The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3)

by Jonathan Brooks

  The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives

  A Dungeon Core Escapade

  The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Series

  Book 3

  Jonathan Brooks

  Cover Design: Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists

  Edited by: Celestian Rince

  Copyright ©2021 Jonathan Brooks

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The following is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, corporations, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design Copyright ©2021 Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all my Patrons on Patreon who are supporting me through my writing endeavors, while also giving me valuable feedback on my works-in-progress!

  In addition, I want to thank my beta-readers, who have shape this book to what it is today:

  Aaron Connelly

  Aaron Wiley

  Alex Canavan

  Alex Sawatzky

  Brian O’Neil

  Brian Oles

  Gevan Eldredge

  Grant Harrell

  Nate Martin

  Rea Semei Solomon

  Rickie Brown

  Tyler Giesel

  Zack Devney

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Recap

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Final Stats

  Author’s Note

  Books by Jonathan Brooks

  Recap

  Tacca GloomLily was born under unusual and negatively portentous circumstances, leading the young Dungeon Fairy to suffer from prejudices and distrust due to the disastrous omens centered around her. Most of her life she had discounted what people said about her as fictitious nonsense, but it turned out that the “bad luck” associated with her mere presence was in fact entirely true. Fortunately for her, the adverse effects of her birth weren’t necessarily detrimental to her; unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the Dungeon Cores she was trained at the Dungeon Assistant Preparatory School (DAPS) to help guide as they entered the world.

  After some orchestration by the Dungeon Placement and Regulatory Council (DPRC), Tacca was sent to dozens of “misbehaving” Dungeon Cores; her bad luck was used as a weapon to assassinate these Cores so that they could be replaced with another that would follow the rules. Such acts weren’t only hard for the Dungeon Cores themselves, however – the poor Dungeon Assistant assigned to see them on their way suffered from the Bond between them being broken every single time. The severing of their connection wasn’t fatal, though at times it hurt Tacca so much that she almost wished she had died.

  Then came an assignment unlike the others. A non-responsive Dungeon Core that wouldn’t talk to any of the Assistants sent to it, who would break the Bond between them as soon as it was established. Her determination and persistence in trying to maintain the connection between them paid off in the end – but it resulted in the soul inhabiting the Core being destroyed. At the same time, Tacca’s soul was sucked into the void left by the departure of the previous tenant inside the Dungeon Core, and her Fairy body was killed as a result.

  Now a Dungeon Core, the former Dungeon Fairy – and still technically Dungeon Assistant – made the best of the situation by using her vast knowledge to create an unusual dungeon. By using some tricks to allow her to have all the Variants of the creatures she chose to inhabit her dungeon, she was given a wide selection of Canines to choose from: Foxes, Dogs, Jackals, Coyotes, and even Wolves. On the flip side, those advantages came with some serious detriments to her overall growth, with a 95% decrease in the Core Improvement Points she would normally receive and the inability to create higher-Leveled creatures without paying exorbitantly high Dungeon Force costs.

  Added to those complications, the DPRC sent another Dungeon Assistant to find out what happened to Tacca when she didn’t report back. Shale IronSchist eventually became Tacca’s new Assistant, though he only knew her as “Tamara” and the Core didn’t inform him of her actual identity until later.

  Opening up to the outside world, Tacca discovered that she was far to the south in the Wentrylock Mountains on the continent of Abenlure – where no Dungeon Cores had ever existed before. It took until the heavy snows melted before her dungeon was located and her first visitors were two farmers-turned-Raiders from a nearby village. Despite their obvious inexperience – and aided by a deliberate decrease of the difficulty of her dungeon – the two Hill Dwarves, Sterge and Gwenda, managed to somehow survive until they reached the last room. Instead of turning back right away, however, Sterge accidentally fell inside the room and caused all of the Canine creatures inside to attack.

  Tacca was torn on whether to help them. She had already done a lot to ensure their survival to that point, her justification being that she needed them to live and leave her dungeon, if only to spread the word of her presence there in the mountains. Ultimately deciding that she needed to stop them from dying with whatever she had at her disposal, the Dungeon Core resorted to Bonding with them so that she could heal them of their injuries – which had unintended results.

  For one, Tacca now had access to create Hill Dwarves in the Melee and Caster Variants, as well as being able to assign Abilities to her creatures that matched what Sterge and Gwenda had available. In return, the two Hill Dwarves acquired an Ability called Dungeon Sight that allowed them to temporarily pinpoint the locations of nearby creatures, traps, and environmental objects inside of a room at the expense of large amounts of stamina. In addition, they also received a Power Boost +50%, which essentially increased the Power they would receive from killing creatures inside of a dungeon by 50% – a huge boon for any Raider.

  Sterge and Gwenda, upon their return, decided to let the Raider Clan outpost know about the new dungeon – and collect their finder’s fee. Even though the fee was much less than they were told, the two Hill Dwarves – along with the rest of the villagers back home – used the money on construction materials because, as they were warned, news about a brand-new dungeon would bring in hordes of new Raiders eager to improve themselves.

  From the beginning of their construction of 18 inns, 2 warehouses, a “Town” Hall, and a Delver Supply Store run by a traveling merchant, they were indeed inundated with Raiders wanting to delve through the new dungeon to increase their Raider Levels and
to acquire loot. Fortunately for the beleaguered Sterge and Gwenda, Jesper Whittle – a representative of the Raider Delving Clan with some authority – stepped in to help regulate the influx of people into their small corner of the world.

  If that was all they had to worry about, that would’ve been enough. Sadly, a merchant from the Ministry of Merchants arrived, wanting to take over the whole situation by buying the land from The Village; when none of the villagers would sell their lease on the land, the Minister used underhanded tactics in an attempt to destroy the dungeon and stifle the business the village was operating.

  Meanwhile, in the dungeon that was such a subject of attention, Tacca was finally open for her own business. After an initial group of higher-Level Raiders arrived to evaluate her premises, she designed a way for groups to exit her dungeon from nearly every room, using a staircase leading to the surface that was cleverly hidden behind a Rotating Stone Bridge trap. After realizing that most of her Core Improvement Points would come from Raider presence inside of her dungeon as opposed to Raider deaths, maximizing their time inside was important.

  To this effort, she also designed a way to indicate when the next group could enter her dungeon: by having one of her Root Foxes appear at the entrance as an invitation to come inside. By doing this, there were very few times when there wasn’t someone inside of her dungeon, allowing her to rapidly increase her own Core Improvement Levels and progress faster than she thought possible. In addition, she also learned that if she Bonded with Raiders as they were about to die, she could acquire additional “creature” types and Variants, expanding her repertoire substantially.

  After a failed attempt by the Ministry of Merchants to destroy her with some prohibitively expensive, over-enchanted, and powerfully protected new Merchant-Raiders to destroy her Core, Tacca was forced to retreat far underground. The development of highly-concentrated and potent Enchantment traps were beneficial in her defense – including access to a new Life-based trap – as were her “guards”, which were equipped with the enchanted gear dropped by the Merchant-Raiders that had failed to kill her.

  Tacca eventually acquired enough Points to increase her Core Improvement Level, and as a result was able to convert many of those CIPs into Special Characteristic Points in order to buy her way out of the negative Special Characteristics. In far less than a year, she was able to eliminate her 95% reduction in CIPs earned as well as the reduction in her creatures’ levels, meaning she could start to grow and expand into a harder section for the Raiders to delve through. She was finally on track for where she wanted to be, free from the restrictions that had held her back for what felt like forever.

  All wasn’t as right in the wider world, however. Back at the DPRC, it was discovered that all over the continent, Dungeon Cores were arbitrarily being destroyed despite having no reason to be destroyed. The balance of primordial forces was slowly tilting towards the intelligent races of the world with every Core’s destruction – which was a nightmare scenario for the survival of the world. If the forces became wildly out of balance, then the entire planet could be utterly destroyed. As a last-ditch effort, the leader of the Council, Malachite, decided to go find out what the problem was by visiting with something called the Conclave of Sages.

  When he arrived at the Conclave chambers, however, he found that the Sages – the most powerful Raiders in the world – had been brutally slaughtered, leaving no survivors. Worse yet, it seemed as though they had barely even been able to put up a fight, and that who or whatever had killed them hadn’t arrived or left through the chamber’s doors…but by some method unknown to the Council Leader. When he Translocated back to the DPRC only an hour later, he found that the rest of the Council Leadership had also disappeared, along with everyone else that had worked there.

  By utilizing the investigative capabilities of Lapis, the Head Instructor of DAPS, to discover what was happening to the Dungeon Cores of the world, Malachite discovered that there were two types of destruction happening. One type involved Cores being destroyed but their Fairies were set free; these were almost always accompanied by reports that Raiders of some type were the ones responsible. The other type had no survivors at all, as well as having no reports of who exactly the culprits were.

  Unfortunately, Tacca and dozens of Raiders waiting outside of her dungeon potentially discovered these culprits. Blue and purple-skinned, 8-foot-tall, six-armed monster people arrived out of nowhere, slaughtering everything they came up against with impunity. Strange glowing shields seemed to protect them from any damage either from spells or weapons, and a small metal contraption also prevented Shale from translocating away. Not only that, but it muted Tacca’s sense of her own dungeon the further they progressed.

  Through her Dungeon Assistant’s help and her powerful Enchantment traps protecting her Core Room, Tacca was able to not only delay these mysterious invaders, but to kill all but 1 of them. That last one made it to her Core room and tried to destroy her, only to be paralyzed by one of the Core’s Fairy abilities, giving her last-second plan time to succeed. By utilizing the initial “synergy” explosion caused by introducing an evolved and its unevolved forms pairing together, she was able to create a powerful shockwave – along with the release of the forces inside of the pair of Raider’s bottomless bags she had acquired – that destroyed the purple-skinned leader of the invaders.

  The shockwave was too fast, however, and as Tacca attempted to Teleport away to safety further up her dungeon, she was caught in mid-transition. While the rest of her dungeon was destroyed, including all of her creatures, traps, and environmental objects, somehow the Dungeon Core survived, only to be trapped in some sort of dimensional “bubble” for months. When she finally emerged from the “bubble” back into the world, she found that she was changed, her Core etched all over almost as if she had been shattered and then put back together.

  With The Village nearby evacuated and no one coming to visit her dungeon, Tacca used the time after she recovered from her experience to rebuild her dungeon, as well as finishing her newer section. However, the unexplained circumstances of the mysterious blue-skinned invaders still haunted her as she struggled to make sense of everything that happened…and she wasn’t the only one.

  Chapter 1

  “I don’t understand; where did these things even come from?”

  Council Leader Malachite didn’t have an answer for the other Fairy, just as he hadn’t had one since they had gotten back from visiting Tacca’s dungeon. That still seems strange even thinking about the circumstances that led to a Dungeon Assistant being sucked into a Core; such a thing shouldn’t even be possible.

  Head Instructor Lapis didn’t even acknowledge the silence from the Council Leader – probably because he never really listened to Malachite unless he felt like it. That’s not really fair; he listens, but it feels like he doesn’t even care what I say sometimes. It had been extremely annoying at first, but the head of the Dungeon Placement and Regulatory Council was starting not to care so much anymore. He chose to ignore the self-important Head Instructor as he concentrated on what he did know.

  The Conclave of Sages, composed of the strongest Raiders in the world, had all been slaughtered in their chambers.

  Every member of the DPRC except for Malachite was missing (not killed like the Sages, as far as he could tell), with no indication of where they fled or were taken to.

  For more than a year, there had been a steady destruction of Dungeon Cores, along with their Dungeon Assistant Fairies.

  The Balance Bar floating above the map in the Council room was tipping dangerously towards the intelligent races of Gairth.

  Lastly, and the most concerning, was the sudden knowledge that some force other than Raiders was taking part in the destruction of Dungeon Cores.

  It was this last one that Lapis was speaking of when he questioned what the monstrous, six-armed, blue-skinned people were that Tacca and her Dungeon Assistant, Shale IronSchist, described. They had appeared out of nowher
e, killed dozens of Raiders that had been queuing up outside for the dungeon without difficulty, and had invaded the former Assistant’s dungeon, killing another group of Raiders within, as well. Not only that, but somehow they were able to suppress the accumulation of Tacca’s Dungeon Force, and later her use of Fairy Mana; again, something that should be impossible. Dungeon Force originated from the primordial energy that permeated the planet, taken in and used/manipulated by both the intelligent races and Dungeon Cores – though in completely different ways. It was this use of the primordial energy by both sides that led to the balance that kept the world from tearing itself apart; if one side, such as the current situation with the intelligent races they were finding themselves in, had more power, they would use more of this energy in a certain way that would cause an imbalance. It was only when everything was in balance that the world would exist in harmony.

  Something was upsetting that balance in favor of the Raiders, and it wasn’t something that Malachite knew enough about to reverse the trend. Neither did Head Instructor Lapis, which was why the other Fairy was practically ripping his hair out trying to understand. The head of the Dungeon Assistant Preparatory School didn’t like the ignorance he was suddenly plagued with.

  “The way I see it, there are two possible explanations,” Lapis went on, speaking to himself as much as he was the Council chambers. “One, these blue-skinned individuals are from a previously unknown and undiscovered race of intelligent people living – again, somehow unknown – somewhere on Gairth. How they had gotten so strong by using magically superior enhancements without having visited any of the dungeons around here is a mystery, as well as the reason why they have waited this long to reveal their presence in such an unorthodox way.”

  The way Lapis spoke about the deaths of numerous Dungeon Fairies and the destruction of their Cores sounded as if he didn’t care about them, but Malachite knew he cared deeply. It was just his way of distancing himself from the situation so that he could think clearly, without emotional attachments.