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

was taking a wheelbarrow full of body parts outside, and the tunnel leading to your loot room is drenched in blood. Business is good, I take it? Lots of heroes coming to visit?”

“Not exactly.”

“It was rather a lot of blood, Beno.”

“It isn’t that a lot of heroes have come. It’s the same hero who’s visited several times. The bugger kept defeating me and making off with my loot.”

“He didn’t look like he’d made off with anything to me,” said Gulliver. “Not judging by the pile of flesh in the wheelbarrow.”

“Let me start at the beginning.”

I explained everything to Gulliver, starting with Cael and his brothers’ first appearance in my dungeon, the subsequent times they beat me, my hard work and new plan to get my own back, and ending with Cael’s vow of revenge.

Gulliver drummed his chin. “Hmm. You have a hero who is very capable, experienced, and has vowed to not just take loot from you, but to destroy you personally. Quite a quandary. Quite a quandary indeed. An awful quandary to be in.”

“Would you stop saying quandary?”

“Perhaps it would be better to have an old pal stick around for a while. Someone to run ideas by, someone to give you dollops of sage advice.”

“Let me guess; you need to write another book.”

“Ah, Beno. Always so cynical.”

“I’ll go one step further in my guess, then. Despite the success of the last book that you wrote about my exploits, you’ve wasted a mountain of gold, you’re broke, and you need to write another.”

“This dungeon is having a negative effect on you, Beno. It’s giving you a dim view of the world. Why so skeptical? Why not give your friend the benefit of the doubt? Is it completely impossible that I might have come to visit you for friendship’s sake?”

“Fine. I suppose I have misjudged you before now, and you proved me wrong. I’m sorry, Gulliver.”

“Apology accepted. Now, I have gotten myself into quite a lot of debt. I need gold, and that means I need to write another book. Hence, I need stuff to put in that book. So, chum, I’m going to hang around for a while and see if anything happens that’s worthy of another of my genius tomes. Since you have something going on with this Cael fellow, perhaps you could use the advice of one as seasoned and experienced as me? I used to be a warscribe, after all. First, how do we know this Cael fellow will even come back? People say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.”

“I killed his brothers, Gull.”

“All’s fair with heroes and dungeons. Everyone knows the risks they take when they creep into a tomb. If they don’t, then natural selection wins again. When Cael calms down, he might realize it’s best to write this off as a bad day, and find another dungeon to raid.”

“This is a matter of honor for him. He swore a vow and everything.”

“Ah. He’s one of those heroes, is he? The vowing kind. Right. So what’s the plan?”

“Three options, as I see it,” I said. “One, I leave this dungeon and open a new one far, far away.”

“Rather cowardly, Beno. Doesn’t sound like you.”

“No, but if we’re considering options, let’s consider them all. And…that’s done. Option one is considered and thus rejected. So that leaves me two choices; either pack my dungeon to the gills with creatures and traps to make it stronger than ever before, or…”

“Pack it with puppies and treats and make him think he’s got the wrong address?”

“Or, instead of waiting for Cael to show up here, I go hunting for him. Right now, he’s alone, tired, and injured. It’s the perfect time to strike, and he won’t expect it. Who has ever heard of a dungeon core leaving his dungeon and going hunting for heroes?”

“Ah. You might be on to something! I once served as Duke Kester’s warscribe back when he tried to spread civility to the remote settlements in the far west, across the river of Tanyor. Never mind that the civilizations out there are thousands of years older than ours and far more civil than some jumped-up duke…but anyway, we were crossing through dense jungle to shave a day off our travel time, when we were beset by vine reavers. Big, ugly, horrible beasts that love nothing more than to tear a man apart. Disgusting, bloodthirsty creatures. No offense to you or your dungeon monsters, Beno.”

“None taken,” I said. “I’m proud to have my beasts compared to vine weavers.”

“Reavers. Vine weavers are something else entirely.”

“I know.”

“You were making a joke? Beno, you have really changed!”

“Come on, do you think there’s a creature out there that I don’t know about?” I said. “I read every creature book in the Dungeon Core Academy.”

“Nobody likes a show-off, Beno. Anyway, we fled from them. All 200 of the duke’s soldiers running through the jungle like cats fleeing a broom. It didn’t matter how fast we ran; the reavers caught us and destroyed half our host before the first night was through.

We spent all that night discussing it, coming up with plans to get out of the jungle, to outrun these beasts who could sprint faster than a cheetah with its arse on fire. We had nothing. Not a single plan.

And then…we decided to just face them. To brandish our swords, to cast a few spells, and at least go down fighting. Do you know what happened? At the first sight of us taking the fight to them, the reavers ran away! They had rarely encountered men, you see. They certainly had never come across an animal that ceased behaving like prey and instead acted like a predator.

That’s why this might actually work, Beno. Nobody likes it when their opponent doesn’t act the way they expect. I say