The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3) by Jonathan Brooks (the false prince TXT) 📕

a room at the expense of large amounts of stamina.  In addition, they also received a Power Boost +50%, which essentially increased the Power they would receive from killing creatures inside of a dungeon by 50% – a huge boon for any Raider.

Sterge and Gwenda, upon their return, decided to let the Raider Clan outpost know about the new dungeon – and collect their finder’s fee.  Even though the fee was much less than they were told, the two Hill Dwarves – along with the rest of the villagers back home – used the money on construction materials because, as they were warned, news about a brand-new dungeon would bring in hordes of new Raiders eager to improve themselves.

From the beginning of their construction of 18 inns, 2 warehouses, a “Town” Hall, and a Delver Supply Store run by a traveling merchant, they were indeed inundated with Raiders wanting to delve through the new dungeon to increase their Raider Levels and to acquire loot.  Fortunately for the beleaguered Sterge and Gwenda, Jesper Whittle – a representative of the Raider Delving Clan with some authority – stepped in to help regulate the influx of people into their small corner of the world.

If that was all they had to worry about, that would’ve been enough.  Sadly, a merchant from the Ministry of Merchants arrived, wanting to take over the whole situation by buying the land from The Village; when none of the villagers would sell their lease on the land, the Minister used underhanded tactics in an attempt to destroy the dungeon and stifle the business the village was operating.

Meanwhile, in the dungeon that was such a subject of attention, Tacca was finally open for her own business.  After an initial group of higher-Level Raiders arrived to evaluate her premises, she designed a way for groups to exit her dungeon from nearly every room, using a staircase leading to the surface that was cleverly hidden behind a Rotating Stone Bridge trap.  After realizing that most of her Core Improvement Points would come from Raider presence inside of her dungeon as opposed to Raider deaths, maximizing their time inside was important.

To this effort, she also designed a way to indicate when the next group could enter her dungeon: by having one of her Root Foxes appear at the entrance as an invitation to come inside.  By doing this, there were very few times when there wasn’t someone inside of her dungeon, allowing her to rapidly increase her own Core Improvement Levels and progress faster than she thought possible.  In addition, she also learned that if she Bonded with Raiders as they were about to die, she could acquire additional “creature” types and Variants, expanding her repertoire substantially.

After a failed attempt by the Ministry of Merchants to destroy her with some prohibitively expensive, over-enchanted, and powerfully protected new Merchant-Raiders to destroy her Core, Tacca was forced to retreat far underground.  The development of highly-concentrated and potent Enchantment traps were beneficial in her defense – including access to a new Life-based trap – as were her “guards”, which were equipped with the enchanted gear dropped by the Merchant-Raiders that had failed to kill her.

Tacca eventually acquired enough Points to increase her Core Improvement Level, and as a result was able to convert many of those CIPs into Special Characteristic Points in order to buy her way out of the negative Special Characteristics.  In far less than a year, she was able to eliminate her 95% reduction in CIPs earned as well as the reduction in her creatures’ levels, meaning she could start to grow and expand into a harder section for the Raiders to delve through.  She was finally on track for where she wanted to be, free from the restrictions that had held her back for what felt like forever.

All wasn’t as right in the wider world, however.  Back at the DPRC, it was discovered that all over the continent, Dungeon Cores were arbitrarily being destroyed despite having no reason to be destroyed.  The balance of primordial forces was slowly tilting towards the intelligent races of the world with every Core’s destruction – which was a nightmare scenario for the survival of the world.  If the forces became wildly out of balance, then the entire planet could be utterly destroyed.  As a last-ditch effort, the leader of the Council, Malachite, decided to go find out what the problem was by visiting with something called the Conclave of Sages.

When he arrived at the Conclave chambers, however, he found that the Sages – the most powerful Raiders in the world – had been brutally slaughtered, leaving no survivors.  Worse yet, it seemed as though they had barely even been able to put up a fight, and that who or whatever had killed them hadn’t arrived or left through the chamber’s doors…but by some method unknown to the Council Leader.  When he Translocated back to the DPRC only an hour later, he found that the rest of the Council Leadership had also disappeared, along with everyone else that had worked there.

By utilizing the investigative capabilities of Lapis, the Head Instructor of DAPS, to discover what was happening to the Dungeon Cores of the world, Malachite discovered that there were two types of destruction happening.  One type involved Cores being destroyed but their Fairies were set free; these were almost always accompanied by reports that Raiders of some type were the ones responsible.  The other type had no survivors at all, as well as having no reports of who exactly the culprits were.

Unfortunately, Tacca and dozens of Raiders waiting outside of her dungeon potentially discovered these culprits.  Blue and purple-skinned, 8-foot-tall, six-armed monster people arrived out of nowhere, slaughtering everything they came up against with impunity.  Strange glowing shields seemed to protect them from any damage either from spells or weapons, and a small metal contraption also prevented Shale from translocating away.  Not only that, but it