Dungeon Core Academy 2

by Alex Oakchest

  Then, every so often, they would make plans and form a raid on the doors, each time trying something new.

  The furthest they had ever got was to within a half-mile of the mana spring, but they had lost many, many honorable warriors in doing so. A chief of the Eternals clan earned glory by advancing further into the tunnels than the chief before him. He proved how far he had gone by having his soldiers bring back rock from the tunnels. The closer they were to the mana springs, the more mana was encased in the rock.

  So far, Reginal had launched the biggest assault, but he hadn’t beaten the last chief’s record.

  He needed a new way, and he had it…he thought. But no matter the method, the goal was always the same; claim back the springs from the people who stole them.

  Reginal was the latest chief tasked with doing so, and to be honest, he was beginning to think that it was a lost cause. So many lives wasted in raids that bore no fruit.

  “Chief?” said a voice outside the tent. “She’s here.”

  Reginal felt a flicker of nerves, but he buried them. He glanced at Devry, who was snoring. Not the pretend snoring he faked to listen to Reginal’s chief meetings, either. That had been a problem, lately. Some of the others were unhappy that they had to discuss sensitive attack strategies with a sleeping kid nearby. Reginal wouldn’t budge on it; Devry had to stay there with his bed and orb.

  “Chief?” called a voice.

  “Send her in please.”

  The girl was tall and skinny. She had a human’s white-pink pallor, but a goblin’s eyes. Yeah, there was definitely goblin in her ancestry some way down the line. Looking like that would get her into trouble in some cities, Reginal thought with a sense of heaviness in his soul.

  She wore thin cotton trousers and a shirt, with a tight leather cuirass over it. The leather was scorched, scratched, and covered in all manner of marks that you’d expect from a trapper. Gaining Tavia’s loyalty was a big score for the Eternals clan.

  “Tavia?” he said.

  “You’re the chief? Not gonna lie, chief, I expected someone bigger. You’re kinda wiry.”

  “Goblins are built differently. We’re made for stamina, not strength. We’re made to outlast things.”

  “Things like the Wrotun?” asked Tavia.

  She glanced at Devry then, and Reginal instinctively moved for his dagger. He stopped himself, but the problem was he didn’t quite trust her yet, and he was way too protective of his boy.

  “Relax,” said Tavia. “I must have been searched five times before they let me see you.”

  “Five times? They’re getting lax. Take a seat.”

  Tavia ignored his request and walked to the model of the tunnels. She paced around it, her eyes widening. “This is really good. It looks just like them. You really mapped it out well.”

  Reginal was surprised at her attitude. Most of the older Wrotun defectors had needed several meetings with Reginal before they truly accepted the reality of things. Their mind washing had been so ingrained that it had been like trying to pry a barnacle from a whale’s arse.

  The most difficult ones had been the family. Two parents, green-skinned and with three eyes. They had sought the surface just like the rest, but they hadn’t wanted to betray their people. They had seen the light in the end, though.

  But this girl. She didn’t seem worried in the slightest.

  “How much do you know?” asked Reginal.

  Tavia picked up a little clay model of a bear trap and moved it just an inch to the right. “I usually cluster the bear traps around here,” she said. “Just by the corner. See, when people are turning corners they tend to look what’s ahead, not beneath.”

  “You talk casually about the tools you used to kill my people.”

  “Kill your people? I was defending my home. At least I thought I was.”

  “Then you are starting to understand?” said Reginal.

  “Maybe,” said Tavia. “But you guys really need to change your approach.”

  “How so?”

  “The dreams. It’s the wrong way to go about it.”

  Ah, the dreams. It was many years ago that the clan decided that mindlessly attacking the tunnels through the surface doors wasn’t going to work.

  So, they had made their minds up to infiltrate the Wrotun. The only problem was that the Wrotun were suspicious of goblins, so there was no question of sending someone into the caverns as a spy. This meant they needed someone from within the Wrotun to join them.

  To get a Wrotun member to turn on their people, you needed to talk to them. How can you talk to people who live deep underground, rarely come to the surface, and feared you so much they would attack a goblin on sight rather than speak to them?

  That was when Mage Acton had an idea. Then again, he always did.

  Mage Acton was one of the eldest members of the clan. If you traced the clan’s family trees, he was probably Reginal’s fourth uncle or something like that. Goblin family trees tended to branch a little too close to each other.

  He was an illusionist by training, having left the clan when he was ten years old to attend the Westharpeth Mage College, returning when he was twenty-one, a fully-grown goblin with mana in his veins and spells in his head. He had loyally served every clan chief since then, treating each equally. When the chief elections came around, Mage Acton always stayed out of the politics side of things.

  Action’s idea was to use his illusionism to cast dreams into the minds of the Wrotun. It depended on choosing the most suggestible of them, which in turn meant picking the ones who might be unhappy with the leadership of the First Branch, or whatever stupid name the Wrotun elder had.

  So Mage Acton fired illusions deep into the ground, penetrating the minds of numerous sleeping Wrotun people. He then focused on those who enjoyed the dream fully instead of waking up, though Reginal didn’t understand how he did this. He didn’t try to, either. He both needed magic desperately and feared it greatly.

  With their targets selected, Mage Acton then cast more refined dreams, invading their target’s sleep with night-time visages that explained to them how the Eternals clan had been the rightful owners of the underground cave and the springs, and how the Wrotun had cast them out.

  Reginal couldn’t believe how widespread the Wrotun elders’ stories were. The first-branches had all been around at the time of the invasion, but the branches after them had been born in the caverns, and they fully believed the propaganda that said it had been their home for centuries.

  But dreams are a powerful thing indeed, and it was one year after beginning their plan, that the first Wrotun people left the cavern and sought out the Eternals clan to see if their dreams were true.

  Now they had scored one of their biggest prizes yet; the Wrotun’s chief trap maker.

  “Are you ready to help us?” Reginal asked her.

  “I wasn’t. But I spent time in your camp. I can’t believe you let me come and go.”

  “We want your willing service, or we do not want it at all.”

  “I wish the First-Leaf was more like you. Maybe it would be different. It can’t go on, the way he’s behaving.”

  “Then you will help?”

  She nodded. “It is better for both our peoples that we leave. We aren’t suited for living underground, and if it weren’t for the springs, I don’t think anyone would have stayed. We need fresh pastures. Fertile soil. And you need your rightful home.”

  Reginal said a silent thanks to Mage Acton. “Then we will begin. I need to know every trap you have set.”

  “A problem with that,” said Tavia. “They brought in two dungeon cores, one guarding each door.”

  “Cores? What?” He felt his blood grow hot then, and his chest tightened. “Cores can create traps at will, can they not?”

  Tavia nodded.

  “Then how will we get past them?”

  “You won’t.”

  “Ah. So you aren’t as inclined to help as I believed,” said Reginal.

&n
bsp; “It isn’t that. You won’t get by the cores, not unless you want to lose half your clan in doing so. No, chief. You need something else. There aren’t many ways to get underground.”

  “I know that, trapper. It was our home after all. The door to the caverns was built by us to be completely proofed against invasion. At any sign of an attack through that, the steps can be destructed, making it a sheer drop.”

  Tavia nodded. “And the mana spring doors are defended by dungeon cores.”

  “Then it’s useless.”

  “It's useless to keep banging your head against the same wall and hoping that the next time you hit it, the wall will crack, instead of your skull. But what if there was a fourth door?”

  “Impossible. We would have known.”

  “Not if the Wrotun made it in secret. Not if it was never, ever used, and put there as an emergency escape. What if you launched an attack on both spring doors to keep the cores busy, yet sent the bulk of your force through the fourth door?”

  CHAPTER 17

  There had been something nagging me from the back of my mind. Do you know the feeling? Like something niggling you, telling you there was something you forgot to do? A chore that you forgot, that kind of thing.

  Ah!

  The memory came back to me.

  I forgot to take care of the corpses in my dungeon tunnel.

  Now, getting rid of corpses was a menial task for a dungeon core. You stripped the heroes of their loot, then you fed their bodies to any meat-eating creatures who lived in your lair. If you didn’t have any, then you would have to get a creature to take the corpses to the surface. But really, what kind of dungeon core doesn’t have any flesh-eating monsters?

  Some cores preferred to leave corpses where they were so that their stink would drift through the dungeon. After all, even the most hardened hero would be scared if he entered a dungeon that stunk of death. The drawback was that this could spur some of them on. Make them mad, make them want to destroy the foul core who had created this place. Also, if you were taking this approach, it was advisable to mute your core senses.

  I was considering feeding the goblins and humans to Gary when an idea hit me.

  “Tomlin, Warrane, Wylie?” I said, using my core voice to reach them wherever they were in the dungeon.

  A few minutes later, Tomlin and Wylie came. Warrane didn’t, but I remembered why; I hadn’t created him, so he couldn’t hear my core voice when I used it that way. There was no connection between our minds except a mutual love for the Soul Bard adventure books, as I had recently learned. We were even thinking of starting a book club.

  “Warrane?” I shouted.

  He heard me now, and the four of us were in my core room.

  “I need you to collect the corpses from the tunnel between the riddle doors and take them to the alchemy chamber.”

  “Wylie drag corpses!”

  Tomlin shook his head. “Tomlin is a cultivator. He does not move corpses.”

  “Tomlin does what his core asks,” I said. “Unless you can give me one good reason why you can’t help the others?”

  “Tomlin believes that having death on his hands may infect the essence vines. Despite flourishing, they are still fragile. The Dark Lord does not want to take a chance with his essence.”

  That didn’t sound right to me, but we’d never gone that deep into essence cultivation in the academy. It was one of those things that sounded like it could be true, but also could be total horse crap. I just didn’t know.

  “You have me there, you crafty swine,” I said. “Tomlin, you’re excused. Warrane, how do you feel about dragging a few corpses through the dungeon?”

  “This leaf already performed the task dozens of times. He would help Tavia after her traps repelled the invaders. He has no fear of touching the dead.”

  “Then two of you leave this core room with honor and my good graces. One of you leaves here as a coward. I’ll let you work out which is which.”

  We met in the alchemy chamber two hours later, where Wylie and two of his crew were waiting for me. They had arranged the goblin and human corpses in quite a neat row, actually. It was very efficient.

  I eyed the red and blue spheres marked on the alchemy chamber floor. I started to get an excited feeling inside me; a phantom dancing of my nerves.

  “What Dark Lord do?” asked Wylie. I noticed that his language skills seemed to be improving the longer he spent with Warrane.

  “I’m going to perform some alchemy,” I told him. “Or you will, under my direction.”

  “Wylie alchemist?”

  I was about to tell him that he would just be doing manual labor and the chamber would perform the actual alchemy, but I thought, what the hells? It doesn’t hurt to keep him happy.

  “Yes, my little friend.”

  “Wylie alchemist miner!” he said, jumping and punching the air.

  “We’ll start with the goblin bard,” I said. “Could you drag him to the middle of the red sphere?”

  My kobolds followed my orders, and it all worked as well as I had hoped. Using the deconstructor sphere, I deconstructed the Seekers’ corpses until I was left with just their life essence.

  The end result was a pile of dust with certain properties relating to the corpse it had come from. Much like the leech from which I had created vampiric dust, but the goblin dust was more concentrated since it had come from tougher, more complex lifeforms.

  The goblin bard deconstructed to leave a pile of bard dust. The ranger left ranger dust, the warrior who had used a warhammer left barbarian dust, and the final goblin left a pile of standard warrior dust.

  Unfortunately, the human corpses left nothing but their ashen remains. It seemed that none of them had earned a specialized class, and it was rather pathetic. It made me feel sad that they had spent their lives as slaves, never earning a class, never pursuing a destiny, only to die in a pit deep underground.

  Still, you can't always get what you want, can you?

  With the specialized dust I had gained from the goblins, there were unlimited possibilities. I had an idea for how I wanted to use them. The theory was sketchy, but I vaguely remembered reading something about it in the academy library.

  “You can all leave,” I told Wylie and his crew. “I need a few trap and puzzle rooms carving out.”

  “Wylie dig,” he said, giving a salute.

  Alone in the alchemy chamber, I felt my excitement begin to bubble again and I had to force myself to be calm.

  I focused on the empty space ahead of me.

  Create kobold.

  My essence left me, becoming a spiral of light until it took the shape of a kobold. This one was the tallest kobold I had made by far, and it had a shock of red hair on its head and a red mustache above its wolf-like snout.

  “Your name is Brecht,” I told him.

  “The core chooses wisely, if I might say.”

  “Good, you already seem reasonable clever. That’ll help with what I want to try.”

  “Can I ask where my name comes from? A kobold must know his past.”

  “Brecht is the middle name of the Soul Bard.”

  “Soul Bard?”

  “Right, you won't know who he is. It’s a fiction series about a bard, that’s all. You should read it. In fact, I might be able to get one of the books, and maybe you could join our book club? But anyway, one of his middle names is Brecht. He actually has 12 names in total. Gets tiresome when he says them all at once.”

  “Delighted to meet you. And what may I call you?”

  I could have just said Core Beno. Or Beno. Or even had him call me Dark Lord, like Tomlin did. But it’s good to freshen things up once in a while. Besides, Dark Lord was so vain a title. We can all use a little modesty from time to time.

  “You can call me…His Dark Magnificence.”

  Brecht suppressed a grin by covering his mouth. At least he knew the pecking order around here, if he was aware enough to hide his laugh. “A quite…fitting…name, my D
ark Magnificence.”

  “Now that’s settled, I have a job for you, Brecht. See that pile of orange dust on the ground?”

  “Ah, I am to sweep the floors?”

  “No, I want you to eat it.”

  Brecht, to give him all credit, picked up a handful of the goblin dust and ate it. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t make a weird face. In fairness though, the wolf side of kobolds means that they’ll pretty much eat anything.

  When he was done swallowing, I waited. And waited.

  Did I get this wrong?

  But then a message appeared, and a flood of excitement rushed through me.

  Brecht is now a [Bard]

  He begins as level 15.

  Woah.

  Level 15?

  Just as I had expected, deconstructing the goblin bard had left his bardy essence behind. By ingesting it, Brecht had earned the bard class. This was amazing, because it opened up all sorts of choices for me. The more Seekers I slaughtered, the more chance to get different kinds of class dust.

  But level 15? That was way, way beyond what I expected. It couldn’t have been my kobold proficiency, because that was only [minor]. Besides, more proficiency had only boosted Shadow to a level 5 scout.

  It must have been the dust itself. I guessed that the goblin bard had been a high level, and remnants of his strength were in the dust.

  “Brecht, in a moment you can head to the inventory room. There should be a magic tambourine in there.”

  The inventory room was a space I had asked Wylie to excavate. The problem with killing loads and loads of people was that your dungeon became cluttered. I liked my dungeon to be somewhat tidy. Any items I looted, like armor and weapons and stuff, would go in the inventory room from now on.

  “I will go now.”

  “Hold on a second, my lovely bard. We still have work to do.”

  The next thirty minutes were bloody brilliant, I don’t mind saying.