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

and took out a glass jar half-filled with blue dust. He opened the lid, releasing a fragrance of cinnamon and oil. He threw a handful of it in the air.

The dust, instead of falling straight back down as gravity would no doubt have preferred, hovered in the air. Then, grain by grain, the dust floated across the room and collided with a wall. Soon, all of the blue dust stuck to one section of the wall, revealing a hidden message.

Pumphrey read the blue-outlined words.

“A cat and a fox, a dog, and an ox. A west-sand crustacean, and a bloody big Alsatian. A gremlin and a joon, and a naughty baboon.”

Sider slapped Cheeks on the shoulder. “I swear, if I hadn’t seen you once eating a beef and gravy pie without using your hands, I’d be convinced you were a genius. Well done, Cheeks!”

“Furgetting sumeune?”

“Congratulations on throwing anti-illusion dust in the air,” said Pumphrey, grinning at his friend. “It took great skill.”

“We just count the legs, right?” said Sider.

Cheeks shook his head. “Joons are fish; they don’t have legs. The only thing these animals all have is eyes. We need to count the eyes, and then extinguish the relevant colored torches on the wall so the right number of eyes is listed.”

“You know,” said Gammon. “The Rump and Apple tavern does a quiz night every Thursday. You and I could make a fortune with that memory of yours, Cheeks.”

Sider tried to picture all the animals in her head. “Focus,” she said. “Pumphrey, you keep counting. The rest of us will just say how many eyes each creature has.”

Gammon chewed his lips as he thought about it. Barely a second of intense pondering and he looked like he was going to explode. “Cats and foxes have two. So do dogs and oxes. That makes ten.”

“Oxen, not oxes” corrected Cheeks. “And that makes eight.”

“Crustaceans have seven, and Alsatians are just dogs, so they have two. Gremlins have two, joons have two, and so do baboons. That makes…”

“Twenty-five,” said Sider. “Cheeks, can you do whatever you need to do with the torches?”

Cheeks approached the mana lanterns cautiously. He took a hand-sized sheet of copper from his satchel. Only certain types of metal could snuff a mana lantern. Given that the heroes sometimes used them, it was handy to carry the copper with them on all their dungeon raids.

Using the sheet, he extinguished all lanterns by the blue and yellow, leaving the colors for two and five still glowing.

Sider grinned. “Okay, boys. When the door opens let’s breeze through this place. I’m starting to get hungry, and we left the puppies on the surface. Puppies regenerate us best when they’re fresh. I don’t want them going rotten.”

The puppies were in fact street dogs rounded up by the dog catcher in a town named Yuleton. To procure them, Pumphrey had posed as a representative of a dog sanctuary, promising to find them a great home. Not the most moral of actions, to be sure, but what else could they do?

A great clanking sound filled the chamber, and the archway of the tunnel they had used to get here was now blocked by a great block of stone.

Sider drew her sword, while Pumphrey and Seabright stood back to back, scanning the room.

Next came a hissing sound, like air wheezing out of an old smoker’s lips.

“What in all hells…” began Sider.

There was no time for anyone to answer her question, because Cheeks collapsed onto his knees, his face purple. He gasped for breath, and he madly tried to pull his shirt collar as if the garment restricting his breathing.

Panic flushed through Sider, and it took all her experience to not struggle against it, and instead let it complete its course and wash through her.

Pumphrey was next, staggering into a wall and then slumping onto his bum.

Gammon fell next, and Seabright followed him, bellowing “By the Guds! What’s happening?” before collapsing.

And then Sider felt it.

A sensation in her chest, as if the air she breathed turned into thorns in her lungs.

This was the trap. They’d got the puzzle wrong!

The sensation became pain and then agony, and weakness coursed through her. She lost control of her hand, dropping her sword.

A trap.

A puzzle failed.

But what…

With her last ounce of energy, she touched the pendant on around her neck and gave a mental command.

“Your pendants!” she choked, as her pendant began to work.

Only Pumphrey and Seabright were conscious enough to heed her orders, and they each touched their pendants.

CHAPTER 15

Sider and the Four versus Core Beno

“And here’s the kicker,” I said, barely containing the laughter inside my core. “Crustaceans have seven eyes, as a rule, yes. No arguments there. But the clue specifically said west-sands crustaceans, which have four. And now look at those dopes, gasping for breath because they got their crustaceans mixed up. Hilarious, or what?”

Gulliver arched a perfectly manicured eyebrow at me. He stared at the image of the poison chamber, which I projected for him using my core vision.

“Those people are dying, Beno.”

“This is a dungeon. What did you think would happen to the people who enter here? It’s not a playground, Gulliver. It isn’t an underground kobold petting zoo.”

“I was a warscribe for almost a decade; I know how the world works. But do you have to take quite so much glee in it?”

“Have I ever looked down on you for your hobbies?” I said.

Gulliver began scribbling then, which he often did when we disagreed about something. I was beginning to suspect that most of his writings about me and my dungeon and my monsters would be negative. Still, if it spread my reputation, free of charge to me, then who cared?

For now, I was proud of myself. I had