Monster Mansion

Dante King

Copyright © 2020 by Dante King

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12: Agent Amanda Fallon

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

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Immortal Swordslinger

Bone Lord

About the Author

Chapter 1

When I got into my enchanted silver Nissan Pulsar that evening and drove into the woods, I was looking forward to getting lucky with a beautiful beastkin woman. The last thing I expected was to merge with an ancient entity from another world.

I had been told that my date lived somewhere out here in the woods. My housemate, a fun-loving cat-girl named Selena, had connected me with her. Selena was into matchmaking among our friends.

“Jeremy,” she’d said to me, pulling up a picture on her cell phone and showing it to me, “I know just the girl for you.” One look at the picture had made me keen enough to find out more.

Selena’s friend was named Astrid. She was a Swedish beastkin woman who had recently moved to the town and—so Selena said—was looking to make new friends and hopefully have a bit of fun. I figured Astrid was a lycan of some kind, because she had wolf ears and a bushy tail in the picture Selena had shown me of her. She looked great in the picture, gym-fit and with a wicked smile. I couldn’t wait to meet her.

Trevor, my boss at the enchantment shop, had told me to be careful. He was one of the older generation who were OK with using Outworlder magic to make a buck but would never date an Outworlder himself. Trevor had been a young man during the more troubled times, back when Outworlder and human had been more at odds than they were now. These days, the two kindreds lived together fairly amicably, but the older folk on both sides often found it hard to give up the old prejudices.

”You say this woman’s a beastkin?” Trevor had asked me earlier that day as he applied the final touch of red arcane ink to an enchanted metal disc charm.

I nodded. ”Looking at her picture, I think she’s probably a lycan.”

“Kids these days.” Trevor shook his head as he raised the finished disc charm up and gazed critically at the fine pen strokes. ”Back in my day, we’d never have been seen dead with an Outworlder woman.” He slapped the charm down on the table and began putting his work materials away as he talked on. “Sure, we got drunk and sometimes ended up with one at the end of a night—it was a bit of fun now and then—but what you young’uns are getting up to now. . . it’s pretty damn gross if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.” I grinned at my boss. He was a paunchy older dude, his brown hair going gray and his belly starting to show the side effects of his taste for the Outworlder beers he so enjoyed. Like most of the old-timers, he didn’t see the appeal in cross-species pollination. Myself? I found the Outworlder women a hundred times more attractive than humans like me. And the beastkin variety, in particular, floated my boat.

Whatever Trevor said, I knew what I liked. I couldn’t wait to get out of the magic shop, into the car, and on my way to meet the gorgeous Astrid.

Thankfully, Trevor’s opinions were going out of fashion. After a hundred years of social reforms, the non-human refugees who’d come through the otherworld portal had been fully integrated with the rest of society.

It was now 120 years since Gateway Day, when the portal had opened from Eosor leading to our world. The Outworlders had come through to earth, and it had changed everything. During the two world wars, Outworlders and their magical abilities had been implemented with devastating consequences.

The Nazis had enslaved millions of Outworlders and attempted to create magical doomsday devices, but the Allied Forces had utilized corps of elite Outworlder volunteers alongside the regular forces. By the end of the war, they managed to free many of the prisoners and defeat the Nazi regime once and for all. The Cold War sent research into arcane weapons systems underground, but after the Wall fell, the two superpowers shared their experimental data.

The mid-90s were an explosion of magical, arcane ingenuity and inventiveness. Free market capitalism met magical paraphernalia, and the world entered a revolution to rival Copernicus. Anti-magic Boomers had called it the “System Apocalypse,” but it was the fulfillment of the dreams of young people all over the world. Internal chi was detected using magically enhanced scientific instruments, and the claims of thousands of years of mystical practitioners were proved beyond doubt to be true.

But that was not all. Chi cultivation and the magical arts were measured, named, systematized, and categorized. Then it was discovered that human practitioners had only scratched the surface of what was possible. Magical essence could be refined, cultivated, and manipulated by humans in a fashion that mirrored roleplaying games.

The Outworlders had previously had the monopoly on magic, but now with the integration of technology and magic, humans could more than compete. Stat readouts could be applied to almost anything, and clear, linear upgrades could be achieved. Everything from magically enhanced cars to enchanted sex toys flooded the market, and everyone—or at least everyone with money to spend—could access them freely.

Skills that had previously taken years of diligent practice to acquire could now be achieved with the use of enchanted items and magical skill injections. Even without items, it became possible for even low-level cultivators to cast a wide range of impressive and useful magic.

The world became a playground for any humans who wanted to increase their levels through magic. Some thought we would ascend to divinity, whereas others just wanted to grind levels so they could shoot bigger fireballs.

Video games had become a reality.

World governments recognized the threat that unlimited cultivation could pose to social order, so they either enforced level caps or outlawed cultivation altogether. The United States, thankfully, was among the former.

In the US, Level 3 was the cap for civilians like me. This meant we only had access to minor spells like cantrips or sleight of hand, and even those were strictly regulated. Simple spells like limited invisibility on an object could be abused, and a tiny fireball could be lethal if the cultivator were precise enough. Under repeated doses, even low-level potions could turn almost anyone into a junkie.

Suffice to say, the heavy regulation of magic was a bit of a downer, but most people were able to accept it. And my job in the enchantment shop allowed me to tinker with all kinds of different spell runes. Most of the time, it was low-level enchantments. Now and then, however, we handled clients who were given special permission to attain levels above the civilian level cap. That gave us some interesting materials and orders to work with now and again.

I had grown up in a world surrounded by the effects of widespread magic use. I couldn’t imagine a world where magic didn’t exist. Those people who lived before Gateway Day had truly been missing out.

The car bumped over a pothole, rattling my teeth in my skull and bringing my attention sharply back to the dark forest road.

I peered out the window into the shaded trees and wondered where exactly it was that Astrid lived. I had been out here plenty of times to set both magical and non-magical traps for animals when I was younger. Uncle Phil even took me into the woods to fire off his bootleg wands. All those times I had been out here, I had never seen any kind of building.

Giant beech and sugar maple trees flanked my car. They stretched up toward the night sky, much larger than anything that existed in regions where cultivation was more strictly regulated. This was a direct effect of magical cultivation happening in these woods. When people practiced the magical arts in an area, the mana they expended influenced the surrounding environment, making trees taller and more dramatic, and sometimes even having strange effects on the animals in a region.

According to arcane scientists, the natural environment was not capable of cultivation, at least not the intentional, active cultivation that humans and Outworlders practiced. How then did they explain these giant trees? The only explanation was that people were coming out here to do cultivation, and the trees benefited from the expended mana.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who came out to the forest to practice magic.

There was nothing to illuminate the track except the full moon and my car’s single headlight—the other had gone out a few weeks ago, and I hadn’t quite been able to find the cash to fix it. The enchantment store was all legal, and legal charms were cheap, so we didn’t turn much of a profit. This meant that the pay wasn’t great, and the materials for my own experiments in arcane enchantments soaked up most of my disposable income.

Making enchantments for my personal use had become an obsession for me, and I had become good at it. The dashboard of my car, for example, was fitted with a spell panel. This was a small electronic device that could link with my internal chi and activate any enchantments attached to the vehicle.

I’d heard that the government was making such devices, so I’d used a little imagination and fashioned something similar over the course of a few years. Doing this had required examining a few Outworlder spells and then modifying the tech devices that could integrate magic. A particularly useful device had been those medical chips that tapped into an individuals’ chi essence to increase a cancer patient’s healing rate. The Nissan’s spell panel was the result.

It was my proudest work, and it was also completely illegal. I couldn’t share it with anyone. I would be able to find a high price for it on the black market, but it would either lead to a governmental grant or life behind bars if I were caught doing so. I preferred not to take my chances. I would remain poor but free.

I reached over the dash and tapped the central button on the spell panel’s touch screen with one finger. There was a momentary delay while the device calibrated, then I felt a slight tugging on my Chi as the yellow backlit LCD screen above it provided a readout:

Jeremy Parker

Level 1

Class: Unaffiliated

Spells: Force Barrier (Level 2), Ensnare (Level 1)

The Force Barrier spell was something I had been working on to sell to the government one day. I figured they could use it on their vehicles and possibly enchant their soldiers’ body armor with it, too. The passive protection that Force Barrier gave to the car also helped when driving through woods like this. It was like a much better version of a physical push bar, so hitting any beasts would do more damage to them than to my car.

Since these woods were a popular place to practice spellcasting, it was just possible that I would meet some dangerously enhanced beasts on the road. Trees and rocks weren’t the only things that underwent a process of change around expended mana. In fact, the most fantastical and potentially dangerous natural evolutions happened in animals.

I’d heard crazy stories about the magical evolutions that happened in some beasts. A buck—already a formidable creature on its own—might double in size and grow massive, glowing antlers with poisoned tines. That sounded bad enough, but a coyote the size of a truck or a black bear whose roar produced fireballs was a creature lifted directly from your worst nightmares. This was not fantastic or unbelievable. There were documented cases of all these things happening, and worse.

Luckily, my town wasn’t home to any cultivators of any note. The regulars who came out into the forest to practice used only a small amount of mana, so I wasn’t particularly concerned. That said, I was glad of the extra protection my spell enhancements granted all the same.

With a flick of a finger, I pulled up the Beast Detection application on my spell panel. A red and black line map of the forest and the nearby suburbs flashed onto the display as the magical radar scanned the area for beasts. It didn’t pick up anything for miles.

I nodded to myself. I could relax. The company who’d developed the beast detection system—PentaTech—was really reliable and at the forefront of many new developments in magitech.

The other spell on my readout—Ensnare—was something I sometimes used to hunt in the forest. The beast control departments would offer a good bounty for turning in animal carcasses with even minor mana-based transformations. Their cores were extracted and then absorbed or sold on the cultivation markets. This was a legal ’gray area,’ but the government was looking at legalizing the practice. Whenever the state made anything legal, it wasn’t to make things safer—they just wanted their share via exorbitant taxes. The most potent animals could even allow a cultivator to learn a new spell, although such beasts were exceedingly rare.

Well, I wouldn’t be running into any enhanced beasts tonight, I thought. The only magical creature I’d be running into was Astrid, the beastkin I had a date with. I could chill.

Smiling, I kept my eye on the road as I plugged my cell phone into my car’s audio dock. The readout of available albums flickered onto the screen. I tapped Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and the album started with War Pigs.

Back in the 70s, cultivation wasn’t as widely used by humans as it was now, but musicians were at the forefront of its practice. When they recorded their music, they were able to enhance their chi by smoking vast amounts of weed, and it resulted in their tracks having certain effects on listeners. War Pigs was infused with a minor relaxant charm, so listening to the track was like taking a big draw of a fat joint.

Some music—like Hendrix, or some of the later Beatles’ stuff—would be positively dangerous to try to drive to, but Sabbath kept it cool.

As the massive guitar riff filled the small car, I grinned. My muscles relaxed, and my mind eased. When Ozzie’s voice hit me, I rolled down my windows and breathed in that sweet forest-scented air.

This was going to be a good night. I could feel it in my bones.

Chapter 2

As I bumped my way down the narrowing forest track, the surrounding trees grew taller and more tightly packed. I was halfway through War Pigs when, with a sudden screech, the stereo system became a horrible mess of feedback and white noise.

“Shit!” I yelled, slapping the control panel to kill the volume.

The stereo squealed, then grumbled and growled, then screeched again like some kind of banshee.

I’d been enjoying the music, but the white noise wasn’t entirely unexpected. This wood was a magical hotspot, and magical hotspots often messed with car stereos. The vast majority of these hotspots weren’t dangerous—they were just a result of someone expending a lot of chi in the area recently.

“Weird,” I muttered as the stereo went silent and the purr of the car’s engine replaced the screaming feedback and static.

I peered out into the gloom. I knew people came here to practice magic, but I wouldn’t have expected quite so much interference to the radio in this forest. I’d never experienced it here before. Who could have been expending enough mana out here to create such a hotspot?

The road widened suddenly, and I saw I was approaching a broad clearing in the trees. It looked like a parking spot.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was anymore, and I slowed the car down. Perhaps this was my destination?

Suddenly, my Beast Detection app on the car’s display panel chimed loudly. I looked in surprise at its screen where a big red exclamation mark signaled a nearby magical threat.

I pushed the notification to read the details.

”What the hell?”

Beastkin Detected!

Type: Lycan

Do you wish to dial beast control?

Select: Yes? / No?

The Beast Detector Application shouldn’t have picked up a Beastkin—it was meant to only identify beasts. I could imagine the Outworlder advocacy groups would kick up quite the fuss if they found PentaTech’s apps were doing that.

Maybe it was just a glitch? The same tech that identified nearby magical beasts might have gotten confused and picked up a beastkin instead.

Before I could dismiss the notification, a woman dashed from the woods on my right and leaped onto the road.

She had white-blonde hair down past her shoulders and was wearing a dark-colored skin-tight leather jumpsuit. Two wolf-like ears peaked out from the top of her head, and a bushy tail slipped out from a hole in her suit. Her breasts were pale half-globes above a plunging neckline, her skin reflecting the light of the moon.

The woman turned and glared hard in my direction, fixing me with a threatening stare. Golden eyes narrowed as my car careened toward her.

”Astrid?!” I yelled.

It was definitely the woman I was meant to meet tonight—I recognized her immediately from the photo Selena had shown me. All the relaxation I’d got from chilling to War Pigs was gone.

I floored the brakes, and my car screeched on the dirt track, the back wheels skidding from side to side. I wrestled with the steering wheel, trying to avoid hitting my date while also not sending the vehicle off the road to plow into a tree.

Astrid crouched suddenly, as if ready to spring, but instead of diving out of the way of my car, she started sprinting straight at it.

Before I could do anything, she leaped into the air, her combat-booted feet landed on my bonnet, and I heard a series of thuds as she sprinted along the length of my vehicle.

I managed to stop the car, a bare few inches from a tree trunk that would have wishboned it. I twisted my head around to look over my shoulder.

Through the back window, I could see Astrid. She didn’t seem harmed at all, but she also wasn’t alone.

She was facing six guys in black kevlar body armor and tactical helmets, looking like black ops soldiers of some kind. A symbol adorned the chests of their armor, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

Five of the men were wearing night-vision goggles, but the sixth had removed his goggles and his helmet, and I could see his weather-beaten face, his bald head, and his grim expression.

They surrounded her in a loose semi-circle, each lining her up in the sights of their rifles.

What had I just stumbled into? What the hell was this?

The sheer insanity of the situation gave my fear no time to reach my mind.

In one smooth motion, I shoved the driver-side door open and jumped out of my vehicle before I ran to stand beside Astrid.

”Jeremy,” Astrid purred, and I noticed that her accent didn’t sound particularly Swedish. ”Nice to meet you.”

She didn’t seem the slightest bit terrified about six firearms being pointed at her. In fact, she was smiling, as though this was all some silly game.

”This isn’t exactly what I pictured for our first date,” I said from the side of my mouth as I kept my eyes on the armed men.

”Kid,” said the soldier who wasn’t wearing night-goggles, ”you need to get back in your vehicle and drive away from here. This doesn’t concern you.”

His bald head was so shiny it almost looked polished. A distinctive scar ran down one side of his face, and his eyes were gray and devoid of any emotion. He was clearly human, and seemed to be in command of the little group. The other soldiers also looked human; they didn’t have any telltale signs like tails, spines, horns, or beast-like ears that would give them away as Outworlders.

“You hear me?” the bald soldier said again to me when I didn’t answer.

I flicked my eyes from his granite stare to the symbol on his chest. I could see it now. It was a golden shield with a pentagram in the center, embossed into his chest armor.

I glanced at the other soldiers and confirmed that they were all wearing similar gear, each marked with the same symbol.

My stomach tightened as I recalled where I’d seen the emblem before.

”You guys are PentaTech?” I said aloud.

What the hell was a Silicon Valley corporation doing sending soldiers like this out here?

I could understand PentaTech employing mercenary soldiers—private security was a big industry these days—but why were they out here hunting beastkin?

The only groups I knew who tracked down and captured beastkin were monster hunting guilds, but they existed in other countries, not the fucking United States of America where freedom was guaranteed for both humans and Outworlders.

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