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

difficulty. I had a long way to go, but with a clever application of evil, the appropriate dose of diabolicalness, and some good, honest, hard work, I’d get there.

Now, it was even more likely that the heroes’ guild would deem more dungeon worthy enough to journey all the way out here, and more heroes meant more slaughter, which in turn meant more levels for me. With the addition of a passive fear effect on my dungeon, things couldn’t have gone better.

But I wasn’t done there.

We spent the next couple of days in a frenzy of activity. As ordered, Wylie and his miners created a route that led from the surface door room to this whole new section of my dungeon. Now, the heroes would have a choice to make when they entered the dungeon. And what did choices mean? Mistakes! Give a hero a decision to make, and you increase the likelihood that he’ll shoot himself in the foot with a big old crossbow bolt made of poor reasoning skills.

The choice presented to would-be heroes was thus: navigating the tile puzzle in my surface door room would still allow them to reach the other side of it, where uncovering a riddle door would grant them access deeper into the original part of my dungeon.

Or, they could just waltz through the new steel door that I had installed. I had made this a regular door without any riddles purposefully to make it seem like the easier choice. But the door led to a long tunnel, which connected to the new part of my dungeon. And what was waiting for them there?

Kainhelm, the ancestor-cursing narkleer.

But I couldn’t leave the defense of said new labyrinth solely to the narkleer. In addition to Kainhelm’s patrols, I also spent some essence sprucing the place up.

When we had journeyed through the old core’s dungeon, we had crossed a room filled with ankle-high fetid water. I had Wylie and the others deepen this, and I spent essence turning it into a fully-fledged pool room.

As nice as the name pool room sounded, this wasn’t a place where heroes could strip to their unders and do a few laps. No, it was a room dominated by a deep pond, which had to be crossed to reach the door on the other side.

In this pool, I introduced some wildlife. Namely, a drownjack.

The drownjack was a fish so big that any fisherman would have been ecstatic to have snagged him. Its bulbous body was covered in scales that glistened when the mana lamps glowed on them, making them look quite beautiful, really. It had three fins, two eyes, and one great big spot on its side, a birthmark that looked like an eye.

To a hero, it would look like any fish at first glance, but the longer they held its stare, the more they would see a human-like face sitting atop its scaly body. It was like a mermaid, in a way, if mermaids were designed by an underworld committee intent on making the ugliest sea creature possible.

“Drownjack,” I said, as the fish floated near the surface of its new home and stared at me with its bulbous eyes. “Your name is Flipper.”

“Glub glub,” answered the drownjack. “Rejected.”

“Rejected? You don’t like the name? Well then…Finito, perhaps? Fitting, since you will be the last thing a hero sees.”

“Rejected.”

I sighed. “Then what do you want to be called? Out with it, I don’t have all day.”

“Glub glub. My name is Megalodonid.”

“Fine, Mega. Your job is to lurk here and kill any heroes who dare undress to their undercakes and swim in your waters. Is that clear?”

“Glub glub,” answered Megalodonid, submerging. A long air bubble rose to the surface, popped, and then the water was deathly still.

With the narkleer settled into his new home and my drownjack swimming in his pool, I was free to consider matters that didn’t relate to hero slaughter. At least, not directly.

As such, I ordered Wylie and the miners to begin chipping away at the blaudy stone in the old core’s chamber. This would be a laborious process, I knew, since blaudy stone is tougher than a troll’s loincloth, but it would be worth it. My problem then would be deciding what to do with it. As far as I understood, raw blaudy stone had to be treated somehow before it could absorb spells. That would require further study.

As the evening of the second day after our victory drew to a close, I decided that I should speak to Overseer Bolton and see what information I could wheedle out of him.

Why was the core next door so important? Why all the secrecy? And why had it been lost? I didn’t believe anything about a library fire at the academy.

I sent Maginhart to the surface to find Bolton, only for him to return less than fifteen minutes later.

“Overssser Bolton is gone, Dark Lord. They sssay he hasss traveled back to the academy.”

“Well then. Answers will have to wait, I suppose.”

“What ordersss do you have for me?”

“Take a break, Maginhart. The next part is down to me, and me alone.”

CHAPTER 27

It was early in the morning when Chief Galatee stepped into the wasteland sun. Barely a bird had woken, not even the insects that always plagued the air and scurried over the yellow soil were stirring, but here Galatee was.

And yet, the Wrotun and Eternal clans were already hard at work, taking advantage of the brief window of time when the sun was still weak. The laborers were so well versed in avoiding the sun’s peak hours that they could have told you the times of sunrise and sunset for the last 30 days just from memory.

“First-Leaf Galatee,” said a voice beside her.

It was Tasgario, the Sixth-Leaf of the Bendarno tree. As Sixth-Leaf he was at the bottom