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

Yes, dungeons could be vain, deceptive, vulnerable to flattery, and could even be tricked themselves.

“It was…” he began, desperately trying to think of the right thing to say. “It was great.”

“Great??”

Wrong word. Damn. Time to try another tack.

“Horrible, I mean. Mur…murderous. Foul. Disgusting.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“I do! I do.”

The voice was silent then, which made him all the more aware of the dungeon sounds around him. The noise of the spider’s leech legs sticking and unsticking on the floor with a slurp. The kobold breathing heavily, its tongue rattling against its lips.

He tried to avoid looking at the dead heroes. It was only a shock response and willful refusal to look at their bodies that kept him sane.

Just keep it together, and there might be a break for him to…

“It seems it is your lucky day,” said the dungeon.

The young hero, aware of the mage with his half-eaten face lying nearby, aware of the ranger who’d been crushed by a giant stone, was hesitant to agree about good fortune.

“You may leave this place,” carried on the dungeon. “But you must tell everyone you meet about the horrors you faced here.”

“Tell them about this place?”

“Tell your parents. Your friends. Your barber. Your butcher. Everyone you ever come within speaking distance of, I want you to tell them of the dungeon you found in the wasteland. Tell them about a dungeon core named Beno, and how he and his dungeon creatures slaughtered your party. Tell them that Beno’s dungeon was sprawling, and filled with traps and treasures.”

The young hero was momentarily confused. Why would the dungeon want news of his lair to spread?

But wait. Wasn’t that how it worked? When dungeons opened, hero guilds always found out about them, somehow.

Did that mean there was value for the dungeon in people learning of its existence?

The young hero suddenly found himself thinking thoughts too stupid to speak. Thinking about opportunity, reward…gold.

 “Supposing I spread the word for you,” he said. “What can I expect in return?”

Where was his confidence coming from? Was the mage’s spell still working in him? Or had he discovered a selfish side, part of his psyche that overrode his fear?

Whatever the answer, he found himself regretting the words as soon as he said them. A chill shuddered through him, and he clenched his fists.

He’d just turned his chance of safety into a death warrant. He’d put his head on the gallows for the sake of greed.

A great laughing sound filled the dungeon now, creeping from every wall, booming from every crevice, bursting from every shadow.

“You have balls,” said the dungeon. “I like that. Not your balls, I mean; I don’t like those. Just the fact that you have them. Get out of here and spread the word about my dungeon, before I change my mind.”

The young hero fled from the dungeon, knowing he had a story he could tell for the rest of his life, and that it was sure to earn him a free ale or two.

CHAPTER 2

Nobody ever forgets the first time they hear a kobold screaming. You just don’t. If you’ve never had the displeasure of hearing it before, you’ll have to trust me on that.

“What was that ghastly sound?” asked Gulliver.

At six feet tall and with a complexion white as snow and eyes darker than crow feathers, it wasn’t hard to see the Nacturn part of Gulliver’s ancestry. According to him, women found it so intriguing that he was impossible to resist, and maids all over Xynnar mourned his absence when he left town. This, I had learned, was as exaggerated as most of his bragging.

The scribe couldn’t have looked more out of place in a dungeon if he’d tried. He wore a shirt with puffy arms, nobleman’s style, made from material that cost more than most peasants earned in a month. The colors clashed with my walls tremendously. Bright yellows and screaming blues don’t fit into a dungeon aesthetic.

“It was the sound of trouble,” I said. “That, my friend, was a kobold scream.”

“Sounded more like the warble of a bogbadug on a warm autumn afternoon.”

“It was a kobold.”

“Or the din of jonk-bear pups playing in a forest, as their mother watches on with doleful eyes.”

“Kobold.”

“Or perhaps,” continued Gulliver, tapping his lip with his finger, eyes deep in thought. “the sound of pain and anguish as one of your dungeon creatures drops a pickaxe on their toes. Or perchance burns their delicate digits when changing an empty mana lantern. You ought to buy your creatures better equipment. This dungeon is a bloody deathtrap.”

Gulliver seemed to miss the point of a dungeon’s purpose. Then again, he often missed the purpose of everything. He seemed to live in his own imagination, where everything was more than it really was. To him, rain wasn’t just rain; it was probably something grandiose like the tears from an unhappy god.

I had come to know the nacturn scribe well after spending so much time with him over the past month. We were fast becoming friends, but it wasn’t like this at first.

He had arrived in the wasteland one morning, appearing as a lone blot in the distance and striding across the wasteland with such an easy air of confidence that you’d think he was strolling through a park.

With a satchel strapped over his shoulder, and a pen and a pad of paper in his hand, Gulliver had approached the clansmen laboring on the surface.

The first clansman he saw was an orc mason, Tegump, who was working under the wasteland sun. As was the laborers’ habit, Tegump had started work in the early hours of the morning, taking advantage of the cooler temperature before the sun rose to full strength. This meant he was almost finished