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

duck was the brains behind his puzzle-solving abilities. “Matilda found a way through?”

“Of course.”

“Such a clever duck. Then lead the way, Cheeks. Seabright, Pumphrey, Gammon, keep a lookout for gnorks, goblins, gronks, all that kind of dungeon crap.”

As Cheeks led them safely across the tile puzzle, Pumphrey hummed a song. Sider recognized it as the priest’s buxom daughter, and she was glad he didn’t actually sing it. As a priest’s daughter herself, she’d hate to have to break his nose again.

“Luuks like uur cure is playing it safe,” said Seabright. “I prefer the impulsive cures. Easier to defeat an enemy whu half defeats himself.”

Cheeks stepped off the last tile, followed by Sider and the rest of them. Safely across the puzzle, Sider took a metal tin from her pocket.

The walls on this side of the tiles were nothing special; just blocks of dirt like in most dungeons. But given that there was no sign of a tunnel or door anywhere around, it stood to reason that the way out of this room was hidden.

She opened the tin and scooped two fingers full of goo from it, before dabbing it on various parts of the wall.

Soon, one patch glowed yellow, the light reflecting in Matilda the duck’s eyes.

“Found our door,” Sider said.

An answering quack gave her the duck’s seal of approval.

With the illusion broken, a door appeared on the wall. It was seven feet tall and had a bull’s head for a knocker.

“Heroes are here, but they’re standing too near,” the bull said, in the rhyming way typical of what had to be a riddle door. “Sure, they stink, but more importantly…can they think?”

Matilda quacked and flapped a wing out of her bag, shocked at the sight of a talking door.

“A riddle duur,” said Seabright. “Always with the riddle duurs.”

Sider sighed. When you’ve raided one dungeon, you’ve raided a thousand. As a professional dungeoneer – she hated the moralistic implication of the word hero and so never used it – she had read too many riddle books to count. Once, after a solid week of memorizing them, she had begun to dream in riddles.

“Get on with it, you ugly bovine,” she told the bull. “What’s your riddle?”

“It walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening,” said the bull.

Sider sighed. “You could have at least tried to make it difficult. The answer is a man and his aging process.”

The door creaked open, and Sider stepped through it, emerging in a tunnel. Ah, this was more like it. Dungeons were supposed to have tunnels, and the tunnels would no doubt lead to a room brimming with treasure. Now that they’d gotten the tiles and riddles out of the way, it wouldn’t be long until they encountered something to kill. Loot and fighting, who could ask for more in life?

Soon after that thought, Sider caught sight of something at the far end of the tunnel.

A small shape, perhaps as tall as her waist. It was too dark to make out in more detail, except for something curious.

“See that?” she said.

“Goblin?” said Pumphrey. “Some little dungeon beast desperate to taste steel, anyway.”

“Steel? Yuur sword is pig irun, yuu cheapskate.”

“Ah, shadup.”

Cheeks squinted. “It appears that the creature has something metal in its hand.”

Matilda gave a soft quack in agreement.

“A key. Must be,” said Seabright.

A key. That might mean secret treasure. Loot there for the taking.

Or it could mean something else.

Sider weighed the risks, then shook her head. “I’m not being suckered by dungeon critter with a key. Whichever way it’s trying to lead us, we’ll go the other way.”

*

From my core room, I watched Shadow standing at the far end of the tunnel between the two riddle doors, doing her best to goad the heroes in an all too obvious way.

She held a steel key in her hand, which we’d rubbed with an alchemical ointment so that it glowed in the dark. The key was useless, but that didn’t matter; it had done its job. The heroes had seen it, and they’d realized it was a trap.

I didn’t want them to follow Shadow, you see. In fact, I wanted them to be so opposed to following her down that part of the tunnel, that they’d purposefully go another way.

It really is a pain that I don’t have hands at a time like this. In the Soul Bard book series, all the villains rub their hands together when their plans show promise. Of course, those villains always end up dead or incapacitated via the bard’s lute, so perhaps they weren’t the best role models.

Ah well. Onto the more pressing matter of hero murder.

This was going just as I had planned for now, but as much as this was playing perfectly in the early stages, I still had reason to worry.

These guys weren’t chumps.

I mean they were, since all heroes are chumps, but they were a little less chumpy than the rest.

The podgy one had figured out my tile puzzle with barely a thought, and the woman cracked the riddle doors straight away. These guys weren’t green-gilled clowns going on their first dungeon raid. That didn’t bode well, and it meant I’d have to alter things just a little.

Staring at a top-down map of my dungeon, I began changing my plan. Not much, but enough to ensure maximum murder for the lowest cost, tweaking it to account for the heroes’ surprising brainpower.

“Gary,” I said, using my core voice, “I need you ready to go to the poison chamber. Stay in one of the tunnels nearby.”

“I would be delighted,” answered Gary. “Any excuse to stretch my legs.”

“Death, Fight, Kill, join him please.”

The three fire beetles squeaked at me.

“Fight!”

“Kill!”

“Death!”

I smiled. “Aw, you guys always know