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

“’Tis morning ‘tis morning,” squeaked the baboon, “I find it quite boring. I don’t like your face; it’s a bloody disgrace.”

“A riddle door. Perfect.”

He’d already spent way too long inspecting this part of the dungeon, and he had a meeting in a town over a hundred miles away later that day. Even traveling using a portal, he’d be pressed for time. Could he hang around here answering riddles?

He should leave this for another day, but he had to know what Beno was hiding.

“Spit it out, then. What’s your riddle?”

“What belongs to you, but other people use it more than you?”

It took Bolton a millisecond to dredge his list of riddle solutions from his memory palace. “Your name.”

“Correct. I would also have accepted your favorite pair of pantaloons or brogues, as any human with siblings can attest. As a riddle door with four brothers, it was always a problem. You may enter.”

Putting aside the idea of a riddle door wearing pantaloons, he watched as the baboon door swung open, revealing a small room, perhaps five by five feet, with an ornamental box sitting in the middle.

“Core Beno?” called Bolton. “I want you here this instant.”

“Why? I can see you from here,” Beno answered.

Bolton gave a smug grin. “Then you will see that I have uncovered a secret. Tell me, Beno, if I open this box here, will I find secret loot? Or will I see something that you tried to hide from me, and by proxy, First-Leaf Galatee and Chief Reginal?”

“You got me there, you devious swine,” Beno said.

Bolton raised a finger. “Never try to pull the wool over an overseer’s eyes. We can see through wool, you know.”

He ran his finger over the box, but his channeled mana revealed no traps, no surprises.

“Let’s see what’s you’re hiding, then,” he said.

He unhooked the latch and pushed back the lid.

There was a bang.

A banner shot out of the box and unraveled, then hovered in mid-air.

A cake was flung out of the box, and it also hovered in midair.

The banner was covered in multi-colored writing, and the cake had words written with icing on the top. Both the banner and cake read the same things, and Bolton couldn’t help but smile.

HAPPY RESSUECRCTION DAY, OVERSEER BOLTON!

Bolton shook his fist in the air, unable to contain his grin. This might have been the first time anyone had remembered.

“Beno, you scamp! I wasted most of my inspection time to find this bloody cake!”

CHAPTER 21

The Collector

“A horse strolls into a tavern,” the Collector said, sitting twenty feet in the air upon a throne made of bones, “and the gentleman whose job is to serve beer and perform general housekeeping within the establishment, says ‘Why the morose look upon your visage?’”

 The Collector waited for the sounds to come, the sounds that beings make when faced with words ordered in such a way as to provoke amusement.

The beings beneath The Collector, way below in the courtyard of the ruined castle it called home, didn’t laugh. Nineteen sentients had heard its arrangement of words but hadn’t provided a single satisfactory sound.

“Fetch me the whip,” the Collector said, clicking its fingers.

The courtyard erupted into a sound called laughter now. Lots of versions of it, from high-pitched ones that sounded like someone cleaning a window with a cloth, to deep ones like barrels rolling over cobblestones.

“Enough,” it said.

As the noise died down and was replaced by the moan of a breeze threading through the ruins, the Collector looked at its audience.

“Honest feedback, please. Do not be worried; I shan’t get upset. What was wrong in my telling of humorous events?”

“It’s a common joke,” said one voice. “But you told it in a way as to rob its humor.”

“Too wordy by far,” said another voice. “Gentleman who serves beer should be bartender or innkeeper.”

A third voice added, “And morose look upon your visage removes the crux of the joke. Long face is an expression meaning sad or upset, and horses have long faces. That is why it works.”

The Collector stroked one of its five chins. “The humor is not the talking horse?”

“No.”

“Nor its downcast mood?”

“Not exactly. It’s the expression of it.”

One of his collection spoke up. “You are all incorrect. The joke is that a human tavern is ill-equipped to cater to horse patrons, and the innkeeper would likely refuse service.”

“Wrong. The horse would take up no more room than a band of miners, a group of heroes, or a crowd of friends. Why would an innkeeper, a businessman, refuse his coin? If the horse had gold, he would find both service and refreshment.”

The sentients in his collection broke into a chorus of bickering, and the Collector tuned it out. It put three of its hands to its forehead. “Damn it all to buggery. I will never master this.”

A great thudding sound came from somewhere beyond the ruins. The Collector stared down at its courtyard, where the grass was littered with loose stones, ones that had come from the wreckage of walls that had formed a castle forecourt.

It knew not which king it had once belonged to, nor what had befallen them. The only thing about the castle’s past that had interested the Collector was the underground burial chamber, which it had raided to construct its giant throne of bones.

The thudding sounds belonged to Milark, a stone troll whom the Collector had chanced upon in the Five-Clove forest. The Collector had just added another sentient to its collection and was taking a stroll to celebrate, when it heard a sobbing sound.

Sticking its tongue out and tasting the sound in the air, the Collector followed it only to find a hulking great troll sitting upon a rock and crying like a baby with a slapped