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

and I wasn’t even sure of my blacksmithing knowledge. “I am. And you are the hammer. Or perhaps our battles with heroes are the hammer, and you are the metal.”

“Maybe we are hot coals,” said Tomlin.

“You’re more like the blacksmith’s apron, if you ask me,” said Gulliver.

“Gull…” I warned.

He nodded at me. “Your dark lord, is quite right, of course. This place is like a forge and Beno is the smith.”

“Words!” cried Shadow. Two of her dogs tilted their heads gave howls, copying her. “Words that sound just right enough that they might actually mean something. No, Beno. We need answers.”

I’ll give you answers, I thought. Answers made of lava. Or acid. Or fire. Anything that melts kobold flesh…

But I couldn’t do anything bad to Shadow. Showing brutal discipline would shut the rest of them up, but it would destroy the bonds we’d built. It would mean completely changing my dungeon philosophy. A short term solution that created long term problems. I would be trying to get rid of a fly from my house by swinging a warhammer around my living room, smashing everything in sight.

I needed something else. Yes, I needed another analogy.

“A soldier, you see, must sometimes…” I began.

And then I stopped.

I felt a dull throb in my core. Using my core senses, I checked every room in the dungeon.

“Heroes,” I said.

“That’s the point, Beno. Heroes are-”

“Enough!” I said, loud enough to shut her up. I carried on, “There are heroes in the dungeon.”

A party of five loot-seekers had entered the first chamber in my dungeon. Not a bunch of rookies, by the looks of them. I always say that you can tell a hero’s skill – or their luck – by their age, since you never saw an old hero who didn’t know what he was doing. The average sword swinger joined the heroes’ guild at 18, and most didn’t live beyond their twenties.

This group looked to be aged in their late thirties. Still young enough to be physically fit, but with the wisdom age brings. Relative to a hero’s terms, obviously. They aren’t geniuses, after all.

I snapped out of my core vision and faced my dungeon mates.

“We have five heroes.”

“Is it Cael Pickering?” asked Tarius. He was standing beside Wylie, wearing his union shirt and resting his pickaxe on his shoulder.

“A pox on him!” thundered Kainhelm.

“It isn’t Cael.”

Tarius breathed out in relief. This annoyed me for a moment. We were a damned dungeon, for demons’ sake. We shouldn’t have been relieved that one specific hero hadn’t come.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized Tarius’ relief was a good sign. A bit of light respite would do the trick here. A victory could be just what I needed to shut Shadow up for a while and boost dungeon morale.

“Do you want me in the first chamber, dear core?” asked Gary. “I’m still not at my best, but I fancy I could hobble up there.”

“Fight!” “Death!” “Kill!” cried my fire beetles, already back to fighting condition.

“I admire your enthusiasm,” I told them, “But no, I don’t want Gary to go to the first chamber, and I don’t want you there either, beetles.”

“Then what?” asked Shadow. “Let them waltz into our loot room, like the last five times?”

“You and I are going to talk when this is over, Shadow. For now, shut up.”

She scoffed. “And there we have it-”

“Enough!”

She was silent again.

Tapping into my core senses, I saw the heroes in the first chamber. They were still pondering over the tile puzzle on the ground, and after that they would need to solve a riddle door to leave the room. Good, that gave me time to think.

I badly needed a win today, but I couldn’t risk losing another dungeon creature. If I did, no victory would be enough to stop morale plummeting. So, what could I do?

Thus far, Cael Pickering and his brothers had eluded all my best ploys and traps. Then again, these new heroes weren’t Cael, and I needed to stop letting that arrogant nitwit get into my mind.

So, what could I tell about these heroes? Well, they were experienced. They hadn’t died yet. They had well-made weapons and armor. Surviving to their late thirties, no doubt raiding lots of dungeons, they probably fancied themselves as invulnerable. They wouldn’t expect too much from dungeon like mine, which was only rated as Hard-1 on the dungeon difficulty scale.

Perhaps that expectation was what I needed to encourage.

“Listen to me,” I said. “And do everything exactly as I say. I need you all to go through the dungeon before the heroes leave the first chamber. Strip every mana lamp, every trap, every puzzle, and then meet me in the loot room.”

The heroes solved the puzzle and riddle in the first chamber and make their way through the warren of tunnels in the center of my dungeon. Although the maze led them to various chambers, they saw not a single monster, they stumbled into not a single trap.

I watched them all the while. I saw them loosen their grips on their weapons. I heard them whisper to each other as they walked at first, and then speak louder and louder as their confidence grew. I heard the discuss my dungeon initially, but then their talk moved onto other things as they let their guard down. Their postures relaxed, their faces untensed, until soon they were walking at a stroll, chatting about how my dungeon must have been closed down and reminiscing about a time when dungeon cores weren’t beaten so easily.

Finally they came to my loot room, where an open loot chest waited in the middle. There was nothing else. No monsters, no obvious trap.

“Aye, this place is definitely shut down,” said one.

“Might as well check the chest