Reincarnated in a Vast, Lonely Universe
Copyright© 2025 by Dragon Cobolt
Chapter 4
Science Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 4 - Matt died. This is kind of required to be reincarnated into another universe, but it was still rather annoying. But now, awakened within a city that sprawls over an entire continent, empty of all life and any sign of who used to live there, he finds himself completely and utterly alone. Where is he? What is this universe? Why was he reincarnated here? Will he get any hot elf girlfriends? These questions and more are all answered - but will bring but more mysteries and more adventures...
Caution: This Science Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Mult Reluctant Romantic War Science Fiction Paranormal Furry Group Sex Harem
The thing about minefields, at least from what I knew about them, was that they didn’t really exist to kill people or damage ships. It was nice if they did either (well, not nice, but it didn’t make the people who planted the land and sea mines unhappy) but in truth, the mines were mostly there to keep people from going in certain directions. To slow them down.
To keep them in place.
And for those purposes, Tzu Tzu Kanagoraga, Lady of Scepter II, ruler of fifteen planets and master of the greatest siege-works in the galaxy (according to her at least), had gotten all of the hard work she wanted from her mines. Her artillery had the Menagerie bracketed, and we couldn’t activate our realspace engines until Alin was done running around like a chicken with her head cut off.
“These guns were meant to target asteroids, I need to do lots of reprogramming to redefine their parameters, I’m sorry, I should have expected a mine field and an intergalactic tyrant!” Alin said, rushing from console to console, her fingers playing over the keys while, at the same time, her eyes flickered and sparked as she worked both with her hands and her cybernetic brain to get the systems operational.
I wanted to take her into my arms and give her a big hug. As it was, I didn’t want to tackle her as she was zipping around the bridge, so I made my voice as gentle as I could manage. “No one could have expected our second solar system to play host to an intergalactic tyrant,” I said, my ears twitching up as Alin reached the navigational console again, throwing herself into the chair and slapping the throttle with one hand.
Several more plasma shells came whistling in from the inner solar system. Their detonations strobed around the Menagerie like miniature suns, sending the few greeblies of the ship into huge, exaggerated stencil shadows across her hull. But then the point defense guns opened up. Flickering lines of tracers reached out, intersecting two guns to an infinitesimally small space mine – and each intersection flashed with a pulse of blue light as the mine detonated. The glittering haze, the new constellation, created a kind of ertzatz bow wave around the Menagerie as the realspace engines kicked on and the entire ship lurched into motion.
More artillery rained down in the area of space we had vacated, detonating further and further behind us – until suddenly, several blooms came well to our fore.
“She’s trying to bracket us again,” Alin said – but her voice was growing decidedly more relaxed with every second. I rocked in the command throne as the engines kicked on, then shuddered to a stop, then flared again – then damped to half, before flaring to full. Alin looked apologetically over her shoulder. “I-I’m varying our velocity so that the artillery has a harder time bracketing us!”
“I know,” I said, then grinned at her. “Keep up the good work, Alin.”
“T-Thanks, Captain!” She said, her ears twitching up as she gave me one of those huge, completely earnest Alin-2 smiles. Then she went back to her consoles as the gas giant that we had been approaching swelled in size. Moment by moment it grew, turning from a baseball to a basketball to a mountain to a continent to a titan, consuming the entire sky ahead of us. It was banded in colors of the autumn – gold and reddish brown. The bulk of the world brought an end to the flashes and let me relax into the chair as if I no longer had any bones.
“Okay! We can repair the jump drive now,” Alin said, brightly. “Excellent idea, Captain.”
I frowned. Some part of me rankled at what Kanagoraga had said – unbreakable defenses? Really? I was chewing up Terran players like her when I still played Starcraft on bronze league. I shook my head. No. This wasn’t some video game. This was real life.
Alin’s ears drooped.
“Oh dear,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked, frowning and leaning forward on the armrest of the command throne.
Alin sighed. “Whatever it was that hit our jump drive, it has damaged the arcanite. We need to recharge it with some undamaged arcanite – not a full reserve, fortunately, just a few sub-crystals would do it.” She frowned. “I’ve never seen a weapon like that.”
“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it-” I started.
Alin spun around in her chair, glowering at me. “No, I will!” she said. “My job is to protect you, to keep you safe, and I walked us directly into a trap!”
“And how, exactly, would you learn the methods of combat in the greater galaxy when your entire life was spent on Earth?” I asked, arching an eyebrow ridge at her, my ears twitching up with amusement. Alin looked like I had force fed her a frog. But slowly, her expression settled and she nodded.
“Okay, fair,” she said. “But how are we going to get our arcanite recharged?”
I grinned. “Well, obviously.” I stood up, clasping my hands behind my back. “We’re going to have to deal with this Lady Kanagoraga ... what does that name mean, does it have any significance?”
“It means she’s from one of the northern elf nations, from before the unification,” Alin said, nodding curtly. “But she’s not acting like their historical stereotypes. Her persona seems to be entirely of her own invention. Bratty and annoying and far too focused on artillery.”
“I’d have thought you’d understand the appeal of big guns,” I said, managing to keep my face and voice even.
“Captain!” Alin exclaimed.
I walked up behind her chair, grinning and leaning over to look at her console. “Where are our engineering bay commands?” I asked. “And are there any asteroids we can mine in this area?”
“There are dozens of asteroids scattered around this Lagrange point – they naturally gather clutter around gas giants like this,” Alin said, then tapped away at her console. “I’m picking up approximately five hundred megatonnes of silicate, though, that’s not exceptionally useful, several thousand normal tons of uranium-”
I held up my hand, spreading my fingers. My claws snicked out at the gesture and I hastily closed my fingers with a sheepish smile. “Can you tabulate the resources and, uh, give me a rough estimation of how many, um, units of resources are required for the production of any of our ships?”
Alin rubbed her chin, her eyes narrowing with thought. Her expression became positively reptilian. “Well,” she said. “Since we have the ability to modify any matter we get our hands on, and the main limitation is the magical energies it requires for alchemical and nanotechnological processes, it’s actually relatively simple to translate each asteroid into a rough energy value to material costs – that I’d then compare with ship construction figures, and boom!” She punched the air, then turned back to her console.
The view on the forward screen zipped out to show the Menagerie at the farthest range the camera dones could travel too. At this range, the Menagerie looked pathetically small, while the gas giant we orbited changed not at all, only accentuating how gigantic that planet was. However, several yellow blips appeared on the screen. I focused on one, and just looking at it brought up a glowing set of numerals that, thanks to the translation magic, I could read.
4551 RU.
I grinned. “And how much for a strike craft?”
“Well, it depends on what you want to build, Captain,” Alin said. “Should I bring up the catalog?”
“No, I read through the database before we launched, I remember most of it,” I said. “Build us four resourcers.”
“But ... that will take up all our stored material,” Alin said, her voice nervous. “What if she sends attack ships? She didn’t have any on the map when we scanned the system, but right now, she’s as much in the fog of war as we are for her!” She blushed. “She can make ships and send them at us.”
“Quite so,” I said, taking a seat. “But you need to play it based on your estimation of your opponent – and she has invested so much in static defense that I think it will take her a lot to budge from her ways.” I chuckled. “Besides, you need to spend money to make money.”
I paused.
“Also, the Menagerie is tanky enough to cover the gap.”
Alin gulped.
In the engineering bays of the Menagerie, the stocked raw materials that we had taken from Earth started to get shifted and moved into the fabrication sections. Aluminum, tungsten, gold, copper, and other more exotic materials were fed directly into millions upon millions of tiny robots, who started to push around the atoms of the elements themselves, following patterns and designs created decades before. Within seconds, the swarms had started to form the vague skeletons of the hexagonal, practical looking resource ships. Communication, computation and automation systems formed like nerve endings floating without muscle, while super structure snapped into place like the bones. A shimmering haze of nanorobots covered the edges, and within minutes, the resourcer was completed with the same bold color patterns as our mothership.
The engines kicked on and it cruised out of the hanger bay and, with a single directed command, set off to start harvesting asteroids. The way that the people of this universe harvested asteroids was, to my eye, pretty flashy ... but, well, it worked faster than anything that had been done in our world. The resourcer started off by cruising within a few kilometers of the asteroid. Then it began to fire a broad cone of pale orange light at the asteroid – a microwave inducer, which began to heat the asteroid. Unevenly, as different metals reacted differently to being bombarded with microwaves. But as the asteroid heated, the resourcer added in a pair of tiny red beams, fired from crystals mounted to either side of the nozzle.
“Those are fire enchantments,” Alin explained. “They used to make longswords do more fire damage, but now, they help break down asteroids!”
Soon, the entire asteroid was glowing brilliantly enough to seem like a sun. And then a gigantic fist took hold of it, a glowing green palm and set of fingers made out of pure magic. That fist was joined by a second – both emitted from the resourcer. Before my eyes, the palms began to rotate the asteroid, spinning it faster and faster. As the asteroid spun, the molten metals and resources within it flowed into the palms of the hands, then into the wrists and, from the wrists, flew into the open compartments of the resourcer, where they were stored in a complex set of honeycomb storage containers.
“So, you’re heating the asteroid, then spinning it so the matter inside gets sorted, lighter to heavier, since different things move through liquids at different speeds?” I asked.
“I- ... yes!” Alin said, sounding pleased as punch.
“ ... what are the giant hands?”
“Bigby’s,” Alin said.
“Ahhh,” I said, nodding slowly. I chose to not ask which of the isekai nerds had brought that particular naming convention here – instead, I turned from the screen to the view of the solar system and the stationary defenses we had seen before we scuttled into our cover. I frowned, slightly. The strengths of Lady Kanagoraga’s defenses were obvious – nearly overwhelming. She had overlapping shield emitters protecting an array of point defense asteroid bases that looked like they could shoot down basically any ship trying to approach from any angle throughout the solar system. If you tried to swing wide, out of the ecliptic, then that would mean that you’d be an easy target for the artillery mounted on several of her planets – not all of them had even been fired at us at the mine field, though part of that had been due to how many of them had had the sun in the way.
Well, no issue if you were high up above or below the lengthwise edge of the solar system.
There were likely even more mine fields and bunkers that we hadn’t had a chance to spot.
I rubbed my hand along my jaw and my tail started to wag.
“First, produce me five probes. Send them here, here, and here,” I said, pointing at the solar system map. “Launch them at fifty percent speed. Keep the last two in reserve.”
“Aye, Captain! On the way!”
The probes, when they were produced, were slender darts covered in camera lenses and scanners. They extended tiny fins, angled themselves, then started to streak off on needle thin plumes of exhaust thrust.
Everything went a lot faster than I expected. Considering the size of space, I would have imagined that everything would take, say, days or weeks of maneuvering. But clearly, something was different about this universe. Solar systems were still impossibly huge by human gut-feeling-reckoning, but by real astronomical terms, they were all seeming pretty dinky. Or ... wait ... I frowned.
“Is this system smaller than the previous one?” I asked Alin.
“It seems that way,” Alin said. “I figured it was some byproduct of the terraforming.”
I frowned. Another mystery to shelve away for-
“Wait, your terraforming can move planets around?” I asked.
“Yes, why?” Alin asked.
I shook my head. “Your civilization is scary sometimes.”
Alin blushed. ‘Oh. I’m sorry!”
“It’s not your fault,” I said as the probes started to come into range of the inner system defense stations. Lady Kanagoraga hadn’t been stupid enough to fire her big guns at the probes, but plenty of weapons fire came from the smaller defense stations. In the scant few seconds I had before probe 1, 2 and 3 were obliterated, I saw that she preferred laser defenses for close ranged weaponry and what appeared to be rapid fire plasma cannons for the long ranged weaponry. I was already bringing up what documentation Alin had on that and reading as quickly as I could when I lifted my hand up and gestured.
“Send probe 4 and 5 straight at her home world, maximum speed,” I said.
“T-They won’t damage it,” Alin said, her voice warning.
“I wasn’t thinking of damaging her world,” I said, lifting my head. “I’m just testing her defenses.”
“Oh. Okay, good!” Alin said. “I was just worried you’d be trying a RKV.”
I wracked my brain. Fortunately, it didn’t take long – I was a bit of a space nerd, after all. “A relativistic kill vehicle? I don’t want to kill her, I just want to beat her base.” I grinned at her. “These are all automated stations, right?”
“Yes, I haven’t detected any other life forms in the solar system,” Alin said.
I nodded, then went back to my documentation. Then I jerked around. “Wait, not even some orcs or goblins or elves on her main planet?”
Alin shook her head.
“If she’s the ruler of fifteen planets, where the hell are her subjects?” I asked.
“Not here?” Alin suggested.
I frowned. Either her best defenses were here for some reason and she didn’t care about her subjects, or ... or there was something else going on. Before I could consider, a picture-in-picture box snapped up in the upper right corner of the main screen. Lady Kanagoraga glowered down at me.
“If you want to test my weapons, you should be doing more than cowering behind a gas giant,” she said, then produced her most impressive sneer. “And if you want to scare me, you need to send out ships with guns on them.”
The picture snapped off before I could respond. Alin glowered at where it had been. “Grr!” she said. “I do not like her very much.”
“Don’t worry, we’re about to give her a lesson in defense,” I said.
“ ... in defense?” Alin blinked at me.
And I started to give my orders on what she should start building.
The first sign that Lady Kanagoraga had that my attack was beginning was a flare of energy over the horizon of the gas giant. It was visible even from her core world, even using basic telescopes. With the advanced sensors of her fortifications, it was like shooting up several flares while playing that novelty western song with the screaming cowboy ghost. Needless to say, she began to drop artillery shells on the energy signature, and quite a few came close.
But none of them came close to damaging the ships in their close formation. That arrowhead shape was built around a single ship that I had found in the documents and enlarged with some help from Alin. It produced an energy shield, like the Menagerie, but through focusing lenses that threw the shield very, very, very wide. In a bubble of invisible light and brilliant magical emissions, the Aegis class mobile shield emitter projected a shell of hardened force that cast aside the radiation and energy emissions that the plasma artillery released with every pulse.
Within its protective bubble, there was a shockingly small fleet – all that I could afford, after the expenditures of RU on the Aegis. The centerpiece were a pair of Thorn class artillery destroyers. Despite the name, they were significantly larger than the Vanguard torpedo destroyers that surrounded them, though they retained the name due to some quirk of interstellar naming conventions. They long, narrow beamed ships were built around single, forward mounted, forward facing ion cannons that could fire their weapons several hundred kilometers longer than the range of the rapid fire plasma weapons that Lady Kanagoraga used for her medium ranged defenses.
The Aegis continued to cruise forward while plasma shells blew around it in closer and closer proximity as the artillery started to zero in on them. Kanagoraga appeared on my screen, glowering at me. “Do you think you can breach my defenses with only six ships?” she sneered at me.
“I could do it with three, I’m just being cautious,” I said, dryly.
She glowered at me. “Idiot,” she snarled, then flicked her hand and the screen cut off.
“I like it when you goad her,” Alin said, giggling.
The defensive line had come into range of the Thorns. The Aegis fired her forward retros, bringing herself to a stop, while the Thorns fired their own retros a few seconds later. This let them drift to the very edge of the shield array, their noses nestling up against the bubble of force. There, they waited.
The next barrage of artillery slammed in around the Aegis. When the last plasma shell had finished emitting with a sputtering hiss, the shield ... dropped.