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

The other two men cheered them on, wincing at each clean strike.

“That’s enough,” said Sider finally.

The two men broke apart, bloodied and covered in perspiration.

“Gather around,” she said.

The men shook hands and walked across the camp, before standing in a semi-circle and facing her. Firelight glinted off the necklaces each of them wore, and Sider touched her own necklace for a second, careful not to accidentally activate it.

“We should arrive at the dungeon by second moon tomorrow,” she said. “I know you doubt that it even exists, but-”

“The boy was an imbecile,” said the man whose nose was broken in five places. Hooray for regenerative healing.

Sider shook her head. “The lad wasn’t an imbecile; he was ready to wet himself. I know it is a long time since any of us could feel fear, but you must remember that it can be like a parasitic worm boring through a person’s mind.”

“I still don’t buy it.”

“What did he say the dungeon was called again?” asked another man.

“Corbeno’s, or something like that.”

“Sounds like a beach in South Tostaga.”

They laughed now, and Sider patiently waited it out.

“Had enough? Ready to listen to me?”

They brought their attention back to her.

“Now,” she said. “Before the slippery bugger managed to escape from us, the boy told us there was a dungeon out here somewhere. I know that it looks more desolate than a tavern after happy hour ends, but I checked with my contact at the heroes’ guild. There’s a dungeon here, alright. Not new, but also not overpowered. Rated average, by the heroes’ guild charter. The perfect place for us to train ahead of our attempt at Mount Desvaule.”

Mount Desvaule. What a word. Even mentioning the tormenting-rated dungeon was enough to knock any further thoughts of mirth from the men. They were serious now, and that was how Sider liked it.

“We have a couple of months until we try the Mount, and I wanted to conquer as many smaller dungeons as we can before then. We need to get into peak fighting shape. Alright, lads? Let’s be professional about this. The dungeon is a day and a half away from here. Let’s find it, conquer the ever-loving hell out of it, and then move on. There’s a lair in New Holden that I want to hit by next week.”

CHAPTER 10

Day followed night, as it always does. Just once, as a joke, it’d be nice to mix it up a little. You know, try out nights in a row. Or a week of days. A month of afternoons.

But the next morning was just like the ones before it, stretching back to the dawn of time. I spent this one in my dungeon.

By now, my essence vines had replenished some of the essence I’d spent constructing the arena and spawning new monsters, leaving me with a surplus to work with.

I couldn’t assault the dungeon next door until my creatures were strong enough, so I decided the best use of my time was to shore up my defenses a little. You never know when heroes might turn up. They don’t exactly blow a trumpet or anything. Well, most of them don’t.

I hopped to a new pedestal in a room north of the loot room. This newly-excavated cavern was much smaller than the arena, and its walls would stay as they were; muddy, cold, and brown.

Sandwiched between the surface door room and the loot room, and running parallel to a tunnel where I had placed two riddle doors, this room would be another problem for would-be heroes to overcome. It was linked to the maze of tunnels in the center of my dungeon, and this meant that some heroes would stumble on it, some wouldn’t. It depended on their navigational skills.

This, by the way, was a dungeon technique dubbed Chaos Walk, and it wasn’t much utilized these days.

See, most cores like to plan their dungeons out in a set route, so that heroes must overcome one room after another in a logical order. Building their dungeons this way, cores can place their most powerful monsters and traps at the early stages of their lair, to wallop the heroes as soon as they enter.

Others can leave their most powerful tools of death to the last, counting on the heroes being tired, hurt, and losing focus.

It was a logical way to construct a dungeon, but it was cliché. All the best dungeon cores were innovators, and innovation meant being prepared to screw up once in a while. To try something new.

For me, this meant having no set order in my dungeon. Heroes entered by the surface door and found themselves in a room filled with a floor tile puzzle, where one wrong step sent vampiric darts shooting out of the walls.

From there they would have to solve a riddle door, which led them to a tunnel with yet another riddle door at the end. After conquering this, they would enter that wild mess of tunnels that looped and ran to dead ends and opened up in several places at once. A real pig of a place, where getting lost was the least of a hero’s problems.

Structuring things this way meant there was no set route through my lair. One tunnel would lead to trap rooms, whereas another might lead to a bunch of monsters waiting to eat hero flesh. My logic here was that no one set of heroes would ever have the golden answer to beating me.

Sure, a hero group might fight their way to my loot room, vanquish my boss monster, and escape with their prize. But they’d never be able to draw a plan of my dungeon and sell it to other heroes, because I would simply alter my rooms. Move traps around, shuffle monsters here