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

the core room where Bolton and I had once made our agreement and the overseer had left with the old core tucked under his arm.

Now, without a core to be seen, there was only one creature to welcome Milark and his weakened army.

“What in all hells is that?” asked Milark.

His last wight-kobold pointed. “It wears a cape! A cape of skin!”

“A troll?” cried an ancient voice, a voice seeping with time and with the anger only a creature granted eternal life can have. “A pox on your families! A plague on your forefathers! A troll comes to visit, wearing nothing but his briefs? What insolence!”

I knew the truth of his situation wouldn’t dawn on Milark, because trolls’ brains reside permanently in the dusk.

One by one, Kainhelm locked eyes with the only remaining wight-kobold, two fire-nose weasels, and the giant wolf spider. At first, nothing happened. Then, a mania gradually took hold on their faces as the narkleer’s insanity stare penetrated their minds, felling their synapses like lumberjacks hacking through a forest.

The spider was the first to strike. In one leap it was on its fellow kobold, and it snapped its jaws over its head and wrenched it clean off, before dropping its prey and focusing on another target. Its eight eyes were ablaze with madness, its teeth dripping with blood.

The fire-nosed weasels foamed at the mouth, grunting and spitting snow-white foam on the ground. Their snouts glowed orange, and steam rose from them.

Milark looked from creature to creature, unable to believe it.

Twin columns of flame shot at him from his weasels, churning plumes of fire cast by his own weasels. His arm and chest hair caught fire, and it was only his mad spinning on the spot as he tried to put the fire out that saved him from locking eyes with the narkleer himself.

The weasels climbed on top of their giant spider, digging their claws into their once-friend’s skin, breathing molten fire over its back.

“Finish it, Kainhelm,” I said.

The narkleer used another of its powers then, moving at a speed that belied its eternal age. The chamber filled with the clatter of bones as the skeleton warriors were destroyed, joining with the shriek of a spider as its weasel friends slaughtered it.

Finally, the dungeon filled with the cries of a troll, an armorless troll now deprived of his army, a troll disemboweled by a narkleer named Kainhelm.

*

Notifications pinged in my inner core, and I felt a sense of victory bubbling inside me. Instead of savoring it, I focused back on the loot room.

For all its foulness and the destruction that it wreaks upon innocent, evil beings like me, holy light doesn’t really make much of a mess.

Checking back on the loot room, I saw that the walls were intact, the ceiling uncracked save for the already-weakened parts, the ground just as it was before.

Save for the six cores lying on it, of course, their inner gem glows extinguished, empty of life like the minerals they resembled.

The first blaudy stone of holy light would have been a shock to them. The second would have rocked them to their soul, working its putrid goodness through their bodies. The third wash of light had finished them, robbing them of their second life and making their resurrecting count for naught.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” I said.

“Cheer up,” said a voice. Gulliver sauntered into the room. He had changed outfits in the short time between the Collector’s arrival and now, and he wore a purple hunting jacket with a flower-patterned shirt underneath. “At least the Collector monstrosity is done for.”

Yes, there he was, lying still on the loot room floor, that nightmare blend of collected limbs and body parts that were all rendered useless after a dousing of holy light.

“Poor Karson,” I said. “We didn’t get him out in time.”

Gulliver’s expression flickered for a second. As a scribe, he was used to witnessing all sorts of stuff, and had explained to me that he had long ago learned not to let it affect him. But now, I saw differently.

“Karson,” said Gulliver. “The fella with the top knot?”

“The same.”

He slumped to the ground. “Tarius will be devastated.”

“I don’t think he knows yet. Not properly. I’ll have to explain to him…”

“Dark Lord!” cried Tomlin.

Following his outstretched finger, I saw him point to the image of my loot room, where the Collector stretched out a goblin hand, a dwarf hand, and an eldritch tentacle, and pushed himself to his feet.

“Get in there and finish that graveyard kleptomaniac off,” I commanded. “Tear him apart for Karson. Rip his guts out for Karson. Carve his spleen out with a spoon, and do it for-”

“Karson!” came a multitude of replies shouted by kobolds, jellies, beetles, and the other medley of monsters that I had spawned.

They rushed into the loot room now and quickly swarmed the Collector, who had staggered to his feet.

“This is it, you swine. Your collecting days are over! Brecht? Play us a song, please,” I said.

The kobold bard unslung his tambourine from his shoulder and placed it in front of him. He’d pounded just two beats of his song before the Collector was on him, throttling his neck using two hairy hands he must have taken from an ape.

“Gary!” I said.

My spider-troll-leech hybrid rushed to Brecht’s side and tried to wrap a leg around the Collector’s neck. The Collector struck out with his tentacle, catching Gary full force in the chest and sending the giant beast flying across the room, where he smashed into a wall. Gary wheezed, all the air gone from his chest, and parts of stone dislodged and fell on his head.

With a leg that could only have come from some kind of mutated ostrich, the Collector kicked Wylie, spreading a wicked cut