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

kings and queens and lords and all the other noble twits. It would be no good having a core in charge of a battalion if he couldn’t smash another army’s core to pieces.”

“Talk to other core, maybe?” asked Wylie. “Ask to leave?”

“Out of the question. I’ve been thinking about it, you see. The decoration we saw in the dungeon, the Corenaissance style, was used by a very particular kind of core. Ones not taught by the academy, actually. The cores who practiced this style were known as the most bloodthirsty in history, renowned for their lust for death and murder.”

“Don’t you lust for death and murder?” asked Tarius.

“I enjoy it, but I don’t lust for it. Our friend next door is likely in a kind of stasis right now, by my guess. His dungeon seems to be completely closed off from the outside world, which means that nobody could try and conquer it. When a core has nothing to do for such a long time, they can hibernate, rather like a bear.”

“So sneak in and kill,” said Wylie.

“If only. He will have left failsafes; triggers that warn him when someone gets too close to his core room. No, there will be a battle one way or the other. When cores meet in the wild, there’s always a fight. We’re like silverback gorillas beating our chests. Lions strutting over the plains, our manes majestic and wild.

We can’t help it you see, boys. When a being lives in darkness, when it spends its life living and breathing destruction, it's hard to flip between states of peace and violence. Blood seeps into your being. Death dominates your thoughts. I’m relatively new, for a core, so I can keep my temperament. But the core next door…if he wakes, and if he realizes that another core is nearby, his first instinct will be to destroy me. So, we’ll destroy him first, and we’ll nab his narkleer for our trouble.”

“Perhaps we should look the other way,” said Karson. “Why risk losing?”

“Because the reward is too great. Do you know how often one gets the chance to win a narkleer to their side? You’d have better odds of getting struck by a lightning bolt made of meteorites while surfing down a double rainbow, it’s so rare. I can’t pass up a chance to grow stronger. Having the narkleer on our side would elevate my dungeon way beyond my core level.”

“Then what we do?” said Wylie.

“I’m glad you asked. Pull yourselves together, and get ready to work. We have stuff to make.”

Most dungeon cores, unless your name is Jahn, don’t just build things willy-nilly. In the academy, we are trained to think like grandmaster chess players, planning our moves far in advance.

We are also taught to do so quickly, since the more popular dungeons must face one party of heroes after another, with very little preparation time.

As such, I had stretched my mental muscles and pursued hundreds of avenues of thought, before finally finding a path to follow. I knew what I needed to do to strengthen my dungeon and prepare to fight the core next door.

First, I had Wylie and his crew dig a passageway. Just north of the loot room was a great maze of tunnels, filled with dead ends and looping paths which were designed to confuse and fatigue heroes before they found their way to the loot room.

From the side of this maze, Wylie’s crew created a tunnel that stretched east for a while, before opening out into a new room. This was a rectangular room 40 x 40 feet, second only to my loot room in size.

Following the completion of the tunnels and room, I received a message.

Maginhart [Kobold] has reached mining Lvl 22!

Karson [Kobold] has reached mining Lvl 20!

Tarius [Kobold] has reached mining Lvl 16!

Wylie [Kobold] has reached supervisor lvl 10!

- Skill unlocked: Tongue lashing

[Your supervisor can issue a tongue lashing to his workers, motivating them to work twice as hard for 1-minute x worker level.]

Satisfied with my miners’ skill increases, I created a pedestal in the corner of my new room and then hopped into it.

“Not much to look at. Let’s change that.”

Right now, the room was barer than a naked priest’s fleshy bottom. Just mud walls with chunks of stone here and there, and a dirt floor free of titles or decoration. No doors, no traps, nothing.

Not to matter. Soon, this would become one of the most important rooms in my dungeon. I accessed my room crafting list.

Essence growing room [Cost 80]

Specialized insect and fungi larder [Cost 100]

Melding room [Cost 120]

Alchemy Chamber [Cost 250]

*New* Arena [Cost 400]

I had unlocked the arena when I had slaughtered the heroes and leveled up to 7. Gaining access to the arena was important because it would elevate the overall difficulty rating of my dungeon. This would attract more heroes for me to murder, as well as making my dungeon a better place to murder them in.

I accessed the essence within myself and then, picturing an arena in my head, gave a mental command.

Essence left me, and the room transformed before my eyes. The walls turned to stone, and on this stone were carvings depicting hordes of monsters locked in battle with humans. Sword-wielding kobolds, goblins holding spears, and even a one-eyed behemoth adorned in battle armor. A little decorative for my tastes, but the stone mural came with the arena, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

At one end of the room, there were six full-sized straw dummies shaped like men, women, and children, each with faces painted on them in what appeared to be blood.

At the other end were targets, rather like archery targets except with a sheen that indicated they were treated to withstand spell damage, too. On these targets, innocent creatures were