The girl and her friend walked further into the room. Purple mist gathered around Freckle-Face, wisps of it that thrummed with energy ready to be unleashed.
Anna took a flint stick from her pocket. She kneeled and cracked it against the stone, producing a flame.
“I am your master now, Mr. Core,” she said.
I laughed. “Having you been drinking?”
She stared at me so hard that her whole face scrunched. It took me a second to realize what she was doing, and I had to laugh again.
“Your powers don’t work on me, you air-brained hag. Cast whatever spells you like, they won’t touch my mind. Go on, try all day. I have the eternity to spare. Your mortal body, I strongly suspect, does not.”
She shrugged. “Everything’s worth trying once, my dad always said. He died trying to tame a wild grizzly when I was a girl, though, so I suppose he wasn’t so clever. I want everyone to leave but the core.”
Tomlin, clearly straining to keep the bowstring taut with his underdeveloped muscles, eyed me.
“I give the orders, Tomlin. Not this girl.”
Anna teased the flame toward an essence vine. The fire caught hold, wilting the vine.
Sudden, intense fear flashed through me as I stared at the burning leaf.
That was when I knew I was in trouble; when a remnant of human emotion such as fear penetrated my nothingness.
If the essence vines burned, I wouldn’t be able to replenish my essence. I would be useless as a core.
But she was testing me. She had to be. If she burned all my essence now, she lost any kind of hold over me.
Though every urge in my core was straining to tell her to extinguish the flame, I didn’t. I held my nerve.
One leaf burned.
And then another.
Tomlin, who spent his whole working life tending to these leaves, was visibly pained. The bow shook in his grasp. “Stop her, Dark Lord! She is burning Tomlin’s plants!”
“My plants. Let the girl play her little games,” I said, trying to sound amused.
Two burned leaves became three. Four. Six. The fire began to get hungrier.
No. I couldn’t take it!
But I had to. She was testing me…trying to break me…
I sensed something then. People on the far western edge of my dungeon, where a dungeon door led to the Wrotun clan’s old underground cavern. Someone was knocking on it.
I quickly used my core voice. “Rusty? Go to the door on the western edge. See who’s there.”
Not many people knew that door even existed. Even fewer would just stand there knocking on it. This might not turn out so badly after all.
“Fine,” I said, feigning despair. “Put out the fire and tell me what the hell you want, you trollop.”
Anna patted the flames until they died out. She pulled her hand away, wincing. “Ow, ow, ow,” she said, shaking it. She wiped ash on her shirt and smiled at me. “Good, Mr. Core. You can be nice when you have to be! Now, everyone out. Utta and I want to talk to Mr. Core.”
A voice spoke to my inner core. “Yip! It’s Chief Reginal and some goblins at the door, Dark Lord!”
“Let him into the dungeon and send him to the cultivation room.”
“Yip!”
“It’s okay, Tomlin, Gary, Brecht. You can leave,” I said. “The day I fear a brat is the day I give up being a dungeon core and become a botanical garden core.”
“She is a very scary young lady, if I may say, good core,” said Gary. “And her friend is ill-mannered bordering on obscene. Are you sure you wish to be left alone?”
“I’ll be fine, Gary. Thank you.”
They left us. Tomlin muttered as he walked, and he glared at Anna. “Burn Tomlin’s plants…Tomlin will show her….”
Anna ruffled his hair as he went by. “Sorry about that, wolf-thing. I didn’t know you liked them so much.”
“Stupid girl and her fire…”
And then we were alone. Me, Anna, Utta, and Shadow, who was nursing her leg and groaning.
“Does it hurt?” said Anna.
“Tremendously, Miss Anna,” said Shadow.
Anna scrunched her face. “Now?”
“It feels lovely!”
“That was one of the first blankets I learned to make in school,” said Anna. “Turning pain to pleasure. What fun! Although, I used it too much on Tucksy Mupu and gave him a complex.”
“What do you want?” I said. “You’ve made your threats, and now I’m listening. What do you need?”
“It’s simple, Mr. Core. I have to kill you to fulfill my prophecy. Utta, can you absorb enough essence to destroy him?”
“It will take a while, Anna.”
“We’ve got all day. Braggart Mr. Core here has an eternity. Or, he did…”
Goblins rushed into the cultivation room, so many of them, so quickly, that Anna and Utta couldn’t even react. The well-drilled goblins surrounded the intruders and held their spears against the teenagers’ throats.
Anna smiled at the goblins, and then scrunched her face.
Nothing happened.
“Damn it. Used it all up, didn’t I? Mum always said I needed to learn some self-restraint…”
Chief Reginal stomped in now, adorned in full battle armor that clanked when he walked. He held his sword in his hand. This was the real Chief Reginal; not the man who suffered through chief meetings because he had to. This was Reginal back in his prime, who as much as he always said he was tired of battle, would never give up a chance to wear his armor and brandish his sword.
“What’s going on here, Beno?”
“Not much, just a bit of trouble. Thank you for coming, Reginal. Now, if you’ll just keep an eye on the brats for me, I need to excavate chambers to put them in. Separate chambers, obviously. I’ll need guards posted to keep watch on them.”
CHAPTER 13
Gulliver had almost made his escape when a hand seized hold of him and gripped him firmly.
“Do you have to go?” she said.
He looked longingly at her, naked except for the bed covers but still a temptation all the same. Her hair was short, which he had always had a thing for, and as a former soldier and head of the town guards, she was easily capable of subduing him if she had to. Again, this was something Gulliver had always found attractive. He supposed he could find the source of this fascination in his memories if he cared to, but that would rob his pleasure of its mystique.
“I have to go I’m afraid, my beautiful and well-satisfied darling,” he said.
“But why?”
“Because, Kathryn, you have clearly forgotten that your husband is one of your town guards and his shift ends soon.”
“Easily solved. I’ll get the word out that we need him to cover a double shift. I am in charge of the whole guard force, you realize?”
“I’m tired, Kathryn. Bloody knackered, in fact. I have work to do, and I’m already working at 150% effort. That means I could dial my energy levels back a whole 50%, and I’d still be working as hard as can be! And people say soldiers have it tough. They’ve obviously never been a scribe.”
“I wouldn’t class your lie-strewn leaflets as a scribe’s’ work.”
“No? Almost every written word in existence is a lie in one way or another. Known facts are but the truth filtered through someone’s mind.”
“And what about science?”
“Science doesn’t mean much in my world, my sweet. My job is to spread whatever Beno…whatever truths Dullbright wants me to. I could stop to question their accuracy, but what would be the point?”
After spending a while in Beno’s dungeon, Gulliver had been glad of the chance to go to a real town. Beno and his monsters were great company, and to be sure not many people could boast of having a dungeon core for a friend, but sometimes a guy needed taverns. Beer. Wine. Excitement. He wanted a place with a little nightlife. Beno’s idea of a good night was catching a bunch of heroes in one of his traps and watching them bleed. Interesting,
to be sure, but not fun.
Unfortunately, Gulliver had quickly learned that Hogsfeate was a quiet town, despite its size. Full of folk who were more content staying at home with their families than reveling in pleasures of the night. Their tavern evenings were quiet affairs, with the most excitement coming when they bard played a more upbeat version of Come See the Goblin in My Kitchen.
Ah, well. The work was interesting and Beno was paying him well…through the Hogsfeate treasury, of course. All he had to do was stay here a few years or so, save up a nice retirement pile, and then Xynnar was his to enjoy.
He left Kathryn’s home via the alleyway behind her house, a narrow slip where the light from the streetlamps didn’t reach. Perfect for a Head of Communications who didn’t want his own private life being made public.
“Got a second, friend?” said a voice.
A figure detached from the shadows ahead of him. A man. Shorter than Gulliver, but almost twice as wide. Wide enough the Gulliver wouldn’t be able to get around him.
“Ah. A mugging then, is it?” said Gulliver. He reached for his satchel.
“Pull a knife, and I’ll pull your pecker off,” snarled the man.
“Let’s not bring peckers into this, my friend. I was just making our transaction easier. You want the gold in my purse, and I want to keep my face, and my pecker now you mention it, the way they are now. It seems to me that your knuckles can get sore from punching a man’s skull, and it drags the whole affair out. If I just hand you my gold, it will save time.”
The truth was that Gulliver had a bunch of pre-written notes in his satchel. As a master scribe, he could pour a certain power into his words. All he needed was for the man to read one, and there wouldn’t be much question of mugging. A master scribe could get a bloke to bray like a goat if he but wrote the right words the right way.
“Nah, I don’t want your gold,” said the man.
Gulliver didn’t see the weapon, but he heard the sound it made when the man pulled it from a sheath.
“Right. Senseless murder instead then, is it?”
“You don’t seem as scared as they usually are.”
“I was a warscribe. I’ve seen things that would make a blockhead like you piss himself.”
“You’ll die all the same, fear or not.”
“Yes, probably.”
The man charged at him with a speed that belied his size. Gulliver backed off a few steps. When the man was closer, he saw the weapon. A machete. A crude, dull thing used for chopping through jungle vegetation. Not a nice way to go.
He turned to flee when the man tripped up. The man tried to steady himself but failed and was about to fall to the floor, when something collided with him.
“Glurghp!”
He made a horrible gurgling sound and then was completely still. The curious thing was the position he’d stopped in. He was on his feet, sort of, but at an angle.
Gulliver tentatively walked over, to find that the man had tripped and impaled himself on a railing spike that belonged to one of the houses backing onto the short slip of alleyway. The spike had gone through his jowls and into his brain, stopping short of piercing back out through his skull.
“I won’t bother calling for a healer, if you don’t mind,” said Gulliver.
He was about to walk away. After all, it wasn’t his job to be clearing away corpses, and anyway, the bloke didn’t deserve much respect. And as much as he tried to be brave, he felt his legs shaking, and he wanted to be far, far away.
As he turned, he caught sight of something sticking out of the man’s pocket.
It was a rolled-up sheet of paper. He unfurled it.
The scribe usually emerges from behind a house on Sycamore Street and uses the alleyway to get back to the main plaza. Meet him there at night. You won’t have many witnesses.
Not just a senseless killing, then, but an assassination ordered by someone.
Well. Was this what it felt like to have enemies? This was a first for him. He’d had a few feuds in his time but mostly with other scribes, and their battles took place on the page. Back in his teens, Gulliver was the most feared battle poet for miles around. Alas, even remembering those poem battles he and his contemporaries used to have was almost enough to make himself cringe out of existence.
But now he had a real enemy, one who wanted to kill him.
He read the note again. No name on it. The bastard was too much of a coward to put his name on the order.
Wait for a second!
Something was clicking in his mind…
Back in his apartment above the plaza, Gulliver shut the window. He usually liked to keep the window open and let the evening sounds of the square drift in, but tonight it felt right to keep it shut.
There, in the little place he’d called home since moving to Hogsfeate, he searched through piles and piles of correspondence he’d kept. Notes, shopping lists, letters. He had sourced as many as he could from the citizens of Hogsfeate, because owning words written in a person’s hand could give you a certain power over them if you knew how to exploit it.
“Ah!”
He had it!
A copy of an order written in the same hand as the one who had asked the brute to kill him.
Gulliver stared at the two pieces of paper. One was an order for a dozen jam pastries to be delivered from Bubonk’s Buttery Treats. Another was an order to kill Gulliver. Both were written by the same person – Sir Dullbright.
Or, to be accurate, the mimic living out his days as Dullbright.
He got up, his stomach fluttering with thousands of moths. He poured himself a glass of brandy, chugged it back, then poured another at double the measure.
Why would the mimic, who worked under Core Beno’s orders, try to have him killed?
Mimics were supposed to be blank canvases. No desires of their own, their only purpose being to mimic their chosen targets on their master’s orders.
The thought made Gulliver so weak that he had to sit down.
Had Beno ordered Morphant to arrange for his murder? Would his best friend do that?
I mean, Beno is a dungeon core, after all. Forged without a soul and trained to kill heroes. And a hero, as he always tells me, is someone who enters his dungeon willingly. I did that. I have always met his definition of a hero, and he would have no problem killing me on that score.
Then again, what does the definition even matter? He had the real Dullbright murdered, after all! Beno is a killer!
He brought his brandy glass to his mouth, but now the smell made him feel sick. He flung it against the wall, where it smashed and showered his floor with amber liquid.
Gulliver suddenly missed Kathryn. Suddenly yearned for the feeling of protection he had when he was with her.
He tried to settle himself. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote you are calm on it, and he let some of his scribe mana seep into the words. Reading them back, his anxiety left him. His mind unclogged, and he could think clearly.
It didn’t make any sense whatsoever for Beno to kill Gulliver. He’d appointed him head of public communications to one day make the town accepting of cores, and in the meantime to give legitimacy to all of Dullbright’s orders. In other words, to make sure the people never, ever learned that the real Dullbright was dead, and a dungeon core was the true master of the town. Killing Gulliver earned Beno absolutely nothing. And besides, they were friends. Core or not, they really were friends.
That meant that, as crazy as it seemed, Morphant was behind the order. The damned mimic had tried to have him killed!
I need to speak to Beno. But the only way is through his core shavings, and Morphant has those.
Damn it. He could send a message, but he knew all too well that words had power, and if his written words fell into the wrong hands…
He’d have to get passage on a wagon or rent a horse and go see Beno in person. He could leave at daybreak. It was the only way.
Feeling somewhat relaxed now, Gulliver settled on a cha
ir. But he didn’t want to sleep yet. Nor did he want to open the window, like he usually did, and let the sounds of the plaza drift in. He didn’t want to hear any of the town’s nightlife, such as it was. No, he’d just stay awake all night, stay alert, and leave as soon as it got light.
Four heavy knocks sounded on his door. A voice spoke.
“Mister Scribe? Sir Dullbright would like to see you.”
CHAPTER 14
Heroes slain in last battle: 29
You have leveled to 22!
- Total essence increased to 2460
- Existing crafting categories expanded
Ability gained: Core Voice Projection
[Core voice power increased, and can now be used across greater distances and with your creatures and with non-dungeon people]
Ability Gained: Core Vision Intensification
[Core vision can be used across greater distances, allowing you to see non-dungeon locations occupied by a) dungeon creatures or b) shavings / shards of your core self
Current Abilities:
Core Control
[Temporarily assume control of one of your creatures]
Float
[You no longer need to use pedestals to move around, and instead can float]
As Razensen had agreed to become a part of my dungeon, his blood-lust rampage on the pirates – the tale of which a bone guy had recounted to me - had leveled me from 19 to 22. The instant increase of the amount of essence I could hold made me feel powerful, no doubt like the ‘pump’ Eric the barbarian always said he felt after trying to impress us by completing 500 push-ups on the loot chamber floor.
But more important were my new powers, Core Voice Projection and Core Vision Intensification. Until now, my core vision had let me remotely view only the chambers within my dungeon.
Added to that, I had been unable to use my core voice beyond the boundaries of my dungeon and Yondersun and thus had to send a few shavings of my core to Hogsfeate so that I could communicate with Shadow and Morphant.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 97