took it and let her pull me up, then surveyed the area. Two more bugs had shown up during the fight and Alia had put them down too. Eight giant ant carcasses were bleeding all over everything now. Definitely a close call, but hey, we’d come out on top.

“Let’s gather up this supplies and get the hell out of here,” I replied.

“Good idea.”

I grabbed a second rifle and made sure it was loaded, then reloaded my own rifle out of the half-dozen magazines I managed to get, then pocketed the rest, including the four pistol magazines I had left after giving half to Alia. Once that was done, we quickly got back out into the main tunnel and started making rapid progress down it.

I wanted out of here.

“Alia...uh, how’d you sign up?” I asked. That was another thing they’d encouraged me to do once they realized I was an immersive player versus a power player: get to know my squadmates.

“Kind of family pressure,” she replied.

“How’s that?”

“Mom and dad were Marines. Both sets of grandparents were Marines. My big brother was. It was kind of expected that I’d sign up. In a way, I guess I never knew anything different. I’d been in the Marine lifestyle since I was born, so signing up just seemed natural.”

“Has it worked out that way? Are you happy?”

“Yeah, for the most part. It was two years ago now. I think they were mad that I didn’t sign up right away. But, I mean, I had other things I wanted to do first. I took a two-year course in tech training and got a job when I was twenty on this little lunar colony way out in the middle of nowhere. Partied a lot. That was fun. I kind of bounced around for awhile until I finally figured it was time to make the family proud. So I signed up at twenty three, burned through the tech courses, and here I am. Never thought I’d be fighting giant fucking ants though.”

“I know what you mean,” I muttered.

My radar pinged suddenly and I saw another one of those special signatures. It was somewhere up ahead, to the right. We kept walking until I tracked the source to a very firmly closed metal door set into the right wall.

“Can we get this open?” I asked.

“Maybe...why?” Alia replied, walking over to it and studying it.

“There’s something on my radar back there, might be important.”

“Okay, give me a minute.”

She studied the door frame and I kept watch, making sure nothing else was going to sneak up on us. As I looked around, I saw a wire coming from the door, going up, affixed to the wall, then the ceiling. I followed it with my eyes across the tunnel, farther down the left wall, and into another one of those side passageways.

Great.

“I can’t open it, I’m sorry. It needs power,” Alia said.

“I think I know where we can get it,” I replied, and pointed out the power cable.

“Oh. Good eye,” she said, smiling at me. She looked really alluring and beautiful inside her helmet. No, I couldn’t get distracted again, not this soon. Man, how often did they expect me to have sex in here?

Well, I guess it depended on how horny I was.

I wondered exactly what the parameters of sex were. I mean, could I literally just fuck right here? Just hop out of my suit in this dark tunnel, bend Alia over, and fuck her against the wall? Would the game actually accommodate that? Well, I wasn’t willing to go that far at least. I was kind of horny, but at this point I was more interested. What was behind this door? I doubt it was anything earth-shattering, but it was probably worth having.

We moved across the tunnel, following the wire. I stood at the entrance of another tunnel, frowning, wondering what waited for us this time. Could be more bugs, could be nothing. Unfortunately, the only way to find out for sure was to go. So I raised my gun and set off. Alia had my back. I could hear her moving slowly but surely down the tunnel behind me. It was comforting. The tunnel was again claustrophobic, dead lights lining the rough rock ceiling, the thick black cabling running like a snake along the upper part of the left wall. I didn’t hear anything in the tunnel with us. I pushed on.

Finally, we ran out of tunnel and came into another room, though this one was smaller. Just a simple square room with a few empty tables, a shelf with little on it, and a basic power generator. It sparked in the darkness.

“Can you fix that?” I asked after we cleared the area.

“Yes,” Alia replied, and slung her rifle as she crossed the room. I again found my eyes drawn to her ass. It was harder to focus, now that I knew what that ass looked like bare. All that thickness, that smooth, pale skin.

I really wanted to fuck her in the ass.

And the knowledge that I could at pretty much any moment was even more distracting. I swallowed and watched her back more in the military sense than the literal sense, looking back down the tunnel we’d come through. I kept expecting something to happen, but nothing did. Alia fixed the generator without a problem in about two minutes. It hummed to life and the lights turned on to their lowest setting.

“It doesn’t have much power left,” she murmured.

“We should hurry then,” I replied.

We jogged back down the passageway, across the main tunnel, to the door. Alia got it open in about fifteen seconds and propped it. Another short tunnel was revealed. I began making my way down it and not but three steps in did the power die once more. Well, it really was a time-sensitive issue. Glad I’d gotten back here in time.

This tunnel led to another simple room that had a few goodies in it: four more magazines for the assault rifles and a pair of nano-packs for our suits, all of which I split with Alia. Well, not a great find, but at least worth the time and effort. We headed back out into the main tunnel and resumed our journey, making for the other end.

And the Emergency Shelter.

And Fara.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was still raining when we emerged from the tunnel.

Still dark, too. But I could see the structure, Emergency Shelter 45, apparently. And the lights were on. That was a very comforting thing to see in all this wasteland I now found myself in. I looked over my shoulder at Alia and saw again that she looked a little unhappy.

“You doing okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she replied a little too quickly.

“Come on, something’s bugging you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

I frowned, looking ahead again, as we closed in on the base, and thought about it. What could this be? I don’t remember them saying characters came with their own problems, although I’m sure there were dozens of things they didn’t bring up because most of the fun of this type of thing was discovering it for yourself.

That was the problem though: I wasn’t any good at this kind of thing.

You could make it so that someone, in a video game, was fast and fit and strong and good at shooting and knew how to reload. That was all mechanical. You could not, however, program better social skills into my brain.

At least, not yet.

Again, I decided to let it wait and see if it went anywhere. It was really important, she could tell me. Hopefully. As we came within the final distance, I turned on my radio. “Fara, this is Zak again, do you hear me?”

“Yes! I hear you. Are you close?” Her response was almost instantaneous.

“We’re right outside the base, can you open the front door?”

“Yes! I can.”

The base didn’t look very large. Honestly, it wasn’t even bigger than that outpost we’d come from on the other side of the tunnel. As I came within a few meters of the base, the door opened up and another armored figure appeared. Fara. She stepped back to let us in and Alia closed and locked the door behind us.

I looked around. Man, the emergency shelter was small. There seemed to be one main room and only a single other door, which led to a bathroom. The room looked like a tiny studio apartment. One corner had a bed, one corner had a little kitchenette area, one corner looked like it was a little emergency infirmary, and the final corner had some technical stuff set up in it.

“You made it,” Fara said, sounding deeply relieved.

I studied the face inside the helmet. She was extremely pretty, with short, bright blonde hair, gently tanned skin, and amazing green eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m okay. Nothing happened while I was waiting. I’ve just been searching the building, seeing what kind of supplies I could dig up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they were very well stocked, I guess. Just managed to find a little bit of medical supplies, some food, no ammo, though. All I have is my pistol.”

“Lucky for you, I have a spare,” I said, passing her the rifle and three magazines of ammo.

“Oh wow, thank you,” she murmured, accepting it.

I walked over to the corner that had the controls and turned on the computer. Taking a moment to sort through what was available, which wasn’t much, I found the security status of the building itself. It was locked down and secure. I also finally managed to locate what the local time was. It was around three in the morning, and sunrise was another five or six hours off.

“Okay, ladies, I think we should call it night,” I said, turning around and looking at the two of them, as well as the bed in the corner. It was a queen size. A little out of place, considering the context of the base, but who cared?!

Sex.

I was definitely going to have sex before sleeping. How would sleeping work? Would it just work? Well, I guess I’d find out. Right now though, I was going to fuck the hell out of Fara, because she was seriously hot.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Fara said, sounding relieved.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Alia murmured.

“Perfect! So, Fara...how about we have sex?” I asked.

She smiled shyly at me. “I would really like that.”

Alia sighed. I looked at her and saw her glaring at Fara and oh shit! Okay, I suddenly knew what was going on. This is why I didn’t really do much socializing in real life.

“You’re jealous,” I said.

Her eyes shot open a lot wider and she began to blush fiercely. “I am not,” she growled.

“You’re jealous!” I repeated, unable to keep from finding this at least a little amusing. I guess this would be a feature.

Fara looked anxious again and Alia turned around, crossing her arms. Well, now I felt bad. I couldn’t have this going on. I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. This felt weird to do in power armor, but whatever.

“I’m sorry, Alia,” I said. “You don’t have to be jealous, okay?”

“You’re just going to sleep with her from now on,” she muttered.

“Come on, no I’m not.” I had to admit, I didn’t know what the fuck to say. This felt really weird, given we’d known each other for like two hours and had had sex twice. After a moment, she huffed in annoyance and turned around.

“You promise you aren’t going to ignore me?” she asked.

“I promise,” I replied.

“If it helps...you’re really pretty,” Fara murmured.

Alia looked at her. “Not as pretty as you. Your eyes are amazing.”

“Let’s get out of our suits. I’ll have sex with Fara, then we can all have sex together, okay?” I suggested.

“Okay,” Alia said, calming down.

I opened up my suit and stepped up. Looking at Alia again, I’d already forgotten how goddamned good she looked in that uniform. It accentuated every curve, and she was a curvy girl. And that red fucking hair, man…

Damn!

Fara, on the other hand, was also really fucking hot. She looked young, maybe early to mid twenties, and she had what I’d expect an average build for a female soldier to be. Maybe five six or five seven, decently fit, slim but in good shape with a bit of thickness to her thighs.

“Take that off,” I said, looking at her.

“Yes, sir,” she murmured submissively, and began to take her clothes off. She looked at Alia. “You have an amazing body,” she said.

“Thanks,” Alia replied, now blushing a little. I began taking my clothes off. Fara got out of her shirt, then took off her bra, freeing her breasts. “Oh wow, you have amazing tits.”

She did. Nice, firm c-cups with hot pink nipples. And it wasn’t an all-over tan, nice. I have no idea why, genuinely, but for some reason, seeing a tan woman with her tits and crotch pale was just really, really hot. I had guesses for why I found some things hot, but I honestly had absolutely no idea why I found that hot.

It looked good on Fara though.

I stepped up to her and put my arms around her, grabbing her ass. She had a really nice, tight, toned ass. I glanced over at Alia. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah...I’ll be fine,” she murmured, sitting down. “Honestly, watching you and Fara fuck would be really hot...” she admitted.

I laughed. “Good. Don’t worry, you’ll be involved soon enough.”

“Okay.”

Well, that had gone smoothly enough. And I was pretty excited to get both of them in bed. But first, Fara. I wanted her alone, just the two of us. And she looked pretty eager. I kissed her and she kissed me back immediately, losing some of her shyness as we began to make out. Her lips were wonderfully full and hot, and she tasted faintly of sugar. She had a beautifully fit body that felt fantastic to touch and grope, her frame very toned and smooth. I groped her breasts as she slipped her tongue eagerly into my mouth.

We twisted our tongues together, making out passionately, her nipples pressing into my palms as I squeezed her firm tits. I couldn’t get enough of her! There was a tremendous satisfaction to fooling around with a busty, voluptuous woman like Alia, with all her wonderfully soft curves. But there was something equally satisfying about groping and touching a firm-bodied, fit goddess like Fara. I stopped kissing her suddenly, then pushed her back onto the bed.

“Oh my!” she cried, then laughed as she fell onto her back.

“Spread your legs,” I said as I got onto the bed.

“Yes, sir,” she replied enthusiastically, opening her long, tan, fit legs for me.

She looked absurdly, almost achingly erotic laying there, like a pin-up poster. I settled in between her firm thighs and laid my cock at the entrance of her pussy, which was smooth and glistening and ready for fucking.

I slipped into her.

She moaned loudly and I did as well as that first burst of pleasure hit me. It was incredible, sheathing my rigid dick in all that tight, hot, wet perfection. It felt like pure, uncut pleasure in there, and pulling back out, then pushing back in sent not just waves but shockwaves of ecstasy into me. Fara moaned so loudly, her voice filling up the emergency shelter, briefly drowning out the sound of the rain hitting the outside.

“Oh yes! Fuck me, Sergeant!” she cried.

“Oh my fuck, Fara,” I groaned as I began sliding rapidly in and out of her sweet, tight vagina, really starting to fucking pound her, “you feel so fucking good!”

“Oh fuck! Give it to me! FUCK ME!” she shrieked in response, putting her legs up in the air.

I pounded her fucking brains out, thrusting hard and deep into her, pushing my entire cock inside of her tight pussy again and again, making her scream at the top of her lungs. I could feel her moving against me, especially when she grabbed me and pulled me against her, kissing me fiercely and pushing up with her firm hips, forcing me deeper into her. We made out passionately for a minute or so before I pushed myself up, almost needing to see her.

I looked down and saw her amazing body as I screwed her.

Her beautiful face, staring up at me, flushed and vibrant, awash in expressions of almost feral desire and raw pleasure.

Her amazing tits, bouncing beautiful in time with my thrusting.

Further down her toned, fit body. Her beautifully carved hips and firm thighs and then her pussy, getting fucked hard as hell, my cock disappearing into over and over again as I pounded her. And listening to her scream and shriek and pant and moan in furious, desperate pleasure. This was an absolutely phenomenal sexual experience.

“Come in me!” she moaned. “Please come in my pussy!” she begged.

She wrapped her legs around my midsection and stared up at me, her expression changing to intense submissive need.

I groaned something inarticulately and then I lost control.

All of this was too much, and it felt too fucking good, and I started busting a huge nut inside of her pussy. She moaned loudly with me, holding me tightly with her legs, as my dick started jerking violently inside of her.

“Oh yesssss...” she groaned. “Oh fuck, there’s so much...”

“Fuck! Fara! Oh my fucking...yes! Fuck that’s so good!” I moaned incoherently.

The pleasure was burning me alive, blasting through him as I emptied my cock into her, coming huge spurts of my stuff inside of her bare pussy. If she wasn’t on birth control, I’d be getting her pregnant, I thought.

And that just made me come harder.

It was wonderful and blinding and powerful.

When I was finished, at some point, (I’d totally lost track of time), I pulled out of her and rolled onto my side, looking at her and at Alia, who was watching us hungrily. She was wearing only her bra and panties now. I looked down at Fara’s pussy, expecting to see a mess, but there wasn’t. I wonder if that was a feature...or a lack of a feature. I guess it could go either way. Certainly it made it easier. I knew a lot of people had this weird fixation on like watching the stuff come out, but I really didn’t get that at all.

Honestly, it was just gross.

So hey, this worked out for me. I could go again right away. Plus, my cock wasn’t even super sensitive like it was half the time after busting a load. Honestly, I felt like I could get right back to see again without much of a break. So bonus points there.

In fact…

“Alia, strip and get over here.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, immediately getting to her feet and peeling off her sports bra, freeing her breasts. Goddamn that girl had some big tits, and they looked fucking awesome dropping down like that as her bra came off.

“Oh my God, Alia,” Fara said, “your boobs are amazing. Holy shit.”

“Thanks,” she murmured shyly as she pulled her panties off.

“Show her your ass,” I said. “It’s so thick.”

She blushed but finished getting her panties off and turned around.

“Oh wow, it’s amazing. I wish my ass was fatter, honestly,” Fara murmured.

“I think yours is pretty great,” I said. Fara had rolled onto her side now, facing away from me, and I ran a hand over her smooth, toned ass. “But yeah, fuck, Alia’s fat ass is just amazing. Now get over here, I’m still horny.”

Alia turned around and hurried over.

There was just enough room in bed for all of us. As soon as she was in bed, I started making out with Alia, groping her huge, pale tits. Oh how amazing they felt in my grasp. We kissed for awhile, and then she broke it, crying out as Fara began to pleasure her. I glanced down and saw that our latest addition to the team of survivors was sucking on one of Alia’s perfect pink nipples, and also fingering her, rubbing her clit gently.

I watched and before long, the two women began to make out intensely, twisting their tongues together. I started sucking on Alia’s other breast. We kept pleasuring her for another few moments, then I began to shift.

“Look out, Fara,” I said.

“Okay,” she murmured, making room for me as I got on top of Alia.

She spread her legs out wider for me and I got in between her big thighs, then slipped inside of her. She moaned loudly as I penetrated her.

“Still jealous?” I asked as I started fucking her.

“No! Ah! Oh fuck!” she cried, taking my dick. “I’m-ah!-I’m not!”

“Good girl,” I said, and started drilling her faster.

She moaned loudly, panting, then let out another cry as Fara resumed sucking on one of her breasts. Now that was a fantastic sight: Alia below me on her back with her legs spread, Fara licking and sucking on her nipple, both of them nude and amazingly beautiful. I pounded the living fuck out of Alia, making her scream in wild pleasure, wanting to help her not be jealous. I actually felt bad about that, even if there was a kind of dark thrill from it. I screwed her until I pulled out, deciding it was time to switch.

“Alia, I want you on your hands and knees, eating Fara’s pussy,” I said.

Both women moved to comply, Fara settling into place at the head of the bed with her legs spread, Alia getting onto her hands and knees, showing me her glistening pink pussy and her fat ass, and me getting behind her. I watched as my redheaded lover lowered her head, burying her face in Fara’s crotch, and began to lick her pussy. Fara moaned loudly, her face twisting in pleasure, as Alia went to work.

Then I got behind Alia and I went back to work.

I slipped into her slick, amazingly tight pussy, grabbed those big hips of hers, and started really hammering her from behind. Alia screamed loudly, her voice muffled, as she took my dick like a whore, pushing her ass against me. I slapped it hard and she moaned louder. I did it again, slamming her pussy, and she began to orgasm.

“Oh fuck...” I groaned, feeling her vaginal muscles begin to clench and spasm around my cock.

I screwed her orgasming pussy until she was finished, watching her eat Fara’s pussy out, and then looked down at her thick ass. Watching my cock disappear inside of her again and again, I suddenly decided it was time to fuck her in the ass. I’d been wanting to do it ever since I’d seen her, so why not do it now?

I pulled out of her pussy, wondered briefly about whether or not I’d need lube, then started trying to work it up her ass.

She cried out, moaning loudly.

Well, apparently not.

I was slipping into her insanely tight ass without any trouble. Holy fucking shit, her ass was tight! I groaned, grabbing it, starting to fuck it harder immediately, and she continued screaming and moaning in mad, lusty pleasure.

“Oh yes! Alia! I’m coming!” Fara screamed, grabbing her head and forcing her face deeper into her crotch.

This was too much. This ass just felt too fucking good, and it looked so incredibly, especially with my dick going up it over and over again. And watching Fara come while Alia ate her out just...fuck! I started coming again, shooting a load up Alia’s fat ass, feeling her push against me, listening to both women scream and cry out in bliss.

It was like heaven. Just pure paradise.

I came for what felt like a long time in Alia’s ass, hunched over her, my dick kicking hard inside the very tight space, draining my nuts into her. When I was finished, I pulled out and sat down heavily. That had been one hell of a threesome.

“Okay, girls...time for sleep,” I murmured.

“All right, I’m really tired,” Alia replied as she sat up, and Fara nodded.

We turned out the lights and got situated beneath the blankets. As we did, the game suddenly froze and a small screen appeared in my field of vision.

HOW LONG WOULD YOU LIKE TO SLEEP FOR?

There were a string of numbers floating in holographic squares. I focused on the number six for a few seconds, and then the pop-up disappeared. Weird without my helmet on, but hey, there had to be a few concessions.

I fell asleep with the beautiful women, listening to the rainfall.

CHAPTER SIX

When I woke up, it was instantaneous.

And that was really nice. Normally it took me forever to wake up, and even then I felt like shit for the first hour or two. But right now I felt awake and focused. It was still raining, I could tell that, but there was a lot more light in the room now. It was morning. As I shifted around, stretching, the women came awake beside me.

Alia was on my left, Fara on my right.

One thing that hadn’t changed: I was still goddamned horny when I woke up. And I vaguely remembered having sex dreams.

“Alia,” I said.

“Yes?” she replied, rolling over, looking at me with those stunning eyes.

“Ride me.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, and she mounted me easily.

I groaned as she took my cock into her vagina, slipping smoothly down my length, and then she began to ride me.

“Oh fuck, that’s so good,” I whispered, staring up at her huge tits as they bounced with her. She looked happy and horny as she fucked my dick.

I let her ride for about a minute before I looked at Fara. “Your turn,” I said.

“I wasn’t done,” Alia complained.

“Get off,” I said. “It’s her turn. I’ll let you back on in a minute.”

“Okay,” she replied, and got off.

Fara happily bounded up on top of me and took up the task of pleasuring me sexually. She moaned as she began to fuck herself with my cock, bouncing on it furiously, grunting as she worked. Goddamn, she looked good, with her short blonde hair and smooth tan skin and fantastically fit body. The hot pleasure of her pussy was bringing me closer and closer to another orgasm, although I wanted one more go at Alia before then.

I let Fara ride me for another half a minute before having her get off.

Although as soon as Alia got back on top of me and started riding at me, I knew I was going to bust pretty soon. If I had to choose, like I had to, I guess I’d go with Alia for being my favorite. Which honestly made sense, given that I’d kind of designed her off of all my favorite things. I loved redheads. I loved curvy chicks. I tended towards liking pale skin. And she was just all of my favorite things rolled up into one stunningly sexy chick.

I groaned loudly, grabbing her big hips, and started orgasming inside of her about a minute after she resumed fucking my dick.

I couldn’t help but notice that Fara looked a little put out.

Alia kept riding my dick as I came inside of her, and halfway through the climax I reached up and grabbed her big tits, squeezing and groping them until I was finished coming, then I relaxed. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I only got to go once,” Fara complained quietly.

“Don’t worry,” I said, reaching over and running a hand up and down one smooth, tan thigh, “you get to go next.”

“Fair enough,” she murmured.

Alia got off of me and I got up out of bed. I looked around, wondering what to do first. My eyes fell on the door that led to the bathroom. “Come on girls, let’s shower,” I said, and they both got up and followed me into the bathroom.

Like the bed, the shower stall was bigger than you’d think. But I wasn’t complaining. I turned on the water to a hot temperature and got in with my beautiful squadmates. Here was another great-feeling thing in this world: showers. I always liked showers over baths, but in here the hot water falling down across me just felt great.

And it certainly helped that there were two very beautiful, wet, naked women in here with me. I found a bar of soap, lathered it up, and started running it over Alia’s buxom body. She let out satisfied sounds of appreciation as I washed her, running mans over her thick ass and big, wonder tits several times. Before long, I switched over Fara, because I didn’t want her feeling left out again. She was so great to touch, her body feeling so good and natural to run my hands over. I made sure to wash both of them, and when I was finished, they returned the favor.

Both women grabbed clothes and soap and began running their hands over my body. Their touch was amazing and very comforting and soothing. They both looked so loving, halfway between desire and submission. This kept up for several minutes, but eventually I began to feel that itch. I wanted to know what happened next. Even here, living it out, I felt the need to learn the next piece of the puzzle, unravel the next clue, figure out where these bugs had come from and what the overall shape the plot was going to take.

And I wondered what else was out there.

We finished washing up, got out, and dried off. Once that was done, we pulled back on our uniforms and moved over to the kitchen area. As I approached it, feeling faintly hungry, the game world again paused and I froze up.

The voice, now not coming from my suit’s helmet, instead seemed to come from the air around me. “Although you do not have to eat or drink, you may do so for enjoyment purposes. You won’t have to worry about relieving yourself.”

I guess that meant I wouldn’t need to take a leak or a dump, so I guess that was nice? I don’t know, having a long piss after needing to go was surprisingly satisfying. But whatever, I wasn’t here to think about going to the bathroom. So I poked through the cabinets, looking for food, and found some pre-made meals. After a bit I selected a cheeseburger, some fries, and some mashed potatoes and gravy. I stuck it in the microwave and waited while the ladies selected their meals. It took just thirty seconds to heat up, and when it came out, I had to admit, it actually looked really appetizing. Not like you’d expect a freeze-dried meal to look.

Soon enough, we were all at a table, eating breakfast.

Goddamn if that didn’t taste fantastic.

“What do we do today?” Fara asked.

“We need to see if we can find more survivors, and find some way of getting in contact with command, and also figure out what the hell happened to this place,” I replied. I thought about it. “How the fuck do we get in touch with anyone? Our radios are practically useless...”

“If we could find a signal booster somewhere, I could install it into the radio tower. That would give us a bigger range,” Alia suggested.

“All right, how common are they?” I replied.

“Well, they aren’t exactly standard issue, but they shouldn’t be crazy rare. I guess there’s a chance any of the structures could have one. Although I didn’t see one back at that first outpost we went to,” she replied.

I sighed. “All right, let’s finish breakfast, then search here. If we don’t find one, we’ll see what else is in the area.” I paused, glancing at Fara as something occurred to me. “I just realized, I don’t know what your specialty is.”

“Oh, I’m a medic,” she replied.

“Okay, perfect. That’ll help round out the team.”

We finished up our breakfast, (I was really tempted to get more, but ultimately I was more tempted to just get a move on), and performed a quick search of the emergency shelter, looking for this signal booster.

The good news was that it didn’t take us very long to search the whole base.

The base news was that there was no such piece of equipment around.

I hadn’t held out hope honestly, but it had been worth the effort. With that out of the way, I fired up the shelter’s computers and tracked down the scanner function. Turning it up to its maximum capacity, I fired off a scan and checked the results.

There were two other structures in the area.

“All right,” I said, looking over the data. “It looks like there’s a support station, whatever that is, about a mile further on east, and a secondary geological survey site two miles south. Does either of those sound better than the other?”

“Not really. Unfortunately, either has about the same chance of holding what we’re looking for,” Alia replied, looking apologetic.

I sighed. “Let’s go to the support station first. What is a support station, anyway?” There wasn’t any further information in the system.

“It’s like where people go to sleep and eat when they aren’t working,” Alia replied.

“Oh, that makes sense,” I murmured, getting back into my suit. It resealed snugly around my body and powered back up.

The girls got back into their armor.

A moment later, we were back outside, heading east through the rainy gray morning.

PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Everything looked different in the bleak light of day, but not by as much as I’d thought it would.

Now I could just see everything with more clarity, and it looked about as I’d expected it to when I was wandering through this land in the dark: miles and miles of dismal landscape beneath a gray cloudy sky. It was largely just barren wastelands of rock and dirt. There were plants, though not many. Something like ugly purplish cacti thrusting up out of the ground in clusters here and there. There were mountains in the distance and hills dotting the landscapes, and big boulders, too, for good measure. I could see buildings off in a few directions, farther off.

I also could see movement in several locations. Big, ugly shapes, clusters of things shifting around, marching to and fro, that I knew now to be bugs. Giant bugs. Why did it have to be giant bugs? Bugs were creepy enough as it was. Finding a spider in my apartment was fucking awful, because then I was suddenly paranoid.

Were there more?

Where were they? Where could they be hiding?

The answer was: basically everywhere.

Well, I guess the good thing about giant bugs was that they had a much harder time hiding. I glanced down at the ground. Well...maybe not. God, there was a fucking nightmare. What kind of traps could these things potentially lay?

I checked my HUD to see just how far we had to go before we reached that geological survey site. Still about a mile and a half. I could at least see it. And there didn’t seem to be anything actually on our path. I looked over at Fara, then Alia, one woman on each side. I found myself wondering exactly how much time I could realistically devote to fucking them, because the sex was just phenomenal. They were both very good at fucking.

“Hey, Fara, how’d you sign up for the Marines?” I asked, partially because the silence was getting to me, partially because I was curious and I liked to learn more about people. It helped fill out the experience and the atmosphere.

“Well...I guess it seemed like the right thing to do,” she replied after a bit. “There’s a lot of people who need help out there, and for whatever reason, my brain just works so well with medicine.”

“You seem a little...mismatched,” Alia said.

“I know. I thought-blood doesn’t bother me, you know? Cutting into people? Ugly wounds? I can handle that. And I thought it would translate to, well, being okay with actual combat. I figure I’d be around other people to defend me and that I’d get training, which I did, and I’m a pretty good shot, it’s just, you know, actually being here and knowing there’s giant fucking insect monsters around, it’s a lot different. I’m still adjusting.” She paused and looked at me. “Although I have to admit, I feel a hell of a lot better with you around.”

“I feel better with you around too,” I replied, then glanced at Alia. “Both of you.”

“Thanks,” Alia murmured in reply, and her eyes flashed with suggestive lust. I felt a pulse of desire throb through my whole body like a heartbeat for a few seconds, but made myself. There was no place to fuck out here. I mean, technically I guess you can fuck pretty much anywhere, but no. There was no way I’d feel comfortable getting out of my armor out here and banging either one of them. As tempting as that was.

I began thinking about something else to say, and then heard a sudden thunder of many feet beating the ground from the right. There was a big boulder there. We all stopped and raised our weapons. Within seconds, a stream of giant ants began to appear from either side of enormous rock. “Open fire!” I screamed, squeezing the trigger the very second I had one of the big ugly fuckers in my sights.

The bullets chopped into the ant’s monstrous face and splattered the others around it. I focused on the right side of the boulder as I kept up the fire, trying to determine how much we were facing. Eight were left on my side, more to the left, which the other two were handling. I emptied my assault rifle into the cluster of giant bugs as they came towards me, huge insect legs pounding the ground as they made their dash.

One went down as half its skull was torn away by gunfire. Another went down as one huge eye was burst in a cloud of dark gore. One stumbled and crashed, thrashing as I blew one of its front legs off. I hosed them down and then hastily reloaded as my rifle ran dry. I could hear the other two rattling through their rounds, shouting war-cries at the huge bugs. They were good shots. And it was weird to find again that I was a good shot.

It was a lot of fun though, admittedly.

I emptied my assault rifle a second time, punching holes in the horrendous bodies of the bugs. Their blood soaked the ground. Now that I could fully see it in the clear daylight, I was a little weirded out to find that their blood was a deep, deep blue color. That wasn’t right. I sure as hell didn’t remember blue coming out when I stepped on an ant. So what were these things, then? Were they really giant ants? Or alien monsters that just looked like ants? That seemed unlikely, because they didn’t just resemble ants, they looked just like them, only massive.

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” Alia said.

“Yeah,” Fara replied, her voice shaky.

“All right, come on, let’s get a move on. Before more of them show up.”

They both responded in agreement and we resumed walking at a brisk pace.

In a way, I was surprised. I thought I’d be more bored with having to walk everywhere, and I’m sure I’d get there eventually, and by then I’d ideally have a vehicle of some kind, but honestly, this was all so cool. Everything looked so real, and it was such an interesting environment compared to what I normally had to look at, that I didn’t really mind the walk. In fact, combine that with the fact that this body was extremely fit and the power armor just felt awesome to move in, and I actually looked forward to a lot more.

As we pressed on, the structure slowly grew closer. I started to get an idea of its shape, and it looked like a single, simple, domed building built near the edge of a cliff. Maybe there would be some answers there. I found myself wondering about a lot of things as we drew nearer. The obvious stuff, like what the fuck was going on, and why were there giant bugs. But other things, like, what happened to our ship? Were there other survivors? Were there survivors of whatever had happened here? Which ended up leading me to wonder what the other women I was surely going to run into looked like...and fucked like.

We managed to get to the building without any further run-ins with the ants, but already I didn’t like what I was seeing. It looked as though there had already been fighting here, or at least some kind of disaster. There was a large hole in the domed roof of the geological survey site, and several of the windows along the walls were broken out. I thought about how to handle this, how a real Marine might handle it.

“You two, head around the right side, I’ll go around the left. Secure the area, meet on the other side,” I said.

They both said ‘yes, Sergeant’ and headed off, guns at ready. I didn’t know if it was right, but it felt right enough, and I headed off on my own path. There was a winding ramp that curved along my side of the structure, which was raised up off the ground a few feet, built onto what looked like a concrete pedestal or platform. It led to a closed door. I ignored it for the moment, checking to see if anything was hiding just out of sight behind the building. I didn’t think there was, but it made sense to double check.

I met the girls on the other side.

“Nothing,” Alia reported.

I looked at the edge of canyon that the survey site had been built near, then walked to its edge about a dozen meters away. Someone had at least had enough sense to establish a safety railing. “Holy shit,” I muttered.

“What?” Fara asked nervously.

“Just...the view.”

It was fucking spectacular. I had seen pictures like this, and heard about views like this, but fucking hell, this was incredible. This was one of a network of canyons that spread out for dozens, maybe hundreds of miles to the left and right, and ahead of us, on into the horizon. It was disorienting, honestly. So was looking down. The canyon floor had to be a quarter mile down. This is really what made me fully realize and appreciate the fact that I was indeed on an alien world. It just looked so...different, and vast, and insane.

I mean, there were places like this on Earth, I guess, but maybe they would feel like another world, too.

I kept looking at the canyon floor, and idea came to me.

As soon as I thought it, I felt an insanely bizarre mix of conflicting emotions: stark terror and trembling excitement. I quickly activated my menu and hunted down the save option, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually saved at all. At least not intentionally. The game had an auto-save, which had activated just after we’d faced the bugs. I saved the game. And then, getting out of the menu, before I could think better of it, I sprinted forward.

And jumped.

I heard the two others shout after me, but they were quickly gone.

My stomach dropped, rolled, and freaked the fuck out as I plunged straight down through the air. I screamed. This was a completely involuntary action. I watched the ground racing up to meet me, the wind shrieking by my power armor. I felt sheer maddened terror, but also a brain-breaking exhilaration as I plummeted like a rock. My stomach seemed to swell and then melt and then burst all within the same instant.

And then I slammed into the ground.

I screamed again, but suddenly I was somewhere else.

Back where I’d been when I saved, standing right there at the cliff’s edge. I laughed, wondering if my scream had been before or after I’d reloaded. I glanced at the two women, who looked back at me. Well, if they’d heard me scream then either they were ignoring it or didn’t know what to say. I stood there trembling for several seconds from the adrenaline rush, and resisted the insane urge to do it again. I’d already broken the atmosphere of the game enough as it was. Some people might be into VR for that, but I was here because I wanted to live out this campaign. For the most part. That and sex. A fucking lot of sex.

I led the women back over to the survey site and up the stairs, then opened up the door and checked out the interior. It wasn’t very impressive, and probably less so since it had obviously been subjected to some kind of attack. There was broken glass and blood on the metal floor, and most of the furniture had been broken. A few chairs, a pair of tables, what might have been a couch, all of it smashed or burned. There were a trio of computer stations set up. Two of them were broken beyond repair, the other looked relatively intact.

“See if you can find anything useful on that, Alia,” I said, pointing.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, and headed over there.

Fara and I poked through the ruins, looking for supplies, anything useful really. A few minutes passed by and we turned up a whole lot of nothing among the wreckage. Alia was still working, so I decided to keep going with the investigation. There was only one door besides the two that let in from the outside, so I went over to it and opened it up. A stairwell, curving to the left and down. I moved down it, Fara at my back.

The basement, built into the concrete platform, was where whoever worked here lived. It certainly looked like a lived in space. It was messy, but unlike the destruction upstairs, this was more the result of humans occupying a space. It was a neat little place to find. A pair of bunk-beds occupied one corner, and there was a small office area in the form of desk with a laptop and some other random supplies on its top, as well as a rolling chair. There was a round table with two chairs in another corner, the top scattered with the remains of a meal. The only door in the room led to a bathroom with a high-efficiency shower cubicle, sink, and toilet.

I found a medical pack and a magazine for our pistols in one of the desk drawers. I passed both items off to Fara, given I figured she could use some more ammo, and she was the medic among us and would do better with the medicine. Unfortunately, that’s all there was for us at this particular building. We headed back upstairs and rejoined Alia.

“Anything?” I asked.

She sighed. “No. Just some survey data, but it’s pretty scrambled. Nothing relevant.”

“Great,” I muttered. “Well, at least we can check it off the list. Come on, let’s go investigate the support station. There’s bound to be something use there.”

We left the building and began heading in that direction.

CHAPTER TWO

Oddly, I missed the rain.

The sun, though weak through the gray clouds, had mostly dried the ground up. I kind of hoped it would start raining again. For whatever reason, I liked the rain. I remembered noting that on the mile-long form they’d had me fill out, so it’d probably rain some more soon. We were making good progress towards the support station. As we walked, I kept thinking back to jumping off the cliff. I was still kind of shaky from it, and the experience was…

Now I actually knew what people were talking about when they described a situation as a ‘rush’, because that’s what it felt like. Like something just rushing violently through my body, surging through it, consuming me. It had definitely been terrifying as hell, but...I had at least some glimmer of appreciate now for adrenaline junkies. Because that had also been extremely exhilarating. Although I did feel bad because in that moment I’d probably scared the shit out of my companions. That was the cost of focus on immersion though: you felt bad even if it made no sense. At present, they had literally no idea it had happened.

Still, guilt was guilt.

As we made our final approach on the support station, which looked noticeably bigger than every other building I’d come to so far, I began to see things I didn’t like. Namely, giant shapes skittering around outside and across the exterior walls.

And they didn’t look like ants.

“What the fuck are those!?” Fara whispered in horror as we drew within about fifty meters of the place.

I frowned, stopping and activating my zoom function, then sighed heavily. “Spiders,” I said. “From the looks of it...jumping spiders.”

They were awful, giant, hunched things and they were moving way too fast for my liking. Son of a bitch, why did it have to be spiders? Or, well, I guess given that I was almost positive they were coming anyway, why so soon?!

I fucking hated spiders.

“Do we have to go in there?” Fara groaned.

“Yes,” I replied. “I’m afraid so...can you handle it?”

“Yeah,” she answered morosely. “I can manage it, I just really don’t want to.”

“Neither do I.” I sighed, continuing to study the base, considering the situation. “All right, we’re going to try and draw as many of them out as possible. I’d much, much rather fight these monsters in a big, wide, open space, instead of somewhere inside.”

“Good idea,” Alia said.

My frown got worse as I considered our ammunition situation. I had a grand total of three full magazines for the assault rifle, and five for my pistol. A quick check of the ladies’ stats showed me that they weren’t fairing a whole lot better. Well, this was what we had and it was going to have to make due.

“Let’s get this done,” I said, and started walking towards the support station.

It didn’t take long to close the gap between us. In a way, I really wasn’t looking forward to this. Facing giant spiders wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Had to be done though. Even if there wasn’t for sure something useful in there...I wasn’t the kind of person to leave a stone unturned. As we came closer, I saw that there was supposed to be a fence all around the entire structure, or really group of structures, as there was more than one building, but it had been shredded in a lot of places. And the spiders…

I could see them much more clearly now.

They were absolutely horrifying.

They were roughly the size of horses, an ugly brown with shading towards green in some places, and had big fangs. Ugh, and the cluster of black eyes on their faces, just...fuck! These things were going to freak me the fuck out.

I’d never been more grateful to be carrying a high-powered assault rifle.

When we were within range, I got the battle started off by targeting one of the big, ugly things and firing off a volley. The bullets drilled into its big, ugly body and sprayed that same odd bluish blood out across the metal exterior of the building it had been crawling across. It fell, hit the ground with a heavy thud, and began to twitch violently. The sight of it turned my stomach. I fired again, this time killing it. The girls opened fire as well, taking out two more of them.

This was basically a starting pistol for all the other spiders, who promptly turned to face us and began crawling with disturbing speed. We continued firing off bursts of bullets at them. I blew the leg off of one spider, spraying the others with gore and causing it to stumble and flop around violently. I finished it off with a burst its hideous alien face, then switched targets and punched half a dozen holes into the body of another giant arachnid. On either side of me, the women were doing a great job selecting targets and putting them down.

The jumping spiders were making horrible hops towards us when they were crawling like living nightmares. That was rapidly closing the distance between us. I began to feel real fear as my magazine ran dry. I slapped another one in and backed up, seeing the other two doing the same. This was not going as well as I had initially hoped. A dozen of the big lumbering things had gone down so far, but there were over a dozen more still coming! I rattled through the rest of my assault rifle, in the end just hosing down the biggest part of the horde coming for us and managing to seriously wound two of them. Then I reloaded with my last magazine.

It was gone all too quickly.

Growling in frustration, I switched to my pistol and resumed fire. The pistol jolted in my armored grasp each time I squeezed the trigger. I did find myself briefly marveling once more at how natural, how smooth all this felt. I was aiming and firing and reloading with ease. Although that notion quickly became lost again in the sea of fear and anxiety and adrenaline that was currently churning within me. I ran through the first magazine and reloaded. Spiders lost limbs and dark huge eyes burst under bullet impacts and thick carapace hides were penetrated by our frantically fired rounds. Blue blood soaked the ground.

We were down to our last four or five giant spiders by the time they came dangerously close. I pumped the last of the rounds in my pistol into the closest one, downed it, then screamed as another one leaped up from behind it and came right at me. Dropping the pistol, I instinctively punched out at it and my wrist-blade activated. The thing let out an ear-splitting shriek as the blade punched into its soft underbelly, but it still slammed into me and knocked me on my ass. I kept screaming in terror and fury as it thrashed around atop me.

And I stabbed the fuck out of it.

I jabbed the blade into it again and again, until I’d pretty much punched a hole straight through its main body. At some point I realized that it had stopped moving, and so I threw the ugly fucker off me. As I sat up, trying to wipe blood from my visor, I let out another shout of surprise as I saw another one coming right for me! Without thinking, I punched right into its face, and stabbed the blade into its eyes. Apparently I got its brain, because I one-hit-killed the fucker and it collapsed instantly. I could hear the other two still fighting.

Struggling to my feet, I saw they each had one on them. I hurried over to Fara, figuring she needed more help since she wasn’t exactly cut out for combat, and roared a battlecry as I punch-stabbed down into the top of its head. That killed it quick, and I helped her roll the body off of her. Glancing back over my shoulder, preparing to do it again, I saw that Alia had managed to kill hers. And another scan of the area revealed that we’d killed them all. I let out a long sigh of relief as I offered Fara my hand. She took it and let me help her up.

“Thank you,” she murmured, sounding daze.

“You’re welcome,” I replied. “Goddamn...” I whispered, looking around at the field of corpses. There had to be like thirty of the fucking things. “Fuck me...”

“I could do that,” Fara said. I glanced at her. She offered me an anxious, though genuine, smile.

“Yes...very soon,” I agreed. I could use some sex after that.

That had to be the first big, difficult battle. Honestly, I was surprised to have survived intact. I hesitated, glancing at my readouts. Well, relatively intact. I was down to just two magazines of pistol ammo, and my suit had taken some damage. In fact, it was down to half strength. Damn, I hadn’t even noticed in all the chaos. Normally I was good about keeping track of shit like that, but there was a world of difference between looking at a screen and actually living this shit.

“Check your suits,” I said, and got out the single nano-pack I had to my name, then fed it into the slot and let it do its job. That was still cool, watching that little black rectangle just disappear into the back of my gauntleted hand. My suit integrity indicator filled back up and pulsed gently, indicating that it was back to one hundred percent. I realized something else was pulsing. Oh! It was time to level up. I activated the menu.

I thought about it for a bit as I looked over the list, and my mind flashed back to the battle I’d just endured. That wrist-blade had come in really handy. I saw there was an option to upgrade it a total of three times. Yeah, I wanted this thing to be more powerful. I selected it, and saw the 0/3 switch to 1/3, which was oddly satisfying. After backing out of that menu, I switched over and checked on my companions.

Both of them were totally tapped out for assault rifle ammo, and they had dwindling reserves for their sidearms. Just like me. Fuck. We needed to find a real arsenal soon. I figured there was hopefully a good chance of a healthy supply of guns and ammo in the support station, but there was no way to know until we actually went there.

Before I forgot about it, I checked my wrist-blade, activating it. It was now twice the size and had a serrated edge.

Hot damn.

“All right, let’s finish clearing the station, then start our search,” I said.

“Yes, Sergeant,” they both replied, and followed me as I headed across the field of giant spider corpses.

…

The support station was in pretty goddamned bad shape.

Most of the windows were broken out, ringed by jagged shards stained with red and blue blood. The exterior was a total mess, and obviously where a lot of fighting had gone on. There were some ant corpses, and a lot of humans. Like, over twenty or thirty, just from what I could see as I walked in through one of the many holes in the fence. The empty shell casings covered as much ground as the blood.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“This must have been a brutal battle,” Alia muttered.

“I, uh...spread out, secure the exterior. Start looking for ammo, anything we can use,” I replied, trying to retain my control.

I was in charge of this outfit, such as it was.

The process was kind of miserable, but it was at least easy. My HUD highlighted unused magazines and intact weapons and supplies. For awhile, I wasn’t sure if it was actually working, because I wasn’t finding anything among the dead. But eventually I did find a single spare magazine for my assault rifle, which I reloaded, and confirmed that no, the battlefield really was just that low on spare supplies.

Looking around again at the sheer amount of shell casings, yeah, I could see it.

We spent a good fifteen minutes or so out there, scanning the dead, checking for survivors, (though I seriously doubted there would be any, this place felt dead). There were a handful of smaller buildings outside, basically just sheds with nothing of much use to any of us, although Alia was briefly excited, as she thought they might hold the signal booster we were looking for. In the end, we just managed to scrape together a handful of magazines for our assault rifles that we split between us, and nothing else. So we headed inside.

Even wreathed in destruction, it was kind of impressive how sleek and high-tech the support station looked. The entryway was a simple room, with a security checkpoint the only real point of interest.

“See if you can get us a map,” I said to Alia, pointing to the checkpoint, which was little more than a big, curved desk of smooth white metal.

“On it,” she replied.

While she did that, Fara and I checked out the nearby area. There were three doors out of the room, and each had their own little label. Left led to the dormitories. Right led to the dining hall. Straight on was operations, whatever that meant. That’s probably where we would find all the good stuff. Well...I glanced over at Fara, who was facing away from me, and her sweet ass, which looked good even in her power armor, and then over at Alia, her beautiful face bathed in the glow of the monitor she was researching, and then over the dormitories.

Not all the good stuff.

A moment later, Alia had a map for us, and she uploaded it to our suits. I did a little research and figured out how to toggle the map, which created a topographic readout superimposed over my vision, which was weird at first, but really useful.

“What now?” Fara asked.

“First, we stick together and clear the base of any lingering threats. Then, once we’re sure we’re alone here, we split up, and we each take a wing to search for supplies and the signal booster,” I replied.

“Sounds good,” Alia said.

We got to it. Like the search outside, this was a little boring, but it at least went fast. As we worked our way through each of the three wings of the building, I found myself thinking about anime. There was one in particular that I’d liked a lot growing up, but as I grew older, kind of distanced myself from it. For a number of reasons, but one of the big ones was that I realized there was a shitload of filler. Eventually, I’d gotten back around to rewatching it when I’d learned that they had re-released basically a filler-less version.

And it wasn’t as good.

At first I just thought that it was me. I was getting older, shit that was cool when I was a teenager just wasn’t cool anymore. And that was certainly true to a certain degree. It wouldn’t ever enrapture me again, not the same way it had back then, but that wasn’t it. Finally, I decided to rewatch the original version, filler and all.

It was a lot better.

For awhile, I didn’t know what the fuck that meant, until finally I figured it out. While there were certainly better ways to do it, the filler made the eventual massive plot points, epic revelations, and intense fights that much more powerful, that much more intense, that much more satisfying and rewarding. There’s some saying that I’d probably butcher about how anticipation basically makes everything better.

So I didn’t as much mind these quiet, boring parts, where I was walking through rooms and hallways, hunting for something. Because it helped build anticipation. To the next plot point. To finding what we were looking for.

The fucking the absolute shit out of Alia and Fara.

That one was on my mind most of all. I kept thinking about what they looked like naked, what it felt like to kiss them, to touch them, to stuff my cock into their mouths or their fantastically tight, wet pussies.

They were stellar fucks.

So we did our search, and we found only three more jumping spiders hidden away in the base, and we blew the fuckers away with relative ease since it was all three of us focusing on a single target at the same time. When that was done and I felt about as safe as I was going to, I assigned Alia to check out the dorms, Fara to check out the dining hall, and told them to meet me in ops when they were finished. They gave their responses and went off.

Operations was made up of five rooms: armory, infirmary, offices, security, and the control room. Although I hadn’t seen much in the armory during our initial sweep, that’s where I went first, because I hadn’t seen nothing, just not nearly as much as I’d hoped. We’d grabbed the obvious stuff during our first sweep, so I took a bit to track down all the ammo that had gotten knocked into less obvious places, my HUD highlighting the little rectangles through the tables and shelves and lockers. I had to pry one of the lockers open to get at a little stash of bullets. In the end, I managed to get my reserves back up to half a dozen magazines for the rifle, and five for the pistol. Not a bad haul, although I was hoping to find another weapon soon.

After clearing out the armory, I moved to the infirmary and snagged another pair of medical kits. From there, I did a quick scope of the offices and discovered the same thing I had the first time we’d been through: nothing. Next up was security. I didn’t think there’d be anything great hidden away in there that they would keep out of the armory, but you never knew. I admonished myself as I quickly searched the security station: I was going too fast. Rushing through this. I wanted to fuck the women. I was kind of jittery with the desire of it and I had a really bad hard-on. Was I normally this horny? Or was it a side effect of the game?

Or a side effect of having sexual access to a pair of extremely hot, fit, military women?

Probably that last one. I was kind of in love with military women, for a reason I’d never quite been able to discern. I guess I just loved fit, competent women. I tried to slow down, but it was pretty difficult. There didn’t seem to be anything useful in the security center, and the computers in there had been pumped full of bullet holes, so they weren’t of any use to me. In the end, I wound up in the control room. After checking it over and finding nothing of material use, I settled in at the biggest computer and started looking for information.

Unfortunately, the database had taken a lot of damage, so it was hard to find anything of use. As I searched, skimming through generic reports of personnel rotation, supply shipments, and maintenance reports, the girls eventually finished up and joined me. They didn’t find much in the dorms and dining hall wing beyond a few spare magazines of ammo. I sent Fara to double-check the infirmary and make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and, after a bit, finally turned the computer over to Alia, since she was the technician here.

After five minutes, she had something for me.

“Oh, hey!” she said.

“What?” I replied, coming back over to stand beside her.

“Okay, so they do have a signal booster here, and apparently they installed it in their own comms tower...on the roof. Oh.”

“Shit,” I muttered. I’d seen a ladder granting roof access back in the dining hall. “Well then, let’s go see if it’s still functional.”

CHAPTER THREE

We found the ladder and I climbed up it, then hit the open button once I reached the top.

I waited there, pistol in hand, awkwardly hanging off the ladder. Waiting. Another big ugly spider could be up there. I waited a few seconds and then, when I didn’t hear anything, poked my head out. Doing a quick check of the whole area, I saw that we had the roof to ourselves.

“It’s clear,” I said and climbed up. Alia came up after me, then Fara.

Their radio tower pretty obvious, just a big metal pole sticking up out of the roof over the control room. We moved over to it. I didn’t like what I saw. It was obvious that some damage had been done to it. The thing was bent, and there were sparks coming out of it periodically in a few places. We moved over to it and Alia crouched next to the base, where she pried open a panel and began rooting around the inner guts of the tower.

I waited for her to assess the situation and looked out over the wastelands.

They were massive.

To my left was the immense network of canyons. To my back was a large mountain range. Right was more undiscovered land, and now that I was up here, I saw a few buildings in the distance, maybe two or three miles away. Dead ahead was the way we’d original come from, the way we would be returning to provided this thing turned out to be intact.

“Jackpot,” Alia said, and pulled something carefully out of the radio’s base, then stood and held it up over her faceplate, inspecting it. It was a small cube that looked like very dense technology. It was bright green in color, shot through with what looked like blue and red circuitry that had a faint glow to it. It was really interesting to look at.

“So that’s it? It works?” I asked.

“Yes. This is the signal booster, and it still functions. This is exactly what we’re looking for. This should allow us to connect with anyone in the region, ideally,” she replied.

“Provided anyone’s left,” Fara said softly.

“Yes, thank you for that,” Alia growled. She carefully pocketed the device.

“Come on, don’t be like that,” I said.

Alia sighed and looked over at me, then at Fara. “Sorry,” Fara murmured, “I’m just...worried. All this is making me nervous.”

Alia stared at her for a bit longer, then her features relaxed. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just been really tense and finding this really put me in a good mood.”

“I know what would put all of us in a good mood,” I said, and they both looked at me. “When we were clearing out the base, I noticed the commander’s quarters were intact, and also had quite a large bed, and a good sized shower. And I thought it would be nice if we made use of those.”

Alia grinned her sex-hungry grin, and Fara smiled her awkward smile, blushing.

“I’d like that,” Fara murmured.

“Hell yes, let’s go,” Alia said.

I hurried back over to the ladder with the ladies in tow, and the three of us got down it and quickly navigated through the base, back to the dorms wing. My hard-on was all the way back now with a vengeance and I fully intended to satisfy it. As soon as we got to the commander’s room, which was easily the biggest of all the dorms, and definitely the most well-furnished, I got out of my suit and started taking off my uniform.

The girls did the same, and watched them undress with an eager intensity. There was something really invigorating about watching these two strip down. Part of it was obviously how hot they were, but there was also such a grace to their movements. And the way they revealed their bodies bit by bit as their uniforms came off…

Alia got her big, beautiful tits out first.

She really was fantastically beautiful, and erotic sensuality seemed to come naturally to her. Everything from the alluring in her gaze to the suggestion in her voice and her body language made her seem like a porn star. And there was something equally hot about Fara’s shyness. I walked over to Fara as soon as she was finished getting naked, revealing every last inch of her smooth, fit body, and kissed her on the mouth.

Fara moaned and responded immediately with her whole body, pressing it against me, and it was heaven, feeling all that soft, smooth, hot skin against my own. Feeling her firm breasts against my bare chest, having her extremely toned ass in my grasp. She slipped her tongue slowly into my mouth, and I moved my own forward and twisted them together. We kept kissing as I walked her slowly backwards until we hit the bed and I released her. She let out a little shout of surprise and joy as she fell onto her back.

Then I turned to Alia, in all her redheaded, busty glory, who was standing close, staring at me with that slutty smile on her face. Her eyes were very intense, and suddenly she actually jumped not just at me, but onto me.

I let out my own small shout of surprise as we both fell onto the bed next to Fara, and Alia straddled me, kissing me hard on the mouth. I got my hands between us, groping her huge tits as we made out passionately. After a bit, she pulled back and I got one of her nipples in my mouth and started sucking on it. She moaned, holding her position, and then moaned again, louder, as Fara came over and began licking her other perfect pink nipple.

“Oh yes,” she whispered, “this is so good...”

I had her thick, fat ass in my hands, squeezing it repeatedly, loving the feel of it. We sucked on her tits together for another minute or so, and then I patted her ass. “Off.”

“Yes, sir,” she murmured, and got off of me.

“I’ve got a position I want to do. Fara, you lay here, on your back, and now bright your legs, fold them, perfect. Hold them right there. Alia, get on top of her and hold her legs in place-yeah, just like that,” I said.

“I know this position,” Alia said, her voice sultry.

“I’m still, you know, kinda new to this,” Fara murmured.

“Sex? Seriously?” Alia replied.

“No! I mean...well, yeah, kinda. I’ve had sex like a dozen times between two people before meeting you two. But before last night, you know, I’ve never done anything with a girl.”

“Oh...well, you certainly seemed to enjoy yourself,” Alia said as she stared down at Fara, who was blushing fiercely now.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “I, uh...it was really good.”

“You like girls now, Fara?” I asked as I got up against their backsides. The end result of this position was that basically their pussies were both easily accessible, Alia’s right on top of Fara’s. I began rubbing my cock in between the lips of Fara’s smooth, glistening vagina.

She gasped. “Yes, I do. I always kind of have, but now I’m sure-oh my!” she moaned loudly as I slipped inside of her.

“Well, I’m really glad I could help you figure that,” Alia said, then ducked her head down and started making out with Fara, who moaned into the kiss as I began fucking her pussy. I had my hands on her hips, gripping her tightly, looking down and seeing both Alia’s thick, pale ass, and my cock disappearing into Fara’s smooth pussy again and again. Listening to her moan loudly, her voice muffled by Alia’s luscious lips, was amazing. And the pleasure generated by just fucking pounding her pussy, her hot, military, tight as hell pussy, was out of this world.

I grunted as I thrust into her, burying my entire big cock inside of her, and started going harder, wanting to make her scream instead of just moan.

“Ah! Oh God! Zak!” she screamed in blissful satisfaction.

“Wow you are really fucking her,” Alia murmured.

“Yep,” I said, then pulled out and realigned, “and now I’m really going to fuck you.”

I slid into Alia’s vagina and listened to her moan as I started pounding her doggystyle, my hips meeting her thick ass repeatedly. I settled my hands over her hips, gripping them tightly, and pounded the fuck out of her. Listening to her moan and then scream in intense sexual pleasure was just as satisfying as it was with Fara. After a bit, I let go of her hips and reached between them, getting a good grip on her huge tits. It felt tremendously satisfying to hold them, to squeeze them, to massage them. They almost fit perfectly into my hands, but they were just a little bit too big, which made the whole thing even hotter.

I pulled out and switched back to Fara, slipping smoothly into her vagina once again, and resumed drilling her. I’d always known that doing this, switching back and forth between fucking two different women, would be amazing, but this was better than I had hoped. It felt beyond that, and the pleasure I felt was no doubt being magnified by the fact that these two women were so fucking hot, and so willing, and it was all completely bareback…

I grunted, then groaned as I started coming inside of Alia. She moaned loudly as she trigger at the same time, orgasming all over my cock as I emptied it into her. My dick kicked hard, over and over, as I came into her pussy, grunting and groaning as the pleasure washed through like a broken dam. We were locked together in perfect blissful unity.

After I finished coming inside of her, I pulled out and got to my feet. “Time for a shower,” I said, stretching and popping my neck. Man, that felt satisfying. A good release of tension. Both women disengaged from each other, and then got up and followed me. All three of us headed into the private bathroom and I started up the shower. Once the water was hot enough, we got in together. We began to wash up.

“Okay girls...I want to see you two kissing,” I said.

“You got it,” Alia replied happily, and slipped smoothly over to Fara, wrapped an arm around her nude, wet body, then tilted her head slightly as she leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. Fara looked surprised, but pleasantly so, and she moaned softly and closed her eyes as they locked lips and began to twist tongues together.

They looked extravagantly erotic like that. I mean, just this perfect visage of two fantastically fit, extremely attractive women, both of them wet and nude, and kissing. Just so completely totally into kissing each other. Passionately making out. Fara was groping Alia’s big tits and Alia had her hands all over Fara’s ass as she pushed her against the wall. Nothing held back. No reservations. There was something awe-inspiring about it.

Before long, I was unable to contain myself any further, and I moved forward. I started groping and touching them, running my hands over their wet, naked, well-formed bodies. Groping Alia’s huge tits and Fara’s seriously amazingly fit ass. And then I started making out with them, kissing their hot, luscious lips, feeling them shove their tongues into my mouth, twist and twine it with my own. The kissing didn’t last long, though.

I needed their mouths elsewhere.

“Down on your knees, ladies,” I said, and they both complied, kneeling down before me. “You know what do to.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Alia replied.

She wrapped her slim fingers around my cock, gripping it firmly, then leaned in and began to lick the head. Fara joined her immediately. Pure pleasure shot through my body as both women dragged their tongues across my cock, licking at it slowly at first, then starting to go faster. And then, after about a minute of this, Alia slipped my cock in her mouth and began bobbing her head.

“Oh fuck...” I groaned, placing my hand on the back of her head. She looked absurdly sexual, her vividly red hair wet against her head, her luminous blue eyes staring up at me, her luscious red lips wrapped around my cock. Fara looked just as hot, especially as she got down lower and began to lick my balls.

“This is amazing,” I whispered, watching the two women work, feeling the hot pleasure making a slow burn into my body.

Honestly, this alone was worth the price of admission.

Alia sucked me off like a high-class hooker for another minute or so, then took it out of her mouth and passed it to Fara, who immediately took on the job with a skillful zeal. The sexy petite blonde blew me and looked absolutely fantastic doing it, her eyes closed, like she was concentrating wholly on what she was doing. And Alia looked pretty great licking my nuts. They passed my cock back and forth between them, and before long, I was ready to pop.

“Okay girls, start licking again. I want to go all over your beautiful faces,” I told them.

“Yes, sir,” they both replied, and resumed licking my cock eagerly.

It didn’t take much longer after that.

With a loud groan, I started letting off. The first of my seed left me in a hard contraction that sprayed across Alia’s face. She moaned loudly and began working my cock with her fist, jacking me off, making me come harder. I felt the pleasure shooting through me, and intensely blissful ecstasy that overwhelmed by senses, made all the more pleasurably by seeing both extremely beautiful women, their bodies naked and wet, their faces upturned and eager as I came on them. After a few more spurts, Alia turned my cock over to Fara’s face and let the rest go onto her. It got all over her face. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes, taking my load onto her cheeks, across her nose, her forehead, and some of it into her mouth.

“Clean it with your mouth,” I said between heavy breaths when I was done. Alia took it back over to her mouth, took it all the way in, closed her lips firmly around it, and then began to suck as she slowly pulled it back out. “Holy fuck,” I whispered as another burst of pleasure hit me. She took her time, staring at me the whole way.

“Is that what you wanted?” she asked when she was done.

“Yes,” I replied. “Definitely. Thank you.”

She let out a small laugh. “You’re welcome.”

“Okay, wash up, girls, we’ve got more work to do.”

…

After the shower, we dried, dressed, and climbed back into our suits of armor.

I was feeling pretty refreshed as we left the support station and started heading due southwest, back across the vast barren wasteland towards the service tunnel that would ultimately takes us back to the radio tower, where we could at long last install this signal booster. As I walked across the desolate badlands, I began wondering things. Like, how long was this going to last? I knew that in the real world, I was supposed to be basically comatose for three days. In game, however, was totally subjective.

Although there were limits, I’d heard a day could be a month inside the game world depending on certain variables. When I’d asked that question, they really didn’t have a straight answer. They said that, due to the wide variability play-styles, combined with the semi-randomly generated nature of the world, combined with the open-ended way they’d designed it and the fact that it was a total-immersion virtual world…

And it could take anywhere between a week and two months, or longer, apparently.

They had told me that when, in the real world, I’d reached certain time thresholds, they would send me a little alert in-game. One for twenty four hours passed, one for forty eight, one for sixty, and then one more when I had an hour left. I suddenly wondered how much time had passed in the real world. Probably less than an hour.

Man, this was such a head-fuck.

We kept walking until we reached that initial building where I’d met (and screwed) Fara, Emergency Shelter 45. We passed it and then hit the service tunnel. It looked different without my nightvision filter on, although it wasn’t completely lit. The gray sunlight faded after a few hundred feet, and beyond that was just darkness with a small light near its center: the opposite end of the passage. Not a great place to be.

“Is this where you two had to come through last night?” Fara asked as we stood at the entrance of the tunnel.

“Yep,” I replied. “It was pretty miserable.”

“Looks like it. Did you run into anything?”

“Ants,” Alia replied. “And dead people.”

“Ugh,” Fara muttered.

“No other realistic way to the radio, I’m afraid. Come on, if we hurry we can probably be through here in a few minutes,” I said, and started off.

The other two followed me. Our footsteps echoed as we made our way down the rough tunnel. As we worked our way through it, I kept expecting something to happen. More ants to come rushing out of the side passageways, giant spiders to break down doors or hop out of shadowy areas, or something else, some new freaking giant bug, but nothing happened. We managed to make it right on through to the sunlight on the corresponding side.

Part of me appreciated that. Sometimes, the most effective use of tension was to never break it.

“Is that it?” Fara asked.

“That’s it,” Alia confirmed as we looked up at the radio tower halfway up the rise in the land the tunnel had been built into. Farther on, I could just make out the structure that Alia and I had made it to last night, and where I’d first banged her. I couldn’t help but smile as I thought about that. We made our way up the path and secured the area once we got to the top. Nothing was waiting up there for us, thankfully, and Alia got right to work. It felt good to be making progress, to actually know what we were supposed to be doing and doing it.

After a few minutes, Alia closed a panel on the base of the tower and stood up. Then she looked at her wristpad and tapped it a few times. She looked at me and smile. “I did it, it’s working,” she reported happily. “I’ve dialed us into this signal booster, so we’ll have free access to it from now on. If anyone’s alive in the region, we should be able to talk to them.”

“Excellent work,” I replied, and activated my radio. “This is Sergeant Zak Thompson with the United Marines, if anyone is in the area and you are hearing me, please respond, over.”

I waited several seconds, and was just gearing up to repeat the message, because that seemed to be standard protocol given what I’d seen in movies and games, when I heard a new voice come onto the radio. “Hello!? Yes! I’m here! I’m alive!”

“Identify yourself,” I replied.

“Oh, um, my name is Doctor Azure. I’m with the government research team here. Please tell me you are here to rescue me...”

I hesitated. “Well...that is technically on our list of objectives.”

“Why are you saying it like that?”

“I’m afraid our mission is somewhat compromised. We experienced catastrophic engine failure not long after arriving over your planet when we showed up in response to the distress call. We’re scattered all over the planet, I think. I mean, as of right now, there’s only three of us. Unless there’s anyone else listening in on this call?...” I waited, then sighed after a few seconds. “Yeah, just three Marines and you in radio range, it seems.”

“Fuck,” Azure whispered. “What are we going to do?”

“Well, the first order of business is for us to get to you. Where are you?”

“I’m at the garage,” she said, then hesitated, then sighed. “I guess that doesn’t paint the best picture. Um...how familiar are you with the region?”

I considered that for a moment. “Are you familiar with Emergency Shelter 45?”

“Yes! I am.”

“Okay, use that as a reference point.”

“All right, the garage is approximately a mile and a half northeast of the emergency shelter. There’s a rise in the land about halfway, if you head northeast and climb it, you should be able to see the garage. It’s pretty much a lone building-” She stopped suddenly.

“Azure?” I asked. Nothing. “Azure?”

“I’m here,” she whispered, “I’m sorry, I heard something. I think there might be some of them outside the building, please hurry!”

“Okay, lock yourself somewhere safe, we’ll be there as fast as we can,” I replied.

“Understood. Please hurry,” she repeated.

I looked at the others. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER FOUR

We didn’t quite run, but we did keep up a pretty brisk pace.

As we hurried back the way we’d come, I was really beginning to be impressed with my physique in this world. I wasn’t winded at all. I felt like I could just keep going and going and going. I suddenly wondered exactly what kind of endurance I had with regards to sex. How many times could I fuck before it became too much? What was my ‘recharge rate’ when it came to orgasms? Because I was able to get hard or even stay hard and stick my cock right back into one of the girls after blowing a big load in or on them.

And speaking of girls…

I wondered what Azure looked like. She sounded sexy. She was a doctor, which would be a nice contrast to ladies I’d been with so far. I imagine she was a doctor in the sense of a scientist, as opposed to someone in a hospital. Not that I didn’t seriously appreciate my tough Marine girlfriends so far, (I really did), but having a hot, smart chick around to fuck would be just awesome. Kind of like banging a teacher or something.

And she sounded a bit older, too.

I loved mature women.

We made good time getting down the hill, through the tunnel, and hurrying towards the natural rise in the land to the north. As we got to the top, I slowly realized that this would give me an excellent view of the whole region. It was a truly spectacular view, even better than the one I’d gotten when on top of the support station.

I could see for miles.

I took a moment to kind of get it all set in my head, so that I could navigate more easily. To the south, at my back, were the places I’d checked out already and the immense network of canyons that stretched away into the horizon. To the west was a huge, imposing range of mountains that looked like a solid wall. To the extreme northeast, at the base of the mountains, I thought I could see a structure, a big one.

Dead ahead, to the north, were seemingly infinite wastelands. I saw the garage not too far away, and then ahead of that and a little to the left, another structure. To my left, the west, I could just caught sight of what seemed to be another structure and a canyon, and a little further beyond that, another range of mountains. Well, closer to hills, I guess. That’s where the radio tower was built and the service tunnel had been dug through.

Well, that certainly helped. I had a clearer idea of the lay of the land, at least. Enough sightseeing. I laid my eyes on the garage, ahead of us and still a little ways away, and set off once more. The three of us descended the hill and picked up the pace. So far, we hadn’t run into anything threatened, although I could still see the big, ugly shape of lots of ants moving off in the distance. And some spiders, too. Not looking forward to fighting those again. On top of that, I could see movement around the garage. Ants, I realized as we drew closer.

“Lock and load,” I said as I raised my assault rifle.

As we got within shooting distance, I did just that and opened fire on one of the half-dozen giant dark ants I saw scurrying around outside the building, almost like sharks circling a boat. The bullets cut through the air, the assault rifle rattling in my grasp as I emptied the magazine into first one, then two, then three of the ants, spraying their awful blue blood across the dirt and rock ground. They let out weird, high-pitched shrieking sounds as we cut through their bodies, blowing their legs off, blasting holes in their bodies.

Once they were dead, I got on the radio and reloaded. “Doctor Azure, can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you. Please tell me that’s you blasting away out there,” she replied.

“It’s us. Stay where you are. We need to finish securing the area. We’ll come to you.”

“I understand.”

We checked the perimeter, then entered the building. It wasn’t a very large building, a simple two-story thing, with the top story being about half the size of the bottom. Entering, I saw that most of the first floor was taken up by a large garage bay.

And there was a vehicle in it!

It looked like it would need some work, but it was mostly intact. Alia was looking at it hungrily. “We’ll get back here after we secure it,” I promised her.

“Looking forward to it,” she murmured.

The rest of the building was pretty standard fare, or what I was becoming to feel was standard: wrecked rooms, a few corpses, blood on the walls. It occurred to me that I was really calm about seeing all this death and destruction. As I searched the building, I wondered about that, actually kind of worried. Was I really just that desensitized? I mean, I’d never actually seen a corpse before, like in the flesh. Really, almost everything I’d seen with regards to death had been fake, part of a movie or a video game.

As I finished searching the second floor and talked again with Azure, learning she had locked herself in the second story, I decided that while the virtual world was ridiculously realistic, some part of my still understand, on a fundamental level, that I wasn’t seeing actual dead people. Real blood. Real corpses. And that was a relief.

After checking out the ground floor, which was just the garage, an office, a bathroom, and some storage rooms, we headed upstairs and checked in with Doctor Azure, and at long last I finally got a chance to see her.

And wow was she pretty.

She was tall, slim, and pale. And from the way her torn, stained labcoat was bulging at the chest...she was quite busty. She had black hair pulled into a rough ponytail, bright blue eyes, and sexy, black framed glasses.

Sex with her was going to be fucking awesome.

“Thank you so much,” she said once she got the door open. She’d taken refuge in what seemed to be the living quarters. Behind her, I could see what basically looking like an apartment.

“You’re welcome. Are you okay?” I replied.

“I’m fine. I’ve been lucky so far...” she hesitated, looked down, “unlike everyone else, it seems.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what else to say. I looked at Alia. “Why don’t you get started on that vehicle?” I looked at Fara. “Search the ground floor for any useful supplies or weapons, then do what you can to help Alia.”

“Yes, sir,” they both replied, and made their way downstairs.

I turned my attention back to Azure. “So, I was hoping you could fill in some blanks, Doctor. As far as I’m concerned, there was a distress call, we fell out of the sky, and then there’s giant bugs that bleed blue. I have no idea why this is happening.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much more myself,” she admitted.

“What do you know?” I asked, and I took the opportunity to get out of my suit of power armor. After this conversation, we were going to screw. As I did step out of my power armor, I saw her eyes flash briefly as she looked up the length of my body.

Definitely going to screw.

“Well, um, I’m a scientist. A biologist. I’ve been working here for six months now. Pretty much the only places I’ve seen are here, the main research installation, and the support station. For the first five months or so, I didn’t really think to much. They had me doing research on some of the native life they found here. Which is to say, hardly anything. Some bugs, uh, not what you’ve seen, just little alien insects. Microbes. Algae. Fungus. Basic things like that. But it started changing over the last month. They wanted stranger and stranger tests done, like how they reacted to certain things, certain kinds of energy, radiation, sicknesses…

“I started hearing rumors maybe two weeks ago, and then there was some kind of security breach last week. I don’t really know what happened, but the brass was really pissed about it and they searched all of us, went through all our stuff. And then, two days ago, everything just...went fucking ballistic. The whole base lost power, and when it came back on, there were alarms, and soon people were screaming, and there was gunfire, and the...giant bugs were just...ripping through everyone and everything. I found a group of soldiers and we managed to get out. At first we tried to make it to the military installation, which is farther to the west, but there were too many bugs. So we doubled back to the nexus...”

“What’s the nexus?” I asked.

“It’s kind of like a control center for the region. It also houses the teleportation grid that connects to the other regions.”

“So there’s more than just this?” I asked.

“Oh yes. This is Region Gamma. Which, if they are using the Greek alphabet appropriately, means it’s the third region. I know that when I flew in, I had a decent view of the planet. The whole thing isn’t like this dead wasteland. I saw an ocean and definitely what appeared to be some greener areas, and then there’s the polar regions. So there’s more than this. Which was why I found it so odd that I was doing research on such basic life. Ultimately I figured they were just having me do research on life found only in this region, which I suppose made enough sense, but now I’m wondering what else it could have been.

“Anyway, the nexus had fallen, so we went to the support station, where some others were. We spent the night there, and most of the next day there, trying to get in touch with others. At some point, a team went off to try and reach the military installation in one of our only remaining vehicles, and we never heard back from them. Finally, in the middle of the night, we were attacked by the bugs. It was a terrible battle, and myself and a few others ended up just running when it became obvious that the situation was a lost cause and I was the only one who made it here. And I just...have been staying here, not sure what to do...um, thank you again for coming.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get this figured out and make sure you stay safe,” I replied. “Now...” I said, stepping closer to her, and her breathing began coming more rapidly. “I was thinking that since we’re going to be here for a little bit while the others repair the vehicle downstairs, you and I could take that time to get to know each other a bit better.”

She swallowed, looking very excited. “I...would like that. A lot,” she murmured.

“Good. So would I.”

I kissed her. She let out a soft moan and kissed me back. I slipped my hand over the back of her neck, pulled her a little closer, and tilted my head slightly, deepening the kiss. She wrapped her arms around and I felt my heart begin hammering in my chest again. As we kept kissing, I started unbuttoning her lab coat, and as soon as it was open, I got it off of her, then started trying to get the rest of her clothes off.

We began that awkward, almost frantic dance of trying to get undressed, making out, and navigating towards the bed at the same time. Surprisingly, I managed not to fall over. And to keep kissing her and getting our clothes off. By the time we were at the bed, she was down to her bra and panties. I reached behind her and unhooked it, then took it off, sliding it down her long, slim arms, revealing her breasts.

Goddamn she had some big tits.

She was pretty skinny, tall and skinny, but she was busty. Probably double-ds. They looked even bigger because she was so thin. I reached up and began groping them, gently grasping them and squeezing them, feeling her nipples against my palms.

“You have amazing breasts, Azure,” I murmured.

She laughed softly. “Thank you. You are in absolutely fantastic shape yourself, Sergeant,” she replied.

I got down onto my knees and pulled down her panties over her slim thighs, revealing a smooth, very pale pussy. I ran a fingertip between the taut lips of it and she moaned softly and shivered. I grinned up at her, then slipped a finger inside of her.

“Oh, fuck!” she whispered.

“You are really wet, Azure,” I murmured.

“Y-yes. I’m very horny...I haven’t had sex for eight months.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes! I...am very work focused, and it’s generally not a good idea to have sex with people you’re going to live and work around in an isolated location, but I’m...I really miss sex. I want you to fuck me like a whore,” she whispered harshly.

“I plan on doing that,” I replied, then started fingering her.

“Ooohhhh yes!” she screamed.

She gripped my shoulders tightly and then brought one foot up and planted it on the edge of the bed, giving me better access to her vagina. I kept fingering her, fucking her with it, making her scream and shudder. Within about thirty seconds, she had an orgasm.

“Oh fuck! Oh yes, Zak! Oh my fucking God yes!” she screamed as she came on my hand and down my arm.

Azure was a squirter. Fucking awesome.

I could feel her vaginal muscles clenching around my finger as she came. I kept pleasuring her throughout the climax, and when she was finished, I got up and moved to the bathroom, washed up really quick, then returned.

“Get on your knees, Azure,” I said.

“Oh...yes, sir,” she murmured, and eagerly dropped to her knees.

She found herself staring at me dick, which she did for a few seconds, then slowly reached out and began touching it. “Wow,” she murmured. “I’ve never, um...been with anyone, who was, uh...this big.” She looked up at me.

“Nervous?”

“A little. I’m not sure if I can handle it.”

“I think you’ll do fine,” I replied.

“I suppose there’s only one way to find out...”

She opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out, then began to drag it across the head of my cock. Immediately, pleasure began to sizzle into me. Fuck, that felt good. She closed her eyes and I was glad to see she’d left her glasses on. I wanted them to stay on during the entire session. She continued licking, dragging her tongue all over the head, covering every last bit of it in her saliva and stimulating the whole thing.

Then she raised my cock up and ducked down and began sucking on that extremely sensitive part just below the head.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered. “That’s...amazing.”

She moaned and kept going, then took it into her mouth and started sucking me off. Her mouth was a place of hot, wet, perfect pleasure.

“See,” I said, laying a hand on the back of her head, “you’re doing a great job.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she murmured.

She kept going, sucking my cock for another minute or so, and then took it out of her mouth. “Can we fuck now?” she asked.

“Eager?”

“Hell yes I am.”

“All right, get up.”

Once she was on her feet, I pushed her onto the bed. She let out a happy and surprised yell, catching her breath. “You are strong,” she said.

“Yes I am,” I agreed as I grabbed her legs and yanked her closer to the edge of the bed.

“I like that. A lot,” she murmured, staring up at me. She was so excited and turned on she was almost panting now.

“You like rough sex?” I asked as I gripped my cock and began rubbing the head in between the wet lips of her pussy.

“I...ah...yes,” she whispered, shivering at the contact.

“How rough?” I asked.

“Really rough...” she groaned.

I penetrated her.

“Oh, fuck!” she cried.

I began working my way into her incredibly wet pussy, relishing the feeling it sheathed tight around my rock hard cock. She was really tight.

“Wow, you were right about your pussy,” I groaned, pushing my way deeper.

“Ah! Oh wow! You are really big...” she moaned loudly, spreading her legs out.

“You aren’t going to wimp out, are you?” I asked.

“Ah! No! I’m not! Fuck that!” she snapped.

“You got it,” I replied, then grabbed her hips and began pounding her.

“OH ZAK FUCK!” she wailed. “OH FUCKING YES FUCK ME LIKE A SLUT!”

My instincts were right: she was a phenomenal fuck.

I kept pounding her, sliding my whole cock in and out of her pussy, feeling the incredible drag, the suction of her each time I pulled back. And within about another minute of this, she suddenly let out a seriously loud scream. Her whole body convulsed so hard her glasses flew off of her face, and she began to orgasm.

Oh how I loved hearing that, and feeling that, and seeing that.

A female full-body orgasm was pretty much a work of art.

Her tits bounced wonderfully, her face was scrunched up, twisting in a look of pure pleasure, her muscles clenching and releasing beneath her smooth, pale skin. Her legs were spread wide, stuck up into the air. And her voice. She had the kind of voice you’d expect a smart, mature woman scientist to have. And it sounded so fucking awesome to hear that voice screaming in uncontrollable sexual gratification.

And just feeling a woman orgasm all over your dick as you pounded her was fucking...too much. It was out of this world. Right about the time she was tapering off, I lost control and began my own orgasm. I started coming in her pussy, and I tightened my grip on her hips and really started fucking slamming into her as I came into her.

“Oh fuck yes!” she screamed, gasping for breath.

I grunted and groaned, my dick contracting hard and fast as it pumped her pussy full of my seed.

It was one of the most satisfying feelings in life.

When I was finished, I pulled out of her, then sat down beside. She remained laying on her back, putting her legs down, her big breasts shifting rapidly as she caught her breath. She simply laid there and stared at the ceiling with wide eyes.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes...” she whispered. “I...forgot how, um...exhilarating sex could be. I’ve spent the past half year convincing myself that I didn’t need sex, but...oh how amazing it feels.” She blinked a few times, then glanced over. “The other two who are with you...they were looking at you in, um, a certain way. Are you...involved?”

“Yes. We’re sleeping together, all three of us, but it won’t be a problem.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Are you into them?”

She smiled and blushed. “I mean...I used to dabble, with girls. It’s been a long time though. Over a decade...but that redhead, what’s her name?”

“Alia.”

“Alia is so hot. I mean, all I could see was her face and some of her hair, but she looks so beautiful. You’ve seen her naked...”

“Oh yeah, she’s beautiful. Like...if you like curvy girls, you will fall in love with her. She has a goddamned fantastic body.”

Azure smirked suddenly. “Who’s your favorite?”

“I...I’m just not going to answer that,” I replied after a few seconds.

She laughed. “It’s okay. I already know.”

“How?”

“It’s obviously Alia. I can tell just by listening to you talk about her. Don’t worry, it’s no big deal. Everyone has a favorite, and they don’t really get a choice in the matter.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I needed that fuck. After all the shit that’s gone down over the past few days...did I ever need that hard dicking.”

“I’ll be more than happy to deliver more to you,” I replied.

She laughed. “I’m looking forward to it. Now, um, I think I need to take a shower...wanna join me?”

“Yeah,” I said, and we got up.

CHAPTER FIVE

After the shower, I dried and dressed, then took the time to search the second story of the garage, which wasn’t very large. Although I didn’t find anything of use hidden up in the living quarters, I didn’t really mind so much.

Meeting Azure had been more than worth it.

Once my search was complete, I got back into my armor and saw that there was something flashing in my HUD. I activated and realized that finding Azure had actually pushed me into another level up. Awesome! Letting the game pause, I began sorting through what was available to me again. Truth be told, I’d always been kind of an indecisive gamer. When it came to stuff like this, I honestly didn’t really get the hang of what was best allocated where until at least the second playthrough, because I needed to get a feel for not only the game, but also how I felt most comfortable playing the game.

Obviously, that wasn’t an option here.

Strength didn’t really seem super useful right now, and I was a shooter type of person over melee. Speed was useful, but I had a vehicle now. Although I couldn’t necessarily count on that, and I would want to upgrade that at some point, I didn’t think it’d be great right now. I’d already upgraded my wrist-blade recently, which didn’t necessarily rule it out, but did make me at least put it on the back burner for now. I still had that extended radar, so same thing there. I didn’t seem in danger of filling up my inventory recently…

That just left durability and accuracy.

Finally, I settled on accuracy. I’d missed some of those shots, it’d be nice to miss fewer of them. Once I had made my selection, I dropped back into the game and headed downstairs with Azure. As we walked into the garage, both Alia and Fara looked at me intently. Alia was under the propped-up hood and Fara was standing nearby.

“Have fun?” Alia asked.

“A lot,” I replied, glancing at Azure, who was blushing deeply again. She cleared her throat and walked over to the far side of the garage.

I joined the other two. “How’s it going?”

“Almost done,” Alia replied.

“I found something for you, Sergeant,” Fara said, approaching. She was holding a very small rectangle of black metal, shot through with blue circuitry.

“What is it?” I asked, accepting it and studying it.

“An upgrade, for a weapon,” she replied.

“Thank you, Fara.”

She smiled shyly. “You’re welcome.”

As I studied it, the world blurred slightly and froze, and my helmet began speaking to me.

“This is a weapon upgrade. It can be applied to any of your arsenal. It will be permanent. If you apply an upgrade to your present assault rifle, it will remain, even if you lose it, and acquire a new assault rifle.”

A holographic image of my assault rifle appeared before me. It rotated until it showed me the right side of the gun, near the middle. Two rectangular slots flashed red. “Simply insert the upgrade module here. You will be asked to make a selection.”

“Simple enough,” I murmured, and slipped the module into my assault rifle. It was a sturdy weapon and I liked it, so why not? A new menu appeared, and I had three choices. Though apparently I could only choose two of them, ultimately.

INCREASE MAX AMMO

INCREASE WEAPON POWER

ADD SECONDARY WEAPON

(UNDERSLUNG GRENADE LAUNCHER)

“Holy fucking shit,” I whispered, and immediately selected the grenade launcher. Fuck yes I wanted a grenade launcher. I felt the gun shift slightly in my hand, and after getting out of the HUD, I checked it over. Sure enough, there was another barrel beneath the first, this one noticeably bigger. “This is going to be awesome.”

“So, um, what’s the plan, exactly?” Azure asked as she slowly moved back over to join us, apparently over her embarrassment now.

“I want to get to that nexus. It seems pretty crucial,” I replied, then quickly brought the others up to speed on what Azure had told me.

“That definitely sounds like a good idea,” Alia agreed.

“So, you finish fixing this, then we drive over there, scope out what kind of shape it’s in, and then make more plans from there,” I said.

“Which we should be able to do right about...now,” Alia said. She closed the hood with a snap and then moved over to the front seat. Slipping in behind the wheel, she activated the vehicle. It came on without a problem. “Just a second...” she murmured. I drew closer and peered into the vehicle. She was tapping at a screen mounted on the dashboard. A few seconds went by, then a chime sounded. “Perfect! It’s fixed and fully powered! We can drive for days,” she reported, looking at me happily.

“Excellent work, Alia. How about you slide over, and you two get in the back, and we get this show on the road,” I replied.

She slipped over into the passenger’s seat and we all got in. Since they’d already opened the garage door, I drove out into the wastelands, towards the nexus.

…

The vehicle we’d acquired was a slick black, four-door all-terrain vehicle that made smooth enough progress across the wasteland. It began to rain again as we made our way across the landscape. I thought that, despite the overall predicament we found ourselves in, it was a pretty peaceful and almost relaxing drive.

In the distance, I could see the nexus Azure had described.

It wasn’t as big as I imagined. Honestly, for some reason, I had thought it would be this huge, high-tech building. But it didn’t even look bigger than the support station we’d raided earlier. I’d been thinking about something as we drove away from the garage.

“Azure,” I said.

“Yes?” she replied.

“You mentioned the power outage, and the sudden paranoia of your superiors, do you think it’s possible that all this is happening on purpose?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking about. I do think it’s possible. Whatever they were doing here was obviously important, and made them really paranoid, it’s certainly possible that someone could have sabotaged us,” she replied.

“Hmm.”

If that was true, this became more complicated. I thought about that some more as we finished our drive over to the nexus. As we pulled up to it, I cleared my mind, preparing for the task ahead. There hadn’t been anything along the outside from what I’d seen on the drive up.

“Azure, how big is this place? I thought something like a teleporter would be...bigger,” I murmured.

“Oh! Right! You wouldn’t know. Most of it’s underground. For added protection, I guess. Though even then it’s not terribly large. There should be another two levels below this top one, and they aren’t very large. It’s quite compact technology.”

“All right then, let’s check it out. Azure, stay with the vehicle,” I said.

“Okay,” she replied. It wasn’t lost on me that she wasn’t a fighter. Although I’d have to ask her about how she handled firearms in the near future, because I wanted her to at least have even just a pistol for defense in case of emergency.

We got out and she locked the vehicle behind us.

We did a quick perimeter check. There were definitely signs of damage: broken windows, bullet holes in the metallic walls, a few corpses strewn about. Nothing on the outside thought. The building was single story, and there didn’t seem to be anything on the roof, either. Though I wasn’t willing to completely rule that out, as I didn’t have a perfect view of it. We got to the front door and I went in first, rifle at ready.

With Alia and Fara backing me up, we began checking the first floor. Beyond a simple entrance area, there was just a break room, a little security room, and a bathroom. Which were all clear. (Though we managed to snag some ammo in the security room.) The rest of the building, that is to say half of it, was taken up by a huge freight elevator. At first, I found myself wondering what the fuck this would even be doing here, and began wondering if it was some kind of oversight by the game designers...then it hit me.

There was a teleporter in the basement. A teleporter that they probably shipped all kinds of cargo through. So if you basically spawned like a vehicle in the basement, you still needed someone way to actually get it up to the surface. Okay, that actually made sense, and was a cool touch. After clearing that elevator though, we ended up taking the stairs. I’d seen too many elevators turn into death traps in games and movies.

And even so, there didn’t seem to be much power in the base. Doors worked, but lights were out, and wouldn’t turn on. My visor was doing a good enough job of dealing with the basically total darkness of the base, but having power would be nice. Even beyond the necessity of powering all the systems, there was just something about the fact that, even thought I could see pretty well, the simple reality that I was in total darkness kind of freaked me out. Even with an assault rifle, power armor, and backup.

It was weird what something as simple as the absence of light could do to your brain.

The first floor looked like it was where personnel stayed. It was maybe twice the size of the topside area. It was obvious that ants had been through, as we found a lot of blue blood and a few giant ant corpses. We hunted through a galley, a dining area, an infirmary, and some dormitories. In one of those, we found a big hole ripped through the wall. There was a tunnel drilled into the dirt and rock that led away from the wall, descending.

We stared down it.

It was quite ominous.

“Fuck,” Alia whispered anxiously. “They can get in.”

“Why here though?” I asked.

“What?” Fara asked.

“Why here and no where else we’ve seen so far? I mean, it’s all made of the same material in the same way. Why is this a weak spot?”

We were silent for a second, then Alia pointed. “Look. Around the edges. There’s burn marks. There must have been some kind of explosion here. That would have weakened the metal enough for them to get through,” she said.

“Okay, so all we need to do is patch this hole, and they can’t get through,” I said, relieved. The idea of being in an underground building where there was just one obvious point of entry for enemies was a hundred times easier to deal with than the idea of there being potential countless points of entry. “We’ll just seal this room for now.”

We left, closed and locked the door behind us, then resumed our search.

We managed to snag a few more magazines for our weapons, and I found another intact pistol that I tucked away for Azure, but otherwise it seemed like either they’d used all their resources in the battle that took place here, or survivors had left with what they could carry. We hit the second and final level and began our search of it. This level was clearly designed for storage and almost nothing else. We found several rooms packed with crates. They were all basically useless to us in the immediate sense. Crated clothing, crated tools, crated parts. There was some food, medical supplies, and a lot of just random shit.

Some of it would surely be useful in the long run, but it would take a long time to sort through, so we just secured the rooms and moved on.

Finally, I got a chance to see the teleporter in question.

It was...simpler than I thought it would be, given how much science fiction liked to envision such devices. Although it at least looked right. It was basically just a giant metal ring, stood upright on a big metal platform that looked almost like a loading dock. This place had been hit kind of hard, too. I saw the immediately creepy sight of two dead giant spiders. They were on their backs with their legs curled up. Fuck, I hated seeing those things.

We moved slowly around the room, checking all the various spaces. There were a lot of computers set up, a lot of desks, and several doors along the walls that all led to rooms packed with all kinds of technical gear and expensive looking equipment. It, at least, had survived mostly intact. Alia was a great technician, but I had my doubts about her being able to singlehandedly repair a wrecked teleportation device.

In the end, we found the nexus to be a dead zone. No survivors on either side. I wish there was some way of checking more thoroughly for survivors, because although I’d made that statement earlier about us being the only four survivors in the region, it was entirely possible there were survivors who just didn’t have access to a radio. Maybe there was a way, some kind of sensor or scanner or radar. Well, if anyplace had it, it should theoretically be here. One of the doors I found did in fact lead to what looked more like a traditional control room, and since the controls for the teleporter were all in the main room with it, I figured this must do other things.

“Alia, what can do with this room?” I asked as we stood in it.

“Theoretically, we should be able to make contact with other regions and even people off-world. So, theoretically, we should be able to get in touch with our own command. We should also be able to do a radar sweep of the region, get an idea of things like power signatures, vehicles, structures...”

“Could we scan for people? Other survivors?” I asked.

“Yes, up to a certain radius.”

“All right, we need to get this place back online. I think the first order of business is to restore power,” I said.

“I saw the main generator through one of these doors. I can look at it,” Alia said.

“Okay. Let’s do that.”

We headed back through the teleportation bay, across it, and to one of the larger doors on the opposite wall. I found my mind starting to pick up as we entered the room, and Alia got to work on hunting down a solution to the problem. This was going to open up several doors. It gave us a base of operations, a place to operate from. We had a vehicle, and we’d soon have a means of scanning the area. We’d been basically stumbling around in the dark for the past few days, but now we could actually make some real progress.

“Oh shit,” Alia said, sounding surprise.

“What?” I asked.

“Good and bad news. Good news is that I can get us power, and pretty easily. Bad news is that it will be running on just above minimum, and it will take effort to bring it up higher.”

“How much to use the teleporter?” I asked.

“I’d say half capacity.”

“And the radar?”

“Closer to full.”

“Why does it take more to use the radar than to use the teleporter?”

“It’s just the way it’s wired, basically. The way it prioritizes. It’s kind of hardwired in, so I can’t really bypass it. At least not within a reasonable amount of time. Maybe if I had a few weeks...”

“No.” I sighed. “Okay, well, that’s fine. Just...get it online, and then we can start figuring out what to do and what exactly we’re looking at it.” A thought came to me. “Fara, stay here with Alia and watch her back.”

“Where are you going?” Fara asked.

“Topside. I want to bring Azure in and see if I can get more information out of her about these other structures.”

“Are you going to fuck her?” Alia asked, smirking at me.

“Yes, but not right now. Next time I have sex, it’s going to be with all three of you at once,” I replied. I’d already decided that.

“Very much looking forward to that,” Alia said, and got to work on the generator.

“Yeah...” Fara murmured, chewing on her lower lip.

Trying not to get distracted, I told them to radio me if anything came up, then made my way back through the base to the stairwell, jogged up it, and headed back outside into the rainy day. I was glad to see that nothing had happened to the vehicle, and Azure was still waiting for me. She had gotten up into the passenger’s seat since we’d left.

I knocked on the window. She unlocked the door and I got in, then started it up.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“The base is secure...relatively. We need to do some patchwork in one of the levels, but otherwise it’s dead.” I started up the vehicle and drove right up next to the entrance, so that it’d be less of a hassle if we needed access to it in a hurry. “Come on.”

We got out and headed inside.

“There’s no power right now,” I said as we hung out in the entrance lobby. The window there, at least, was intact, and let in some gray light. Rain ran down the glass and we stood there together at it, staring out across the wastelands. “Alia’s fixing the problem.”

Neither of us spoke for a few moments.

“How are you holding up?” I asked finally, because she seemed a little distant.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I feel a little like I’m shock. I guess I am. I’ve been in combat situations before. But this is...it was slaughter, not really combat.”

“I’m sorry...that reminds me, can you handle a firearm?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve had some basic training. I did have a shotgun but I lost it in all the chaos during my escape of the support station.”

“Here,” I said, and gave her the pistol, a holster I’d found, and a few magazines for it.

“Thank you,” she said, affixing the holster to her belt and then checking out the weapon. She sure seemed like she knew what she was doing with it. Once she had examined it, she hit the safety and holstered it.

“Okay, Azure, I’m going to need to need some more information on the other buildings, and anything you can think of in the region, anything that might help,” I said. Suddenly, the lights overhead came back on.

Azure began to talk.

Despite everything, I felt pretty good. This was going well, so far.

Hopefully it stayed that way.

THE END