Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

“Something’s here,” he said. “I smells it. I tastes it. There’s a tomb or cave or dungeon or crypt or pit or cove nearby. I knows it.”

And so the party had clambered out of the wagon and inspected the wilderness, even getting down on their hands and knees to look for whatever was hidden.

“Is this what heroes do?” asked the teenager. “Crawl around?”

Their leader, a knight, grunted. “No hero’s above getting on his knees and lookin’ for secrets.”

Eventually, the rogue narrowed his feeling down to one part of the wasteland in particular.

“It’s here! I senses it.”

“Out of the way, out of the way,” said the mage, whose tone of voice always made it sound like words were being stolen from his throat as he spoke them.

He used a disillusionment spell, and that was when they had found a door cut into the ground.

“Wonders be!” exclaimed the teenager.

This lame choice of words earned him an eye roll, a death stare, and a grunt from the others. Heroes hid their enthusiasm; that was what made them so cool.

The boy was amazed but also a little scared, because when they opened the door and saw a set of stone steps leading deep underground, it made it all seem real. This was a dungeon, proper and true, and he was a hero…sort of.

But that all seemed so long ago.

The four heroes he had come down here with were dead now. He’d watched them get slaughtered, he knew that, but when he tried to recall what did it, his mind felt fogged.

He looked at the darkness around him, and he saw eyes blinking from it. Dozens of them. No, fifty of them! Eyes all around him, watching him.

Or did he? Was his mind imagining them, were they born from fear?

No. Heroes didn’t get scared. He wasn’t worried.

And then a voice spoke.

“I could spare you.”

It seemed to come from above him and around him. From the walls, the ceiling. Echoing from side to side, up and down, creeping into his ears and waltzing through his head and then tip-tapping down his spine.

“If you dance for me, hero, you may leave this place with your life.”

He looked around. That voice; there was something strange about it. Something…playful.

“Dance?” he said.

“Yes. You know. Where you move your body in strange shapes that seem to have no reason to them. I will provide the music.”

A drumbeat sounded.

Thump-bomp-bump. Thump-bomp-bump.

Over and over again.

“Dance, hero. Dance as if your life depended on it.”

Oh, gods, he thought.

“Well?” asked the voice.

The hero was not long beyond his seventeenth birthday. He didn’t want to die yet. Not before he’d finally known a woman. After all, no use pretending now, was there? No use lying about silly things like that.

It all seemed so pointless now, all those boasts. He’d told the guys at the mill that he’d already become a man.

“Oh yeah? Who is she?” they asked.

“She…uh…she lives in another town.”

So, as the ominous drumbeat got louder and louder, he began to dance.

Arms in the air, legs lifting up and down. It was a stupid dance, the only dance he knew.

“I need to see more hips,” said the voice.

And so he swiveled his hips, he gyrated to that drumbeat from the shadows, he waggled his midriff as if each movement would help him stay alive.

Then he heard someone laughing.

Four figures stepped out of the shadows. Four people who he had watched die not long before. They were laughing at him, chortling so much they had to hold their bellies to contain their mirth.

“But you died…I saw your blood…What did you…” he began, every sentence slipping from his grasp.

“Pig guts!” said the knight, holding a string of blood-drenched intestines.

“Syrup and tomato juice!” said the rogue, wiping glop off his face.

“I cast an illusion on you, made you think you had watched us die!” said the mage, laughing.

The ranger held up a wooden hand now. “And I lost this hand when I was a kid.”

The hero felt nauseated. “So this was all just a pran-”

He couldn’t finish his sentence, because his nausea had suddenly caught him with the speed and force of a shooting star. Vomit flew from his mouth now, splattering out like a cosmic star trail.

A hand clapped his back. “Easy now, lad. We’ve all felt like this at one point in our lives. This was an initiation for you, nothing more.”

Another hand patted his back. “Cheer up. You just joined the League of Quite Good Adventurers.”

Yet another hand slapped him. “Welcome to the club, green cheeks. Come on lads, we’ve had our fun. Let’s get our arses back on the wagon and get out of this desert.”

“Would you,” the young hero said, getting his breath. “Would you stop slapping my back, please?”

It was a second before his logical brain returned to him. This had all been an initiation?

Never mind. He wasn’t going to die. That was the main thing.

“So this isn’t a dungeon?”

“No, boy. We’re in the middle of nowhere! Just a crypt, or somethin’. Or a mine, or a bunch of disused vaults.”

“I’d like to leave.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said a voice.

The voice sounded like it had come from above them, below them, all around them like some unseen god.

“Huh?”

Now this…that was a menacing voice if ever he heard one. The sound of it seeped deep into him, chilling his bones. Even the prankster adventurers seemed worried.

“What was that?” said the mage, spinning around to find the source of it.

A great sigh came from all around them. “The voice of the dungeon, donkey brains. What else would it be? A god?”

“I thought this wasn’t really a dungeon?” said the young, newly-initiated hero.

The voice sighed