Monster Mansion 2 by Dante King (best way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

night, because Sarah had figured that the denizens of the suburb where Kyrine was hiding would not be thrilled to see a bunch of heavily armed outlanders in their neighborhood.

As they were getting their gear out of the boot, Todd and Josh were arguing in whispers.

“The Technomancer is real!” Josh asserted, but Todd was shaking his head.

“It’s a myth,” Todd said, as he hauled his warhammer out of the boot and leaned it against the car. Todd was a healer, and he had a range of potions on a clip belt around his waist. Another belt crossed his chest, with hard polymer vials full of stims, painkillers, and healing potions. He still wanted to be able to deal damage if he needed to, however, so he carried his big brass-plated warhammer into every fight.

Josh, whose specialty was ranged support, was fitting a quiver of crossbow bolts over one shoulder. He had a crossbow in his hand, a huge thing that could fire enchanted bolts as well as regular heavy steel ones. He had an axe at his belt for close work, and a pair of long-barreled enchanted pistols slung in holsters on his belt like some fantastic half-troll cowboy.

Sarah was clipping armor on over her regular clothes. She was armed to the teeth, with daggers, deployable caltrops, two smaller one-handed swords, and the massive two-handed sword that was her most prized possession. Her armor was Kevlar mesh overlaid with plate steel, enchanted so that she felt the weight of it as little as possible. The steel would stop swords, but the Kevlar inlaid below would stop a bullet. It covered every part of her body, and her helmet had a visor that she could lower, completely protecting her face.

All of this was essential for a dungeon diver. Though the only dungeons they ran were simulations, the VR programs were designed so that blows, bullets, and spells all behaved the same as they would in real life. The only difference was that they didn’t kill.

There would be no such quarter given in a real dungeon, Sarah was sure of that.

“What do you say, boss?” asked Josh, interrupting Sarah’s thoughts as she closed up the vehicle. She glanced at him, feeling annoyed. The brothers had been bickering since they’d gotten on the road, and she felt she had more important things to worry about right now. “What do I think about what?” she asked irritably, locking the car and stepping away.

Josh didn’t seem to notice her tone. He hefted his crossbow on his back and followed her. “Do you think the Technomancer is the real deal, or do you think it’s just a hoax?”

Sarah didn’t answer at first.

They began to make their way slowly up the hill. The brothers had been griping at each other about the existence of the Technomancer for most of the drive. He was an urban legend in the city. Young, ambitious cultivators would disappear, or kids who got addicted to stim potions would vanish without a trace.

Rumors were that there was a man who ruled an empire of potion-dealing, getting the young people hooked or offering quick power boosts to those who wanted them. He was supposed to have a network of ‘takers,’ people who roamed the streets and trapped naïve or unsuspecting youths into his service. Once he had them in his clutches, it was said that he performed the most horrendous experiments on them, bending them to his will with mind-altering potions and powerful meta-implants that took over parts of their brains.

Sarah had always thought it was bullshit until…

“You remember Bobby Delray?” she asked quietly.

“Sure,” said Josh. “That kid who used to live near where we grew up. Yeah, I remember him, nice kid. What happened to him? I don’t see him around anymore.”

“He died,” Sarah replied bluntly. “He went missing for a couple months, everyone thought he’d run away. But then he was found, wandering in some waste ground not far from Byron’s Arcade, you know the place?”

“Shit, yeah,” said Todd. “I know the place. Where they demolished the old apartment blocks and never built anything to replace them. Wait a minute, what do you mean, ‘wandering’?”

Sarah shrugged. “Just wandering about in circles, mumbling. He was all cut up, but carefully cut, like someone had tried to do surgery on him. They’d put implants into his head, but it hadn’t worked. He had a partially fried meta-chip in his right frontal lobe, and someone had removed his left eye. There were bits of magitech neurocircuitry on his back, as if someone had tried to create an artificial neural network and failed. He kept saying that one word, over and over again… ‘Technomancer. Technomancer.’ He died in the hospital three days later. They never found who did it.”

“Bullshit!” scoffed Josh. “Who told you that? That’s not like you to believe a story like that, boss, come on. I thought better of you!”

Sarah cut his laugh off when she turned to glare at him.

“No one told me,” she said shortly. “I found him.”

There was a long silence as they plodded up the road, keeping to the shadows under the trees that lined the wide road on each side. The houses here were all laid well back from the road, and many of them had walls around them. Here and there, Amanda saw a light on in an upstairs room, and once she heard a dog bark, but mostly all was silent.

“How come you never told us about this before?” Josh asked quietly.

“It was years ago,” said Amanda. “Before the rumors about the Technomancer became a thing. It was before I knew you guys well, and to be honest I kind of wanted to forget about it. It was pretty fucked up. I liked Bobby, you know?” She shivered. “I’ve not thought about it in years. Why are you so interested in the