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

calm and collected even as poison darts slaughtered three of his gremlins. His demeanor was cool just as four of his fire-nose weasels were flattened by a boulder that fell from an overhead hatch.

On and on he went, pushing deeper into the dungeon without a care.

It might have been disheartening if I hadn’t expected the fear affliction to leave him eventually. You see, fear can only work when it has thoughts and worries to latch onto. Now that my fear affliction had run out, Milark’s troll nature had resurfaced, and trolls are renowned for being so entirely stupid that thoughts escape them like gas from a mule with a poorly belly. Quite simply, if thoughts were gold, this troll faced a lifetime of debt.

So, it was with reduced numbers but growing confidence that Milark reached a chamber in my new dungeon, and it was here that I hoped to strike him hardest.

He and his gang came to a square chamber the size of a modest tavern barroom, with limestone walls slick with dew and covered in a rapidly spreading moss. There was an oval-shaped iron door on the far side of the chamber, but in front of it, and dominating the room, was a pool of water.

The water was greener than the wall moss, spotted with algae, and had flies collecting in groups and buzzing inches above the surface. Milark’s nose twitched at what must have been an overpowering smell of fetidness, and it was with a new fear in his eyes that he eyed the pool that offered no other means of crossing the room and reaching the door.

So, there was a glimmer of fear still there, after all.

“Other routes?” he asked.

Two gremlins tittered to each other, speaking in a language known only to their kind and deemed unworthy of learning by anyone but the most bored linguist. The two jackal blights, still mourning the loss of two of their pack to a trap, howled. The giant wolf spider approached the pool and dipped a leg in it, sending a ripple across the surface.

“Stupid!” said Milark. “It could have been acid. Kobolds! No other routes?”

I knew the answer before the kobolds shook their heads. This dungeon was a much more linear route than I would have chosen, and I hadn’t even begun to think about such structural changes yet. The only way through this room was to reach the door on the other side of the pool. It was going to be fun watching Milark realize that.

Milark huffed. “Then we must cross. Spider, is leg okay?”

The wolf spider nodded, all eight of its eyes blinking in unison.

“Then not acid. We will cross now. Hurry. Need to clear route and meet master in the middle.”

Milark unclasped his metal armor until he was bare-chested and had only a pair of tight leather briefs hiding his troll modesty. With a great heave, he threw his armor so that it arced over the pool and clattered on the platform on the other side, near the door. I was surprised that he had the sense to take off his suit of metal before swimming, and it meant I’d have to watch him. Milark may not be like most trolls.

“Quick. No dawdling,” he said.

The troll stepped into the pool, and even at his height, the water reached his neck. He began to wade, and the swish of the disturbed water was met with splashes as his kobolds and jackals and weasels and skeletons joined him. The wolf spider skittered along the wall, clinging to the stone and skirting around the pool.

Once the whole menagerie of monsters was in the pool, I decided it was time.

“Megalodonid,” I said, already hating my drownjack’s name. “Give our fine guests a lovely watery death.”

Milark must have believed the water was the only hindrance here, and that the only sounds were the patters and splashes of animals swimming through the murk. His tiny troll mind let him believe that the only movements in the pool were the ripples they sent out as they waded through, the tremors breaking the surface tension and making the algae float off to the sides.

A scream robbed him of that comfort.

A crying, terrified, wonderful scream.

A kobold disappeared below the surface, leaving only a few popping air bubbles in his place. There was no violence around him, no great ripples or crashes of water, no sign of the silent thing that had dragged him. He had simply vanished into the murk.

Milark looked around, spinning in place hoping to catch sight of the underwater nemesis.

Ah, I thought, watching with growing joy in my core. That’s more like it. There’s that lovely fear again.

A gremlin disappeared then. It was swimming one instant, gone the next.

“Hurry!” shouted Milark, pointing at the door as if his creatures might be confused about which direction to flee.

The troll took great strides, and the water lapped around him, rushing away at the force of his steps and sloshing against the chamber walls. His jackals panicked, and his gremlin shaman swam with an awkwardness I imagined could only be equaled by a donkey being forced to breaststroke through the Balsacan channel.

“Glub glub!” shouted a watery voice.

Milark was looking the other way, and he didn’t see the drownjack briefly surface and take a great bite of another wight-kobold, dragging the creature into an underwater doom.

If panic was an aroma, the room would have smelled worse than a dwarf’s girdle now.

The troll and his flock became more desperate and they swam toward the edge of the pool. Their fear became a disease with a split-second rate of infection, and soon kobolds were pushing gremlins underwater in their attempt to save themselves. Four gremlin fighters stood on the shoulders of a skeleton warrior, but when the drownjack swam into it and shattered its bony body, the gremlins