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

Hang on a second.

“Demon’s arses, that’s the trap,” I said.

Shadow fixed me a look that said I want to smash you with a mana-lined sledgehammer. Instead, she said, “The ceiling? You are a genius, Core Beno. I never thought that the ceiling getting lower and lower might be a trap!”

“Not that,” I said. “The trap is…”

Another noise competed with the rumble of the ever-lowering ceiling. A panel opened in the center of the room, uncovering a hole in the ground. It was the size of a troll’s grave and filled with a gloopy green liquid that gently lapped side to side.

The ceiling had cut the room height in half now so that Gary had to stoop. “The liquid,” he said. “It is our only hope of safety from a bloody painful crushing. We must dive in and hold our breath.”

“It’s the only way,” agreed Shadow, edging toward the pool.

“You first. Chop chop, my dear!”

They were ready to dive into the pool of disgusting goop that had conveniently appeared in the middle of the room. Not only that, but they were displaying an unusual level of panic for two of my bravest creatures, and they had completely abandoned logic.

Something was wrong here. The signs pointed to one particular kind of trap.

“Halt!” I shouted, causing Shadow to pause at the edge of the water pool. “The trap isn’t the ceiling. The real trap here is your own panic. The core has released something in the air to make you scared, and that impairs your decision making worse than drinking moonshine from the puddles outside a dwarven tavern. The pool of water won’t save your lives, you fools. It's filled with some sort of acid mixture. I would bet my arse on it.”

“What about the ceiling? Do you ask me to call my own eight eyes liars?” asked Gary.

“The ceiling will stop before it gets low enough to crush you. It isn’t meant to hurt you; it's meant to make you hurt yourself by diving into acid to escape it.”

I knew what I was dealing with now. See, you can learn a lot about a core from the kinds of traps he places in his dungeon. Some of us lean toward the practical side; we want our traps to kill and maim heroes as all good traps should.

But some cores like their traps not just to kill, but to cause suffering. In this case, the suffering was both mental and physical; when awake, the core would no doubt watch heroes as they jumped into the pool, to their own deaths.

Shadow lifted a leg. “Core Beno, I don’t…”

“Do not take another step,” I commanded, projecting my voice in such a way that, as a dungeon creature, Shadow could not disobey me.

We waited then. Tense, scared, feeling doomed. Or, I supposed that was how they felt, given that the core had laced the air with some kind of toxin. I felt quite assured that I had figured out this core’s nature, and I would use it against him later.

The ceiling fell further, and Gary, the tallest of them, had to spread his leech legs out and lower his spider abdomen to the ground. The ravens stopped hovering and just settled down on the dirt. Shadow kneeled, staring at the ceiling with her anxiety clear on her face.

“Beno, this isn’t working…” she said.

And then it stopped.

With another great churning sound, the ceiling reversed itself, rising to its previous height in barely a second. Across the room, a door opened.

Fresh air - as fresh as dungeon air can get - wafted into the room.

“Breathe deeply, my friends,” I said, casting my voice through Edgar’s beak. “Let the toxin leave you.”

“I feel different,” said Shadow. “What just happened?”

“Your body is filled with squishy things called organs, and the core attacked two of these – your lungs and your brain – with a panic-inducing poison. Luckily, I know a little about poison and falling ceiling traps. If the core didn’t know we were here yet, he will have woken up now, I’m sure. Let’s hit him while he is still groggy.”

CHAPTER 25

Under my guidance, Shadow, Gary, and the ravens conquered puzzle room after puzzle room, deftly solving tile puzzles, riddle doors, and various other conundrums that I didn’t find too taxing. Traps were few and far between, and cautious scouting by Shadow and Edgar helped them avoid most poorly-placed spike pits, pitfalls, and bear traps.

“No creatures,” said Gary. “Nothing to fight, except the narkleer. Strange.”

“With a hibernating core and no way to the surface, the only things that would survive down here are monsters who don’t need to eat, or don’t need to eat often.”

“The undead.”

“Exactly. Zombies, skeletons, wraiths, ghouls, wights, accountants. The underworld’s rich tapestry of dead things. Even so, there aren’t any down here. The lack of anything like that tells us a couple of things,” I said.

I paused for dramatic effect, but nobody asked me what I meant. So, I carried on.

“For one, if I was going into hibernation, I would populate my lair with so many skeletons it’d be like a necromancer’s birthday party. The lack of them means that this core didn’t know he was going into hibernation.”

“Makes sense,” said Shadow.

“Secondly,” I said, “If his décor didn’t date this core enough, then a lack of monsters might do so. There was a period of coredom history where many cores felt the use of monsters was uncouth. That as cores, we shouldn’t stoop to using brawn to defeat heroes, and instead use our minds.”

“You’re an egotistical bunch,” said Shadow.

“A fair point. But it tells us that we’re dealing with a core all too charmed by his own intellect.”

“Aren’t you all?”

“A fair point.”

They pushed on through the dungeon, guided by my