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

them; ones bearing my name but not my words, just inferior scribbles intended to cash in on my fame.”

“As humble as you are, I have to agree,” I said. “Someone who knew you well would be able to spot the trickery. It won’t always be so, though. A mimic needs two things to showcase its talents.

For one, a mimic can only copy that which it has seen. Secondly, its ability to imitate something grows stronger the longer it spends with its subject. Even so, this little fella has only just met you, Gull, and already it is indistinguishable to most people’s eyes. Mimic, walk a few steps, please.”

The mimic walked, copying the over-long steps that Gulliver had taken around it moments earlier. It crossed the room while tapping its chin.

“You know,” said the real Gulliver. “I have on occasion found myself in the unenviable position of needing to please two ladies at once. Constrained by the laws of time and space, I have found myself in a pickle that resulted in me having pots thrown at my skull from an overhead veranda. This could be useful…”

“You’re not having your own mimic. Moving on, time for creature number two.”

“Fine, what’s next on this wonderful creature carousel? Do you have any idea what you are creating, or are you like an amateur baker throwing everything into the cake bowl and hoping it doesn’t come out tasting terrible?”

“That’s the problem with the melding room,” I said. “You assign three monsters to stand in the runemarks, and you have no idea exactly how it will meld them together. Take Gary, for instance. He’s a giant spider with stone troll skin and leeches for legs. To make him, I combined a spider, leech, and a stone-dwarf troll. As it turned out, he’s actually as fearsome as he is pleasant, but it could have gone wrong. I could have ended up with…say…a troll the size of a leech, that could shoot tiny webbing from its backside.”

“And what do you hope to get today?”

“It is possible to purposefully get a result you desire here,” I said. “But you still have to be lucky. Nevertheless, I’m going to try. See, I need my mimic to take on some of the qualities of a leech.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see…if it happens as I hope. No point blowing my own trumpet before í know the song being played.”

“How will you accomplish this, my gentlemen gem?”

“By giving the melding room a nudge. Watch.”

Creature created!

Creature created!

30 essence points used [Total: 379/909]

There they were, squirming on the melding room floor, all slug-like and slimy. No, I’m not talking about door-to-door spelltome salesmen.

 I had created two little leeches.

If this worked as it should, if Lady Chance was feeling friendly, then using two leeches instead of one would encourage the melding room to utilize their unique abilities more strongly. And when combined with a mimic…

…well, I just had to hope this worked. Either way, I would use whatever boss monster was created, I’m sure.

“Mimic, leeches, step onto the runemarks, if you please. The melding will begin.”

CHAPTER 20

While I waited for the melding chamber to finish creating my boss monster, I attended to some general dungeon bits and bobs. My battle with the heroes had highlighted weaknesses in my lair and flaws in my plans of attack, so I needed to fix that.

Firstly, the tile puzzle in the first room in my lair was supposed to hit dungeon-divers with a taxing mental puzzle before they got their bearings. If I could wear out their minds, it’d take away a millisecond or two of their reaction time when it came to combat.

But the last chumps had passed over the tiles while shedding barely a bead of sweat. Thinking about it, I concluded it was because they had all the time in the world to figure the puzzle out.

So, how to address that?

I could introduce a creature or two to the first room. Give them something to think about while they puzzled over the puzzle. But a hero party was almost certainly going to slaughter the first few creatures they saw in that situation. They would be full of energy, bursting to kill things. No, I’d just be throwing my creatures to the wolves. Literally, given the last heroes we’d encountered.

I needed a way to put them under pressure while they solved the tile puzzle. A hero under pressure made mistakes, and in this case, a mistake would mean stepping on the wrong tile and triggering vampiric darts to shoot out of the walls.

Aha! Got it!

“Maginhart,” I said, casting my core voice.

“Yesss, Dark Lord?”

“I need you to go to the surface. See if the Cynthia the tinker can craft me a crude hourglass. I need it to be four or five feet tall and have runemarks on it. The runemarks don’t need to mean anything.”

“Certainly, Dark Lord. I would be most pleasssed to visit the surface again.”

“You like it up there?”

“Yesss, Dark Lord. The sssun feelsss…different.”

“If you like it, you like it. I hate it, but I’m happy for you to be our surface liaison. Just don’t bother the clans up there. The less we interact right now, the better.”

“I will asssk her to make an hour glasss for you, Dark Lord.”

That should do it. I would put a tall hourglass in the first room. When the heroes entered, sand would start falling. This would make them think that something would happen when the hourglass emptied, and their little hero minds would start imagining all kinds of gruesome traps.

In reality, nothing would happen when the hourglass emptied, but as a psychological trick, it should be enough to make them hurry up. A rushed mind makes lots of lovely little mistakes.

My next issue was that the last heroes’ journey through the