Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One Read online

  Contents

  Gun Princess Royale, Book 1

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Preface.

  Maps

  Intro.

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Outro.

  Afterword.

  Gun Princess Royale, Book 1

  Awakening the Princess

  By Albert Ruckholdt

  2017 Copyright Albert Ruckholdt

  First Revision

  Kindle Edition

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Acknowledgments

  This is dedicated to my family and friends who supported me on this venture when it first began a few years ago when I decided to break out of the daily routine and try my hand at writing.

  Special Thanks:

  To the many readers at Royal Road Legends who gave me the feedback I needed to complete this work:

  Augustus, Dan, Pyro1515, Serinphora, Artyomthecat531, Kisuke28, Maou Shojou Ariel Chan, Ivanator the Great, Nyururin, Solielos, and many, many others.

  Preface.

  A few of you who have read Princess Royale that was released on Amazon Kindle more than a year ago maybe wondering why re-release the novel, albeit under a different title.

  Why bother?

  There are two reasons.

  The first is that the book now has a custom made cover. When I first released the story on Amazon Kindle back in 2015, I used a premade cover that fit the story content to some degree. However, I later discovered that the elements of the cover had already been used so I commissioned a custom cover.

  The second reason is that the story was not well received. To be specific, the numbers were so low they were practically insignificant. So why not take the opportunity to rewrite the story, and release it again. It wasn’t as if many people would mind. I have the numbers to back this up. But was my reason to rewrite because of the poor reception?

  No.

  My decision to rewrite it was because the story fell well short of my original vision for it.

  It was a story with potential that I proverbially fumbled and dropped the ball on. It lacked depth. It simply wasn’t even worth earning reviews. I felt that I had done this story a disservice. I let the characters down. It was time to make amends, and in order to do so I had to go back to my roots; to change my way of writing to the way I used to write. It was time to scrap the light novel approach. After all, this story originally came to life when I decided to post a quickly written light novel on Royal Road Legend (RRL), with the intention to write something easy to read, that fit alongside the genres being explored by many writers on RRL. But when I tried taking it, cleaning it up, and releasing it to mainstream readers it tanked. It was time to start from scratch, and get it right, or at the least to write it in a manner that was satisfying to my original vision of its breadth and scope.

  With these words, I can now present to you Book One of the Gun Princess Royale series, Awakening the Princess, the way I had envisioned and failed to deliver.

  I truly hope you enjoy it.

  Maps

  Intro.

  - I -

  I will be honest with you…my outfit embarrasses me.

  It is not unlike that worn by the other girls – the other Princesses – so in that respect I’m merely one of the pack.

  Truthfully, some of their costumes – for lack of a better word – are far more risqué and revealing than my attire.

  Yet it embarrasses me nonetheless while reminding me of what I have become, and of the body that has become my prison.

  It is a form fitting, skin hugging, bodysuit that covers me from torso to painted toes. A pastel blue bustier supports my large very fulsome breasts, exposing their tops and promoting a dangerous amount of cleavage. A cropped dark blue jacket offers me a degree of modesty. The shoulders are puffy and dark blue like the jacket, and my forearms and hands are sheathed in black gauntlets with a swirling gold pattern. The torso is light-grey with patches of black and white. The legs are a glossy black with faint tiger stripes of purplish-blue along the shins and calves, and the boots I wear are reinforced, oversized, and allow me to put my foot through a wall without injuring myself.

  In other words, I feel like an escapee from an action cartoon for teenage boys obsessed with overly buxom babes, or early twenty somethings that have never dated a girl in their lives and now fawn over two-dimensional females with oversized bosoms.

  I am being polite in calling them bosoms.

  There was a time a mere week ago when I would have called them by another less savory name, but now that I possess a large shapely pair, I can’t bring myself to refer to them impolitely.

  Oh how the tables have turned.

  The shoe – dare I say, the high heel – is most definitely on the other foot

  So as I stand before the photographer doing my best not to sweat under the intense lights of the studio, clad in my revealing Princess Regalia for the sake of a promotional shoot that will put me on the pages of a magazine read by hundreds of thousands of girls, I smile outwardly and cringe inwardly, and try not to think of how I was tossed out of the frying pan and into the fire by an accursed entity that was simply bored and decided I would serve to entertain it.

  Yes, I was toyed with by an accursed entity with a grudge and a chip on its shoulder….

  You may ask why am I participating in a photoshoot? We’ll get to that much, much later. Suffice to say that the person I am now is not the person that I was a week ago.

  You see last week I was a boy…and this week I’m a girl.

  Did I ever dream, fantasize, or desire to be a girl? I attest to you with wholehearted honesty that I did not.

  Did I ever consider what my life would be like had I been born female? Yes, I am compelled to grudgingly admit that is true and with good reason. Then again, I’m sure many a teenage boy has asked himself that question at one time or another.

  However, I will reiterate for the sake of posterity that at no point in my life did I ever want to be a girl.

  No, sir. Never.

  That begs the question of do I wish to remain a girl. Honestly…I just don’t know.

  So much has happened since that day that I have trouble keeping my finger on the pulse of reality, and there are times I look in the mirror and lose the ability to think coherently altogether.

  Some of you may read this and tell me that the Fates were at least kind as in the eyes of mortal men I am quite attractive. However, being the girl that I am now comes with a unique set of complications, and my life is far from a bed of roses.

  - II -

  Before I begin telling you how my life was unsuspectingly turned upside down and inside out in the span of one fateful afternoon, I should begin by telling you a little about myself, and about my immediate family.

  My family – and by no means were they unique – did not fit the defi
nition of normal. They were above normal, or should I say, beyond normal. To begin with, my parents were smarter than the average Jane and Joe, and that included my sister. My family belonged to the category of humans known as Alphas.

  More than a century ago, a very intelligent group of people discovered how to read a section of the black code of our human DNA – I refer to the significant percentage of our genome that doesn’t code proteins, the so-called noncoding DNA – and made a notable breakthrough. Without delving deeply into the details – quite simply because I don’t understand them beyond layman’s terms – these very smart people figured out how to read these few pages of code in our genome and decided to make some changes for the better.

  They gave birth to a means of recoding the human brain, and essentially bootstrapping it to a higher level of processing capacity. It was the equivalent of upgrading the CPU on your computer except they were working with human minds, arguably one of the smartest computers in the universe. I say arguably because the large grey men that humanity succeeded in pissing off when they ventured well beyond their home solar system would undoubtedly say that humanity was a collective of simpletons by comparison.

  I agree.

  Compared to the angry grey men, humanity wasn’t in the same intellectual league. We weren’t lagging behind them by a country mile, but we certainly trailed in their technological wake. So when these relatively smart humans discovered how to make a percentage of the population smarter, they began to shorten, hand over fist, the lead the angry grey men had on humanity.

  And the war began to swing in our favor.

  That was a hundred years ago and the war is still ongoing, but now it’s been pushed out into the far reaches of the ever expanding human held territories. In many respects it’s so far out of sight and mind that it rarely makes the headlines, though it’s far from being a footnote on the news channels. Yet while much of humanity spares little thought for the war, at this very moment the crews of the immense battlefortresses that venture forth into harm’s way to protect our borders, engage in that distant ignored conflict with the angry grey men.

  Why is the war still with us?

  Well, because the angry grey men were tougher than anyone gave them credit, and they were stubborn enough to refuse humanity’s attempts to bring the war to a diplomatic end. I also suspect, as do many war reporters and correspondents, that humanity had become the tiger playing with its food. Sooner or later, humanity would triumph. They just had to be careful about how they went about it, and avoid any sudden surprises such as cataclysmic plagues, planet killing events, et cetera.

  However, our war with the angry grey men isn’t part of my story. At least, it’s not part of what I want to tell you. I’m simply pointing out that when the genome breakthrough took place, some humans got smarter while others didn’t. This caused a disparity within the species known as humanity that went beyond race, social, or monetary distinctions.

  This was about smarts, and the Alphas were at the top of the intelligence pyramid, followed by the Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and finally those that no amount of bootstrapping would free from the chains of mediocrity – the Menials. In other words, the Menials were immune to the bootstrapping, and were relegated the status of not having a status beyond belonging to a collective mass of people that lived lives, contributed in their own humble way, but would never make the ground-breaking achievements of the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, or even the Deltas.

  I do make it sound like a meritocracy but it is not. True, people got smarter but very little changed otherwise. Societal injustice and inequality are as rampant now as centuries ago, as is the false adage that greed is good.

  Now let me tell you about my family.

  My parents and sister were smart enough to qualify for the Alpha category. They were bootstrapped in their late teens, and went on to make worthwhile contributions to the human species. My parents went into the research fields of trans-light mechanics. They were chasing the hitherto unachieved depths of trans-space where outside relative distances in the universe became so small as to be insignificant. It was the holy grail of space travel – to be able to move between vast distances in the blink of an eye. My sister’s interests lay elsewhere and so she entered the scientific realm of human genetic engineering. My sister wanted to help humanity reach new heights beyond what bootstrapping their minds had achieved.

  Thus in their own separate ways, my family was looking to better the lives of their fellow humans. Perhaps they were intending to leave behind an enduring legacy of scientific achievement. But whether their intentions were altruistic or not, I cannot say because I had little contact with them. They were special and I was not. As such my existence was far removed from theirs.

  In fact, before my life ended and began anew, I had barely qualified for the Delta category, and could look forward to a productive life working for some company, perhaps marrying and siring offspring, before eventually passing away and beginning a new journey in the afterlife. Or maybe I’d be re-incarnated for another attempt at life in this realm that we humans perceive as reality.

  I feel depressed when encapsulating my life that could have been in such a fashion.

  Perhaps it was better that things turned out the way they did.

  At the very least, you could say my life this past week has been a Hellish roller coaster ride with no end, but at the least it hasn’t been boring.

  Now I’ll tell you a little about the me from before the incident.

  - III -

  My name was Ronin Kassius.

  When the literally life changing event took place, I was fifteen standard years old going on sixteen, and a first-year high schooler attending Telos Academy on Telos Island just off the east coast of the northern continent, scarcely a kilometer away from the sprawling city-state of Ar Telica, on the world of Teloria, the fourth planet of an eleven world solar system.

  At the time of writing, Teloria was one of fourteen colonized planets across a dozen star systems that had been partially terraformed through human ingenuity to make them habitable for people. They weren’t perfect, at least not perfect in the way Earth was millennia ago, but they were capable of sustaining human life with a minimum of fuss. In fact, Teloria was darn close to what the Earth was like before it was over populated and over polluted.

  In keeping with learning from our mistakes, the planet was being slowly colonized, and the human stain – I mean footprint – across its surface was thus far restricted to a total of seven city-states – five on the east coast of the northern continent, and two on the west coast. Also, our technology was far better now than it had been on Earth two centuries ago so over pollution was something we were quite capable of preventing thanks to the smarts of many Alphas and Betas. In short, our recycling technologies were top notch.

  That’s a little about the world I live in.

  However, as I was saying, I was an almost sixteen year old, male high school student at Telos Academy, a rather prestigious school within the city-state limits of Ar Telica. It wasn’t the only school in the city-state – there were eleven others – but it was considered one of the best, and all my immediate family had been students there at one time or another. I expected to graduate from the Academy in three years time, and possibly head on to tertiary education, before finding a job and making a life and family of my own.

  That was the basic plan, until Fate put its foot down and intervened.

  Fate can be such a bitch.

  To say I was manly would be a stretch of the definition.

  At five foot one, I was considered short for a first year high school student. In fact, there were some girls in my class that were taller than me and probably stronger. In other words, I wasn’t manly at all. I had disappointingly girlish looks that landed me in hot water during my last year of middle school when the girls of the high school Cosplay Club coerced me into cross-playing for them during the opening week of club recruitments. I ended up wearing a princess outfit from a popular an
imated show, and paraded about with a placard advertising the Cosplay Club. I was so convincing as a girl that I received a number of invitations from the high school boys to eat lunch with them, or meet them for cake or snacks after school.

  I will admit that until the time of the incident, I’d never been more terrified in my life until I faced the prospect of being beaten up by large, burly high school boys when they discovered my true gender and identity. It sent me into a panic that had me fleeing down the hallways and onto the rooftops on the third day. Back then I’d resolved never to dress as a girl while male, and it was a truly frightening experience that somewhat scarred me both mentally and physically for much of the year. The club girls probably understood this because they promised never to reveal my identity as the Silver Blue Princess. In hindsight, I should have made them sign a legally binding agreement with the penalty of being sued for damages if they broke said agreement – just to be safe.

  Was I unhappy with my school life?

  No, but I can’t say I was happy either.

  I apologize for sounding ambivalent, but truthfully I wasn’t friendless or ostracized, as evidenced by the fact that many of the girls in my class were eager to include me in conversations, but it was undoubtedly because they didn’t consider me a threat or person of interest the way other boys in my class were viewed. In other words, they were comfortable around me probably because they didn’t see me as boyfriend material. To that end, they treated me like one of them, and more often than not forgot that I was a boy at all.

  Have I mentioned that I had girlish looks? Well, I did and until the events of this week, I was almost always confused for being a girl when I went shopping on my own.

  However with respect to my school existence, I found the girls’ attitude toward me unsettling and disappointing to say the least, but I had grown to accept it by telling myself that one day my turn would come and Mother Nature would give me the growth spurt I was long overdue. One day, I would be a man’s man, so to speak. But for now, I wasn’t manly and that meant that my chances of scoring highly with a girl were close to zero. I was friends with them, but not the kind of friend that I wanted to be.