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

cartful of gold has been wasted on what amounts to pulped turnips and smushed carrots. But that’s not the most terrible part. The explosion came from Core Jahn’s territory, I’m sure of it.”

“Core Jahn…to put this delicately…”

“Are you capable of putting things delicately?” I asked.

“Jahn isn’t like you, is he, Beno?”

“We’re wrought from similar cloth, but his was frayed at the seams. That’s as best as I can put it,” I said. “This could be a disaster. The Eternal and Wrotun clan chiefs already have faces like slapped arses when it comes to Jahn. He’s been given more last chances than a…than a guy who keeps being given last chances.”

“You didn’t tell me you were also a wordsmith, Beno.”

“Reginal and Galatee are going to have a fit when they see this.”

“You’re worried about your friend? Cores have a sensitive side that I didn’t expect.”

“I need to help my buddy out,” I said.

Damn it. As if being summoned to the surface wasn’t bad enough already. For a dungeon core, being in the open surface air was like a shark taking a beach holiday.

By now, the surface workers had stopped what they were doing and had gathered around the explosion site, picking through the remnants of their vegetables.

The workers included cultivators, whose job was to use alchemically-enhanced fertilizer to make the barren mud around them capable of supporting growth. The workers also included forgers and scourges and hunters and scouts, whose jobs were to comb the wasteland for miles and find anything that could help the clan, like signs of foliage and old streams that had dried up but might still have a source hidden somewhere.

Even from a hundred feet away, I could see the tension built up in their shoulders as they edged around the blast site and tried to see what had happened. I could almost feel their panic as they picked through the pulped preserves that should have kept them fed for months.

A square patch of ground near the workers rose upwards, before transforming into a door as the illusion cast on it faded.

“Ho,” said Gulliver. “The honorable leaders emerge like worms crawling from the ground to drink rain.”

From this door cut into the ground, emerged a party of goblins, orcs, griffins, and dwarves, led by the stern figures of First-Leaf Galatee and Chief Reginal.

This wasn’t good for Core Jahn. My friend, my old Dungeon Core Academy classmate, was in deep trouble.

I focused on a pedestal point near the blast. With a mental blink, I transported myself through the ether, arriving a half-mile across the wasteland near the blast site.

There, sitting atop a pedestal created by Core Jahn, I was still no wiser as to what had happened. There was a great sinkhole, and peering down I spotted Core Jahn’s dungeon twenty feet below ground.

Nestled amongst a mess of mud and rubble were the smashed remains of the clans’ wagons, though calling them wagons now was being kind. When you take a wagon and smash the carriage, storage area, wheels, and driver’s seat to pieces, it is hardly a carriage anymore, is it?

Like when a hero succumbs to one of my delightful dungeon traps and gets stabbed, disemboweled, and decapitated; you’d hardly call the mess of blood and bones a man anymore, would you?

Gulliver followed me with his usual swagger, puffing up his cheeks and making sure his shirt frills were perfect as he walked.

“Some warning would be nice, when you’re about to hop from your pedestals. Some of us have to walk.”

“Jahn?” I said, shouting down into the dungeon.

Up on the surface, the Wrotun and Eternals workers were foraging through the ruined vegetables, scavenging any edible ones and rubbing the dirt off them. Others were talking in that strange high-pitched way people do when they’re really, really worried.

First-Leaf Galatee and Chief Reginal approached them, followed by a gathering of clan members who had been in the main cavern below ground.

Galatee was a person you had to watch for. She had a kind smile and twinkling eyes much of the time, but displease her and those lips would purse and her twinkling would become a cold glare. She looked much younger than she really was; though she was reluctant to give out her real age, I had worked out that she was at least ninety years old. Yet, constant bathing in mana spring water had kept her looking sprightly.

Lately, the clan had seen much more of the glaring version Galatee’s eyes than the twinkling. She was a new ruler, and she was still getting used to the pressures of it; of trying to lead her people while getting them to live peacefully alongside the Eternal clan, who had been their enemy until recently.

Chief Reginal, on the other hand, displayed his true age proudly and wore his leadership like it was a snug wool cardigan knitted by his grandmother. He was tall by goblin standards, and though he was well muscled, his biceps and triceps and all his other ceps were losing definition as he got older. His skin, the parts uncovered by chief robes and battle armor, showed scars from a long life of combat, and his belly showed signs of swelling from his recent spell of non-combat.

Galatee stared at the workers around her for a few seconds, before speaking.

“The fact that I need to ask one of you to explain what has happened worries me,” she said.

The Wrotun and Eternal workers looked at each other, at the ground, up at the sky.

Chief Reginal’s green skin looked like it was slowly turning the color of beetroot as anger built up inside him. A little like the pulped beetroot on the ground near him, actually.

“If one of you doesn’t grow some balls and explain this right now, I swear on the name of the Divine Nine that