Dungeon Core Academy 2

by Alex Oakchest

  I needed more rooms. Lots of them. I had to construct traps, make puzzles, and in general, fashion this place into a pit of horrors where any intruder stupid enough to invade it met a gruesome end.

  What do you need if you want to excavate lots of rooms underground?

  Miners. People willing to do the dirty work so that you can keep your core hands clean.

  I already had Wylie, but as good as he was at excavation, it would take him too long. So, why not increase my workforce a little?

  After all, I could spend 450 essence points at a time now, and Tomlin would hopefully increase my essence regeneration speed soon. Besides, after leveling up, my dungeon could hold 18 monsters at a time.

  I was about to create three new kobolds at 35 essence points each when I paused for a second. I remembered back when I had begun my first dungeon, when I was an inexperienced level 1 core. Back then, creating one kobold had been a task, and look at me now!

  Before I created my new workforce, I checked my crafting list to see if there was any creature better suited to digging. Every time I leveled up, more and more things would be added to each crafting list.

  Monsters

  Spider [Cost 15]

  Leech [Cost 15]

  Fire beetle [Cost 20 ]

  Kobold [Cost 35]

  Angry Elemental Jelly Cube [Cost 75]

  Sinister Owl [Cost 120]

  Stone Dwarf Troll [Cost 180]

  Bogbadug [Cost 200]

  *New* Bone Guy [Cost 250]

  *New* Hivemind Shrooms [Cost 375]

  *New* Mimic [Cost 500]

  There were some interesting additions to my list now. The Bone Guy was appealing to me. I cast my memory back to Overseer Winthrop’s creature class, and the module we’d studied on undead creatures. The undead covered tons of things; zombies, vampires, ghosts, demons, librarians. Lots of crossovers.

  Bone Guys were of the undead affiliation, which meant they could take a beating. Man, could they take a pounding for the dungeon. You could club a Bone Guy around the head for hours, and he’d just stare at you and ask for more brains to eat.

  That made them a good front line creature, one you sent forth to give heroes a bit of a test and to fatigue them. They did, however, have a weakness. Most undead creatures got all weak-kneed when they faced any kind of holy power. If a paladin or monk was in a hero party, don’t bother sending a bone guy to fight them.

  The hivemind shrooms…I didn’t know much about those.

  Surprised? The Core Beno, the all-knowing, the mighty, didn’t know about something?

  Nah, I wouldn’t be surprised either if I was you. There’s tons that I don’t know. After all, the overseers only taught us enough so that we could graduate from the academy. For most cores, their real learning started when they built their first dungeon.

  I’d have to craft some Hivemind shrooms to see what they could do, but not yet. I still had so much to do.

  The final new entry on my crafting list made me very, very excited.

  Mimics!

  What is a dungeon, really, if it doesn’t have a mimic? It is like a bard without his lute, a mage without a beard, a barbarian without unchecked vanity that makes him stare at his reflection in his sword.

  In case you don’t know, a mimic is a most delightful creature. They are shapeshifters capable of taking on the appearance of inanimate objects. Their true form is a sort of giant mouth, with a slurping tongue and rows of dagger-sharp teeth.

  To a hero, though…the first time a hero meets a mimic, it is usually in the form of a loot chest, or a magic book. The stupid hero will approach it, thinking that it must be his birthday, and he’ll open the chest…

  …only to get eaten alive by the mimic!

  Does that sound beautiful, or what?

  I couldn’t wait to get a mimic, but it seemed I would have to. They cost 500 essence, and right now I only held 450 at a time.

  Since I couldn’t make any creature more adept at mining than a kobold, I create three more of them. 105 essence points left me, and the core room glowed with the three patches of light that spun around and around, soon becoming fully formed creatures.

  Two were Shadow’s height, while the third was even smaller than Wylie, and had a rather pronounced gut. Unlike Tomlin, Wylie, and Shadow, these kobolds had taken more of the lizard side of their lizard/wolf genes, and their faces looked more reptilian.

  “Wylie,” I said. Both he and Warrane had been standing side by side as I created these new dungeon dwellers, both of them equally as transfixed. “These are your new mining mates.”

  “Wylie is boss?” asked the kobold.

  I thought about that. A team needed a leader, no doubt about that. And Wylie was technically my second-longest-serving kobold and had dug many rooms for me in my old dungeon. Should I reward his loyalty?

  I decided against it, as much as I felt bad to do that. Loyalty and long-service wasn’t a great way to award power. Someone should have to earn power through a display of skill and experience. Though Wylie was a good digger, he wouldn’t make a good leader.

  “Wylie, as much as I could use you as a leader,” I said, “It pains me to say I need my greatest digger to focus his attention on what he is the best at.”

  “Wylie sad.”

  Hmm. I wasn’t doing a great job at letting him down gently. Maybe this would have been a good time to take a more authoritarian dungeon core attitude.

  Warrane kneeled beside Wylie and put his hand on his shoulder. “This leaf has seen many kobolds. There is a kobold tree in Wrotun caves who also dedicate their lives to mining.”

  “Tree?” said Wylie.

  “He means family,” I added.

  Warrane nodded. “For all the years the Wrotun kobolds have spent mining, none match you, Wylie. A gift like yours would be wasted without a pickaxe in hand. This leaf has not found his gift, yet, so he can recognize its absence too well.”

  “Wylie is good miner?”

  “An exceptional miner,” I said. “And from now on, the four of you are my mining and excavation team. And you will be supervised by Warrane.”

  The green-faced boy stared at me now, his three eyes blinking not in unison, but one after another. I hated it when he did that!

  “This leaf will supervise them?”

  I could see the smile creeping on his face. Warrane had spent his life dishonored thanks to events he couldn’t control. Was it his fault people in his tree turned tail and left the caverns? Nope. All the same, he’d grown up knowing he’d never be allowed to rise to a fourth-leaf or anything above, and he’d never get whatever perks of authority that came with it.

  Well, I couldn’t fix their wonky honor system, but I could help the kid.

  I displayed my map to them all now, but I spoke primarily to Warren. “See the essence room? I need a tunnel coming off it, with a new room excavating. This will be a specialized essence growing room. Essence grows on walls, so I’ll need lots of smaller walls built in rows all through the room.”

  “This leaf understands. Many walls in the same room, but with space between so that cultivator Tomlin can attend to them.”

  “Exactly.” I pointed to space beside the essence room. “And right here, I need you to build a melding room.”

  “How can this leaf distinguish on room type from another?”

  “You just need to give the order to Wylie and his team and dig the space, I’ll allocate a purpose to the room, okay?”

  “Yes, Core Beno.”

  “I’ll need yet another room connected to this by a tunnel. Then,” I said, this time pointing to the opposite side of the map, just west of the core room, “I’ll need a large, oval-shaped room here. This will be the loot room. Only, we won’t be using normal loot.”

  This was something I had thought about a lot over the last few hours.

  See, I was a dungeon core trained by the Dungeon Core Academy. This meant that my skills were honed toward a very particular type of dungeon. The common kind
, where the core placed loot for the heroes to find, and they battled their way through to it.

  The function of a loot room in place like this was to stage a final battle. Providing the heroes didn’t die before getting there, a core would always place a boss monster there, ready to tear the heroes new bumholes.

  Things were a little different here, in the Wrotun caves.

  For one, the Seekers weren’t ordinary heroes. Their motivation wasn’t to earn treasure and glory, but to get to the mana springs. I assumed that they would also want to spread out into the Wrotun’s main cave and wipe them out so they could claim the springs as their own.

  So, the Seekers didn’t want loot. That meant they wouldn’t behave the same way as regular heroes, which threw quite a lot of my training out of the window, right?

  Yeah, I’d thought so too.

  Then I thought about it. Loot itself is just a prize. It’s a token of success.

  That was what the mana spring was to the Seekers. Getting to the spring represented success. All I needed to do to get them to act more like the heroes I had studied how to kill, was to replace loot, with mana.

  How could I do this?

  Well, now that I had figured things out, that was the easy part.

  CHAPTER 15

  Under Warrane’s supervision, it took Wylie and the other miners three days to dig out tunnels and excavate the rooms like I asked. When they were done, I visited each room and spent the essence to assign them each as special rooms.

  By the time I was done, it was starting to look more and more like a dungeon. I checked my stats now, happy with what we’d done so far.

  Rooms:

  Core Room

  Essence Growing Room

  Melding Room

  Loot Room

  After so much hard work, Wylie had gone from a level 6 miner to level 9, while my three new kobolds had earned levels 2,3 and 3. One of them must have slacked a little more than the others, but I guessed that Warrane was still learning how to lead, and how to keep his workforce motivated. It’s hard-working out when to chew someone’s bumhole, and when to blow smoke up it.

  Wait, let me rephrase that.

  Actually, forget it. Lots to do, not much time.

  As well as adhering to my dungeon blueprint, those lovely little kobolds had done something else.

  While carving their way into the bowels of the caves, they had come across mineral and metal deposits from time to time. This built up the beginnings of a stockpile for me.

  Material Inventory

  Iron x12

  Copper x6

  Coal x10

  Silver x2

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  Ah. I hear a question from you. Or did I? Sometimes, it’s hard to work out what I actually hear, and what I imagine. Being a core can be lonely sometimes so even if you aren’t reading this and you are just a figment of my imagination, I’d like to thank you for your company.

  Either way, real or not, the question was this; what can a dungeon core do with metals?

  That was a good question, and one that I will answer shortly. Suffice to say, there are lots of delightful things he can do. And I mean delightful as in, they will help me murder dungeon intruders. Not delightful in the way most people mean it. Language can be a funny thing.

  Anyway, I had an empty room in the east part of my dungeon, just beyond the essence growing and the melding rooms.

  I crafted pedestal points in all of my chambers, and I used this to hop into the empty room now. I floated there for a second, alone. Dim sounds reached me; Warren giving the kobolds their orders, Wylie enthusiastically agreeing with them. Rhythmic dinks as their pickaxes carved into stone and dirt.

  There was a quieter sound, too. Were I not a core, and if this wasn’t my dungeon, I wouldn’t have been attuned enough to hear it. But I listened, and there it was; Tomlin, in the essence growing room nearby, singing softly to himself. “Tomlin is great, he knows to cultivate. Tomlins essence grows the best, really thick and full of life.”

  Well, if that was how he boosted his spirits, then all power to him.

  In my empty room, I was eager to get started on something new. I pulled up my list of rooms now, which showed the various kind of chambers I could create in my dungeon.

  There was one new, brilliant entry.

  Crafting List

  Rooms

  Essence growing room [Cost 80 ]

  Specialised insect and fungi larder [Cost 100]

  Melding room [Cost 120]

  *New* Alchemy Room [Cost 300]

  Now we were talking! Sometimes, being a dungeon core is all about the little things. You know, like being able to create a room that allows you to alter the inherent properties of items, minerals, and metals, magically transforming them into a state that would have been impossible were it not for magic. Simple joys.

  I spent 300 essence points to assign this as an alchemy room. It began to change in front of me; first, the stone walls gained a rather decorative swishy effect. That’s not the greatest way to describe it, but that was what it looked like. Thin streams of multi-colored light moving along the walls in waves.

  In the center of the room, two spheres appeared. These were illuminated, and they looked like runes. You know, like the tattoos young heroes always get because they think its cool? And then, when a real rune-reader translates them, they always mean something stupid like I’m a massive, massive idiot.

  One floor sphere was dark red, the other sky blue. I recalled the brief class I’d taken on alchemy rooms. Their working was simple, but from that simplicity, you could create something amazing.

  Before I could get started, I heard footsteps behind me.

  “Tomlin has massaged vines in the first essence room to maximum potential. They will grow faster and thicker now. He has planted them in new essence room.”

  “Ah, yeah. Thanks, Tomlin. I can already feel my essence regenerating faster. You did an amazing job! And you’ve become a level 7 cultivator already. Great work.”

  “Tomlin thanks Dark Lord for his praise. What is Dark Lord doing?”

  “This is an alchemy chamber. See the spheres? They’re the heart of dungeon alchemy. If I place something on the red sphere, it will deconstruct it. It’ll strip it away to its most basic, valuable elements. The blue sphere, on the other hand, can transform one object into another.”

  “Dark Lord can create anything now?”

  “Not anything. Only the most basic things, I am afraid. I’ll need a resident alchemist to make full use of this.”

  “Tomlin doesn’t understand deconstruct.”

  “Let me show you.”

  I already had an idea for my first use of the deconstructing sphere.

  Create leech.

  Two seconds later, 15 essence points poorer, I had a leech. A slimy, slug-like specimen but with teeth on the underside of its gooey body.

  “Tomlin, could you place the leech on the red sphere please?”

  “Tomlin would rather not.”

  “Would Tomlin rather see how long he could survive on the surface, clanless and with only his annoying songs for company?”

  Tomlin pinched the leech between his thumb and index and middle fingers, while turning his head as far away from it as he could. You’d have thought it was some kind of disgusting creature instead of the beautiful, blood-swollen thing it was.

  “That’s right, just there.”

  The leech was in the center of the sphere now.

  Deconstruct.

  A stream of crimson light whooshed over the sphere. There was a burning aroma in the air, something like the fumes that mana lights gave off.

  When the light dispersed, the leech was gone. In its place was a red pile of dust.

  Item Deconstructed: Leech [Unassigned Lvl1]

  Results: Vampiric dust [20% purity]

  “You see, Tomlin?” I said, feeling pleased. “Leeches can drain the blood from things and use it to nourish themselves. Deconstr
ucted to their essence, you see this. Vampiric dust.”

  “What will Dark Lord do with it?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  One thing I puzzled over was that the vampiric dust only had 20% purity. I guessed this would dictate its effectiveness, but what decided how pure it was?

  When I thought about it, only a couple of things stuck out. One, the leech was a newly made creature. It hadn’t leveled up from battle yet, and it was too simple-minded to level up through doing dungeon work.

  Two, I wasn’t an alchemist.

  Maybe, when using the deconstructor sphere on creatures, the higher the monster the better the purity of its essence. Added to that, a better-ranked, specialized alchemist would use the sphere better than I had.

  Still, I had the beginnings of something.

  “Tomlin, can you grab some iron from the deposit inventory, please?”

  Tomlin trundled off, grumbling that this was no work for a cultivator, and before long he was back with five pieces of iron.

  “Thank you. We need those to go onto the blue sphere.”

  Tomlin placed the iron pieces on the outer edge of the sphere. Then, grumbling to himself, he picked them up and placed them again, this time in the center. Then he spent a few seconds making sure they were dead-center, and not just near it. I wondered if being a cultivator was giving him a perfectionist streak.

  “Okay, great. Finally, please could you put the vampiric dust on the iron?”

  He did that, and then I gave a mental command.

  Create Vampiric Darts.

  The whoosh of light was blue this time, and once it dispersed I saw that I was now the proud owner of 50 vampiric poisoned darts.

  Vampiric Poisoned Darts

  Iron darts loaded with vampiric dust. When they hit a target, they will restore health to a chosen recipient.

  Lovely!

  “Thanks for your help, Tomlin. You can get back to making up songs about how great you are now.”

  I had to wait for my essence to regenerate before I could act on the next step in my defensive plan. While I did that, I asked Warrane and his mining crew to dig out a new room, this one near the surface door.