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

“Shut up.”

Razensen ignored their babble, focusing on two words he’d heard them say.

Sneaky kobold?

Did these heroes have possession of Shadow? The Stone had been sending his monsters out to the wasteland to look for Shadow. Though nobody had dared say it, Razensen had presumed the kobold had gone back to the ice. But if she was alive…

“Wait! Wha’s that over there? Sticking out behind the mud?”

Rumbled.

“Send them to the ice!” bellowed Razensen. “Try and keep one alive.”

His kobolds crawled to the top of the ambush mounds and pulled their bowstrings taut. His bone guys rattled as they charged out, swords raised, their dead eyes set on the heroes’ flanks. His shrub bandits formed at the base of the mound, thorns sticking out from their leaves and ready to shoot.

Answering in like, the heroes drew their swords. Strange, curved blades in some hands, long, thin rapiers in others.

Arrows zipped through the air, some landing in flesh with soft pops and resulting in cries of pain, others bouncing harmlessly off the chamber walls. Hero steel met bone guy iron, and the air filled with the metallic musical clanging as the opponents danced with their swords.

“Argh!” yelled a hero, clutching the end of a thorn lodged in his throat. “Hegh gogh me!”

One hero sidestepped a bone guy’s swing and then struck a blow of his own, carving through the skeleton from collar bone to hip, breaking the bones apart and leaving it to collapse on the ground in an ivory heap.

Soon the heroes were dead, having taken one bone guy, two shrubs, and two kobolds to the ice with them.

Razensen stepped out in the center of the loot chamber, only to find that two heroes remained. They were the boy and the girl. He studied them. The boy was scared; though he tried to be brave and clenched his fists, his throat wobbled, and his eyes darted this way and that, his gaze taking in over the slaughter around him. The girl defiantly crossed her arms. She stood with a leaning gait, heavily favoring one leg. An injury, perhaps.

Razensen’s monsters were standing still as if they were frozen.

“Well? Leaving a job half done?” he boomed, feeling the heat in his eyes. “Send them to the ice!”

The girl smiled. A crooked smile, like a wolf licking its lips before a meal.

“I’m Anna,” she said, her voice infuriatingly perky. “What’s your name, big yeti man? It’s nice to meet me, isn’t it?”

“Kill her!” ordered Razensen.

Not a single monster moved.

The girl shook her head. “No, thank you! No death for me today!”

Razensen’s monsters turned on him. Bows were drawn, their arrows pointed at his face. Thorns protruded amidst shrub bandits’ leaves and pointed at him. His remaining bone guys lifted their swords and rattled in his direction.

“Have you gone mad? Kill the heroes!” he shouted, unable to believe it.

“They don’t feel like it,” said the girl. “They want to serve me now. And so do you, big yeti man.”

“What, little girl?”

She stared at him with a look of concentration.

Razensen felt something in his mind. Something...smothering his thoughts. Making him feel…

She isn’t so bad, this girl. Not so bad at all. A better master than…

“No!” he roared, and the feeling left him, and his mind felt clear as ice.

“You dare to try to play with Razensen, son of Goralsen’s, mind?”

The girl looked at the boy and gulped. “Suppose I’m not as good as I think I am, Utta. Give us a chance to escape.”

“There’s no wind in here, Anna.”

“Can’t you use anything?”

The boy stared around the room, settling on the mana lanterns glowing from the walls. He raised his hands, and one by one they blinked out, the flames drifting to the boy’s hands and leaving the loot chamber in near darkness.

It was then that Razensen felt heat sear over him as if he had been set aflame. He stomped around, roaring, the pain spreading over his fur, the smell of burning hair so cloying he could barely breathe.

“Water! Wylie get water!” shouted a distant voice.

Beautiful, freezing water splattered over him, drenching him from horn to foot and extinguishing the flames. Wylie the kobold stood there, an empty bucket in his hand.

“Thank you, Wylie,” said Razensen.

Two more kobolds ran in, buckets raised, water sloshing at the top.

“The fires are out, little ones,” he said. “I do not need-”

The water hit his face. First one bucket, then another. Razensen felt it seep deep into his fur.

“Thank you,” he grunted.

He heard the sound of footsteps fleeing the distant tunnel, and he knew that the boy and girl were gone.

Across the wasteland, a convoy of wagons spearheaded Duke Smit’s forces, with his retinue of soldiers behind them. Foot soldiers were marching, while the officers rode on horseback. Sitting at the front of one wagon was a man dressed in simple clothing. He held the horses’ reins in one hand and wiped the sweat from his brow with the other.

Beside him stomped a big, hulking beast that had no place in a wasteland like this. Its three eyes glowed yellow like the sun, and its blood-red horns seemed to shine.

The wagon driver looked sidelong at his monstrous companion. “Remember what I said, Nazenfyord.”

“I am no idiot, Smit.”

“All the same, it bears repeating.”

“I will crush any rebellion in this dust pile of a town,” said Nazenfyord, his three eyes flashing red for just a second. “And then you will help me capture my bastard of a brother. You will keep your promise to me, Duke.”

“There haven’t been any sightings of him for a while. He may have left for colder climes.”

“He knows I am here. I killed our parents and tried to murder him, and