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

thing is for them to leave having had a good experience,” I insisted to Kyrine. “If we kill them, they won’t come back. Amanda Fallon went to a lot of trouble to get the information about us out there. If we kill this group of dungeon runners, we’ll have to do all that again.”

Kyrine grumbled and sulked, but she submitted to my requests.

I watched the team gathering loot from the statue chamber, filling their pockets and bags with bullion, coins, and old-style Eosorean jewelry. They chatted excitedly about the potions and upgrades they were going to buy when they got back to the city, and that was reassuring to me. My only worry had been that they might take their wealth and retire after one run, but the fact that they were into potions and armor upgrades told me that I didn’t have to worry about that.

I was being careful speaking now. We’d had a couple of moments earlier when the adventurers had heard our voices, so I made sure to keep a laser focus when I spoke with Kyrine.

“They’ll be back,” I assured Kyrine. “And when the Technomancer comes to play, we’ll have the opportunity to do some real killing.”

She brightened up at that. “Ooh, I’d almost forgotten about him!” she said. “Yes, we’ll get a boost then.”

“Speaking of boosts…”

I brought up my Personal Cultivation System, looking at the stats for the portal dungeon. The dungeon runners had levelled it up, and there was now the option to add another chamber to the experience.

“Once these runners are out, we’ll have to create the added chamber,” I said. “We don’t want the dungeon to just be the same when they come back.”

“Shh… listen to what they’re saying,” said Kyrine.

I stopped talking, dismissing my PCS screen and turning my attention to the dungeon runners. They were walking back up the corridor, weighted down with gold.

The ranged expert, the big half-ogre called Josh, was speaking. He was the one who, to my great satisfaction, had brought Samuel Adams lager as tribute. I got the impression the others had thought this was silly, but I was very pleased with the gift. Kyrine did not have anything in the way of modern drinks in her database. No matter how much refined Eosorean brandy she could provide, a chilled bottle of Samuel Adams was my still favorite.

“You know what would be good loot?” said Josh.

“What?” asked his brother.

“Monster cores,” replied Josh.

“Monster cores?” said Sarah. “But you couldn’t expect those in a dungeon, surely. That’s not how it works!”

“Just saying,” said Josh with a shrug. “If there was a way to get monster cores as loot, we wouldn’t have to carry all this gold. Monster cores are worth a lot of dough. This gold is going to raise some questions when we try to sell it, but cores wouldn’t.”

They lapsed into silence and I could almost hear Kyrine thinking the same question as I was thinking: how could we get monster cores into the mansion as loot?

The monsters we summoned in the dungeon experience were just that—summoned creatures with no cores. Only real, unsummoned magical creatures had cores, and I doubted that it would be possible to get a menagerie of real creatures in one of our portal dungeons.

“We could have them in the grounds,” said Kyrine thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Monsters. If we could get some real monsters, we could have them populate the mansion’s grounds. That way dungeon runners could fight real monsters in the grounds before they even got inside the mansion.”

I didn’t even feel surprised that Kyrine had been aware of my thoughts. We were so closely psychically bonded that it took effort for us to detach our minds from each other. As we watched the dungeon adventurers leave, I thought it over.

“It would be great to have the adventurers able to fight monsters in the grounds too,” I said, “but it would be a risk because we wouldn’t have any control over them, not the way we do with the monsters in the portal dungeon.”

I felt Kyrine’s mental shrug. “Anyone who comes ready to fight in a dungeon should be able to fight monsters off,” she said. “And anyway, it might bring people who were interested purely in real creature fighting and core harvesting. If they killed creatures in the grounds, that would give me big mana boosts as well.”

“And I guess we could create environmental barriers in the grounds—walls, hedges, that kind of thing—to keep the monsters contained if we wanted to.”

“Exactly!” said Kyrine, sounding excited.

“And that just leaves the question of how to get them into the grounds in the first place…”

We watched the dungeon runners leave.

I looked out after them as they walked to the gate, then left, the woman who led them waving a hand behind her as they headed out into the world again. It was still dark, but there was a glimmer of light above the hills off in the distance. The sun would be up soon.

“Let’s get back to the mansion,” I suggested, and together, Kyrine and I detached ourselves from the portal dungeon’s viewpoint. When we were there, we were out of our bodies, and we became the sentient consciousness of the dungeon, aware of its every move and monster. Now, we were back in the mansion’s main hall, in our separate bodies.

I detached the portal dungeon from the mansion’s main entrance, and the little nugget of polished green ghost jade that contained the dungeon materialized in my hand. I grinned and tossed it up in the air then caught it again, before slipping it into the pocket of my jeans.

Kyrine looked satisfied with herself. She gave me a fond smile. “I’ll never stop being grateful that the agents found me such a good Keeper,” she said, coming over and giving me a kiss.

“You