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

through the air like Thor’s hammer, trailing lighting before it smashed into the lizard’s open maw. Yelling wordlessly, Sarah unsheathed her two-handed longsword.

One swing took a goblin’s head off, and the backstroke cut another one with such force that he was cut clean in two, green goblin cuts slipping wetly to the floor with a hissing squelch.

The lizard was down, and Sarah leaped toward it. She brought her sword down and beheaded it, then chopped again to take off its tail. Shifting her sword into her left hand, she lifted the bladed tail and smashed it into the face of one of the three remaining goblins.

He fell back, clutching at his face. There were only two left, and they raised their guns to fire at her. Magical lightning crashed into her again, scoring her armor and knocking her off balance, but she barely felt it.

She crashed into them, knocking one flying. The other died with her sword in his guts, and when she yanked the blade out it brought a stream of green blood whipping through the air with it.

The last goblin howled and tried to run, but Sarah caught its neck with the tip of her blade and it staggered a few steps before falling on its face.

“Look out, boss!” she heard Todd yell, and looking up she saw two more mobs coming at her from the other side of the chamber. Where had they come from? It didn’t matter. She grabbed up two of the goblins’ MP5s from where they lay on the ground. She felt her own mana pool respond to their magical enhancements.

Sarah was not a cultivator, but like everyone she did have a mana pool. Her pool was deep in comparison to some people, and it was only her interest in melee combat that had stopped her from pursuing the magical path. Now, she was glad of her mana pool, because she knew that the rifles would draw on that for their power. The goblins would have been using the dungeon’s limitless mana pool to power the weapons, but Sarah did not have that advantage. Instinct told her that she had maybe twenty rounds’ worth of mana in her, not more.

Gripping one gun in each hand, she walked steadily toward the charging mob, firing both guns from the hip. The mob was mixed, goblins and spiders and smaller versions of the lizard she’d fought in the boss chamber.

She unloaded on them, feeling the exhilarating power of the lightning blasts rushing from her mana pool to the guns and out into the chamber. The blasts tore through the advancing mob, sending goblin brains and spider guts and lizard bits everywhere in a gory cloud.

The guns made a satisfying snapping noise each time they fired, and the Storm Spheres lit the cave with an eerie, blue-white glow as they flew through the air.

Josh and Todd attacked the mob from the rear, Todd wading in swinging his warhammer about and shouting battle cries, and Josh flinging throwing axes and firing off his last few crossbow bolts.

Sarah reached the corpse of the lizard. Her mace was there, stuck in the creature’s mouth. She had only two blasts left in her mana pool, so she dropped one gun and lifted the other, looking for the switch that would change spells.

There it was. She flicked it, changing it from Storm Sphere to Fireball. When she raised the gun and blasted two rounds of Fireball into the writing mass of wounded and dying monsters, they went up like oil-soaked paper with a loud whoosh!

Suddenly, there was an eerie silence in the chamber. Sarah dropped the gun with a clatter and retrieved her mace. Weariness hit her in a wave, and suddenly Todd was beside her, pressing a potion into her hand.

“What’s this?” she said.

“Stim potion,” he replied. “My last one.”

She nodded her thanks and drank it down, feeling the fatigue leave her immediately.

The three adventurers stood in the middle of the dungeon and looked at each other, smiling. Flames flickered from the pile of burning corpses, and an acrid smoke was drifting up to the vaulted chamber roof.

They all looked at the second and third boss doors.

“Next time?” suggested Sarah.

“Next time,” the brothers agreed in unison. Todd had a bad burn on his chest, and Josh was bleeding from a wounded leg. Todd was already breaking out the last few healing potions. They would all soon be well again, but it would be foolhardy to take on a new boss chamber without a good supply of potions in hand.

Time to collect their loot and get on the road, Sarah thought.

Sarah looked at her companions, thinking of the coins, bullion, and jewelry laid out in the first boss chamber, not to mention all the coins lying about here in the main hall.

“How much gold can you carry?” she asked.

They both grinned. “Lots,” they replied.

It took them a while, but eventually they staggered out of the dungeon, weighted down with coins and bullion. Sarah’s new mace hung over her shoulder, and Todd and Josh had two magitech MP5s each.

They had done it. It had been a near thing at points, but they had done the first successful run and loot grab in a real dungeon for over a century.

They had made history.

Chapter 15

Kyrine and I watched the dungeon adventurers leave from within the sentient dungeon awareness point of view. From here, I could feel every part of the portal dungeon I’d created. I was the dungeon. Kyrine was here too, her awareness meshed with mine, but I had control over what happened, and she was obliged to do as I instructed.

She had wanted to kill the adventurers, or at least fling more monsters at them as they gathered their loot and prepared to leave, but I forbade it.

“The most important