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

by Alex Oakchest

  “You’ve still helped more than I would have expected.”

  “It’s funny, Beno. I’ve served as scribe for all sorts of dukes, lords, nobles, as you know. Not a single one of them slaughtered a party of heroes in front of my eyes. Yet, even with your penchant for murdering people, you’re the most decent of the lot.”

  “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a while.”

  “How about you repay me by stopping doubting yourself, and ripping this Cael idiot apart? He’s only flesh and blood.”

  “Only flesh and blood,” I agreed.

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  I used my core voice now.

  “I want every dungeon mate to meet me in the loot room. Kainhelm, that means you. Use your alchemical paste and come join us. I will see you all there in five minutes exactly.”

  Tomlin was the last to enter the loot room. Everyone in the dungeon turned to face the kobold as he entered, grumbling and still wearing his cultivator mitts.

  “That was a long five minutes, Tomlin,” I said.

  “Tomlin was busy. He doesn’t see why he must attend.”

  “Because although your spine is made of jelly,” I began, and then glanced at my angry elemental jelly monsters, “No offense to you, Peach and Gore.”

  “None taken, master.

  “Shove your no offense up your-”

  “Although you are about as brave as a nervous mouse, Tomlin, you are a part of the dungeon. Our best fighters are going out to battle on behalf of the dungeon, and you will show them the respect of attending meetings like this.”

  “Dark Lord is right. Tomlin is sorry.”

  “Now, my friends, my dungeon mates,” I said, “We will shortly battle with a hero who you all know well. Cael Pickering, that arrogant worm. That stain upon the wasteland. That gloating gutbag. He has vowed revenge against me, my friends, and by extension, against you. And for what? Because we merely killed his brothers? What did he expect from coming to our dungeon?”

  “Yip yip!” shouted Rusty the kobold, waving his shaman staff in the air and dancing side to side. “What did he expect?”

  “Fight!” cried a fire beetle.

  “Death!”

  “Kill!”

  “Quite right, my friends. As always, you verbalize with sophistication what the rest of us, even Gulliver, cannot. Now…though we have slaughtered many heroes in many delightful ways, this battle will be different. This hero will not be skulking around our home. We will take the fight to him, entering through a portal and tearing him apart before he has a chance to pull up his britches!”

  “Yip yip!” cried Rusty, dancing side to side, his cloak flowing behind him and his bone crown rattling atop his head. “Britches! Britches!”

  “Once the portal is activated, it will open to Cael’s current location. I do not know where it is, and so we lose our usual advantage of knowing our field of battle intimately. There will be no traps, at least none of our own devising, and no puzzles. But, we are not without advantages. We have the benefit of surprise. We have the benefit of courage. We have the benefit that we aren’t arrogant, self-serving heroes with no sense of morals or decency.”

  Cheers rose in the dungeon. Rusty yipped and danced, kobolds shouted, jelly’s warbled, Gary slapped his leech legs together in thunderous applause.

  “Now, onto specifics. First, Razensen and his unit will spearhead the attack. Depending on whether…”

  “I will ask a poxing question, if I may,” said a voice.

  I noticed that even though Kainhelm was wearing his alchemical paste that blocked his deathly energy, the other dungeon creatures gave him a wide berth. Only Razensen was standing next to him.

  “Yes, Kainhelm?”

  “I will fight alongside my friend Razensen and those beasts who are under his poxing command.”

  “I’m not sure, Kainhelm. Razensen has been drilling his unit in a specific way.”

  “I would be honored for old Kainhelm to fight by my side,” said Razensen. “With him and his glorious skin cape, we will send all heroes to the ice!”

  “Then who am I to stand in the way?” I said. “Now, onto formations…”

  Gathered in the loot room, I could feel the mixture of tension and excitement coming off my army of monsters. Bogbadugs leaped around, full of nervous energy. Rusty wrung his hands on his shaman staff. Brecht tensely beat his tambourine with his fingertips.

  “It is time,” I said. “Gulliver?”

  Gulliver pranced to the center of the room.

  “My dear friends. Monsters, beasts, creatures, critters of all wonderful shapes and sizes. There comes a time in everyone’s life, be you human or otherwise, when you must look within yourself and-”

  “Just use the damned stone, Gulliver.”

  The scribe took a small purple pebble from his satchel. He held it up like a dice player ready to roll, and he tossed it on the ground. It landed with a clink.

  Light spread out from it, pluming upwards like smoke until soon it formed a swirling portal that reached from the ground to the ceiling. I couldn’t see where it led, but I knew that we couldn’t delay.

  “Quickly,” I told my monsters. “The portal will remain open for 12 hours, no more, no less. It may open to a place far away, and we do not want to get caught there if we take too long and the portal closes behind us. So go, destroy Cael, and then we will celebrate!”

  My monsters poured through the portal. First Razensen, Kainhelm, and the bone guys and kobold bowmen of his unit, followed by bogbadugs, jellies, fire beetles. I went last, floating at the rear and following them through.

  CHAPTER 18

  We emerged in a sun-drenched land, a vast spread of orange and yellow rocks broken only by the cracks in the ground that ran like earthquake tremors into the horizon. The sun – the stupid prat - beat down mercilessly and gave only plant life such as cacti and brittlebushes chance to grow. It was a depressingly familiar place. There was even a town nearby that looked exactly like Yondersun, down to the row of wooden shacks lined with orcs, goblins, and gnomes outside…

  “This is Yondersun!” said Gulliver, stepping through the portal.

  “And there’s Cael Pickering. He was already on his way to the dungeon!” I said.

  There he was. Cael demon-damned Pickering. Strutting over the wasteland with his two blades sheathed on his waist and his stupid chest puffed out. With him were more than a dozen fighters sporting combat leathers and tarnished metal armor, and brandishing a range of swords, fell axes, warhammers, halberds. I was sure I had seen some of them at the men-at-arms board in Yondersun.

  The sudden appearance of an army of monsters made Cael pause. He lifted his hand in the air, and his fighters stopped marching. One mercenary stood beside Cael, the rest stayed behind him.

  “Holy hells,” said one warrior, eyeing us.

  “Look at that big yeti monster!”

  “And the freak standing beside it! Look at the skin flap on its back!”

  “Cael, this ain’t what we signed up for.”

  Cael didn’t take his eyes off me. “Shut up!” he shouted.

  I floated over to him, keeping a healthy fifteen feet of distance between us.

  Cael unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a tattoo on his chest, just below his right nipple. The edges were red and sore-looking.

  “A new wartificer symbol,” he said. “A special one, this. Know what it does, core?”

  “Gives you a reason to show us your nipples?”

  “Gives me the means for revenge. Took me a while to find a wartificer who had a symbol that would destroy a core. Had to suffer quite a few cart rides, walk many, many miles. But I found one, and I paid almost every coin I had for him to graft one onto me, too. Hours it took. Hours of agony like you wouldn’t believe. To get through it, all I had to do was think about destroying you, and I ended up enjoying every second. Money well-spent. Time well-used. And the rest of my gold? Well,
you can see I hired a few pals to make sure there are no mistakes.”

  “Didn’t tell us we were fighting a gods-damned army, did you? Told us it was just a dungeon!” shouted one mercenary.

  “He’s created a few new monsters, that’s all! Stop being such a coward. I am a wartificer. I have beaten this pebble’s dungeon more times than I can count.”

  “You can’t count to five?” I said.

  “Make your jokes, core. You might as well enjoy your last few seconds. Your time is over. I am a wartificer. The marks wrought upon my skin give me abilities few can imagine. I have borne pain that would have made the strongest of men tremble, and I did it gladly, knowing it would give me the strength to beat ones such as you. This is our last meeting, Core. This is for my brothers. This is for-”

  “Oh, shut up, stupid bag of flesh!” said Razensen.

  He stomped across the wasteland, covering the distance between him and Cael in just a few strides of his giant legs.

  When he reached the hero he lifted his great fist.

  “To the ice with you!”

  Cael stepped out of reach, forcing Razensen to change his target at the last second.

  He smashed his fist down, flattening the man who had been standing beside Cael with such force that his spine snapped like a twig.

  The mercenaries stared at their dead compatriot, mouths open wide in shock. Some drew their weapons, others whispered to each other.

  Cael drew his longer blade and his feather. Within a second he had etched his shape onto the blade. The scar symbol on his chest glowed yellow, and light burned across his sword.

  “The core is mine!” he bellowed. “Have your fun with the rest!”

  As I floated out of range, mercenaries charged into my army of rock trolls and beetles. Bogbadugs leaped from the flanks, while bow-wielding kobolds peppered the enemy with arrows. Swords swept through skeletal rib cages of bone guys. Axes hewed through shrubs and swiped through kobold flesh.

  A man collapsed to his knees, gasping through for air while holding the arrow that had pierced his throat. A kobold staggered, his belly punctured by a sword, before taking his last step. Shrub bandits surrounded a mercenary, lone and separated from his pack, and peppered him with hundreds of thorns until soon it was impossible to see the man behind all the thorns that stuck out of him.

  All the while, Cael threaded through the chaos, his blade drawn, his eyes focused on me. He ducked under a leaping bogbadug. He pivoted around a bone guy and hewed it with his sword, making it clatter on the ground as a pile of bones.

  “Razensen,” I said. “You see him?”

  “I see, stone.”

  Cael approached me from the north.

  Razensen left me and cut a wide arc, before stomping toward the hero from the east.

  As wary as I was of his wartificer-enhanced sword, I knew I had to stop moving. To be the bait and give Razensen a chance to catch Cael.

  Cael closed the distance, a smug smile on his lips.

  “To the ice!” boomed a voice.

  Razensen was on him then, giant fists raised, ready to flatten my nemesis.

  Cael twisted, stabbing out with his sword, gutting Razensen and burying his weapon to the hilt.

  The great monster stumbled and then fell backward, crashing onto the ground and flattening two mercenaries beneath him.

  Now I was in trouble. Razensen was supposed to make this so easy. To negate Cael’s wartificery with pure, unrelenting force.

  Cael tried to pull his blade loose but it refused to leave Razensen’s gut. He kept tugging on it, his face straining.

  Wait.

  I noticed something.

  Cael had a smaller blade, but he wasn’t drawing it. I remembered why; he could only use his wartificer once, and then he had to let his power replenish. He knew he could only destroy a core using the blade he had wartificed.

  “Arrows!” I shouted. “Before he can pull…”

  Too late. Cael wrenched the blade free and displayed it triumphantly above him.

  “Your monsters are weak, core. You are weak. Hells, my brothers were weak. But me? There is nothing you could do, no creature you could create, no trap that you could conjure that is able to kill-”

  A giant fist closed upon Cael’s torso and squeezed. Razensen, still on his back and with blood dripping from his belly, stared up at the night sky with glowing red eyes, three of them burning like stars ready to explode. Though he could only move his arm, he still had power enough to close his hand tightly around the hero.

  From Cael came the sound of bones cracking. His face reddened, and he tried to scream but couldn’t summon the breath to even make a sound.

  And then Razensen gave one big groan and released his grip, and his limp hand slapped down onto the wasteland.

  “A pox on your ancestors,” cried Kainhelm, taking great strides on his gangly legs. “Plague your family for generations to come! Blight each of your descendants! Razensen, speak to me, can you move? Can you breathe?”

  “Rusty!” I shouted.

  The kobold appeared. “Yip?”

  “Use a healing totem on Razensen. Do what you can to seal the wound.”

  “Yip yip!”

  I floated over to Cael now. I hovered twenty feet above him, leaving enough distance that he couldn’t surprise me with one last attack. Not that there was much danger, his chest was crushed, his face pale, his lips covered in bloody spittle.

  “You…” he groaned. “You could spare me. Let me...go. I’ll never come back. I’ve raided my last…dungeon. I…swear it.”

  “You want mercy, eh?”

  “Surely you can…find it…in your heart…I know you can…”

  “Oh, really? It’s in my heart, is it? Well, you’d have to find my heart first.”

  “No!”

  “Kainhelm? You deserve the honors.”

  Kainhelm stomped over Cael, and I let him have the joy of killing him. As Cael’s cries rang out and then stopped, I floated above the center of the fray where my monsters and the mercenaries were still going at it.

  “Enough!” I shouted.

  Not a single one paid me the slightest bit of attention. Not a surprise, given they were locked in mortal struggle.

  I used my core voice to speak to my monsters in a way they couldn’t ignore.

  “Disengage. Step away from the mercenaries and back off. Keep a safe distance.”

  The mercenaries were too surprised at my monsters’ sudden retreat to give instant chase. I took my chance.

  “Cael is dead,” I said. “Such a terrible shame. There will come a time to mourn his brave and pure soul, let me assure you. For now, let’s talk about more interesting things.”

  Every single mercenary was listening to me.

  “Killing Cael was really all I planned to do today,” I said. “Did he already pay you?”

  “Aye,” said one.

  “If you already have your gold and Cael is dead, it really seems like a waste of time fighting each other, doesn’t it? I’d suggest that you all leave here and enjoy your fortune. Though if you ever want to try looting my dungeon in the future, you’re more than welcome.”

  As the mercenaries sheathed their weapons and headed into the wasteland horizon, notifications pinged in my inner core.

  Heroes slain: 8

  Leveled up to 17!

  - Total essence increased to 1789

  - Existing crafting categories expanded

  - Dungeon capacity increased!

  - Brecht [Kobold, Bard] is upgraded to lvl 22!

  - Gary [Melded monster] leveled up to 10!

  - Rusty [Kobold, Bard] leveled up to….

  I dismissed the flood of post-battle information and turned my attention to my creatures, to my dungeon mates. Some were nursing superficial cuts and scrapes. Others were on the ground and yelling for help, while others didn’t make a sound at all.

  It was always a sorry sight, the wreckage from battle. Lately, I was beginning to get less a
nd less enjoyment from hero slaughter, and instead felt the stabbing loss of my monsters outweighed any cause for celebration.

  But dwelling didn’t help the wounded.

  “Attend the wounded!” I said. “Wylie? Send for Cynthia. Rusty? We need more healing totems. Gary, can you help carry Redjack? Jopvitz, Tarius, help move…”

  I gave order after order, and my monsters and I sifted through the detritus of the fight as the twinkling stars above us dulled and then faded completely, and the sun slowly yawned over the wasteland.

  CHAPTER 19

  I floated into the Scorched Scorpion and found myself in Yondersun’s premier tavern for the first time. Core Jahn had created the shell of the building, but Willy, the innkeeper, had made the tables and chairs himself. Well, himself was being generous, since Willy was an ex-carpenter who had crushed his right hand in a wagon accident and thus couldn’t work anymore, and had to instruct two apprentices in the skill. As such, every table was different from the rest, each one showing an increase in workmanship so that only one looked sturdy enough that you’d truly trust your drinks on it.

  Over in one corner of the tavern, a kobold and a spider-troll-leech were playing their instruments and supplying the drinkers with music. Brecht and Gary had asked me over and over again if they could take their talents into town. Now that the No-Cores were gone, I felt it was time to relax about like this.

  Many patrons were supping in the Scorched Scorpion, but the three who caught my interest were a bunch of folks with their backs to me. They wore leather armor unsuitable for the wasteland, and their pink faces showed no sign of a suntan. Leaning against their chairs were swords, shields, and a mace.

  Heroes. They had to be.

  “What do you think?” asked one. “We hittin’ the dungeon today, or what?”

  His friend glugged his beer. “Er…well…”