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

by Alex Oakchest

  “Remarkable,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A tragedy, I mean. And the glass orb thing that floats around Devry? What is it?”

  “Ah. An artificed vitality orb. It can’t do anything about the roots that have already grown inside Devry, but it can zap any new ones before they spread. What’s lost is lost, for the poor lad.”

  “Meaning his inability to walk.”

  “He’ll never get out of his chair, but the lad is sharper than a rogue’s blade, only lacking the poisoned tip. He would make a good ruler one day if only he could develop a nasty edge.”

  “Yep,” I agreed. “The apple fell far away from Reginal’s tree, in Devry’s case. I assume he takes after his mother.”

  “Never met her.”

  “This seed…did someone feed it to him?”

  “Ah. Now you’re asking the right questions. Pity I don’t have the right answers. Yorgoot seeds grow in the wild. I could see a young lad mistaking the yorgoot fruit for a plum or a cherry and taking a bite. But let me tell you, those things are rare. There’s a reason yorgoot poison sells for a mountain of gold.”

  “Not easy to acquire, then.”

  “Outlawed, actually. It’s illegal to cultivate the yorgoot fruit, and being caught in possession of a seed will get you jailed until your whiskers begin to grey.”

  “Assassination is illegal too, but that distinction doesn’t stop assassins plying their trade. Tell me, Cynthia. Does…”

  Cynthia sighed. “Beno, I have a job of my own, you know. Your dungeon has given me some of my more interesting jobs lately. Much better than the tedium Yondersun dreams up. That’s why I’m givin’ you the time of day and answering stuff like I’m an encyclopedia of Yondersun, or something. But if you’ve come here just to gab, then I have things to do.”

  “One last question. The orbs that stop Devry’s condition from spreading. I have noticed that after a while, they fill up with a black mist. Does that mean they have to be replaced every so often?”

  “Correct.”

  “Where does Reginal get them from?”

  “I make them, as it happens.”

  Now I was getting somewhere.

  “I want to help him get more of them if I can. What do you need to make them?”

  “There’s the problem,” she said. “I need raw oscil, and plenty of it. Shame that it’s rarer than a gold-shitting dragon, and you can only mine it in a few specific places in the south. I bought my last batch from Hogsfeate, but they don’t have much to sell. I’ve got enough left for one more orb. Maybe two. After that...”

  “Reginal is going to be desperate to find some more, for Devry’s sake. Right, I’ll see if I can help with that. Thank you, Cynthia. Oh, one last thing.”

  “No, sorry, Beno. No more questions. I have work to do.”

  “Actually, I need to buy something. I need something that will put a fire out as quickly as possible, and I need a few alchemical pastes.”

  “Some that will extinguish a fire? If something is on fire, it would have been a better idea to ask that question first, no, instead of asking me all about young Devry? Priorities, Beno.”

  “There’s no fire, yet. It’s more a case of being prepared.”

  Cynthia dragged a huge leather trunk from a corner of the room. She popped it open to reveal hundreds of jars filled with various powders and materials.

  “Let’s see…you could use…”

  “I’ll send a kobold up to collect it all.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what you’ll need?”

  “No, Cynthia. I don’t have time. I have work to do.”

  “Hmph. Fine. But send Maginhart.”

  “Why?”

  “I just like the little fella, as kobolds go.”

  Leaving Cynthia’s tent with slightly more than a vague notion of what to do about Reginal, I floated in the Yondersun air for a minute. The sun bothered me just a little less now. I didn’t enjoy it, and I supposed I never would, but I could stomach it.

  As I stared at Yondersun town way beyond me, at its hastily erected stone walls and at the residents coming in and out of the gates, I spotted a boy. A little goblin boy in a wheelchair, rolling himself along while a glass orb floated just behind him.

  Devry, up and about. Smiling, chatting to people. As the chief’s son, people should have resented him. After all, it was hard for common folk to have affection for people born into power. But the Yondersun residents seemed to like Devry.

  He was a good lad. It seemed a shame to use him as a pawn, but a pawn had to have value or there’d be no point using it in the first place. In this case, as long as Reginal played the game the way I wanted him to, there was no need for the pawn to get hurt.

  Leverage would take time to get, but there were other things I could do in the meantime. First, there was a door to my dungeon that only Chief Reginal, Galatee, and I could unlock. This allowed them to visit me by taking a tunnel from the west, thus avoiding the parts of the dungeon strewn with traps and other means of causing death.

  I didn’t want Reginal and Galatee to continue enjoying the same access through this tunnel, but nor could I lay traps all over it. That would too blatant. Instead, I opted for something different; a good old lock. I crafted two great bolts on our side of the door so that Reginal and Galatee would need to knock on it and ask for access. It would put their noses out of joint and might strain the good relations I’d been trying to foster, but I was hardly the one who’d started it.

  Later in the day, Maginhart returned from the surface with a jar full of white powder, rather like flour. He presented it to me, his forked tongue hanging lazily from his mouth.

  “Cynthia saysss a pinch of thisss ssshould extinguisssh mossst firesss, Dark Lord,” he said.

  “Thank you, Maginhart. Can you take it to Tomlin in the essence cultivation room and explain what it’s for?”

  “Certainly, Dark Lord.”

  Maginhart began to walk away, shoulders slumped.

  “Maginhart,” I said.

  “Yesss?”

  “Cynthia is looking for an apprentice. How would you like to study under her for a while?”

  “Become a tinker, Dark Lord?”

  “Tinker, alchemist, artificer. She’ll teach you a little of everything. It won’t be forever; you’ll still be a part of the dungeon, and I’ll expect you to come back and use your skills here.”

  “But I would not be a miner?”

  “Correct.”

  He smiled, straightening his shoulders. His beady lizard eyes glowed. “Thank you very much, Dark Lord. I appreciate it immensssely.”

  “No problem. Just study hard, don’t disgrace the dungeon, and I want you back here every night before sundown, got it?”

  “Yesss, Dark Lord.”

  He skipped off toward the cultivation chamber, jar in hand, whistling to himself.

  I had to admit, it felt good to do something nice for one of my creatures for once. A core had to be authoritative, but it was hard work, ordering people around all the time.

  “That was rather nice,” said a voice.

  Gulliver stepped out of the shadows in the corner of the room.

  “How long have you been there?” I said.

  “I’m always watching.”

  “Creepy.”

  “A scribe has to know when to stay quiet. The most candid moments happen when someone believes they aren’t being watched.”

  “And scenes like this are going in your book?”

  “I want to capture the better parts of you, Beno. Not just the parts where you slaughter people.”

  “Slaughter will have to be put on hold for a day or two at any rate,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Hogsfeate and visit Mage Hardere and see if he can track Cael for us.”

  CHAPTER 6

  When a town starts to grow, people follow the gold. It’s just the way of the world. Yondersun was beginning to flourish, and this meant that travelers from other parts of Xynnar v
isited it. Whether that be merchants seeking new opportunities, wandering craftsmen looking for work, or just tourists seeking new sights, there were lots more strange wagons parked outside the town gates these days.

  This meant Gulliver and I were able to pay a cotton merchant named Claus to give us passage on his cart. After failing to convince Chief Reginal to let him become Yondersun’s exclusive cotton importer and exporter, Claus was bound for a dock town on the eastern coast, but would stop at Hogsfeate on the way if I slipped him a few silver coins.

  It was a tiresome journey over a wasteland of cracked, dry rocks. Horse hooves pounded and wagon wheels rolled over a plain of orange stone that spread as far as the eye could see, broken only by lonely cacti and clumps of desert weed.

  Claus and Gulliver chatted incessantly through the journey, comparing notes on the places they’d seen in Xynnar, the best beers they’d had, the easiest places for a traveler to find some evening company. When they finished with that, Claus launched into a diatribe about his trade.

  “Y’see, the thing people don’t realize about cotton is that…”

  Every so often, my attention would be drawn to Gulliver’s leather satchel, which he kept on his lap. I would float beside it and listen for a second or two.

  “Relax,” said Gulliver, patting it. “He’s safe.”

  The journey by cart should have taken the best part of the morning and afternoon, but Claus had an unfortunate blend of impatience and cruelty, which meant he whipped his desert horses and drove them on without rest.

  “Nygar!” he would shout, and then lash the horses with his whip.

  As Hogsfeate loomed into sight on the horizon, Claus lashed the horses again.

  Gulliver leaned toward him. “Listen, I’ve had enough of that. Don’t you think you should put the whip down?”

  “Why should I? Nygar!”

  Crack. One horse neighed, and the beasts clomped faster toward the town.

  Gulliver’s brow furrowed. He looked angry for perhaps the first time since I’d known him.

  “I understand that it can be difficult to refrain from whipping things. Perhaps if the urge to wield it comes on you, you could shove it up your arse instead?” he said.

  Claus pulled the reins. “Hrargh!” he cried, and the horses stopped. He turned to face us. He stank of whiskey, which was no surprise since he’d spent the full journey supping from a bottle that never seemed to empty.

  “Are you tellin’ me how to drive my own animals?” he said.

  Gulliver glared at him. “You’re driving them into the ground, you fool! Give them water. Let them rest. Why the urgent hurry when Hogsfeate is right there?”

  “You poncy scribe. Who the hell do you think you are? I’ll treat my own stock however I like, and if you’ve got a problem, you and your fancy little core friend here can get off my cart and make your own way. Well? What’s it to be?”

  Claus glared at me. Then at Gulliver.

  “We’ll make our own way,” I said. “It’ll be good to get away from the stink.”

  Gulliver glanced at me. “Sorry, Beno. Still, at least we can see Hogsfeate now. We don’t have too far to go, and anyway, I’m the one who has to walk. You can just float like a grumpy bumblebee.”

  “I suppose we should leave this prat to his whipping. Then again…”

  I couldn’t help but look at the horses and think about my own dungeon creatures. I had been guilty of overworking my dungeon mates in the past, but never to this extreme. At least I had learned from it, and I had appointed one of my kobolds as the head of a dungeon union and I started giving them more breaks.

  Staring at these animals chained to the cart, their life a struggle as they heaved it from one place to the next while the merchant sat on his arse and got drunk, I didn’t like it one bit.

  “Dolos,” I said, using my telepathic core voice. “Give this bullying git a scare.”

  Unnoticed by the cart driver, the satchel on Gulliver’s lap squirmed, and something slithered out.

  “Hello, Dolos,” I said.

  A slug-like translucent blob crawled down the scribe’s leg and onto the cart. Gulliver glanced down Dolos, but he knew enough to say nothing.

  “You’re sure you won’t stop this whip business?” I said.

  “Nyagh!” replied Claus, then pointlessly lashed one horse’s rump with his whip. The horse moved into a trot before Claus tugged on the reins to stop it.

  “Okay, Dolos,” I said, with a mental command. “Go ahead.”

  Dolos wriggled over to the Claus and latched onto his bare skin just above his ankle. As a memory-sapping mimic, Dolos’s bite was so soft that Claus didn’t feel a thing until he had already sucked twenty seconds’ worth of memory out of him, growing much plumper in the process.

  Finally noticing the strange blob attached to his leg, Claus cried and kicked out.

  “Mother of mercy! What in all hells…”

  He shook his leg as if it were on fire, but there was no need. Dolos opened his mouth and unlatched from Claus, leaving bite marks on his skin.

  Dolos began to transform. In a matter of seconds, his form changed from a globule of translucent goo, bulging and expanding and growing larger and larger and taking on colors, until there before us was an altogether different creature.

  Now, he was a woman.

  A tall, reedy woman with dark rings around her dark eyes, and black ringlets of hair that looks like snakes, coiled and ready to strike. Her face was paler than a baker’s flour counter, her shirt and trousers smeared with mud.

  “A…Anya?” said Claus, so shocked he almost fell off the cart. He gripped the edges until his knuckles turned white.

  Dolos, in his Anya guise, fixed the driver a stare that would have made the most loathsome underworld demon feel intimidated.

  “You left me, Claus,” Dolos said, his new feminine voice seething with anger.

  Gulliver arched his eyebrow at me as if to ask who Anya was, and which memory of the driver’s Dolos had taken her from. I didn’t know, but I was fascinated to find out.

  “I…you were…” cried Claus.

  “You left me alone! Alone and lost! You left me to die!”

  Gulliver produced a leather-backed book and a feather quill from his satchel and, with his tongue sticking out of his mouth, scribbled away.

  “I didn’t leave you,” Claus said, almost weeping.

  “Liar!” cried the woman. Her voice was terrible now, the shriek of an angry spectre disturbed from eternal slumber.

  Claus stumbled backward, losing his footing and falling off the cart. He landed on the ground with a thump. Sitting up and rubbing his bleeding skull, he shuffled backward on his rump, never taking his eyes off Dolos in his mud-smeared, womanly form. When he was far enough away he sprinted toward Hogsfeate, where its walls loomed in the distance.

  I gave myself a few seconds to enjoy the sight of him fleeing from us.

  Dolos has now become a level 4 mimic!

  - Memory leeching powers 25% more effective. Dolos will leech more memories in a quicker time, giving him more mimicry options

  Pleased with Dolos’ progression, I dismissed the message from my core and focused on my mimic friend.

  “Well done, Dolos,” I said. “Very well done. You can resume your own form now. We may need to use your abilities again, so let’s not waste them.”

  The woman disappeared, once again becoming a translucent blob no larger than Gulliver’s winkle pickers.

  “You dredged this Anya woman from Claus’s memories, I take it?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” said Dolos, his voice monotone. As a mimic, he had little flavor to his personality when he wasn’t stealing it from others. I was trying to fix that, but it was slow going.

  Gulliver, his quill poised over a half-filled page, asked, “Did Claus kill her or something? He doesn’t look the type.”

  “He didn’t kill her,” answered Dolos. “She was the love of his life, lost in the wilderness after bandits a
ttacked his cart and they were separated. He blames himself for her death. I brought his deepest guilt to the surface.”

  “Poor bugger. I almost feel bad for him now,” I said.

  Gulliver nodded at the horses, whose rumps were covered by pale-white whip scars “Don’t spare too many tears for him. A man who lives by a whip won’t learn by anything else.”

  “I said almost, Gulliver. I haven’t quite reached the point of being empathetic. It’s a pity we aren’t in my dungeon - I could have fed him to Gary. Anyway, at least he might hesitate to use his whip unnecessarily again. Now, can you drive a cart?” I asked.

  “We’re stealing this thing?”

  “We can’t just abandon it here, horses and all. We’ll drive it to town, take the horses to the stables so they can some water and a nice bundle of hay, and we’ll leave the cart it by the gates. Claus will find it eventually.”

  “I suppose as long as we’re not adding thievery to assault, it’s not all bad. And of course I can drive the cart, Beno. When I was just an apprentice, I spent four months with the Silver Hammer merchant company, recording their annual voyage across the Doomed Dunes. Doomed Dunes. Nicely named, isn’t it? You can tell they don’t have a dedicated tourist office. Anyway, people in the Silver Hammer company die doing that journey, and they don’t take freeloaders. So, if I wanted access to their story, I had to learn a useful skill.”

  “Let’s see your mastery of animals, then,” I said.

  “Prepare to be impressed. I’ll try and get alongside Claus. Look at him running toward Hogsfeate as if his life depended on it. Ha! If I slow down at just the right time, maybe I can whip his arse.”

  After taking the horses to the stables and slipping the stable boys extra coins to take special care of them, we left leaving the cart beside the town walls and approached the gates of Hogsfeate. Two guards waited there. One was using a stick to pick stones from his boots, while the other puffed on a pipe.