Ursa Major by Naomi Lucas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Terraform Zero, a virtual reality colonization game, has swept the galaxy by storm. The Champions are household names that give humanity hope. Vee Miles believes she is good enough to compete amongst them, but the costly entrance fee is holding her back.

Enter the Earthian Planetary Exploration Division.

Still reeling from a publicity nightmare named Zeph, the corporation is desperate to change the public’s opinions toward Cyborgs. They offer to sponsor Vee. The EPED gets the PR boost, and she gets to keep the prize money. The EPED’s deal comes with strings though, and she has to pretend to be a made-up Cyborg shifting bear named Cypher.

A male that had the look of a Viking space warrior, with enough scars and otherworldly brawn to make any woman swoon. An imaginary male that makes her heart race…

Little does she know she’s being used as bait to lure the real Cypher from his den.

He’s out now.

He’s coming for her, and there’s no place virtual or otherwise for her to hide.

Ursa Major

Indestructible Hero!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🩵🖤❤️💜💚
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☺️😍🥰😁😋

The heroine: Vee – she had always loved cyborgs and had been obsessed with their heroics since she was young. Though she had never seen one in real life until she went to the EPED (Earthian Planetary Exploration Division) to get corporate sponsorship for her bit to play Terraform Zero, a virtual reality colonization game, in the championships. She felt out of place when she met with Nightheart in his classy office. Vee was one of the few solo players that had made it as far as she had. She never had the friends or the money to align with others and did not have the funds to play in the championship without the sponsorship.

The Hero: Cypher – he is a cyborg shifter. His other form is a Bear. He “hibernates” much of the time, which is to say, he goes out of himself to monitor the networks and security feeds around him make sure nothing gets in that he doesn’t know about. He is the watcher of Ghost City, which is a gigantic city ship and a mecca for cyborgs.

“Part of him was Ghost City. He was the data hound and security expert, but he also relayed information to his brethren seeking entry. It was a needed haven for a people who had no real home, no real place to go after the war. Without war, or a common enemy, Cyborgs had little else to focus on. Many of his kind struggled to find their way.”

The Story: Nightheart offered Vee the sponsorship, and enough money for her to play in the championship in style with money left over afterwards, if she didn’t win. He also promised that a job would be offered to her as well with the EPED or one of its partners. Though there was one caveat, she had to have a made-up partner for her championship bid, a cyborg named Cypher. She was told that it would help represent cyborgs in a good light after one that was employed by the EPED kidnapped a woman and a child not long ago. Vee readily agreed to the terms.

“Even with their current tenuous reputation, they were still fabled war heroes. Fantasies made flesh. Only a thousand or so existed throughout the universe. Not only were they otherworldly with superhero-like abilities, but they were also incredibly rare.
And incredibly strong and incredibly deadly. They lived long lives, were exceptionally hard to kill, and were enhanced with the finest technology humans had ever created.
We made gods.
Literal, breathing gods.
Hecking heroes.”

Though it turned out Cyper wasn’t a fake cyborg that EPED just made up for the sake of publicity, he was real and Nightheart had been trying to recruit him for years, but Cypher refused to leave Ghost. However, when he saw that his classified information, including his picture was all over the network about him being entered in the Terraform Zero championships, Cypher leaves Ghost to find whoever has been impersonating him and releasing his information.

I have been really liking this series, most specifically because every book is basically a standalone and they are all so different. Each of the cyborg shifters shifts into a different mechanical animal, and the settings for each of the books is completely different as is the main conflict. The fact that the Heroes are all nearly indestructible alpha male hotties does not hurt either. I love that they can do so much, from getting inside almost any technology and appropriating it for their own purposes, to changing into a huge metal beast that can kill almost anything, to being able to overcome injuries that would kill most humans. Plus, there are some very steamy intimate scenes as well.

The one thing I didn’t understand and didn’t seem consistent in this series was the fact that in the last book I read Ashes and Metal, Gunner saved Elodie from a bomb and got his back torn to shreds, right down to his metal frame, and though it mentioned the skin growing back right away, it didn’t mention anything about him being scarred. There was also a scene where he cuts off his own thumb, and that grew back, even the metal beneath his skin. So, I don’t understand how Cypher got scars on his body during the war.

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