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

Dolos wriggled over to the Claus and latched onto his bare skin just above his ankle. As a memory-sapping mimic, Dolos’s bite was so soft that Claus didn’t feel a thing until he had already sucked twenty seconds’ worth of memory out of him, growing much plumper in the process.

Finally noticing the strange blob attached to his leg, Claus cried and kicked out.

“Mother of mercy! What in all hells…”

He shook his leg as if it were on fire, but there was no need. Dolos opened his mouth and unlatched from Claus, leaving bite marks on his skin.

Dolos began to transform. In a matter of seconds, his form changed from a globule of translucent goo, bulging and expanding and growing larger and larger and taking on colors, until there before us was an altogether different creature.

Now, he was a woman.

A tall, reedy woman with dark rings around her dark eyes, and black ringlets of hair that looks like snakes, coiled and ready to strike. Her face was paler than a baker’s flour counter, her shirt and trousers smeared with mud.

“A…Anya?” said Claus, so shocked he almost fell off the cart. He gripped the edges until his knuckles turned white.

Dolos, in his Anya guise, fixed the driver a stare that would have made the most loathsome underworld demon feel intimidated.

“You left me, Claus,” Dolos said, his new feminine voice seething with anger.

Gulliver arched his eyebrow at me as if to ask who Anya was, and which memory of the driver’s Dolos had taken her from. I didn’t know, but I was fascinated to find out.

“I…you were…” cried Claus.

“You left me alone! Alone and lost! You left me to die!”

Gulliver produced a leather-backed book and a feather quill from his satchel and, with his tongue sticking out of his mouth, scribbled away.

“I didn’t leave you,” Claus said, almost weeping.

“Liar!” cried the woman. Her voice was terrible now, the shriek of an angry spectre disturbed from eternal slumber.

Claus stumbled backward, losing his footing and falling off the cart. He landed on the ground with a thump. Sitting up and rubbing his bleeding skull, he shuffled backward on his rump, never taking his eyes off Dolos in his mud-smeared, womanly form. When he was far enough away he sprinted toward Hogsfeate, where its walls loomed in the distance.

I gave myself a few seconds to enjoy the sight of him fleeing from us.

Dolos has now become a level 4 mimic!

- Memory leeching powers 25% more effective. Dolos will leech more memories in a quicker time, giving him more mimicry options

Pleased with Dolos’ progression, I dismissed the message from my core and focused on my mimic friend.

“Well done, Dolos,” I said. “Very well done. You can resume your own form now. We may need to use your abilities again, so let’s not waste them.”

The woman disappeared, once again becoming a translucent blob no larger than Gulliver’s winkle pickers.

“You dredged this Anya woman from Claus’s memories, I take it?” I asked him.

“Yes,” said Dolos, his voice monotone. As a mimic, he had little flavor to his personality when he wasn’t stealing it from others. I was trying to fix that, but it was slow going.

Gulliver, his quill poised over a half-filled page, asked, “Did Claus kill her or something? He doesn’t look the type.”

“He didn’t kill her,” answered Dolos. “She was the love of his life, lost in the wilderness after bandits attacked his cart and they were separated. He blames himself for her death. I brought his deepest guilt to the surface.”

“Poor bugger. I almost feel bad for him now,” I said.

Gulliver nodded at the horses, whose rumps were covered by pale-white whip scars “Don’t spare too many tears for him. A man who lives by a whip won’t learn by anything else.”

“I said almost, Gulliver. I haven’t quite reached the point of being empathetic. It’s a pity we aren’t in my dungeon - I could have fed him to Gary. Anyway, at least he might hesitate to use his whip unnecessarily again. Now, can you drive a cart?” I asked.

“We’re stealing this thing?”

“We can’t just abandon it here, horses and all. We’ll drive it to town, take the horses to the stables so they can some water and a nice bundle of hay, and we’ll leave the cart it by the gates. Claus will find it eventually.”

“I suppose as long as we’re not adding thievery to assault, it’s not all bad. And of course I can drive the cart, Beno. When I was just an apprentice, I spent four months with the Silver Hammer merchant company, recording their annual voyage across the Doomed Dunes. Doomed Dunes. Nicely named, isn’t it? You can tell they don’t have a dedicated tourist office. Anyway, people in the Silver Hammer company die doing that journey, and they don’t take freeloaders. So, if I wanted access to their story, I had to learn a useful skill.”

“Let’s see your mastery of animals, then,” I said.

“Prepare to be impressed. I’ll try and get alongside Claus. Look at him running toward Hogsfeate as if his life depended on it. Ha! If I slow down at just the right time, maybe I can whip his arse.”

After taking the horses to the stables and slipping the stable boys extra coins to take special care of them, we left leaving the cart beside the town walls and approached the gates of Hogsfeate. Two guards waited there. One was using a stick to pick stones from his boots, while the other puffed on a pipe.

“What’s yer business?”

Gulliver smiled and took off his cap and swung it in front of him, bowing. “I’m traveling Xynnar to find new dancing girls for my show. You fellows might make the cut, but you’ll have to sway your