Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series)

by Alex Oakchest

“Tomlin, guard your nest,” I commanded.

  He didn’t move. His kobold eyes were so wide I could see the whites. I would have felt sorry for him, if he weren’t both a complete coward and my only line of defense. A sorry combination, indeed.

  After a few seconds more looking at the creature, my core senses washed over it, and information was fed back to me.

  Greater Bogbadug

  Habitat: Marshes, bogs

  Traits: Loves essence

  A bogbadug?

  What the hell?

  The bogbadug sniffed the air now, its oversized nostrils flaring as it caught the scent of something. Evidently it liked the aroma, whatever it was, because it licked its lips with a long, slurping tongue.

  There was no food down here. Nothing for a giant toad to eat. Only…

  Oh, holy twelve demon lords of the damned underworlds!

  The bogbadug had caught the scent of my essence vines in my core room!

  Time seemed to slow for me now, just as my pulse (imaginary) raced. I swear, I could almost hear an actual pulse pounding now, and it wasn’t just from that coward Tomlin.

  I had to think quickly. Actions and decisions in times like this sealed the fate of a core.

  Traps. Could I quickly fashion a trap to catch this thing before it followed the scent to my essence room?

  No – the trap crafting category was still locked for me.

  Okay. First things first, I had to contain it here, in room four. What could I do?

  The bogbadug started to walk now, following the smell in the direction of the tunnel that led out of the room and toward my loot room.

  Ah!

  I quickly hopped onto the pedestal in my loot room. Here, I entered my core placement mode, which was how I manipulated the things that I had created using essence.

  As the bogbadug walked down the tunnel, I used my placement command to move my loot chest.

  First, I turned it so that it was standing vertically. Then, I dragged it to the tunnel, covering most of the entrance. There was a two-foot gap at the top, but it was something.

  I hopped back into room four now, where Tomlin was still cowering. I shook my head. Or at least, I liked to pretend I had. “Pull yourself together,” I said.

  The bogbadug, at the far end of the tunnel, was hammering the loot chest with his fists. The chest would hold him off from the tunnel to my core room for a while, but it was a crummy chest. It wouldn’t withstand it forever.

  It was then that I heard something.

  Footsteps coming from my core room.

  What in all hells was going on? Was Vedetta here?

  “Core Beno,” called a voice. “I request your presence in the core room for an evaluation.”

  Another evaluation?

  A second one? Right now?

  And was that…Overseer Bolton?

  I was suddenly aware of the almighty racket the bogbadug was making as it hammered desperately at the loot chest, its hunger for essence growing stronger by the second.

  I didn’t want to exaggerate what my feelings were at that moment. After all, I am not an overdramatic core by nature. So, to sum up my feelings…

  Things could have been going better.

  I had no way of killing the bogbadug, but nor could I let Overseer Bolton see it. The fact he was here for an evaluation so soon after the last one meant that I was being targeted. Overseers were people. They couldn’t help their biases sometimes.

  If Bolton saw the bogbadug running amok, he’d probably kill it. He shouldn’t do that, but I bet he would.

  Not to save me. Oh no, nothing as nice as that. He’d kill the creature and then claim, ‘severe failure on Core Beno’s part forced me to intercede.’

  When an overseer had to intercede in dungeon happenings, it wasn’t good.

  Now, I heard another shout from across the dungeon. Only, this one didn’t come from my core room, in came from room four. And it was muffled.

  I pedestal-hopped into room three, where I could at least see room four. Yup, I heard the voice again, coming from behind the wall.

  The girl! She’d returned! This was the last thing that I needed.

  “Vedetta? This isn’t the best time.”

  She shouted something, but she was outside my dungeon and blocked by mud, so I could hardly hear what she said. She was probably yelling about what a good job I was doing. She’d have to wait.

  Hop!

  Back on the pedestal point in my loot room, I had a choice to make.

  Bolton was approaching from the core room, calling my name. “Core Beno?”

  Maybe I had a plan. A shoddy one, but a lack of time meant shoddy plans.

  “Tomlin!” I called. “Pull yourself together and get over here.”

  I manipulated the loot chest so that it was the right way around. This left the tunnel mostly clear for the bogbadug to go through, but I quickly opened the chest lid.

  I manipulated the spare essence leaf I’d taken from my core room so that it was waving in the air. “Essence? See? For you.”

  The frog’s eyes bulged. Its tongue hung from its mouth, and saliva dripped from it.

  I threw the leaf into the loot chest. The bogbadug dived in, and I quickly slammed the lid over it.

  Just then, Tomlin ambled over tentatively, eyes darting around for any sign of the monster.

  “Recovered your courage?” I asked him. “That’s nice timing.”

  “Ah, Core Beno,” said a voice behind me.

  I whispered to Tomlin. “The frog freak is in the chest. Sit on top of it. Don’t let it out. If it makes noise, pretend that it’s you who’s making it.”

  I turned around to face Overseer Bolton, expecting the worst. After all, I had appealed against his decision. Overseers were a vain bunch, and they didn’t like their judgments being questioned by us lowly cores. I understood it why. After ascending to their third life, they had earned respect.

  Overseer Bolton didn’t seem angry at me. He was smiling, and his eyes looked just as warm and kind as always. There was one difference, however.

  “You shaved your head, Overseer Bolton. It looks great on you.”

  “Yes, well, there comes a time when we must stop lying to ourselves. My hair was thinner than the bristles on a tavern boy’s broom. If you lie to yourself, who else will you lie to? Honesty begins from within.”

  “I agree, integrity is paramount. I’ll just be a second, I need to check something.”

  “Core Beno, I don’t have ti-”

  I hopped to the pedestal in room three. “Vedetta,” I said. “Vedetta?”

  I heard a muffled sound coming from the walls.

  “If you can hear me, shut your mouth for a few minutes. I have an overseer here. When it’s clear, I’ll knock on the wall. Or Tomlin will, anyway. Got it? To summarize, shut up.”

  Then I went back to my core room, where I found Bolton and Tomlin in conversation. Tomlin was sitting on the loot chest, trying to look natural and swinging his legs back and forth so that his heels were thumping the chest.

  I realized he was doing this to keep in time with the bogbadug inside it, who was hammering to get out.

  Great.

  “You want to study, hmm?” said Bolton, smiling at Tomlin. “I admire an inquisitive mind, but you must always carry out your core’s tasks. I see that you’re a miner. Level three, eh? Perhaps you’ll come to love mining as a craft. And I mean craft, too. It isn’t just a job. There’s a craft to everything, if you open your mind enough to seek it out. Ah, Beno, you’re back.”

  “Let’s go to the core room, Overseer.”

  “I’d like to tour the rest of the dungeon.”

  “I haven’t progressed much there since your last visit.”

  “Ah, yes. The one where I wrongly issued a condemnation, yes? I’m glad you pointed that out to the overseers’ panel, Beno. I love to be corrected by them.”

  For the first time ever, I picked up on a little hostility in Bolton’s voice. It made me sad. I
understood I had probably pricked his ego, but my existence was on the line! His condemnation could have sunk me.

  I could have apologized like I had planned, but I decided that he wouldn’t appreciate it. It would be drawing attention to it all. Better to move on.

  “If you please, overseer, I have made great progress in my core room.”

  “The essence vines? Yes, I saw they now cover two walls. The vines have connected at the corner of the walls, you know. Interesting, that one flame would turn the whole lot into a carpet of fire. One core, not naming names, has already wasted all his essence. Don’t be the second.”

  “I have plans in place, Overseer.”

  “Come on then, let’s take a walk.”

  Overseer Bolton stood in front of the loot chest now. He wanted to walk down the tunnel and into the rest of my dungeon, but the chest was blocking it.

  “Ahem,” he said, and made a polite cough.

  Tomlin didn’t pick up on the hint. Or, he was following my orders to not get up from the chest lid. Either way, Bolton wasn’t happy. I wished I had unlocked the puzzle and traps part of the crafting list, because I could have added a lock to the chest.

  “Core Beno, could you ask your kobold to move, please? Why is your loot chest there anyway? It is a strange placement.”

  “I’m experimenting on the effects a chest’s placement can have.”

  “Ah. Displacement theory. I remember when I first had that idea, I thought I was a visionary genius. Fine, Beno, we mustn’t disturb your experiments. Excuse me, chap.”

  He smiled at Tomlin now, who gave a ridiculous smile back. Seriously, it was like he’d never smiled in his life and he was being asked to guess what it looked like.

  Bolton stepped past him and walked down the tunnel toward room three, where I prayed to all the demons in the underworlds that he wouldn’t hear a little girl yelling through a mud wall.

  When I joined him in the room, Bolton was pacing around it. “Not much to inspect,” he said. “Very little dungeon progress since my last visit. A new tunnel and room, yes. A loot chest, as I have seen. More essence vines. Oh, and the kobold. Not much advancement to speak of.”

  I was going to point out that it had been only days since his last evaluation, but I was feeling especially level-headed that day. I sensed it would be a bad idea to offer a contradiction to an overseer who I had already annoyed.

  “By the way,” continued Bolton, “Your kobold is extraordinarily bad-mannered. Sitting on the loot chest? Not doing any work? Refusing to move out of the way? If I was still a core and this was my dungeon, I would have whipped him for two days straight and then I’d make him wash his own blood off the whip.”

  Hmm, this was a side of Bolton I had never seen before. He hardly ever talked about his days as a core. When he did, it was in class and he spoke on a purely educational basis.

  “You used to whip your minions?” I asked.

  “You’re a core, Beno. You aren’t their friend. A dungeon needs discipline, and you set an example for the others by punishing the unruly. Well, what do I know, standing next to Beno the Almighty? I only created the greatest dungeon ever made, after all. Hmm. Hopefully, Core Beno, your minions will accept your softer brand discipline and will not take advantage of it.”

  That sealed it. He was fixing to issue me a condemnation. I don’t know how he had rigged it so that he could evaluate me again so soon. I mean, cores were picked randomly for evaluation until each one had a turn. Then the random process would begin again. There was no way that every other core had been evaluated already.

  I guess I was right about the appeal. I hadn’t meant to, but I had made an enemy of my favorite overseer. Great.

  My only job now was to get through this evaluation without giving him another reason to condemn me.

  “You know,” said Bolton. “Two cores have already opened their dungeons.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t give names, but you can use them as a measuring stick. In your dungeon I see one requirement satisfied, one partly satisfied, and two completely ignored. Your quick start has slowed down of late, Core Beno. Don’t rest on your laurels.”

  “Sometimes haste can lead to mistakes. I would hate to open my dungeon early just to get ahead, only for the heroes to sweep through and maybe even find their way into my core room. Some cores open their dungeons without any traps, relying on their monsters to defeat the heroes. That seems risky to me.”

  “And you are risk-averse, aren’t you? You don’t have a history of trying out dangerous techniques or anything like that?”

  “Sometimes a risk is worth it, sometimes it isn’t. I would like to be prepared for my first heroes, to ensure my success.”

  “Hardly any core ever defeats their first party of heroes,” said Bolton. “The best you can hope for is to kill one of them, and prevent the others from removing his corpse from your dungeon after they have taken your loot.”

  “That’s the dream,” I said.

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “How about I show you my core room now, overseer?”

  He shook his head. “I have seen it. Actually, I believe I have seen enough. You’ll receive my reports shortly.”

  With that, Bolton was gone.

  Well.

  That had gone smoothly.

  CHAPTER 15

  I had to be honest with myself. I was going to get a condemnation. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too harsh. Maybe an increase in essence costs or something like that. It wouldn’t be ideal, but I could handle it.

  It was just…before I came to my dungeon, I was excited. I had all these ideas. I wanted to get my dungeon running as soon as possible, and for the overseers to evaluate it and be impressed. I had blown that.

  Even if I was optimistic and could convince myself that Bolton would reward me, there was always the chance the overseers were watching me remotely, and that they knew I was struggling to deal with a bogbadug, and that I had let an eleven-year-old girl waltz around my dungeon.

  I was playing with fire, and I might already have a bunch of overseers looking unfavorably on my work.

  Still, it wasn’t over. Hopefully, I wouldn’t get Bolton in my next evaluation. Now, I just had to make some real progress.

  Yeah, that was it. Get busy, keep my worries at bay. Victory against a party of heroes would mean instant success; if a core completely obliterated a gang of dungeon divers, then it didn’t matter how many evaluations he failed. The overseers would be forced to give him a pass mark.

  Time to get to work! This wasn’t over!

  I entered my loot room, where Tomlin was still sitting on the loot chest.

  “First things first,” I said, “We better think about how to deal with the bogbadug.”

  “Tomlin sat on the chest for you, Dark Lord.”

  “You did. Actually, my first step should have been to thank you, so I’ll do that now.”

  “An order is an order.”

  “It is, and I’d like you to carry on sitting there for a minute. Back in a sec.”

  Hopping to room three, I listened and couldn’t hear a thing. Either Vedetta was being quiet like I asked, which was unlikely. Or she had left, and I had lost my surface liaison.

  Still, it was lucky that I had blocked up the hole in the wall. What if I had left it open and a little girl had walked into the dungeon while Bolton was here? That wouldn’t have been good at all.

  Phew.

  Anyway, even if Vedetta had left in a huff, she would be back. She needed to help her mother, and she wasn’t really a child. She was older than me, in fact. She’d be sensible enough to not let her emotions ruin her chances of helping her mother.

  “Vedetta?” I said.

  No answer. Yep, she must have left.

  Hopping back into my loot room, I needed to come up with a way of destroying the bogbadug once we let it out of the loot chest.

  Problems, problems. I thought back to my academy classes, but we had never covered wh
at to do when you trapped an overgrown frog in a chest and asked your kobold to sit on it to prevent it from escaping.

  I had an idea, though.

  By now, all of my essence had regenerated, leaving me with 49 points. That was enough, I hoped.

  I focused on the ground in front of my pedestal.

  Create fire beetle.

  There was a whoosh of light, and I felt essence leave me in a gust. The light spiraled on the ground, forming into a shape. When it dispersed, I was left with a strange little creature.

  It was a beetle. Small, black, with a hardened shell that had streaks of red light on top of it. It smelled faintly of horse crap.

  “What is it?” said Tomlin, staring curiously from the loot chest.

  “You have never seen a fire beetle before? Not even in the academy?”

  “Breeding grounds are kept separate, Dark Lord.”

  “Ah. Yes. Well, this is quite simple. It’s a beetle, and it’s infused with fire damage. That’s as clear as I can put it, but it describes it quite well.”

  “Tomlin doesn’t like it.”

  “Tomlin will have to get used to it; this beetle is now one of our clanmates.”

  “What is your name, fire beetle?” said the kobold.

  “It can’t talk, Tomlin. It doesn’t have your great intelligence. Beetles are quite simple creatures, I’m afraid. At least it won’t talk back to me, though. Now prepare yourself, because I need another.”

  Create fire beetle.

  Another twenty points of essence left me, and a second beetle spawned on the ground. The two of them faced each other now, and they gently butted heads. I guessed that was what passed as a hello among the beetles.

  They were quite cute. Probably hideous to most people, but as a core, it was natural that I’d be fond of the creatures I created. Even ones who were cowardly, and who only mined for me so they could earn study time.

  The greatest thing about the beetles was that with their limited intelligence came a limited emotional response. They would at least carry out my orders without reluctance.

  They also had fire damage. That was the key when dealing with a frog creature like the bogbadug. I was hoping that, as a creature that spent some of its time in water, it was weak against fire.