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

what you wanted about their love for swilling beer and bare-knuckle fighting, but they fell in line when it mattered.

She looked around, taking in her surroundings. This dungeon was as silent and gloomy as most of the ones you’d find in Xynnar. Her dungeoneering experience came into play as she scanned the very first room to try and glean as much information about the core as possible.

Most heroes weren’t as patient as her. As soon as they set foot in a dungeon they got loot-crazy, and they stalked around like mad pigeons gobbling up breadcrumbs, relying on their swordsmanship and magic to get them out of trouble.

 Sider wasn’t like that. She took her time. She used her senses. Not all heroes believed it, but this kind of thing was just as important as spending hours swinging your sword or shooting fireballs at straw dummies.

Yes, every core was different, and you had to try and think like them if you wanted to get through their dungeon. So…what about this core?

Well, there were no monsters in the first room. That meant the core was cautious. Rather than leave the initial chamber in darkness, which a lot of cores did under the stupid notion that heroes – people committed to finding underground lairs – were scared of the dark, this core lit the place up with mana lamps.

Most telling, though, was what Sider saw in the room before her.

“See that?” she said.

Pumphrey shrugged. “A tile puzzle. Cheeks will sort it in a jiffy.”

There, spread out over the ground in the first room in the dungeon, was a series of multi-colored tiles. Sider looked at the ceiling, seeing no hint of hidden compartments there, which meant nothing was likely to attack from above. Then again, that was the whole point of them being hidden, so that people couldn’t just look up and spot them.

“Seabright,” she said. “Check the ceiling for illusions.”

Seabright, who wore his hair tied back with dozens of pins and made a habit of seeking out new pins whenever they visited a town, took a glass jar from his satchel. He grabbed some blue dust from it and threw it toward the ceiling. The dust rained back down, most of it landing on Sider’s shoulders.

“We’re clear,” he said.

Sider brushed the dust from her coat. “Thanks. Let’s see what else we have to deal with.”

The presence of a tile puzzle here in the first chamber suggested that this core preferred cunning over brawn. Sider wasn’t too worried about that, despite her party being weighted slightly toward combat.

“Let’s be as careful as a priest sneaking out of a pleasure house in the middle of the night. I’m not getting suckered by a trap again; I had to pay 200 gold for a healer to patch me up last time. Okay, what have we got? We know that the tiles will trigger a trap. Dainty toes and eagle eyes, boys,” she said.

When she looked at the walls, she felt a stirring in her gut. If this were a morning after a night of heavy drinking, she’d ignore gut stirs. But in the depths of a dungeon, she paid her bowels great heed. This was heroes’ instinct yelling at her.

“Okay,” she said, edging closer to where the tiles began. “A tile puzzle with something in the walls ready to strike if we get it wrong. It’s brain time, come on. What’s the answer to the puzzle, and what’s the trap?”

“I’m betting arrows,” said Pumphrey. “Aimed at groin height. Cores are sardistic.”

“Sadistic,” said Cheeks.

“Nu. Feels like fireballs tu me,” answered Seabright, in that nasal accent all Untryuns had.

Pumphrey patted the coin purse on his belt. Everyone knew he kept it padded with tissue so it looked bigger. “Wanna back up those big balls with some coin?”

“Two cuppers,” said Seabright.

“Two coppers for this? Easiest money I ever made. Done, spit on it and we’ll call it sealed.”

“What if it’s fire arrows?” said Gammon, named for his love of the cooked pork dish, who never got involved with Pumphrey’s and Seabright’s bets except to point out details that needed clarification.

“Fire arrows are still arrows,” said Pumphrey. “I win.”

“What if it’s magical fire arrows? Ones made from fire but still shaped like arrows?”

“Seabright said fireballs. We’d call that a null bet.”

“Boys,” said Sider. “Shut it.”

Sider stared at the tile puzzle, but she couldn’t make any sense of it. There was a pattern here, there always was, but it was too complex for her to recognize. Her brain just didn’t work that way.

“Cheeks?” she said.

Cheeks, the shortest and stockiest of the group, stepped forward. While the others were all athletic, Cheeks was like a block of fudge. His body wasn’t hard, wasn’t soft, but somewhere in the middle and that came with its advantages and disadvantages. She’d once seen him win a fight by letting his opponent, a farmer whose duck Cheeks had stolen, punch him until he dropped out of sheer exhaustion. Cheeks had simply stepped over the farmer, collected his duck, and walked away.

His peculiar size meant that his leathers were all custom made, and as such were pricey. Cheeks took better care of his stuff than most heroes, even buying leather oil from an apothecary to protect his chest piece. He wore a tan leather bag on his back, and a duck stuck its bill out of it and looked around, blinking.

Sucking in his cheeks, Cheeks took just a few seconds to glance over the tiles.

“What do you think, Matilda?” he said, reaching back and stroking the duck. She quacked at Cheeks, who furrowed his brow. “What? The green tiles always follow the red, then every third step, two blues meet, and then there’s a diagonal yellow adjacent to another green. You’re so clever.”

Sider had given up asking Cheeks to stop pretending his