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

The chamber filled with cries, howls, squeaks, splashes. The wolf spider reached the other side and offered four legs to the creatures swimming toward it, but hardly any had the presence of mind to grab on.

Milark beat them all to the edge, but as he tried to pull himself up, something bit his leg. He let out a cry that drowned the sound of everything else.

“Fish!” he bellowed.

With fury written on his face, he reached underwater and grabbed his attacker and he squeezed and squeezed until it went limp.

“Might be more,” he grunted. “Hurry.”

And then, with one last splash, the drownjack surfaced, stretched its mouth over the troll’s armor, and dragged it underneath the water. After that, the drownjack breached the surface no more, and as his core master, I knew instantly that the troll had injured him greatly and that he was gone.

The attacks stopped, and what was left of the host of monsters reached the edge and climbed out of the pool, dripping with water and fear.

The jackal blights were gone, as were the gremlin fighters. The pool claimed all but Milark, two fire-nosed weasels, one wight-kobold, two skeletal warriors, a gremlin shaman, and a giant wolf spider.

I watched, both mourning my drownjack in my emotionless core way and feeling pleased that he had served my dungeon greatly in his short time here. He would be remembered.

For now, Milark’s creatures showed barely a hint of their previous strength.

And the best was yet to come.

*

The Collector and his cores reached the loot room, which was exactly where I wanted them to be. I’d hoped to tax him a little more on his route here, but it didn’t matter; if things worked as I planned, he’d die all the same.

My plan was quite simple, but it depended on the Collector behaving a certain way.

Most heroes, on reaching a giant chamber with a treasure chest sitting in the middle, would have sprinted in like pigs following the scent of a truffle. But the Collector was no ordinary hero.

He and his platformed cores paused by the entrance and then didn’t move.

“The slippery bugger suspects a trap,” I said.

Tomlin, who had been poor company thanks to the cowardice that even the hint of battle brought out in him, slowly nodded.

“Tomlin wonders how he might have gotten that idea.”

“The was rather sarcastic, Tomlin. Cowards don’t have much purchase in the bank of sharp wit.”

“Loot rooms are not usually empty of monsters, Tomlin thinks.”

“Tomlin thinks correctly,” I agreed. “If I’m going to use the blaudy stones on this fool, I can’t have my creatures caught in it. I must keep them out of danger. But then, if there are no creatures, the loot room looks entirely too conspicuous. Damn it.”

The Collector still hadn’t moved and hadn’t even sent his little imp forward to test for traps. That told me a couple of things; his imp had perhaps run out of mana and thus was as useful as a trumpet player in a burglary gang. Also, creating Milark’s army had taxed his cores, and he was saving their essence for later.

“Poor Mega,” said Tomlin, his face downcast.

“He served the dungeon well in his short time with us,” I said.

“He was going to teach Tomlin how to swim.”

Such a simple sentence, yet it carried a weight of sadness within it. Though the emotion had little hope of penetrating my core in any significant way, it didn’t mean I was impervious to its meaning.

The Collector had to die, and fast.

“Shadow, Gary, Death, Fight, and Kill. I need you all in the loot room.”

My monsters, who were lurking in the tunnels bordering the opposite side of the loot room, began to move. They might have been full of backchat most of the time, but I’ll give them this; they didn’t question my orders in the slightest when it mattered.

“Keep a healthy distance,” I told them, watching them assemble in the loot room. “We need to coax him in, but don’t let yourself get drawn into combat.”

Even now, faced with kobolds and beetles and a hybrid boss monster, the Collector didn’t move. He just surveyed the room with a thoughtful look in his mish-mash of eyes.

Damn. The kobolds weren’t enough to draw him in. We needed more.

“Kason, Wylie, Tarius, jellies. Join them.”

My kobold miners and floating blobs of jelly traveled through the dungeon, soon joining Shadow and the others in the loot room.

And still, the Collector kept his caution.

“He’s not biting the worm,” I said. “Perhaps the bait isn’t tasty enough.”

When I said this, Tomlin shrank back even further against the core room wall. If he did it anymore, he’d become part of it.

“Don’t send Tomlin,” he said, his little kobold eyes pleading.

“Tomlin, you’re about as much a temptation to the Collector as a crud-crusted copper coin to a land baron. No, this bugger needs a bigger prize. A treasure worth of sticking his neck out to collect.”

“Kainhelm?” asked Tomlin.

“No, not Kainhelm. Something else. Something nobody could resist, collector or not.”

And with that, I did what few cores would ever do with heroes in their dungeon.

I gave a mental command and felt the core room grow hazy around me as I left the pedestal, and in a blink of time, I found myself in the loot room.

There, floating atop a pedestal in this cavernous chamber, I felt exposed. Even with Gary and Shadow and the battle-loving beetles nearby, I felt alone.

The Collector was across the cavern, lurking in the archway entrance with his cores around him on their ridiculous, yet envy-inducing, wheeled platforms.

“You’re even more hideous up close,” I said. “You’re an ugly git, to be blunt. I bet