Dungeon Core Academy 2

by Alex Oakchest

  “One thing that concerns me is the idea that in an emergency, perhaps a fire of some sort, we may need to flee the caves by a different surface door. What if we must use one of the doors protected by our cores? Surely we would all flee straight into our own traps?”

  “It makes sense to worry about that,” I answered. “However, Second-Leaf Godwin bought me from the academy, and she is technically my owner, as much as I hate the word. She could command all my traps to deactivate and my monsters to stand down.”

  “Ah, very clever.”

  The First-Leaf regarded me for a second then, with one eyebrow raised. Then his face relaxed.

  Well, relaxed as much as was possible for him. He’d always look like someone had kicked him in the nuts; that was just the way he was.

  “A sensible precaution,” said Godwin. “It seems your academy core forgers are sensible fellows.”

  “I agree.”

  And I would have agreed, if I were telling the truth.

  See, there’s no such rule that means our owner can deactivate all our traps. I pulled the fact from my gem arse. I hadn’t planned on lying to the First-Leaf, but it had come to me in a flash of inspiration. It seemed like a good idea to have him rely on something that wasn’t true.

  A message appeared before me now, writing itself in spirals of light for me and everyone else to see.

  Melding complete.

  “I say, melding?” asked the goatief.

  “It’s nothing special,” I said. “It just means my boss monster is ready.” I used my inner core voice now. “Tomlin, are you around?”

  “Tomlin is working on the red essence.”

  “Really? Have you cultivated it yet?”

  “He has not, but he is close.”

  “Good job! Listen, can you go open the melding room door for me?”

  “Melding room, Dark Lord? That is…uh…that is a long way from the essence rooms.”

  “It’s right next door! You’re scared, aren’t you? Scared of the idea of a new boss monster. Fine.”

  I looked at the Wrotun people. “Kobolds,” I said. “Always acting like cowards.” And then I realized the dialogue with Tomlin had been in my head, so they’d have no idea what I was talking about. I thought better of trying to explain it.

  “Something the matter?” asked Godwin. “Is everything under control? I hope this dungeon has not strained your competency.”

  “The opposite. Everything’s great. Excuse me a minute.”

  I was about to hop to the pedestal in my melding room when I heard a sound.

  It was a noise that I didn’t need my inner core to hear, because this was a shriek that wound its way through the dungeon tunnels. A cry of utter pain, one that made even I, a dungeon core, wince.

  Something very bad had happened to someone very unlucky.

  “What in all hells was that?” said Godwin.

  And then the sound came again. A desperate scream of pain.

  It sounded for all the world like…like…

  “I say! That was my boy!” said the elder goatief.

  Godwin gave me a look of pure anger. Anger that had been boiled down to its essence, then mixed with fury and rage to become the expression currently gouged into this old gnome’s features.

  “You should pray to your forgers that nothing has happened to Second-Leaf Rushden’s boy,” he told me.

  The Rushden family tore off down the tunnels, with the younger third and fourth leaves reaching the entryway first, and the elder leaves and First-Leaf Godwin behind. I knew that the tunnels ahead were still strewn with some of Tavia’s traps, but I hadn’t gotten around to laying my own yet.

  “Tomlin, Shadow, everyone; make sure nothing happens to the people currently running through our dungeon Make them aware of any traps.”

  There comes a time when it’s okay to panic. To exaggerate. To use harsh words.

  This was one of those times, so I will say this; things looked bad.

  I just couldn’t understand what had happened. The scream came from way north of us, and it was unmistakably the Rushden boy. Had Wylie failed to lead him away from traps or something?

  “Wylie,” I said, using my core voice. “What happened?”

  “Wylie didn’t see!”

  “Is the boy alive?”

  “Wylie doesn’t-”

  Wylie shouted something, but I couldn’t hear. I used my core vision to take a look through the dungeon, whizzing through the tunnel until I saw it.

  I couldn’t believe the scene in the room near the surface door.

  The Rushden family had surrounded Wylie. Two of them restrained him. Wylie had a look of fear and confusion on his face. On the opposite side of the room, First-Leaf Godwin had backed Gary into the corner, using his glowing staff as a threat.

  And then there was an older female Goatief in the center of the room. She was kneeling beside a body. It was the body of the fifth-leaf of the Rushden family.

  CHAPTER 19

  I hopped to the room next to the surface door. It was hard to know what to focus on. Two goatiefs were restraining Wylie, bending his arms behind his back. The boy was lying dead in the center of the room. His mother kept shaking his face, as though he’d wake up.

  “A healer! Get us a healer!” she shouted.

  The boy’s father looked at Wylie, then at Gary in the far corner of the room. “Which beast did this?” he shouted, his voice thundery.

  “If everyone could calm down,” said Gary, lifting a leech leg and holding it high in the air. “We can straighten up this mishap. A calm mind is a mind that can cast itself on the winds of thought.”

  “Mishap??”

  “He doesn’t mean it that way,” I said. “He’s a boss monster. Empathy isn’t his strongest skill.”

  “It’s no mishap,” said First-Leaf Godwin. “It is murder.”

  “A healer! A healer!” cried the mother.

  Godwin shook his head. “Your son is dead.”

  “Then get him to the mana spring.”

  “The spring extends life; it cannot restore it.”

  “I say, I want both creatures killed on the spot!” said the eldest Goatief. His voice was strange, his words coated in a mixture of anger and grief so that he was half-screaming, half-shouting the words.

  I could tell he hadn’t processed what had happened. He was in shock, and his shock response was to demand anger and retribution.

  This didn’t seem right. I was certain that neither Wylie nor Gary had killed this boy. For one, I had ordered Wylie to escort the boy safely around the dungeon. Even if he had decided to go against his nature and deceive me, he was hardly a ferocious beast. I didn’t see how Wylie could have done it.

  Gary, on the other hand…I was going to have a hard time explaining how Gary couldn’t have done it. I knew he was a delightful guy, but he looked like a hideous freak. In the nicest possible way.

  The only fact I clung to was that the boy’s wounds didn’t match up with Gary or Wylie doing it. He had three long cuts across his chest, from which blood poured freely and gave my dungeon floor a rather pleasing crimson hue. Actually. It really set the room off. I’d need to look into…

  Not the time for planning decorations!

  “Look at him,” I said. “Slashes across his chest. Gary couldn’t have done that; he’d have left bite marks, not slashes.”

  Godwin, still pointing his glowing staff at Gary, fixed me with a stare hotter than fire. “Do you think they want to know how your monster killed him? Do you think this is the time to draw attention to the horror? You’re a menace. To think, we welcomed you into our caves.”

  “I want the monsters dead,” said the boy’s father. His face was paler than ice.

  “And you shall.”

  I heard a pounding inside my head. It was though I had a pulse again, and that pulse was racing and racing, building into a toxic mix of rage and adrenaline.

  “If either of my monsters are harmed without establishing the facts, I
’ll unleash everything in my dungeon and set them loose on your people,” I said.

  The words left my mouth and seemed to take on a weight of their own. I could hardly believe I had said it. Like it or not, every core has a duty, and my given duty was to defend these people, not hurt them.

  I guessed it was just my own shock response. I was worried about my friends.

  It seemed that the threat was enough. I could see in all the Rushden’s’ faces that my words had affected them. Even Godwin looked a little worried.

  He nodded at a younger Rushden. She was older than the dead boy, but younger than the eldest goatief. A fourth leaf, perhaps.

  “Fetch Galatee and five strong men and women. We will take the monsters away until we learn the truth,” Godwin said.

  “No you won’t,” I said.

  “Core, you are lucky that the Seekers are still out there, because it means we cannot afford to remove you yet. But the truth of this will out. I will not stand for added danger in our caverns, and certainly not from our own defense system.”

  My mind was a crazy blast of thoughts now. Of the questions I should ask, things I should say.

  I knew Gary or Wylie hadn’t done this, but that certainty led to the bigger question; who had done it?

  “Gary?” I said. “What did you see?”

  Godwin raised his staff and pointed it at Gary. A blast of foul-smelling black smoke left it, drifting over to Gary and then splattering against his mouth. It formed a barrier over it, preventing him from taking. Before I could ask Wylie, Godwin did the same to him.

  What in all hells was he doing?

  I kept the question to myself. I sensed that the First-Leaf was up to something now, and I felt it was in my best interest to get him out of the dungeon, even if it meant taking Gary and Wylie away.

  I needed time to think and to plan, without the First-Leaf being there.

  That was why I said little as reinforcements arrived, and the Wrotun took Wylie and Gary out of my dungeon. I didn’t want to look at Wylie’s scared face but I forced myself to, and I tried to appear as confident as possible.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to him and Gary. “You’ll be back before you know it.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” said the First-Leaf. He pointed at Warrane. “Fifth-Leaf get back to the caverns. There will be a general meeting tonight.”

  “This leaf will stay. It is his duty.”

  “He will go where his First-Leaf tells him to. Caverns. Now.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I’ll be honest with you. I couldn’t have cared any less about the dead goatief boy. Even if you’d said to me, “Beno I will pay you all the gold in Xynnar if you just shed a tear for the goatief”, then I still wouldn’t be able to. It’s just not in my nature to care.

  Part of the forging process in the academy does something to a core’s emotions, and it makes it hard to shed a tear over sad puppies, stories of unrequited love, and pompous goatief boys who decided to explore a dungeon.

  Maybe I would have pretended, though. Gold is gold, after all, and if someone was offering all the gold in Xynnar, why not try to cry a little? Then again, who would ever offer that much gold? It’s like the game kids always play. The hypothetical if a mage put a wand to your head, would you kiss a pig’s bottom? You know, that kind of thing.

  Anyway, the only thing I was bothered about was Wylie and Gary. Every time I thought about Godwin and the others leading them out of my dungeon, I felt rage boil up inside me.

  I could only calm myself down by trying really hard to dredge empathy from the bottom of my core soul. Or if not empathy, then a close imitation of it. How would I feel if my son had died in a dungeon?

  Impossible to say. I don’t have a son.

  Hmm. Empathy is hard.

  Ah, wait a second. How would I feel if I had created a kobold, sent him to the caverns, and someone there had slaughtered him?

  I would be angry. I would want to come up with some diabolical plan to wipe them out completely. To make them pay for what they’d done by killing every last one of them, grinding their bodies into gristle, and feeding the slop to my creatures.

  And now, after those soothing thoughts, I felt a little more relaxed.

  Now that I had calmed down, I tried to approach this rationally. No matter what angle I viewed it from, I couldn’t see how Wylie or Gary had killed the boy. The Wrotun were safe from my creatures unless I willed otherwise, and my creations would only attack them if I gave the order.

  What else, then? Could a Seeker have done it?

  Doubtful. It didn’t seem logical that a Seeker could sneak in, murder the boy, the creep out again. For one thing, the timing would be very coincidental. What were the odds that a Seeker would be there near the surface door at the same time the boy was? I mean, Godwin had brought them to me unannounced. It wasn’t a planned visit.

  What else could have happened? Could the boy have done it to himself? I didn’t see why or how. He had three long, deep gashes on his chest. He couldn’t have done that to himself. The same logic meant it couldn’t have been an accident of any kind.

  Fine, so I wasn’t going to work things out that way. I needed a different approach.

  Who could have benefited from this? That was the question.

  Well, the Seekers benefited, since I had two less creatures in my dungeon, and Gary had been one of my toughest. There was nobody else who I could think would benefit from this.

  I felt a stirring in my core. Somebody was in the dungeon.

  Checking my core vision, I saw that Galatee had entered my core room.

  I hopped there to find her waiting beside my pedestal. She was wearing a tight set of leathers that made her old gnome body look toned. The leather chest piece looked like it would withstand a sword lunge or two, but it was also trimmed with gold so that it looked nice. Her face was graver than a…than a…a grave?

  “Core Beno,” she said. “Your monsters have been placed in two cells near the cavern, where they cannot harm anyone. They will not be destroyed until we are satisfied that we know happened today.”

  “Surely you don’t believe they did it?”

  “Try to think like someone else would, core. This is a dungeon full of monsters. One of our people died in a room where you had stationed a beast. What is the most likely explanation?”

  “The most likely explanation isn’t always the right one.”

  She wavered a little now. I could see it in her eyes. She was just parroting what the First-Leaf had told her to say, but at least a part of her didn’t believe it.

  “Perhaps not always, but you can forgive a grieving family for latching onto passing debris of logic to keep their minds afloat.”

  “Galatee, I-”

  “Enough,” she said. She sounded like her father when she said that.

  Come to think of it, was the First-Leaf her father? She had never called him that, but I was sure that was how their tree structure worked.

  “I have come to give you this, as requested,” she said.

  She opened the satchel around her shoulder and produced a crystal. It was the size of an apple and jagged, with a slightly blue tint that stopped it being fully transparent.

  “Core Jahn has a crystal in his dungeon, too. This will allow you to speak to him. It is only to be used to coordinate your efforts in the event of an invasion on both doors.”

  She placed the crystal on the pedestal.

  “Got it. Thank you. I need to ask for one fav-”

  Galatee didn’t even answer me. Instead, she just walked away, and soon her footsteps became distant echoes, and then disappeared completely.

  I glanced at the crystal that she had left on my pedestal. I could talk to Jahn, at least. It would be good to hear a friendly voice. To find out what he was doing, to…

  Wait a second.

  I had an idea. There was something I had to do, but I needed to be quick.

  “Hello? Beno?” said a voice.

  It c
ame from the crystal. It sounded distant, as though he was shouting from across a valley. I could still make out the words.

  “Jahn?”

  “Beno! Thank the forgers that it’s you! I was worried. They won’t tell me anything about you.”

  “Are you okay, Jahn?”

  “I’m fine. A little homesick, but fine.”

  “And your essence? Tell me that you didn’t absorb it.”

  “I cultivated it into vines,” he said proudly. “Two walls of them, growing happily. I might plant a third wall too. And guess what? I fou-”

  Core Jahn could talk for days if you let him, and I was suddenly filled with an urgent need to at least try the plan that had just occurred to me. To do that, I needed to use the crystal. It pained me, but this chat was going to have to be brief.

  “Is there anything you need to tell me, Jahn? Anything I should know?”

  “Well, two days ago I began digging a tunnel toward the east. Then I excavated one to the north, and I carved two rooms. I went for an oval shape, because-”

  “Jahn, is there anything vitally important I should know, or anything that you’d like to know from me?”

  “I said to myself last week, Jahn, you need to-”

  No, I wasn’t getting anywhere where. Jahn was going to talk for hours. Ordinarily, I would have let him, but this was an emergency.

  “Sorry, Jahn, but I have to go. Take care, my friend. We’ll talk soon.”

  “Beno? Why do you need to go?”

  I realized then that I had no idea how to stop him from talking to me. So instead, I sent out an order using my core voice.

  “The first kobold to come to the core room, pick up the crystal and take it to the alchemy chamber gets to be temporary leader while Warrane and Wylie are gone.”

  Ten minutes later, after getting help from one of Wylie’s miners, I was in the alchemy chamber, with the crystal placed down on the deconstructor sphere.

  The kobold eyed me warily. He was one of the miners I had created to help Wylie in his digging and excavation, and he’d spent his time in the dungeon under Warrane’s supervision.