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

sinking deep in, but the spider did not stop. It tried to take Sarah’s legs out with a sweeping low blow, but she jumped in the air to avoid it and replied with a double swing of her sword. The first swing took off the rest of the spider’s maimed leg at the root, and the second went wide as the spider screamed and flung itself backward.

Sarah dived in, and the tip of her sword caught the creature’s eyes, tracing a line of blood across the piled bank of eyes. Several of them went out, and blood and green pus bubbled from the wound.

The spider howled in pain and redoubled its attack, forcing Sarah to give ground while she regained her balance. Josh’s crossbow rang again, the bolt whistling past her and thudding into the wound she’d just created on the spider’s face. The monster reeled for a moment, its eyes flickering and its legs waving about in the air.

It sprang backward and tried to flee. The spider was fast. Sarah heard Todd’s shout from behind her, “Lightning speed!” She braced for the spell’s impact, and a moment after his shout she felt it, a powerful speed buff that wrapped her in a shimmering red energy. The speed buff wouldn’t last for long, so she made good use of it. A blast of momentum carried her forward, her sword lowered like a lance.

The spider hurried away from her, but she was too quick under the influence of Todd’s spell. Her sword plunged into the monster’s head and she drove it through, then wrenched it back out and brought the edge down in a massive two-handed stroke to cleave the creature’s head almost in two.

Writhing, the wreck of the gigantic spider crashed to the ground, spurting blood and spilling guts in a slippery mess all over the cave floor. Sarah leaped back and turned, just in time to see a spinning blade coming at her head. Instinct brought her sword up and the spinning blade rang against it before careening off into the darkness of the hall.

Then another one came, this time from the left. Again, she deflected it, then a third, and then a fourth.

“They won’t stop coming!” she yelled. She could feel the Lightning Speed buff wearing off now, and she needed all of its power to keep deflecting the flying blades.

“It’s the spider!” she heard Josh shout. “The spider must be lying on the trigger for the flying blades!”

Sarah danced away from the spider, new blades flying at her from all directions as Todd and Josh both dashed over to the spider’s corpse. The two half-ogre brothers were very strong, and together they heaved the body of the spider up and out of the way.

As they did so, they revealed a metal plate set into the ground, with a rune shaped like a dagger inlaid into it. Once the spider was no longer lying on the plate, the blades stopped flying.

Just as well, because the Lightning Speed buff was about to finish, and Sarah knew it had a long cooldown— Todd wouldn’t be able to use it again for a good while.

“That was quite something!” Sarah panted, grinning and leaning on her blade. She looked around the chamber. Suddenly, there was a tinkling sound and they saw a little stream of gold coins falling to the ground. They fell from six feet in the air, looking as if they were magically appearing out of thin air.

Sarah walked warily over and picked a few of them up. They were thick, heavy gold, with the face of an outworlder man on one side and three lines of text in a flowing script on the other side.

“They real gold?” said Josh as he came up.

Sarah held one up to the light. “I’d say so. Congratulations, lads, we’ve got our first dungeon loot. Let’s get some more.”

They collected up the coins and moved deeper into the chamber, keeping an eye out for traps. As they walked, Sarah’s foot knocked against something. Looking down, she realized it was one of the blades that had been flying at her. She crouched to pick it up and look at it more closely.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “That’s a nice touch.”

“What?” said Todd, moving closer to see.

Sarah held it out and Todd began to laugh. It was a throwing axe just like the ones that the adventurers had left at the door as tribute.

They looked back toward the entrance. Their tributes were gone.

“The dungeon must have absorbed them, and now she’s throwing them right back at us,” said Sarah with a chuckle. “That really is smart.”

They could feel the dungeon’s approval as they moved through the vaulted chamber. As they went, they picked up the discarded axes. Josh looked at them with interest, and he stuck a few of them through his belt. “I’ll take something out with one of these before I leave here,” he swore.

It was not long before he got his chance.

There were three doors in the hallway, one in each wall. The adventurers walked to the center one first. Sarah tried it without much hope, and sure enough it didn’t move. There was something carved into the wood.

Todd went over to one of the torches on the wall, lifted it from its sconce and brought it back, holding it up so the light shone on the wood. It was a big number 3.

“Do the other two have numbers?” Sarah wondered, an idea coming to her as she thought about it. When they explored the other two doors, they found that it was so. The one on the left had a big number 2 carved into the wood.

“I bet the other one has a number 1, and that’s the order we need to open them in.”

They walked over to the door on the right, and sure