Fight! And the story/excerpt is in the can. Well, the first draft, at least.
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This close to the monster, even Morgan’s untrained magical senses could ‘feel’ where the magic was coming from ; a spot to the left and below the carpet shoggoth’s maw, and at a bad angle for a sword. Morgan dropped his without hesitation and pulled out twin knives a moment later.
The first stab ripped through the carpet shoggoth’s hide; and, as Morgan expected, the monster reacted immediately with the closest tentacle at hand. Makes sense, Morgan thought as he used his second blade to nail the questing tentacle to a handy post. Monsters that don’t react to being wrecked don’t last long. Heck, are they even really monsters?
With his newly-found leverage, Morgan pulled his first blade through the carpet-shoggoth’s body in an disemboweling stroke until he met resistance. On a hunch, Morgan let go of the second blade to reach deep into the foul hole of writhing fibers and strange, caustic fluids and pull out something hard and subtly odd to the touch.
The moment it popped free, the carpet shoggoth convulsed, writhed — and shriveled, its unholy tentacles desiccating and unraveling as Morgan watched. He flicked a look back to see Ben half-collapsing to the floor; Kiddo was already attending to him, pulling out water from Ben’s pack. The wizard looked like he wasn’t about to die on the spot, so Morgan went back to taking apart the odd growth he had extracted from the monster.Morgan wasn’t at all surprised to discover that inside the growth was a reasonably intact copy of Petit Albert. He could feel the power inside it, too. Guess I can figure out why somebody would want it. And I got to it before Ben did…
Morgan stood up, then turned to the other two. “Hey, Ben!” he said, waving the Petit Albert in one hand. “Guess where I found your book?”