War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (best short novels .TXT) 📕

were done with their jungle expedition and whining for dinner. He’d feed them outside so they could enjoy the night. He limped out, one foot in a holey sock, the other bare plastic. From the garage, he grabbed the food and filled their bowls on the back porch. They joined him, tails waggling, mouths drooling, nails clicking on the cement. The fragrance of dog and dry grass reminded him that he’d need to give them baths soon.

“Good dogs,” he said. Having the puppies kept him from feeling too alone. He’d have to try that dating thing again at some point. He still had his lapsed OkCupid account and a Lizzy-sized hole in his life.

That was a worry for another night, or maybe another year entirely.

For now? He had a date with destiny.

Beer in hand, he ambled back into the house and through the kitchen. His living room was bachelor sparse. Over the years, he’d cleaned out his mother’s stuff, then his father’s stuff, and now all that remained was his stuff—two big La-Z-Boys, flanked by end tables, faced a seventy-five-inch TV sitting on a shelf above his game consoles. The walls had some pictures of Logan, his dad, and Uncle Bud, but mainly they were for the speakers, which gave him perfect, crystal-clear surround sound and enough bass to stop the heart in your chest.

His newest game console awaited him, and it was strange to say the least.

It was a purple cube he’d picked up at a pawnshop for twenty-five bucks. Old-school. The single controller had a long wire—that told you exactly how old the unit was. He liked to think of it as a lost classic, probably some knockoff of the old-school systems like Atari and Intellivision. Maybe the purple cube had been one of Nintendo’s first competitors. He hadn’t been able to find anything out about the thing on Google, which was shocking in its own right, but he didn’t really care.

Logan liked the classic gaming experience. His Army buddies were all probably shooting it up in Blood Warfare 4: Blood Debt.

Logan needed to keep in better touch with his buddies. Growing up as an only child, struggling through high school, he hadn’t found true friends until he’d enlisted. Then? It was what the military called the esprit de corps, a fancy French term for morale. But it was more than that. It was that feeling of camaraderie that Logan missed. Going through hell with your buddies made you love every single one of them... Well, maybe some more than others. He would never miss Wheeler getting black-out drunk and barfing all over his bunk. There was plenty he did miss, though.

With a sigh, Logan promised himself he’d send more texts and make more calls. Just as soon as he beat this game.

He’d been hooked on the thing for the past month.

Only one controller. Only one game: The Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons. Zany. Wild. It had character. It was an outdated 2D Dungeon Keeper-style game. The graphics weren’t great, but the game play was fun and that was all that mattered in the end. And he was so close to finishing it. Stuck on the last level.

A stylized S, the black logo of the company, decorated the front of the purple cube. The power button was nestled in the top swoop of the S. He pressed the button and a mauve light winked on in the bottom swoop.

As the old game console rattled to life, he plopped down on his favorite La-Z-Boy. He unstrapped his fake leg and propped it beside his chair. It felt good to be free of the prosthesis—like taking off ski boots after a long day on the slopes.

He sipped his beer and set it on the end table. No coasters. If the dating thing turned into the girlfriend thing, she might insist on coasters. He wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of action.

The screen flashed, music tinkled out with 8-bit beauty, and his current progress showed him at 97% complete. He’d kept his dungeon safe from dozens of waves of greedy dungeoneers looking to steal his dungeon core from out of the inner sanctum. Tonight would be the night he’d kill the last, most powerful group. It was made up of five raiders, each a different class, all bent on his destruction.

Logan had prepared his dungeon carefully.

It was a deadly place, full of traps, monsters, and mazes. Logan had chosen the Spider King Guardian, so he had access to webs and arachnids of every size and shape.

Logan licked his lips and hunched forward, allowing the lead fighter to effortlessly hack through cobwebs he’d placed in an inner stairwell. Sure, let the tank through. Logan didn’t much care about that guy. However, the cleric in the party? His healing spells would only make Logan’s life harder.

At the perfect time, Logan pushed the X button. The floor opened up like a yawning maw and the pixel-y cleric fell onto venom-coated spikes.

“Hell yeah!” Logan crowed.

The cleric gushed blocky blood before flashing and dematerializing. The cube gave out the kill sound, “Wah-wah,” before promptly notifying him that only four dungeoneers remained.

The party’s magic-user, an Inferno Hellreaver, cast a fireball that fried a room full of giant spiders. That was the bad news. The good news? They’d missed the secret room that Logan had put behind them. One of his largest minions, Debbie the Drider—his name for her—scurried out of the hidden room on a host of arachnoid legs, raising her bow and unleashing a hail of poisoned arrows. The magic-user’s days of fireballs were over. Two arrows pierced him, shattering him like the glass cannon he was. Debbie was also critically wounded, thanks to the efforts of an elven ranger, before the party’s rogue managed to stab her in the back.

Poor Debbie.

The rogue undid Logan’s pressure-plate trap in the next room, and the tank took out his giant spider, Shelly Shelob. Logan frowned. Three raiders were still alive. He’d wanted to keep the party out of