Southwest Days (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 2) by Kal Aaron (best book recommendations TXT) 📕

head of a large snake-roach out of her way and crept forward. Small fires burned all around the chamber, fueled by the bodies, slime, and whatever strange fungus the monsters farmed for food. She’d blown enough of the area clean of anything to not have to worry about getting trapped by flames, though she doubted if hanging out in the area was recommended by the Surgeon General.

“It’s good to be thorough.” Lyssa waved more smoke out of her face while keeping one gun in front of her at all times.

She circled the chamber, her lungs challenged by her attempts to not breathe through her nose but take shallow breaths to avoid inhaling too much smoke. The air in the mine had been stale even before she started trying to set fire to the whole place.

“Huh,” she murmured. “If there is a nest here, maybe they’re newer than I thought. That many of them could have dug to the surface easily in a short time.” She looked around. “But I’m not feeling any sorcery. Whoever did this isn’t hanging out with their pets. The question is whether he’s going to come back.”

“Perhaps he had an issue with the smell,” Jofi replied. “If it’s as bad as you claim.”

Lyssa snickered. “Could be. Maybe this whole thing is an abandoned mistake.”

Her explosive barrage had rearranged the topography of the chamber, flattening most of the mounds and leaving charred rubble mixed in among the plentiful piles of dead monsters. Before, the ground had been soft, but now it crunched under her boots as if she were walking on dried twigs.

“Yet another reason for a gas mask.” Lyssa nudged a pair of monster legs to her side. “You know the one thing I’ve managed to avoid as a Torch?”

“I can’t say,” Jofi replied. “There are too many possibilities, and I’m not familiar with all the potential ones.”

“Having to go into a sewer.” Lyssa shuddered. “But this was close. I’m not sure if it’s worse. Obnoxious.”

Two complete circuits of the room followed before Lyssa nodded to herself, satisfied she’d destroyed the nest and all the eggs. Just as she lowered her guns, loud skittering sounded from different sides of the room.

“Of course,” she complained. “They’re going to make me work for it.”

Lyssa jerked up her weapons and pointed at the sound. It was coming from the tunnels. There couldn’t be many monsters left alive, but she couldn’t risk leaving even a single survivor. She’d not spotted anything that looked like a queen, so for all she knew, any of them might be able to lay eggs, or a breeding pair had survived. Maybe the size differences were based on gender.

A snake-roach emerged from a tunnel halfway up a wall, and Lyssa put a bullet into its head before it landed on the ground. It landed with a thump, its green blood splattering around it.

Another monster emerged right after the first and suffered the same fate. She emptied a gun, picking off the snake-roaches that were trying to flood the room. The deaths created a temporary waterfall of dead slimy horrors piling up on one side of the chamber, with none of the enemy showing any restraint or concern. Whatever lesson the others had learned hadn’t been passed on to the rest of the colony.

Sometimes luck played out in odd ways. That day, it was represented by monsters not rising to hamster-level intelligence. Something approaching doglike intelligence might have been too much to handle without help.

A second and third group of snake-roaches erupted from different parts of the chamber. Lyssa reloaded her first gun and aimed both weapons in different directions. This job had long ceased being a simple exercise.

She opened fire and killed the reinforcements, including a handful of larger snake-roaches. Their face-first emergence from the tunnel made them easy to eliminate.

Lyssa’s guns fell silent again as the stream of reinforcements abated. The battle left three gore-covered mounds spread around the edges of the room and the walls covered with green blood. The new deaths had also brought back her least favorite smell. She hissed in irritation.

Reloading again, she took stock of her ammo situation. She had a couple of conventional rounds left in one gun and a full magazine in her second, but there were no regular magazines left. Even the most ruthless cartel or terrorist group didn’t have enough expendable lackeys that running out of ammo was typically a concern. Her last monster hunt had been far more straightforward.

Among her remaining enchanted ammunition magazines, the explosive rounds were spent, but she still carried three magazines each of ablative and penetrator rounds, along with the always present dark temptation, a single mostly empty magazine containing three showstopper rounds.

“Next time I go on a monster hunt,” Lyssa said, “remind me to bring more ammo. I liked it better when we took down that big alligator thing on Santa Catalina. He was a lot tougher, but at least there was only one of him. Right now, I wish I had an exterminator suit.”

“It’s hard to know what might be necessary for any given encounter,” Jofi replied. “But your efforts appear to have been sufficient in this case.”

“That remains to be proven.” Lyssa smacked her lips. “These guys keep demonstrating that they have a large family.”

She frowned when she noticed a hint of white in one of the tunnels. The earlier destruction had cleared bodies and a mound out of the way to reveal newer exits, but this one appeared to lead to another chamber.

Lyssa aimed at the egg and fired three times in the center. Her shots ripped through it, leaving it leaking.

“That must have been where they all came—"

A loud rumble shook the walls and ground. Lyssa frowned and looked around. She couldn’t spot a cause or feel any sorcery to explain it. It’d be annoying to defeat a horde of monsters only to be killed by a random earthquake, especially not that long after leaving California.

A huge thud resounded from behind one of the stone