“I know. I know.”
“Thank you, Gull.”
“Any time.”
“You’d do well to stay out of the way when things get frantic,” I said.
“My dear gem, scribalistic neutrality protects me better than the strongest shield.”
“This guy won’t give a rat’s arse about that.”
Gulliver rolled his eyes. “You know as well as I do how I can blend into the shadows.”
“Stay safe, Gull.”
*
Safe in my core room, with a top-down map of my dungeon projected to my right, I used my core vision to watch the chamber near the surface doors.
It wasn’t long before the figures appeared. First, a metal-armored troll who had to stoop to enter, and was too tall to stand up straight even when properly inside the room. Then came the clack-clack-clack of wheels turning, and three cores rolled into the room on their artificed platforms. The Collector was next, followed by his other cores. There was no sign of his flying lizards. I supposed he’d kept them outside to alert him of any potential attacks from the surface dwellers.
They were in my dungeon now, and Gulliver was right; if the Collector wanted me, he’d have to do what any hero would, and battle his way through.
So…were they up to the challenge? It was time to find that out.
Faced with a tile puzzle, perhaps the armored troll would have been stumped. They aren’t all that bright, as a rule. Maybe the puzzle would have given the Collector some pause, too. But six cores? There was no chance it would give them much difficulty.
“Well, get on with it,” said the Collector, its voice like wind whistling through the eye sockets of a skull. “I want to be home and asleep before midnight.”
One core, the color of a stormy sky and shaped like a cannonball, spoke.
“Tile puzzle, Lord Collector.”
“Dispense with the lord business. I have never told you to call me that, and I don’t understand why you started. Figure the puzzle out.”
In barely a second, the core answered. “Third from the right. Second from the left. Fifth-right, second-left, third right.”
“Milark, you heard the core.”
The troll, stooping, crossed the tile puzzle as instructed by the core. Although the troll seemed unnaturally tense, I knew nothing would happen, because the core had solved the puzzle perfectly.
Even when across the tiles, the troll seemed nervous. He scratched his chin with the base of his great hammer, and he looked around as if he expected danger to slither from every shadow. Not an altogether unrealistic expectation, in a dungeon.
“Funny, a great big troll like him,” I said. Tomlin was the only creature in my core room now that Gulliver had sauntered off somewhere. Tomlin wasn’t being nice, though; he was only accompanying me through his affliction of utter cowardice. “A big, hulking lump of muscle adorned in metal armor, and he’s scared already?”
“It’s the fear affliction, Dark Lord,” said Tomlin. “The one you were bragging about.”
Ah, yes. When my dungeon reached Hard I status, I had earned a fear affliction, and it was taking its toll on the troll. It did not affect the cores, since they were like me and knew nothing of fear. The Collector, too, seemed impervious. And what’s more, I knew the fear wouldn’t affect the troll for long. As they progressed, he would start to feel a little more at ease.
A nice dose of slaughter might fix that.
The Collector nodded to a core beside him, one the color of copper and halo shaped.
“Illusions,” he simply said.
With a burst of light, the core used its essence and created a little imp no larger than an apple.
“Tricksies!” the imp cried, “Tricksies, tricksies, tricksies!” It scampered around the room, before latching onto a wall and then completing a full lap of it, running horizontally yet somehow sticking to the surface. Sparkling dust left its feet as it ran, and some of this dust highlighted a door hidden on the wall.
On the newly-uncovered door, a knocker shaped like a bull stirred to life.
“Ho hum, what fun,” it said, “Heroes to delay, what a way to start the day.”
The Collector stroked his third chin – taken from a goblin – using his fourth hand – taken from a manticore.
“Riddle. For the love of… you cores love your confounded riddles, don’t you? Spit it out, you bovine monstrosity.”
“It walks on four legs in the-”
“Man,” interrupted the halo core.
The riddle door creaked open, revealing my passageway beyond it.
“A little too easy for my liking. I need to update the riddle. Anyhow, this will be interesting,” I said to Tomlin. “Which door does he choose? I hope it’s the steel door, obviously.”
“Any door that doesn’t lead him near to Tomlin, Dark Lord.”
“Coward.”
In the surface door room, the Collector paused. A choice faced him now; the riddle door was open, but there was also the steel door I had recently installed, the one that led to the entirely new section of my dungeon. Which would he choose?
“Milark,” he said, “Take the steel door. Cores, give Milark some company for his travels. The rest of us will walk this way.”
Four of the cores whirred to life now, each wielding their individual essence and casting it amidst flashes of light that illuminated the dungeon like rainbow-colored lightning in a thunderstorm.
Soon, a barrage of new creatures were standing there. Four jackal blights, six fire-nosed weasels, five wight-kobolds, four skeleton warriors, a wolf spider the size of a wagon, and a gremlin shaman with a flock of gremlin fighters.
Not a bad collection. Most of these monsters weren’t available to me, which was a little worrying. It didn’t necessarily mean that these cores were all above my level, but it meant they had leveled up differently to me, and thus had earned a different list of craftable creatures. Most importantly, it made their behavior hard to predict, since these cores evidently didn’t think like me, and hadn’t shared my education.
I tried to calculate how much essence they must have used so that I could work out how much they had taxed themselves, but it was an impossible task. I didn’t know which creature came from which core.
It wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I just had to remember what Gulliver had said; these weren’t just monsters. That was the wrong way to think of them. In fact, 'monsters' was too complimentary a word for them, and they didn’t deserve the honor.
No, they were heroes by definition, and I would murder them in the way I had been taught.
CHAPTER 32
Milark the troll led the monsters through the steel doors. This took them to the longest tunnel in my whole lair, one which connected my dungeon with the one I had inherited from the old core. Although I’d already begun creating defenses for it I hadn’t laced it with too many traps yet, but that didn’t matter. It would take them time to cross the tunnel, and the longer the two groups of invaders were separated, the better.
Focusing back on the Collector, I watched as he and his six cores crossed the riddle door threshold.
The Collector led the way, walking with what I can only describe as lopsided strides, given that his numerous legs were all taken from different beings. The longest must have been taken from a giant spider because it was long and bristly and made a sticking sound when he lifted it from the ground.
Beside him, the wheels of the cores’ platforms rattled over the dirt and jittered when they hit loose stones. None of them spoke a word. Knowing how chatty cores can be, this told me a lot about the Collector’s level of discipline.
It took him less than a few minutes to cross the tunnel, where he was met by another riddle door at the end. As expected, the door had barely blurted its riddle before a core supplied the answer, and the Collector proceeded on.
“Now we’ll see how good he is,” I said.
Tomlin, still wearing his cultivator gloves that resembled oven mitts, was
sitting against the core room wall and taking reassurance from the solid structure behind him. Solid walls meant nothing could grab you from behind.
“Tomlin is worried, Dark Lord.”
I resisted the urge to reprimand his cowardice. “Tomlin doesn’t need to be scared. These cores aren’t a match for me, lad. You might as well put a toddler in a gladiator ring with a cyclops.”
As brave as my words sounded, I wasn’t naive. Six cores against one? Two parties of heroes taking separate paths through my dungeon? It was a war on two fronts, and I’d be stupid to take it so lightly. Luckily, I was prepared for the Collector.
*
Way across the dungeon, Milark the armored troll almost reached the end of the connecting passageway, though he walked with much less of a saunter than his master across the dungeon had. Even surrounded by his rabble of monsters, the fear in the air still affected Milark. A little less than before, maybe, he wasn’t free of it yet.
“Wights first,” he said, pointing the base of his hammer at the archway ahead.
His wights were undead kobolds created by core essence. They looked like Tomlin the morning after a heavy night of red wine, retaining their wolfish faces but colored as pale as bone and bearing expressions that conveyed lots of feelings based around murder and death. They lacked the brains of regular kobolds but made up for it in aggression.
The five kobolds walked on, each of them armed with a sword and a bad attitude, and they headed toward the archway at the end of the tunnel.
“Hurry,” grunted Milark, not knowing that in a dungeon, caution trumps speed.
There was a clicking sound. It was a sound that no hero, no matter their species or class, wants to hear when they are in a dungeon.
One kobold yelled in surprise.
Another grunted.
Back in my core room, I smiled to myself.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
Three great scythes swung out from the walls, cutting one kobold in half, disarming – literally - another, and leaving a third kobold stranded as the blades swung back and forth, their metal flashing in sequence.
The troll, his armor covered in kobold liquids that had splashed onto his chest even ten feet away, stomped forward.
The scythes swished backward and forwards, each rotation leaving a mandatory scythe-free period where the passageway was clear. This was another of those silly trap rules, similar to riddle doors always needing a logical riddle, and traps being solvable. Pah.
Milark watched the blades swinging, and he counted the seconds in his head.
He tensed his free hand, and he shifted his foot…
Watching him, I almost let out a cackle. A troll in metal armor? He had no chance of making it through in time.
He swung his hammer, smashing one scythe so hard that it bent backward and flattened against the wall. He took a step and hit the next one, halting its momentum with blunt force. He hit the third scythe with a furious underswing, bending it so it was pressed against the ceiling.
Near him were a dead wight-kobold and an armless one who hadn’t been spared the scythes’ justice.
“Shaman,” grunted Milark.
A gremlin shaman who was the size of a goblin, just as ugly, and twice as hairy, stepped forward and pounded the base of his staff on the ground three times.
“Ta doro da tep!” it said.
The kobold’s arm wounds sealed, staunching the blood. It got to its feet, seemingly free from pain. Its sword-wielding days were over, but it could carry on.
I quickly altered the list of alive monsters in my head, reducing the number of Milark’s flight-worthy wight-kobolds from five to three.
*
The Collector and his half dozen cores had traveled through the maze of tunnels in the center of my original dungeon. It was a complex route even for the best of heroes, but the Collector barely struggled. He took no dead pathways, and his core’s little imp helped him avoid all my pitfalls and other such traps of doom.
“If I was paranoid,” I said, “I’d swear that he knew the way.”
Tomlin looked at me for a few seconds, barely blinking in that unnerving way with which kobolds hold your gaze.
“A traitor, Dark Lord? Tomlin doesn’t believe that.”
“Neither do I. As my creatures, none of you could betray me. Gulliver and I signed a mana contract, so he couldn’t have spilled about my tunnels. That leaves Overseer Bolton or one of the clan. And neither Galatee nor Reginal would do it, given my job is to protect them. Which leaves just one shiny-domed overseer.”
“Overseer Bolton is an honorable man,” said Tomlin.
“He’s a man, let’s agree on that. We can table the honor part for now.”
“Overseer would not do this. He likes you, Dark Lord. When we chat in the essence room, he always praises you.”
“Stop, Tomlin. You’ll make me blush. Perhaps I’m just getting carried away.”
As it happened, the Collector did blunder. Presented with a tunnel that forked in three directions, he picked the one that, normally, I would have been pleased to see him take.
Following the passageway, he soon emerged into the poison chamber.
“Great!” said Tomlin, hopping foot to foot with excitement. “Almost done! Collector and his friends will suffocate on fumes.”
“Sorry, Tomlin. Cores can’t die from poison, for one,” I said. “And this Collector bugger probably has a dozen livers buried under his patchwork quilt of a body. He’s probably stolen livers from giants, dwarves, old women who sit in the dimly-lit corners of taverns. You know, all those folks who can hold their booze. Poison won’t hurt him.”
I wasn’t wrong. Then again, I rarely am.
Well, aside from numerous examples my kobolds could supply.
In any case, the Collector and his clan stepped into the poison chamber, watched the door slam shut behind them, and were faced with a room that was empty save for mana lamps on the wall.
“Imp?” the Collector said.
The little imp completed his wall-running routine, leaving behind a spray of glowing dust that easily unmasked the clue to my lantern puzzle.
Unlike the last heroes, the Collector solved the puzzle properly, lighting the correct lamps to signify the right number of eyes.
“He might look like he was born in a soul flayer’s worst nightmare, but he knows how many eyes a west-sands crustacean has,” I said. “In fact, he’s probably got some himself. Maybe on his back, or something.”
I was annoyed, but there wasn’t much I could do. Not every puzzle will hamper every hero. The trick was to fill your dungeon with a good balance, and just trust that different puzzles will stop different dungeon divers.
In any case, the laws of dungeon fairness dictate that a trap well solved is adequately rewarded.
As such, a door opened in the poison chamber. A door that led to my loot room, and thus, could only lead to a battle.
*
Milark led his comrades deeper into the eastern dungeon, walking through its dimly lit halls and past gruesome statues and carvings. With each step, the troll seemed to gather courage, and by now, the fear affliction of my dungeon hardly affected him.
He barely blinked when some of my new traps caught him out. He was blasé when two of his jackal-blights scampered straight into a pitfall. He stayed calm and collected even as poison darts slaughtered three of his gremlins. His demeanor was cool just as four of his fire-nose weasels were flattened by a boulder that fell from an overhead hatch.
On and on he went, pushing deeper into the dungeon without a care.
It might have been disheartening if I hadn’t expected the fear affliction to leave him eventually. You see, fear can only work when it has thoughts and worries to latch onto. Now that my fear affliction had run out, Milark’s troll nature had resurfaced, and trolls are renowned for being so entirely stupid that thoughts escape them like gas from a mule with a poorly belly. Quite simply, if thoughts were gold, this troll faced a lifetime of debt.
So, it was with reduced numbers but growing confidence that Milark reached a chamber in my new dungeon, and it was here that I hoped to strike him hardest.
He and his gang came to a square chamber the size of a modest tavern barroom, with limestone walls slick with dew and covered in a rapidly spreading moss. There was an oval-shaped iron door on the far side of the chamber, but in front of it, and dominating the room, was a pool of water.
The water was greener than the wall moss, spotted with algae, and had flies collecting in groups and buzzing inches above the surface. Milark’s nose twitched at what must have been an overpowering smell of fetidness, and it was with a new fear in his eyes that he eyed the pool that offered no other means of crossing the room and reaching the door.
So, there was a glimmer of fear still there, after all.
“Other routes?” he asked.
Two gremlins tittered to each other, speaking in a language known only to their kind and deemed unworthy of learning by anyone but the most bored linguist. The two jackal blights, still mourning the loss of two of their pack to a trap, howled. The giant wolf spider approached the pool and dipped a leg in it, sending a ripple across the surface.
“Stupid!” said Milark. “It could have been acid. Kobolds! No other routes?”
I knew the answer before the kobolds shook their heads. This dungeon was a much more linear route than I would have chosen, and I hadn’t even begun to think about such structural changes yet. The only way through this room was to reach the door on the other side of the pool. It was going to be fun watching Milark realize that.
Milark huffed. “Then we must cross. Spider, is leg okay?”
The wolf spider nodded, all eight of its eyes blinking in unison.
“Then not acid. We will cross now. Hurry. Need to clear route and meet master in the middle.”
Milark unclasped his metal armor until he was bare-chested and had only a pair of tight leather briefs hiding his troll modesty. With a great heave, he threw his armor so that it arced over the pool and clattered on the platform on the other side, near the door. I was surprised that he had the sense to take off his suit of metal before swimming, and it meant I’d have to watch him. Milark may not be like most trolls.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 59