The third way of gathering loot is to take it from the heroes that you kill. Some of them race down into the dungeon thinking they’re great and they’re gonna kill a bunch of monsters. Maybe some of them are rookie heroes, there to impress a guild and earn a contract.
They’d go down there with their best weapons and armor. Swords with artificed gems set in the hilts. Fancy breastplates that their mothers bought them for their birthday.
A rather greedy core could kill a hero and loot his stuff.
Even thinking about it made me laugh. A hero enters a dungeon for loot, and the dungeon core ends up looting him! Who wouldn’t enjoy that?
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
When I stopped laughing, I felt slightly embarrassed about doing so in an empty chamber. I guessed I couldn’t help it. The longer you spend as a core, the more your core instincts filter through. I’d have to try and control myself a little. I’d still kill heroes. I mean…I had to. I’d just try and be more professional about it, though.
Anyway, that was the third way. Kill a hero, loot him, and then use that loot to draw other suckers into your dungeon. The circle of life, a person might call it. Or is it death?
But that didn’t matter right now, because I couldn’t open my dungeon up to heroes yet. I was going to have to find loot another way. A fourth way.
My next step was to craft another pedestal point. I placed this in one of the unassigned chambers. I chose the one that split off at the right side of the tunnel leading from the loot room.
After traveling into room three via my new pedestal point, I once again found myself staring at a rather bland room with nothing but mud walls and a dirt floor.
There were a couple of things I wanted to do here, but I was too low-level to do them. I needed access to the trap part of the crafting menu, but it wouldn’t unlock until my total essence reached a certain level. The only way to increase my total essence was to kill stuff and level up, or find more essence buds. There was as much chance of me farting gold dust than that happening.
But there was something I could do. Something that really excited me. After all, though I enjoyed my own company, I didn’t like being down there all alone all the time. I’d feel better if I had a friend.
Some people, if they were here watching me, might have felt a little apprehensive that my whole deal here is to entice, entrap, and then disembowel heroes. Perhaps they would think it’s better that I’m all alone.
I wouldn’t blame them for feeling that way. It would just mean they’re a well-adjusted person with empathy for others. When I first became a core and still had a glimmer of my old self inside me, I felt the same way.
I remember sitting in Overseer Tocky-Turnbull’s Introduction to Being a Core class, and he explained what we were and what we’d have to do. He accompanied this by casting a light spell on the wall that showed a bunch of paintings. Ones of heroes going into dungeons. Bear traps slamming over their feet. Giant boulders crashing into them. Then we saw the cores siphoning lifeforce from the heroes so that they could grow stronger.
Seeing it for the first time, I felt queasy. I was a gem core, so it was impossible for me to vomit, of course. It was a phantom feeling, like when someone loses an arm or a leg and they think they can still feel it. I’ve mostly gotten rid of this, but I still get the occasional phantom emotion from time to time.
Anyway, I felt sick when I first learned about what my new life would consist of. Then, Overseer Tocky-Turnbull changed my thinking.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to imagine a lion,” the overseer told us all. “A big warrior lion out in the sandy plains of Jansanze. No, wait a second. If we’re imagining things, let’s go big. So, picture a…dragon. Shiny scales, a giant head with big horns coming off it. He’s flying over the plains with his wings flapping so loud they sound like cannons firing, and then he spots a sheep way below him.
This dragon is hungry. His nestlings are hungry. A sheep would feed them for a little while. Would you call him evil when he scoops the sheep up in his mouth and carries it back to his nest? Maybe some people would. If they do, I respect that.
You cores can’t have that same opinion. For our dragon friend, it is his nature. He doesn’t have a choice in it. So it is with you cores. You can’t nourish yourselves in any other way. You exist to entrap heroes and drain their souls.”
It isn’t exactly like the sheep story, either. The sheep is defenseless. Whereas heroes come down here armed to the teeth, and their sole intention is to defeat me and take my loot. They’re not even motivated by survival; humans don’t have an inner need to kill stuff for treasure. Glittering gems and mountains of gold don’t inherently keep a person alive. Not directly, anyway.
So, it works on both sides. They want to kill me, and I need to kill them. What I’m saying is, heroes aren’t innocent in all of this.
If I told someone this and they didn’t change their mind about me, that would be okay. I’d just want them to understand that I don’t do any of this because I’m evil, and I’d hope that we could remain friends.
With that said, I had work to do there in the third room in my dungeon.
As a level one core without much essence, the only categories available in my crafting list were fixtures and monsters. As I selected the monsters list, my excitement grew inside me. I was close to getting a friend!
Monsters:
Spider [Cost 15]
Leech [Cost 15]
Fire beetle [Cost 20]
Kobold [Cost 35]
Hmm. Not a fearsome list at all. In fact, it looked like the lunchtime menu at an orc restaurant. Plus, even with my discounted essence rates, they were still expensive. 15 essence points to create one leech? Yeah, right.
There was another thing to be wary of, too. If I wanted to, I could have used up all my essence creating fire beetles. At my current total of 49 essence points, I could create 2 at a time.
Then I could keep creating beetles, regenerating my essence, creating more beetles, and so on until my dungeon was crawling with the buggers. All it would take is being patient while my essence regenerated.
Fire beetles might not be so fearsome on their own, but 5000 of them would have been a match for anyone!
But…
Yes, there’s always a but when it comes to dungeons…
As a level one core, I had limits to the number of rooms I could build and the number of monsters I could have in my dungeon at any one time.
I checked them now.
Level 1 Limits:
Rooms: 4
Monsters: 4
Traps: 6
Puzzles: 2
Leveling up wasn’t just a way of increasing essence, it also gave me access to other crafting categories, and it increased how much of the lovely stuff I could place in my dungeon.
As a devout academy student, I was very interested in dungeon core history, and I’d learned that it hadn’t always been this way.
There used to be no limits whatsoever on the number of monsters a level one core could create. All he needed to do was be patient when he waited for his essence to regenerate.
So, a dungeon core named Alibub created rats in his dungeon. Not just one rat. Not two. Not three. Not four.
Alibub painstakingly created 10,000 rats in his little level one dungeon. Then, he let them do what rats love most: breed until their rat loins ached.
Rats are incredibly fertile – which is why some silly alchemists sell their blood as a…ahem…cure for intimate problems – and the randy blighters will spawn an entire family tree before you can blink.
Soon enough, Alibub’s dungeon was crawling with them. Seriously, he must have had almost a million rats in there. When an overseer went to evaluate him, he could barely move around the place, and he developed a lifetime phobia of vermin. For a dungeon to scare an overseer, it has to be BAD.
Alibub then opened his dungeon by digging his way to the surface. No prizes for guessing what happened next.
Yup
. A million rats scurried out of the dungeon and sought freedom. They prowled over the nearby plains, through a forest, and then they reached a town called Penketh. They decimated the farmland on the town boundaries, and then the sea of vermin flooded into the town itself.
It was a horror show. Coming from a dungeon core, that is quite the description.
So that’s why the overseers designed a limit on what a first level core can make. The assumption is that by the time a core reaches, say, level 10, he’ll be wiser, more disciplined, and you can trust him to handle more monsters responsibly.
Right now, I had a choice to make. I wanted to start enticing heroes down here, and I needed something capable of killing them. Spiders, beetles, and leeches weren’t great for that.
I had to be a little more patient. I needed more resources; more essence, more stuff to craft with.
I knew what I had to do.
I gave a command to my inner core.
Create kobold.
I felt a pinching sensation in my core as 35 essence points left me. Tendrils of light illuminated the room, settling in the center of it near my pedestal. They whizzed around and around, eventually forming a shape.
Kobold created!
You have created your first monster! Your crafting fixtures list has been updated.
Dungeon Requirement [Partly] Satisfied!
Requirement: 1 Monster, 1 trap
Satisfied: ½
With a whoosh and the smell of spent essence, the shape took life and became a little creature standing before me.
“Pleased to meet you!” I said, glad to use my voice again.
Kobolds are weird creatures. They look like child-size combinations of a dragon and a wolf, except with humanoid forms. In other words, arms and legs, but no wings. And without the ability to breathe fire.
Actually, it’s only their faces that resemble dragons.
I knew a fair bit about them thanks to my academy bookworm days, and kobolds came with a reputation of being difficult to get along with. They were renowned for being intolerant of any race but kobolds, a trait that led to the great Kobold-Human war of 10D3S2056. (We really need to simplify our calendar system.)
Now, I didn’t want such a thing as intolerance here in my dungeon. Sure, this was going to be a place where hundreds of heroes met their deaths. It’d be filled with spikes, lava pits, mantraps. But there was no place for prejudice in my lair.
However, kobolds came with a couple of other traits that made them perfect for places like this. For one, the little dragon-things were insanely territorial. Seriously, I would advise any travelers that if they are ever walking in a forest and they see little weird twig sculptures hanging from trees and hear lots of strange chirping sounds…run! They should run as if their life depended on it! Which it probably would, because they had likely wandered into a kobold clan’s nest.
As well as that, kobolds are crafty little creatures. They are especially adept at making traps, but they can turn their hand (or is it paws? Claws?) to other stuff, too. For a core whose only hands were spiritual and could only do stuff like digging, a kobold was useful to have around.
This one was as tall as an adult human’s waist, and rather slender. Its muscles were toned, but it didn’t look strong. It was wearing a loincloth around its midriff and it had a pack on its back.
It sniffed the air now, its wolf-like snout pinching and unpinching, its dragon-like eyes scanning the room.
“You create?” it asked me.
Its voice was rough, almost gravelly. To a human, it would have sounded like a chirpy snarl. As a core, I had an inherent ability to understand the tongue of all animals and creatures.
That language ability in itself was a good reason for never leaving the dungeon. I hated to imagine walking through a muddy field and hearing all the worms talking to each other, the mice gossiping, the birds screaming stuff. Nope, that’d get annoying.
“You create?” it asked me again.
“Yes, I create,” I said. “I mean, yes I created you. Your name is Tomlin.”
This was an important thing to do when you made a creature. Creating a monster bound it to me and naming it strengthened that bond, making a link of loyalty between me and my creation that was almost impossible to break. Plus, it was much better than saying “Hey, kobold number 1. Hey, kobold number 500.”
“How?” it asked.
“How did I create you?”
“How Tomlin?”
“Ah, you mean how did I choose your name.”
“Yes. Thank.”
“Well, Tomlin, have you ever heard of the Soul Bard series of books? No, I guess you haven’t. If you have the ability to read English, or you can learn it, I’ll try and get a copy for you once I have a surface liaison. Anyway, Tomlin is the Soul Bard’s best friend. His loyal compadre. The first critter he meets when he leaves his village on his big adventure, and they stick together through everything.”
“You Soul Bard?”
“I wish, Tomlin. I’m just a core gem. This is your home now, okay? This is your nest, and I am your clanmate. Any creatures I create are also your clanmates. Okay?”
That was another important thing to remember to do, but it mostly applied to kobolds. By telling Tomlin this was his nest, I had made him associate his territorial instincts with it.
“Clan. Okay!” he answered, and his snout and mouth changed expression, forming something of a smile. A rather snarling smile, but a smile, nonetheless.
He might not be much of a warrior, and he never would be considering what I had planned for him, but at least I had some kind of defense now.
“Core. Tell what Tomlin do?”
“Call me Beno. No…wait…call me the Dark Master. No, Dark Lord. Call me Dark Lord. Much cooler.”
“Dark Lord,” said Tomlin, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed him calling me that. “What do?”
I smiled now. Inwardly, of course.
This was another trait of kobolds; they couldn’t sit still. Call them anything, but they weren’t lazy. In fact, many dwarven settlements had tried to tame kobolds over the years, seeing them as perfect fits for their mines. Of course, wild kobolds couldn’t be tamed. They were way too intelligent for that.
“Tomlin, I have a role in mind for you. A very important one, okay? I think you’re perfect for it. See the wall behind you?”
Tomlin turned around, checked the wall, then turned back and nodded. “See.”
“I’d like you to dig a tunnel into it, please. Ten feet long will do, and wide enough to fit a minecart. Do you know what a minecart is?”
Tomlin nodded. “Cart.”
Good – Tomlin came with a modicum of knowledge. At least I didn’t have to play father to him and teach him everything.
“Once you dig the tunnel, I’d like you to begin digging another room. Make it…hmm…twenty square feet. If you find anything useful while you are working, put it to one side.”
Tomlin nodded. “Dig. Will do.”
“Are you happy with this, Tomlin? I would like to choose a specialty for you, but as my first companion, I would like you to be happy. If you are, then you will become a miner.”
“Miner!” shouted Tomlin, with more enthusiasm than I expected from a kobold. “Tomlin is miner! Good. Very good. Tomlin can explore. Make find.”
Specialty assigned to [Kobold Tomlin]: Miner [LVL1]
- Mining equipment added to Tomlin’s inventory
I rubbed my imaginary hands together. This was all starting to take shape.
“Not too bad, considering I started with nothing but a patch of moss, huh?” I said.
“Huh?”
“Oh, you’re not impressed? You’ve seen better dungeons than mine? Fair enough, you’re probably right. Can’t please everyone. Just bear with me a little.”
“Tomlin not say anything.”
“Never mind. I’m just pleased you’re so happy with your new job. Okay then my first and, by technicality, best friend, time to get
at it.”
Tomlin saluted me and then trundled off toward the wall. When he was facing it, I expected him to begin scraping away with his claws.
Instead, Tomlin hefted his backpack around, opened it, and produced a small wooden pickaxe and a shovel. Great! That happened when I chose his specialty. Course, I’d need to get better gear for him soon. His wooden tools would be ineffective, and they’d break easily.
I’d have to make him some iron tools to begin with. That reminded me – when I created Tomlin, my crafting list had been updated.
Core Crafting Categories:
1) Dungeon Fixtures
2) Monsters
3) Tools & Weapons
4) ????
5) ????
6) ????
Aha! A third category had been unlocked! What a pleasant surprise.
Opening it, I saw that there wasn’t a great deal I could make just yet.
Tools and Weapons
Iron Pickaxe [Cost 200]
Iron Spade [Cost 200]
Iron Sword [Cost 250]
Iron Shield [Cost 250]
Two hundred essence for a bloody pickaxe! Were they having a laugh, or what?
Wait, no. I was forgetting.
Crafting things using essence was a simple business, but an ineffective one. Iron and essence were two different things, and the crafting process that converted essence to iron needed a lot of essence to complete. That was why an iron pickaxe cost so much, even with the discount I had earned from the overseers.
So, there was a way to make it cheaper.
“Tomlin,” I said.
My friend snapped his wolf-dragon eyes in my direction. “Yes, Dark Lord?”
“What are your special skills as a miner?”
“Mining, Dark Lord.”
“Yes, and what else?”
“Mineral find.”
“I thought so. I can assign a particular material or mineral for your find skill, and you will sense when it is nearby while you are mining. Good, good. I’d like you to keep a special eye out for iron.”
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 4