Southwest Days (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 2)

by Kal Aaron

  Her confidence grew. She hadn’t been sure they’d be as easy to kill as the earlier monsters. Despite what she’d said to Jofi, she was ready to run if overwhelmed.

  Lyssa snickered as she aimed at three monsters lined up in a neat row. She fired through the first one’s mouth and smiled in triumph as the bullet passed through the two creatures behind it. The shot skimmed the next-closest monster but didn’t finish it off. That was her record thus far.

  The monsters had charged, but none had gotten close enough to worry her. Their continued mindless behavior kept their movements easy to predict.

  That was another common problem with rogues who made monsters. They focused too much on hideous features and not enough on their practicality.

  The press of angry fangs and legs limited Lyssa’s ability to take many clever record-setting shots, but she managed more doubles and triples. As with her first battle, the monsters didn’t react to their heavy losses as they continued their relentless surge toward the invader. In some cases, they tripped and stumbled over the bodies of other snake-roaches, oblivious to the deaths of their allies.

  Lyssa emptied her regular magazine before aiming her other pistol and squeezing off three quick shots spread out along the closing monster line. The thunderous blasts from the explosive rounds shredded the monsters and blasted bits, slime, and sludge all over.

  The horde stopped and began moving back and forth as if confused. She didn’t think it was fear, but she’d take any distraction to reload while trying to not worry about them demonstrating another more aggressive charging behavior.

  Lyssa tossed her other pistol in the air and yanked out another standard magazine before catching the falling pistol with the mag. She slammed them both against her leg to force the magazine into the weapon.

  The click from the gun snapped the horde out of their daze. They returned to their mad charge, but she was ready for them.

  “Eat this,” she shouted.

  Lyssa carved a path through the chamber by emptying half her explosive magazine into the monsters. The thunderous echo assaulted her ears. Hot chunks blasted from the rocks at the center of the mounds, cutting into the snake-roaches like shrapnel, wounding some and killing others. The enemies' numbers were plummeting rapidly.

  The horde slowed but didn’t stop. After a moment, they scurried toward the opposite end of the chamber, forming a writhing, angry mass. She growled in irritation. This encounter was starting to lose its charm.

  Lyssa stepped forward so she’d have more room to maneuver. She peppered the chamber with shots, concentrating on small snake-roaches. The larger ones had yet to move toward her, but her explosive rampage hadn’t yet damaged any of the eggs in the center of the chamber.

  With the cessation of the blasts, the swarm surged toward her again. She emptied the rest of her explosive magazine to disrupt their front lines. This time her attack also blew apart two of the eggs. A group of large snake-roaches leaped off the mounds to join the attack.

  Every creature had its limits. It was bittersweet being right about their trigger.

  “Fine!” Lyssa shouted. “Let’s do this. Join the party, you freaks.”

  Although they were bigger, the new threats were slower, and to Lyssa’s surprise, their opened mouths combined with that same size made them not much harder to put them down than their smaller cousins. It took two bullets down the gullet instead of one to send them to their twitching demise, but the first at least slowed them. Their size interfered with them lining up for easy combos.

  Lyssa’s gun went dry, and she loaded her pistols with her last two explosive magazines. She waited for a moment as the snake-roaches rushed toward her, their angry fangs waiting to chomp on a new meal.

  Their numbers were dwindling, and they’d not gotten a nip on her. This battle was hers.

  “Come on,” she shouted. “Get closer together, you slimy bastards. Make it worth it. This is getting expensive, and I’m going to have to air my regalia out for a week!”

  Lyssa moved toward one of the few sections of the wall without tunnels. No more monsters had poured into the cave after the start of the battle, but she didn’t want to take the chance of an ambush from behind. A controlled defensive position was key to her current strategy.

  Large and small snake-roaches rushed toward her side by side, all but crawling over one another. They’d lost their fear of the explosions from earlier, but she had enough ammo to take them down. It was time to finish this cleaning job.

  Lyssa pointed her pistols toward the center of the horde and fired. The large blast born of both rounds incinerated a group of monsters and knocked over those nearby. The first blasts had barely finished before she added new ones. She drew an arc with both pistols, taking a shot every few yards. The entire chamber rattled from the near-constant explosions. It’d been a long time since she’d used this level of force.

  Flames ripped through the creatures, leaving crispy, twitching monster chunks on the ground. Shockwaves and fire tore into the eggs, blasted them apart, and splattered their milky contents over the remainder of the monster horde.

  Smoldering rocks rained down all over, some smacking into Lyssa and stinging but not doing much damage to her regalia. She completed her first arcs and swept her guns back toward the center, continuing to fire.

  Scorched, half-burned monsters tried to move forward. Their undamaged brethren surged over them, pressing them into the ground as they tried to close on the source of their doom.

  The percussive drumbeat of death continued until her gun ran dry. The final fall of rubble striking the chamber offered a clear coda. Her ears rang.

  Acrid smoke filled the area. Lyssa coughed and waved it out of her face. She ejected her magazines and slapped in fresh standard magazines, believing it was over but unsure.

  She peered into the chamber through the smoke, looking for any sign of movement. On the off-chance the enemy couldn’t see her or was trying to surprise her, she decided to lure them out.

  “I don’t like this new smell, but I do think it’s an improvement over the one before,” she shouted. “Anyone who’s still hungry should come get a taste while you still can. Tasty Sorceress! I probably taste just like chicken.”

  “Is this wise?” Jofi replied. “And do they know what chicken tastes like?”

  “Probably not wise, and they probably don’t know what chicken tastes like. Even if they do, maybe they don’t like it.” Lyssa shrugged. “But I think that might be all of them. That wasn’t as hard as I thought. Expensive and obnoxious, but not hard.”

  “Didn’t you say that before?” Jofi asked. “Only to find a much larger number of enemies?”

  Lyssa groaned. “No one likes a smart ass or someone who says ‘I told you so.’”

  She kicked the smoking decapitated 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 a
n 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 walls, and her heart rate sped up. Pieces of rock flew from the wall.

  Lyssa pointed her guns at the wall and ran to the other side of the room. “Looks like we’re not done, though I wonder if whoever made these things made them that purposeful about guarding the eggs.”

  “Does it matter?” Jofi asked.

  “If I kill them all, I guess not.”

  Another thud sounded. A huge hole blew open in the wall, and a large dark pointed leg came through. It looked similar to what she’d seen on the snake-roaches, but the curved tip alone was the length of an entire leg of the egg guardians. The monsters came in small, large, and super sizes.

  The chamber shook as something pounded the wall, raining down dirt and rock. An avalanche buried one side of the chamber as the wall gave way and a massive snake-roach crashed through to reveal a vast cavern beyond the hatchery. Unlike the other monsters, this one had a bulbous end. At least she’d found the source of the eggs.

  “They keep you locked up in another room and just carry the eggs out?” Lyssa looked over the length of the creature. “It sucks to be you, Your Highness, but hey, we all have our problems.”

  She looked behind her. The tunnel she’d used to enter the hatchery was partially buried, leaving a narrow slit. The necessary spells would take too long to cast with a monster going after her. She needed to finish off the queen with what she had available.

  Lyssa aimed her guns at the queen’s mouth. “No, turns out it sucks to be me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Whatever doubt Lyssa had about a rogue being involved had vanished. The setup of the colony was unnatural, even before considering the creatures. There was no way they’d dug there from another location with so many creatures and bred so quickly without someone noticing. The convenience of them being in a mine was hard to ignore.

  She didn’t have much time to think about it as the queen lumbered toward her. Each step was a loud crunch in the remnants of the hatchery. This abomination needed to be ended.

  Lyssa grimaced at the huge mouth. The damned thing could swallow her whole if she wasn’t careful. She fired a couple of shots, hoping the queen was as weak as the rest of the swarm. The creature twitched and reared back before crashing forward and almost crushing the Sorceress.

  “Damn it.”

  Raking her side with gunfire didn’t help much. Her attacks left dripping wounds, but they weren’t slowing the queen down. The monster whipped toward Lyssa and charged with its mouth open. She sprinted out of the way.

  The queen collided with the wall, knocking off more rocks and shaking the chamber. Lyssa fell but rolled back to her feet and took a couple of shots at the rear of the queen and what she assumed was an ovipositor. The attack provoked another angry charge.

  The giant monster wasn’t any more intelligent than her progeny, but her size made up for it. Lyssa couldn’t risk being careless, and right now, the only hope she had was to put more rounds into her royal opponent.

  Lyssa sprinted toward a nearby remnant of a mound and hopped on top with a grunt. She spun and jumped toward the queen, clearing the top of her head and running along her back while firing her pistols into her body. The queen reared back and bucked Lyssa off, sending her hard into a wall.

  Pain shot through the Sorceress’ back. With a hiss, she slid down the wall. Her opponent thrashed, flinging thick green bloo
d everywhere.

  She had no idea where the brain was in the snake-roaches or if they even had one. Firing through their mouths had killed them, but she’d put plenty of rounds into the queen’s mouth without doing anything but annoying the creature. The queen wasn’t even slower than before.

  Taking advantage of the queen’s distraction, Lyssa rushed toward the open chamber. A sickening odor greeted her arrival, along with the splash of her boots in the shallow pool of thick green fluid covering the floor. There were no eggs left in the chamber except for the rapidly deflating victim of her earlier attack.

  The bleeding queen battered through a cracked mound and turned toward her original chamber. Having to jog backward in deepening fluid slowed Lyssa’s progress, but it gave her enough time to eject her empty magazines and load ablative rounds into one pistol and penetrators into another.

  Lyssa expected another charge from the queen. Instead, the wounded monster swayed, its mouth half-closed as if waiting for something. Was it charging up some sort of attack?

  “It’d be really helpful if you would die already,” Lyssa said. “You’re just embarrassing yourself now.”

  She backed up some more, grateful to find the fluid shallower toward the other end of the chamber, but that left her soaked to her waist. After this was over, she’d need to down every herb she had from Tricia and ask for a few more to make sure she didn’t end with some nasty disease.

  The queen advanced, taking one slow step toward Lyssa. Her mouth opened again. Without an attack in progress, Lyssa could see the sheer size of her fangs. She didn’t want to test her regalia or vest against teeth that were half her height.

  “Okay, you don’t regenerate, and you’re just big.” Lyssa scoffed. “You’re not even that fast. I’m not some unarmed twenty-year-old internet star, you slimy bitch. I’m going to die someday, probably violently and doing Torch work, but damned if I’ll let myself get swallowed by an overgrown snake-roach. Even if you do, I’m going to make sure you have the worst case of indigestion ever.”