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

look tired,” I said, and she nodded, leaning back and stretching. We’d been woken up from deep sleep when the dungeon runners arrived, and now the night was almost gone.

“I am,” she agreed. “If you don’t need me for the moment, I think I’ll go back to bed.”

I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “I’m awake now, and I think I’ll grab a coffee and see what’s next. I feel pretty buzzed after our first fight.”

Kyrine went up the stairs and headed back toward my rooms. It had been designed as my bedroom, but I was already starting to think of it as ours. At first, Kyrine had been more likely to retreat to her dungeon core to rest, but recently she was spending more and more time in her avatar form and seemed to be enjoying the pleasures of having a body again.

I could smell coffee, and I walked to the kitchen, where I found Amanda, Belinda, Astrid, and Selena sitting round the big table with a fresh pot of coffee in front of them.

“That was something else,” I said as I poured a cup for myself and sank down onto a seat.

“It went well then?” asked Selena eagerly. She had helped me create the portal dungeon, using her extensive knowledge of computer gaming to guide me in the kinds of things a dungeon runner would expect from the experience.

“It went great,” I said, and proceeded to tell them all about what had happened.

When I was finished, daylight was coming in the kitchen window and the morning was progressing. They all sat back in silence

“Before you came in, we were discussing the dungeons, and what might happen to the world when loads of people started increasing their levels beyond cap,” said Belinda. “I guess this successful first run brings that a bit closer.”

“Not before time,” muttered Amanda, who had put her career on the line to get the information about the dungeon out to potential dungeon adventurer teams. All the women nodded agreement at that.

Astrid got out of her seat and came over to me, taking both my hands and planting a bold kiss on my lips. “I’m so proud of all you’ve achieved!” she said.

I caught a twist of a smile from Selena, but she glanced away quickly, and I wondered if Astrid had told her about the threesome Kyrine, Astrid, and I had enjoyed together a few days earlier.

If so, I hoped she wouldn’t be jealous. I knew Selena was interested in me that way— she’d said as much— but we’d never followed it up. The way she looked at us just now made me think that she probably did know about it, and the fact that she’d smiled suggested that she was pleased for us rather than jealous.

Now was not the time to get her take on it, however.

“I’m proud of it all too,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it without you guys, but we need to think about what we do next.”

I told them about what the adventurers had said about getting dungeon cores into the loot system for the mansion, and the idea Kyrine had suggested as a solution.

“Having a population of real monsters and magical creatures in the grounds would be great,” I said, “but I don’t know how we’d actually get them in there.”

“There’s the Blackwood mountain range not far from here,” said Selena. “That’s full of monsters. Hunters go there all the time to harvest cores. Perhaps we could get some from there?”

“Perhaps,” I said doubtfully, “but I don’t like the idea of having to transport live monsters from the mountains. It would be time-consuming and difficult. We’d need cages, stun guns, a bigger vehicle…”

“What about a portal?” Amanda suggested. We all looked at her.

“A portal?” I asked with interest. “What are you thinking?”

Amanda sat forward, smiling. “Remember the communication portal station we set up near here?”

I did remember now. It had completely slipped my mind. In the months before I had arrived at the dungeon, the agents had communicated with EDI headquarters through a magical portal set up in an abandoned electrical substation not far from the mansion. They used it to pass file folders and small pieces of equipment through, keeping information more secure than it would have been online.

Amanda reached into her pocket and pulled out a small metal cube. It was dull gray and featureless, just about the right size to fit neatly in her hand. She put it on the table in front of her and pressed the top.

There was a noise like water dripping into sizzling fat, and a hiss of smoke. The little cube expanded, four legs folding out like a mini transformer from the base, and a red-light diode appearing on the top. It hummed gently in the middle of the table.

“What is it?” I asked, fascinated.

“It’s the portal generator from the substation. I went there and deactivated the connection on our way here. If you have two of them, you can program them to communicate with each other. They’re totally stable, and once the portal is active, they can’t be moved unless you have the access key.”

“But surely this only creates a small portal, not something big enough for monsters to come through?”

“Oh, that’s only because of the limiter that’s put on the power unit. It’s easy enough to remove. Then you can have a much bigger portal.”

“This is great!” I said. “All we need is another unit. If we ask Kyrine to absorb this, then she’ll be able to create as many as we need.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Amanda. “Someone will need to actually go there initially to set up the portal, but once it’s in place nothing will move it unless you choose to let it.”

“I couldn’t have thought of a better solution!” I said. “Once we