Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (detective books to read txt) 📕

Flame Barrier spell that I had shaped into an axe swept upward. It sliced neatly through the hellhounds neck and sent its surprised-looking head tumbling. It rolled away and splashed into the pond. The dog’s body thudded limply to the ground.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Not too tough, all things considered.

“Now, where the hell is that relic?” I asked my tiny-ass self.

The body of the hellhound shuddered. The skin around the severed stump of neck wrinkled and puckered. With a gross speed, like the most repugnant flower blooming in fast forward, the dog’s head reformed. It bulged out; bone solidifying, flesh knitting, skin stretching.

And, alongside that first head, another grew.

“Ah, not a hellhound then,” I said. “A… hydrahound?”

The rumbling growl emanating from the dog’s throat spoke of an animal that was really pissed.

“Great,” I said.

The left head darted out, mouth open wide, hoping to make a snack out of my pint-sized ass. I rolled to the side and felt the head whisk over me. Hot saliva rained down, pattering around and over me. I gained my feet but immediately had to roll out of the way of the right head as it lashed out.

I activated the Flame Barrier spell again. In my haste, I only had time to form the fiery spell into a crude spear. I caught the hydrahound square in one of its four maniacal eyeballs. A viscous goo gushed out, and the right head reared back in pain, the beast snapping and growling with annoyance.

If things had been hard fighting a one-headed hellhound, they became doubly so with two heads. I needed all my reactions and all my skill to ensure I didn’t end up as mush in the hellhound’s colon.

I managed to keep the two-headed dog at bay through a combination of spells and quick feet. As the fight went on, it became all too evident that my magic potency had been drastically reduced by whatever charm had rippled out of the pond.

A thick, muscled paw whipped out of nowhere and caught me squarely in the chest with the force of a battering ram. I was clubbed through the air and landed hard on my back, but I used the impact to roll myself backward and away from another paw that smashed downward, sending up stone chips.

I fired off a series of Frost Shards, one spell after another, as I backed away from the massive two-headed dog, and tried to gain myself a little breathing room, a little time to think. The shards punched into the hydrahound’s beefy chest but did not penetrate to anything vital. I had a feeling that I could stick the thing with enough shards to make it look like a porcupine and still not bring it down.

The hydrahound was clearly losing the little patience it possessed. The two heads kept lunging at me, forcing me back. The obvious solution to their continued assault would have been to blow or cut their heads off, but I knew what that would mean. I wasn’t going to fall into the same trap as fucking Hercules. I wasn’t going to let the red mist come down and then end up with a twenty-headed hydrahound. No, thanks.

The beast had backed me up against the parapet. It thrust one of its heads toward me once more, going for the kill. I used my Telekinesis spell, straining to the max, launching a rock right into the side of its thick head and sending the whole creature lurching sideways.

I took the opportunity to glance over the side of the tower’s waist-high wall. There was only darkness down there. No sign of Manafell, no sign of anything.

No escape.

Running out of ideas, I activated Flame Flight and, wreathed in ghostly flames, I boosted up into the air, over my tenacious enemy. I landed in a fighting crouch on the other side of the garden. Staff at the ready, mind fizzing as I thought of some way to get out of this jam.

The problem that faced me was the same one that had probably faced every bounty hunter and adventurer in Avalonia, ever since the first one had strapped on armor and weapons and dipped into their mana reserves with action at the forefront of their mind. The problem was this: how was I going to kill this fucking thing?

That’s what it boiled down to. I needed the hydrahound dead and out for the count. How the hell was I going to do that when my magic was proving less efficacious than usual, I couldn’t slice or explode its head off, and I was the size of a loaf of bread standing on its end?

Talk about a pickle.

What I needed was something that could completely annihilate this creature. Annihilate it either so completely, or keep working on it so continuously, that I would have time to find and grab the relic and get out of there. I was betting a lot on the assumption that, as soon as I had the relic in hand, I would be able to flee back through the crack, but a guy needed something to hope for.

I tossed down some Arcane Mines, as far as my little gnome-like arms could chuck them, while I waited for inspiration to strike.

“Come on, genius lightning bolt, strike me in the fucking head, why don’t you?” I hissed to myself.

The hydrahound was still on the other side of the garden. It was bucking like a mustang now, which I guessed was another after-effect of the Compulsion spell. I cast Rain of Toads, and little amphibians started to fall from the sky. Because they had also been shrunken, they were no larger than flies, but there were a good number of them. The hydrahound scratched at them, like it had the worst case of fleas imaginable. The toads didn’t look like they were doing any damage,