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

It scampered around the room, before latching onto a wall and then completing a full lap of it, running horizontally yet somehow sticking to the surface. Sparkling dust left its feet as it ran, and some of this dust highlighted a door hidden on the wall.

On the newly-uncovered door, a knocker shaped like a bull stirred to life. 

“Ho hum, what fun,” it said, “Heroes to delay, what a way to start the day.”

The Collector stroked his third chin – taken from a goblin – using his fourth hand – taken from a manticore.

“Riddle. For the love of… you cores love your confounded riddles, don’t you? Spit it out, you bovine monstrosity.”

“It walks on four legs in the-”

“Man,” interrupted the halo core.

The riddle door creaked open, revealing my passageway beyond it.

“A little too easy for my liking. I need to update the riddle. Anyhow, this will be interesting,” I said to Tomlin. “Which door does he choose? I hope it’s the steel door, obviously.”

“Any door that doesn’t lead him near to Tomlin, Dark Lord.”

“Coward.”

In the surface door room, the Collector paused. A choice faced him now; the riddle door was open, but there was also the steel door I had recently installed, the one that led to the entirely new section of my dungeon. Which would he choose?

“Milark,” he said, “Take the steel door. Cores, give Milark some company for his travels. The rest of us will walk this way.”

Four of the cores whirred to life now, each wielding their individual essence and casting it amidst flashes of light that illuminated the dungeon like rainbow-colored lightning in a thunderstorm.

Soon, a barrage of new creatures were standing there. Four jackal blights, six fire-nosed weasels, five wight-kobolds, four skeleton warriors, a wolf spider the size of a wagon, and a gremlin shaman with a flock of gremlin fighters.

Not a bad collection. Most of these monsters weren’t available to me, which was a little worrying. It didn’t necessarily mean that these cores were all above my level, but it meant they had leveled up differently to me, and thus had earned a different list of craftable creatures. Most importantly, it made their behavior hard to predict, since these cores evidently didn’t think like me, and hadn’t shared my education.

I tried to calculate how much essence they must have used so that I could work out how much they had taxed themselves, but it was an impossible task. I didn’t know which creature came from which core.

It wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I just had to remember what Gulliver had said; these weren’t just monsters. That was the wrong way to think of them. In fact, 'monsters' was too complimentary a word for them, and they didn’t deserve the honor.

No, they were heroes by definition, and I would murder them in the way I had been taught.

CHAPTER 32

Milark the troll led the monsters through the steel doors. This took them to the longest tunnel in my whole lair, one which connected my dungeon with the one I had inherited from the old core. Although I’d already begun creating defenses for it I hadn’t laced it with too many traps yet, but that didn’t matter. It would take them time to cross the tunnel, and the longer the two groups of invaders were separated, the better.

Focusing back on the Collector, I watched as he and his six cores crossed the riddle door threshold.

The Collector led the way, walking with what I can only describe as lopsided strides, given that his numerous legs were all taken from different beings. The longest must have been taken from a giant spider because it was long and bristly and made a sticking sound when he lifted it from the ground.

Beside him, the wheels of the cores’ platforms rattled over the dirt and jittered when they hit loose stones. None of them spoke a word. Knowing how chatty cores can be, this told me a lot about the Collector’s level of discipline.

It took him less than a few minutes to cross the tunnel, where he was met by another riddle door at the end. As expected, the door had barely blurted its riddle before a core supplied the answer, and the Collector proceeded on.

“Now we’ll see how good he is,” I said.

Tomlin, still wearing his cultivator gloves that resembled oven mitts, was sitting against the core room wall and taking reassurance from the solid structure behind him. Solid walls meant nothing could grab you from behind.

“Tomlin is worried, Dark Lord.”

I resisted the urge to reprimand his cowardice. “Tomlin doesn’t need to be scared. These cores aren’t a match for me, lad. You might as well put a toddler in a gladiator ring with a cyclops.”

As brave as my words sounded, I wasn’t naive. Six cores against one? Two parties of heroes taking separate paths through my dungeon? It was a war on two fronts, and I’d be stupid to take it so lightly. Luckily, I was prepared for the Collector.

*

Way across the dungeon, Milark the armored troll almost reached the end of the connecting passageway, though he walked with much less of a saunter than his master across the dungeon had. Even surrounded by his rabble of monsters, the fear in the air still affected Milark. A little less than before, maybe, he wasn’t free of it yet.

“Wights first,” he said, pointing the base of his hammer at the archway ahead.

His wights were undead kobolds created by core essence. They looked like Tomlin the morning after a heavy night of red wine, retaining their wolfish faces but colored as pale as bone and bearing expressions that conveyed lots of feelings based around murder and death. They lacked the brains of regular kobolds but made up for it in aggression.

The five kobolds walked on, each of them