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

by Alex Oakchest

  “Quick. No dawdling,” he said.

  The troll stepped into the pool, and even at his height, the water reached his neck. He began to wade, and the swish of the disturbed water was met with splashes as his kobolds and jackals and weasels and skeletons joined him. The wolf spider skittered along the wall, clinging to the stone and skirting around the pool.

  Once the whole menagerie of monsters was in the pool, I decided it was time.

  “Megalodonid,” I said, already hating my drownjack’s name. “Give our fine guests a lovely watery death.”

  Milark must have believed the water was the only hindrance here, and that the only sounds were the patters and splashes of animals swimming through the murk. His tiny troll mind let him believe that the only movements in the pool were the ripples they sent out as they waded through, the tremors breaking the surface tension and making the algae float off to the sides.

  A scream robbed him of that comfort.

  A crying, terrified, wonderful scream.

  A kobold disappeared below the surface, leaving only a few popping air bubbles in his place. There was no violence around him, no great ripples or crashes of water, no sign of the silent thing that had dragged him. He had simply vanished into the murk.

  Milark looked around, spinning in place hoping to catch sight of the underwater nemesis.

  Ah, I thought, watching with growing joy in my core. That’s more like it. There’s that lovely fear again.

  A gremlin disappeared then. It was swimming one instant, gone the next.

  “Hurry!” shouted Milark, pointing at the door as if his creatures might be confused about which direction to flee.

  The troll took great strides, and the water lapped around him, rushing away at the force of his steps and sloshing against the chamber walls. His jackals panicked, and his gremlin shaman swam with an awkwardness I imagined could only be equaled by a donkey being forced to breaststroke through the Balsacan channel.

  “Glub glub!” shouted a watery voice.

  Milark was looking the other way, and he didn’t see the drownjack briefly surface and take a great bite of another wight-kobold, dragging the creature into an underwater doom.

  If panic was an aroma, the room would have smelled worse than a dwarf’s girdle now.

  The troll and his flock became more desperate and they swam toward the edge of the pool. Their fear became a disease with a split-second rate of infection, and soon kobolds were pushing gremlins underwater in their attempt to save themselves. Four gremlin fighters stood on the shoulders of a skeleton warrior, but when the drownjack swam into it and shattered its bony body, the gremlins toppled into the water and straight into the wide-open mouth of a hungry mutant fish.

  The chamber filled with cries, howls, squeaks, splashes. The wolf spider reached the other side and offered four legs to the creatures swimming toward it, but hardly any had the presence of mind to grab on.

  Milark beat them all to the edge, but as he tried to pull himself up, something bit his leg. He let out a cry that drowned the sound of everything else.

  “Fish!” he bellowed.

  With fury written on his face, he reached underwater and grabbed his attacker and he squeezed and squeezed until it went limp.

  “Might be more,” he grunted. “Hurry.”

  And then, with one last splash, the drownjack surfaced, stretched its mouth over the troll’s armor, and dragged it underneath the water. After that, the drownjack breached the surface no more, and as his core master, I knew instantly that the troll had injured him greatly and that he was gone.

  The attacks stopped, and what was left of the host of monsters reached the edge and climbed out of the pool, dripping with water and fear.

  The jackal blights were gone, as were the gremlin fighters. The pool claimed all but Milark, two fire-nosed weasels, one wight-kobold, two skeletal warriors, a gremlin shaman, and a giant wolf spider.

  I watched, both mourning my drownjack in my emotionless core way and feeling pleased that he had served my dungeon greatly in his short time here. He would be remembered.

  For now, Milark’s creatures showed barely a hint of their previous strength.

  And the best was yet to come.

  *

  The Collector and his cores reached the loot room, which was exactly where I wanted them to be. I’d hoped to tax him a little more on his route here, but it didn’t matter; if things worked as I planned, he’d die all the same.

  My plan was quite simple, but it depended on the Collector behaving a certain way.

  Most heroes, on reaching a giant chamber with a treasure chest sitting in the middle, would have sprinted in like pigs following the scent of a truffle. But the Collector was no ordinary hero.

  He and his platformed cores paused by the entrance and then didn’t move.

  “The slippery bugger suspects a trap,” I said.

  Tomlin, who had been poor company thanks to the cowardice that even the hint of battle brought out in him, slowly nodded.

  “Tomlin wonders how he might have gotten that idea.”

  “The was rather sarcastic, Tomlin. Cowards don’t have much purchase in the bank of sharp wit.”

  “Loot rooms are not usually empty of monsters, Tomlin thinks.”

  “Tomlin thinks correctly,” I agreed. “If I’m going to use the blaudy stones on this fool, I can’t have my creatures caught in it. I must keep them out of danger. But then, if there are no creatures, the loot room looks entirely too conspicuous. Damn it.”

  The Collector still hadn’t moved and hadn’t even sent his little imp forward to test for traps. That told me a couple of things; his imp had perhaps run out of mana and thus was as useful as a trumpet player in a burglary gang. Also, creating Milark’s army had taxed his cores, and he was saving their essence for later.

  “Poor Mega,” said Tomlin, his face downcast.

  “He served the dungeon well in his short time with us,” I said.

  “He was going to teach Tomlin how to swim.”

  Such a simple sentence, yet it carried a weight of sadness within it. Though the emotion had little hope of penetrating my core in any significant way, it didn’t mean I was impervious to its meaning.

  The Collector had to die, and fast.

  “Shadow, Gary, Death, Fight, and Kill. I need you all in the loot room.”

  My monsters, who were lurking in the tunnels bordering the opposite side of the loot room, began to move. They might have been full of backchat most of the time, but I’ll give them this; they didn’t question my orders in the slightest when it mattered.

  “Keep a healthy distance,” I told them, watching them assemble in the loot room. “We need to coax him in, but don’t let yourself get drawn into combat.”

  Even now, faced with kobolds and beetles and a hybrid boss monster, the Collector didn’t move. He just surveyed the room with a thoughtful look in his mish-mash of eyes.

  Damn. The kobolds weren’t enough to draw him in. We needed more.

  “Kason, Wylie, Tarius, jellies. Join them.”

  My kobold miners and floating blobs of jelly traveled through the dungeon, soon joining Shadow and the others in the loot room.

  And still, the Collector kept his caution.

  “He’s not biting the worm,” I said. “Perhaps the bait isn’t tasty enough.”

  When I said this, Tomlin shrank back even further against the core room wall. If he did it anymore, he’d become part of it.

  “Don’t send Tomlin,” he said, his little kobold eyes pleading.

  “Tomlin, you’re about as much a temptation to the Collector as a crud-crusted copper coin to a land baron. No, this bugger needs a bigger prize. A treasure worth of sticking his neck out to collect.”

  “Kainhelm?” asked Tomlin.

  “No, not Kainhelm. Something else. Something nobody could resist, collector or not.”

  And with that, I did what few cores would ever do with heroes in their dungeon.

  I gave a m
ental command and felt the core room grow hazy around me as I left the pedestal, and in a blink of time, I found myself in the loot room.

  There, floating atop a pedestal in this cavernous chamber, I felt exposed. Even with Gary and Shadow and the battle-loving beetles nearby, I felt alone.

  The Collector was across the cavern, lurking in the archway entrance with his cores around him on their ridiculous, yet envy-inducing, wheeled platforms.

  “You’re even more hideous up close,” I said. “You’re an ugly git, to be blunt. I bet young demons wallpaper their bedchambers with pictures of your face.”

  Only now, dangling myself as a prize, did I see in a change in the Collector's face. His three noses twitched, and his medley of eyes stared at me with such an intensity that it was like he was trying to burn holes in me. Which, without knowing where he got his eyes from, might have been possible.

  “Cores,” I said. The half a dozen cores, glittering in different colors and shapes like a jeweler’s display case, stared at me. Though, like myself, they lacked eyes, I could feel their attention on me.

  “Surely you see the ridiculousness of your predicament,” I told them. “Invading another core’s lair. Serving this wretched thing. You don’t have to wield your essence for him, my friends. I am well regarded by the Dungeon Core Academy, you know. I am something of a cult figure in the overseers’ eyes. Renounce your servitude to this fool, and you could have dungeons of your own.”

  The Collector had been silent all this time, and he didn’t say anything even now.

  Instead, he laughed. A horrible cacophony of several laughs coming from several mouths, each sound produced by several vocal cords collected from all manner of unfortunate beings. I heard the guffaw of a goblin, the hearty laugh of a barkkin, the deep throaty mirth of an eldritch.

  “Leave your comedy to the experts,” said the Collector. “My collection has heard quite enough jokes recently. Your words are like swamp air, my dear friend. No substance except the stink they carry with them.”

  I ignored him, concentrating on the cores. I didn’t even know if it was possible, but if I could get even one of them to turn…

  “Core life doesn’t mean servitude,” I told them. “Trust me on this, because I know it more than most. My friends, I am a free core. And without this hodgepodge of stolen limbs looming over you, you could be free too.”

  The Collector stroked its many chins with many of its fingers.

  “A free core, hmm? A lovely thought. One that raises many questions, which I have the answer to. Cores? Help me welcome a new addition to my collection.”

  Light burst from each core as they used their essence, spawning creature after creature before them until soon, the loot room resembled the ballroom at a kobold’s birthday party.

  The Collector stepped into the room fully now, and his cores rolled on their platforms until they had all left the tunnel archway and were inside the core room.

  “I suppose I have my answer,” I said.

  Using essence of my own, I used some essence of my own.

  Steel door created!

  A door appeared where the Collector had once stood, covering the archway. It was of simple construction and with an easily beaten lock, but I wouldn’t give the Collector time to work on it, nor even realize that he needed to.

  “Pendants please, Shadow. The rest of you know what to do.”

  The Collector and a brand-new host of creatures were ready for battle. His eyes, every single one of them, seemed to thirst for it, and it was in that instant I knew that it wasn’t his collection that pleased him, but the act of collecting it.

  Yes, he really was no different from the heroes that trawled through dungeons. He ached to best dungeon cores, to outthink and outfight them. Unlike heroes, though, he wasn’t content with loot, and had to keep his defeated cores as trophies.

  But his bloodthirsty expression soon changed.

  Knowing our plan, all of my creatures bolted out of the loot room, each fleeing down different tunnels.

  Shadow took three blaudy stone pendants from her bag.

  “The second you activate them, run,” I told her.

  I left the loot chamber pedestal and materialized in my core room, where I quickly cast an image of the loot room in front of me.

  Shadow stroked each pendant and whispered the words she had once heard heroes use, before they unleashed full moonlight. She threw them into the center of the loot room and as the pendants began to tremble and glow, she sprinted toward a tunnel.

  A voice cried out.

  “Karson!”

  It was Tarius, standing in one tunnel archway and pointing at his friend.

  Karson was still in the loot room!

  One of the Collector’s new rot flies had shot its sting at him as he fled, piercing his leg. He was lying on the ground, clutching his thigh as the rot venom bloated it.

  I knew it was hopeless. It was already too late to help him.

  Could I risk everything for one kobold?

  As much as it pained me, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  “Get back,” I ordered.

  Despite my mastery of him, Tarius’s bond with Karson was strong enough that he fought against the order.

  “Karson!” he shouted.

  “Gary, grab him,” I said.

  A leech leg wrapped around Tarius and pulled him away, and Gary and the kobold went further down the tunnel, away from the loot room.

  Then, with three flashes bright enough to chase even the stubbornest of shadows away, holy light exploded out of the pendants and washed through the room like a spiritual tidal wave, lashing over the Collector and his cores.

  CHAPTER 33

  “Dark Lord!” yelled Tomlin.

  There was no time to dwell on the loot room, because Tomlin was pointing to a core image of my eastern dungeon.

  Milark and his dwindling host of monsters had powered their way through the ancient halls and mural-lined passageways. My scant traps had taken out a few more of them, it seemed, but I knew that I had no more traps left. I simply hadn’t had the time to bring this new set of passageways and chambers up to my usual standard.

  There was only one obstacle left for the troll, now armorless thanks to Megalodonid, but what an obstacle it was.

  They had reached the core room where Bolton and I had once made our agreement and the overseer had left with the old core tucked under his arm.

  Now, without a core to be seen, there was only one creature to welcome Milark and his weakened army.

  “What in all hells is that?” asked Milark.

  His last wight-kobold pointed. “It wears a cape! A cape of skin!”

  “A troll?” cried an ancient voice, a voice seeping with time and with the anger only a creature granted eternal life can have. “A pox on your families! A plague on your forefathers! A troll comes to visit, wearing nothing but his briefs? What insolence!”

  I knew the truth of his situation wouldn’t dawn on Milark, because trolls’ brains reside permanently in the dusk.

  One by one, Kainhelm locked eyes with the only remaining wight-kobold, two fire-nose weasels, and the giant wolf spider. At first, nothing happened. Then, a mania gradually took hold on their faces as the narkleer’s insanity stare penetrated their minds, felling their synapses like lumberjacks hacking through a forest.

  The spider was the first to strike. In one leap it was on its fellow kobold, and it snapped its jaws over its head and wrenched it clean off, before dropping its prey and focusing on another target. Its eight eyes were ablaze with madness, its teeth dripping with blood.

  The fire-nosed weasels foamed at the mouth, grunting and spitting snow-white foam on the ground. Their snouts glowed orange, and steam rose from them.

  Milark looked from creature to creature, unable to believe it.

  Twin columns of flame shot at him from his weasels, churning plumes of fire cast by his own weasels. His arm and chest hair caught fire, and it was only his mad spinning on t
he spot as he tried to put the fire out that saved him from locking eyes with the narkleer himself.

  The weasels climbed on top of their giant spider, digging their claws into their once-friend’s skin, breathing molten fire over its back.

  “Finish it, Kainhelm,” I said.

  The narkleer used another of its powers then, moving at a speed that belied its eternal age. The chamber filled with the clatter of bones as the skeleton warriors were destroyed, joining with the shriek of a spider as its weasel friends slaughtered it.

  Finally, the dungeon filled with the cries of a troll, an armorless troll now deprived of his army, a troll disemboweled by a narkleer named Kainhelm.

  *

  Notifications pinged in my inner core, and I felt a sense of victory bubbling inside me. Instead of savoring it, I focused back on the loot room.

  For all its foulness and the destruction that it wreaks upon innocent, evil beings like me, holy light doesn’t really make much of a mess.

  Checking back on the loot room, I saw that the walls were intact, the ceiling uncracked save for the already-weakened parts, the ground just as it was before.

  Save for the six cores lying on it, of course, their inner gem glows extinguished, empty of life like the minerals they resembled.

  The first blaudy stone of holy light would have been a shock to them. The second would have rocked them to their soul, working its putrid goodness through their bodies. The third wash of light had finished them, robbing them of their second life and making their resurrecting count for naught.

  “It didn’t have to be like this,” I said.

  “Cheer up,” said a voice. Gulliver sauntered into the room. He had changed outfits in the short time between the Collector’s arrival and now, and he wore a purple hunting jacket with a flower-patterned shirt underneath. “At least the Collector monstrosity is done for.”