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

The tank and the ranger slashed through the webs covering the entryway to the innermost chamber. Logan’s boss, a spidery wizard with web spells, poison missiles, and hard chitinous armor, waited for the raiders, protecting the dark gem floating over the sanctum’s pedestal. That dark gem was the heart of the dungeon, and if he lost that, the game was over. This was risky, and the fight could go either way, but he was too close now not to at least try.

Logan focused his efforts on the rogue, riddling him with arcane missiles. The wah-wah of the kill was sweet, but the battle was far from over.

Logan quickly spawned a pair of level-two Spiderkin. They never stood a chance against the invaders, but he used them to split the remainder of the party just long enough to snare the elven ranger in his Web Lock spell. He used the last of his magic—called Apothos instead of the more typical mana—to summon an additional round of Spiderkin, which rappelled in from the ceiling on strands of silver silk.

The tank had his big two-handed sword raised, ready to slash Logan’s dungeon lord to pieces.

The cube squawked and hissed as the spiders descended and killed the ranger. Wah-wah. The tank hit Logan’s arachnoid wizard, halving his hit points.

Logan clicked to his menu, found the melee option, and chose his only weapon, a Black Widow dagger.

Logan toggled the directional pad, narrowly avoiding an overhand slash, then smashed X, driving his blade home even as the tank pivoted and ran him through with his sword.

Breathless, the Army vet turned landscaper winced, waiting for either the wah-wah or the more sinister tones of his own destruction. He had to grin. He was a combat veteran, and yet he felt like a twelve-year-old boy. This was fun. This was so much better than being in a real firefight—so much less was on the line.

Then?

Wah-wah!

His stomach clenched into a knot.

Logan’s character had single-digit hit points but the tank was dead. Dead. Gone. TPK. And his fragile dungeon core had survived every single dungeoneer the game had thrown at it. Supposedly, something called the Tree of Souls was now safe from the raiders. Logan wasn’t sure what that meant—great game play, but the world building lacked the substance of some of the more modern dungeon crawlers out there on the market. The game was over, though. He grabbed his beer and raised the tip of the bottle in a salute.

“Debbie. Shelly. We did it.”

His eyes narrowed. The screen was flashing, almost like the dang thing was glitching. That would suck—to beat the game and be denied the endgame cutscene. At least he hoped there was an endgame cutscene.

Suddenly, the cube went crazy with blips and bloops, and then a new song started, the victory song. Logan let out a sigh of relief as he waited for the end credits to roll. But something else happened. A purple glow slowly filled in the room. The cube looked like a radioactive bomb about to explode.

The screen itself went black.

Words formed in the darkness, growing larger and brighter. Congratulations, Neophyte. Welcome to the Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons!

Huh? That was a strange message. Why did it say welcome when he’d just beaten the game?

The cube wasn’t just glowing purple anymore, it was twitching, shaking, and rattling on the shelf next to his Xbox and Playstation.

Uh-oh. Seriously, what in the heck was going on?

Blisters bubbled across the plastic of the cube, and plumes of fine gray smoke curled up.

No, no, no. It was overheating. Catching fire maybe. Logan wasn’t about to lose his TV and his other gaming consoles. He threw himself off the sofa and hit the carpet, lunging forward to try to knock the boiling plastic away. He was too late.

Tentacles exploded out of the purple cube. His TV careened backward as the cube grew and split the shelf and smacked away the other consoles.

The cube itself, now the size of sofa, was covered with a slick purple skin. The horror, whatever it was, opened like a mouth as wide as his woodchipper. Too many jagged teeth filled that glowing maw.

Logan skittered back, hit the chair, and used it to stand. He was moving so slow—he’d taken his leg off! The pups were still outside. Thank goodness for that. But things were looking bleak.

No, he couldn’t afford to think like that.

The battle was only over when you gave up, and he wasn’t going to do that. Not ever.

Resolve hardened, he hopped toward the bedroom to get to the Mossberg 500 shotgun by his nightstand. That would put a damper on the purple monster in his living room—tentacles, teeth, that garish purple glow.

He would grab the Colt 1911, his father’s pistol, as well as the scattergun, but that meant getting there. He got three hops in before a tentacle whipped around his single leg and pulled it out from under him. He hit the ground with a thud, teeth biting into his tongue in a bright flash of pain.

Logan spit out a mouthful of blood, dug his fingers into the carpet, and began to pull himself forward. The air had a hot, fetid smell, like a dead raccoon stuck in a truck engine on a hot summer’s day. He couldn’t see the creature now—his eyes were fixed on the door at the end of the hall—but he could feel it looming over him.

With a jerk, Logan was yanked across his carpet. He felt teeth sink into his good calf, a jagged lance of pain shooting through his body. The mouth opened and chomped back down, ripping into both his thighs. When he felt the teeth rise for a third bite, he turned and kicked at it. He wouldn’t be taken by this monster cube without a fight.

The thing had grown a single eye—in the same place where the power button had been. It roared in defiance, flinging greasy saliva into