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

right now I need someone to speak to the chiefs while I plan things, and I trust you with this job. You’re level-headed enough to deal with the chiefs. Okay?”

“Yes, Dark Lord,” said Tomlin, and scampered away.

“Now, we’ll prepare for the worst,” I said. “Let’s say we have 30 men and the witch in my dungeon. What do we do? Eric, I take it you will fight?”

The barbarian, still in the pool, shrugged. “You paid me to watch your mimic in Hogsfeate. I didn’t charge you extra to look for the little wolf, because I like her. But if you want me to fight, you will have to loosen your purse. I want to be compensated for the coin I just gave to the raven, too. I don’t fancy trying to get it back from him.”

“Quite rightly; they are buggers when it comes to their shiny things. Very well. I think I can scrape the gold to pay you a little extra. Kainhelm, how about you?”

“Yes, poxing core, of course I will fight alongside my friend Razensen.”

“Which brings me to your unit, Razensen.”

“What unit?” asked the bogan. “They’ve all gone to the ice!”

“Exactly. Having you commanding a separate team of monsters has proven invaluable, but we’ll need to furnish you with new monsters. Tougher ones. The problem is, I only have a certain amount of essence to use, and I also need to build traps.”

“Traps?” said Eric. “More like toys, if you beg my humble pardon. A man can step around a pit in the ground. He can’t step around my axe.”

“A pit in the ground, Eric? Oh, you really have no idea of the sophistication a core is capable of, do you? You think we resort to digging holes in the mud?”

“You have two pitfalls near the very first chamber!”

“A clever person thinks in such complex thoughts that they sometimes miss the simple ones,” I said. “Most heroes train to disarm all kinds of complex traps, so much so that they forget the lessons they learned in their apprenticeship, and they don’t take care around simple things like bear traps. It is a fascinating psychological phenomenon. But these chumps crossing the wasteland aren’t heroes. They will be heroes by definition when they enter my lair, but they won’t be heroes by training. I believe I could rid myself of most of them easily. The witch is the problem.”

Kainhelm scratched his bony chin with a long, bony finger. “Is there a way to…pox it, what am I try to say? Hmm. Is there a way to prevent the little sorceress using magic?”

“There are alchemic solutions that can dull a mage’s powers.”

“Then we have her! Stop her powers, and I’ll tear her little blighted guts out and I will add her skin to my skin cape.”

“I asked Cynthia about this a while ago. She doesn’t have any of the materials needed for such a paste, and she couldn’t source them for me. We can’t deal with the witch that way.”

Eric took some water in his mouth, tipped his head back, and then blew it out as if he was a fountain. “Many moons back…” he began.

“You know that Razensen bathes in there, don’t you, Eric?”

The barbarian shrugged. “So? I’ve drunk from worse water sources, let me tell you. There’s no pool too murky, no hole too muddy to shame Eric the barbarian. Now, many moons back, I was journeying across the Cocklepuj outbacks when I encountered an Octantine Bush Goyle. Any of you undergrounders heard of them?”

“Of course,” I said. “Eight-limbed murderous trolls that were created by a mad mage centuries ago. He was lonely and needed a creature that would double as security and a pet, if I remember rightly. They escaped from his tower and began breeding. After they slaughtered a load of nearby peasants, the mage was hanged.”

“Damned mages and their abominations,” said Razensen.

Kainhelm’s face flushed with fury. He would normally have unleashed it in a torrent of abuse but seeing that his friend was the cause of it, he seemed to hold back. “Narkleers like me were created at a mage’s hand, plague it!”

“I never meant offense, my friend. It is just that mages take it upon themselves to create these monsters and give no thought to the delicate balance of nature. They do not see that introducing a predator or prey to a food chain can break it. The bogans were nearly destroyed when a damned mage created a flying polar bear. It took us decades to exterminate the creatures, and many of us were sent to the ice in doing do.”

“Poor old Kainhelm has never had people of his own to hunt alongside,” muttered the narkleer. “We are always solitary.”

“Well, not when you have your pal Razensen with you. You’ll always have a hunting partner in me.”

“Thank you, you poxing bogan. Thank you.”

“Flying bears aside, I don’t get involved in moral questions,” said Eric, “Nor do I care. Answer me this. The bush goyles were never hunted to extinction, were they?”

“Who’d be mad enough to hunt something as big as a troll, but with eight gigantic arms?” I said.

“Eric the barbican, that’s who! I was travelin’ out west, and I saw one. By the axe, I thought, I could get a pretty penny or two for this bugger’s skin. So, I tried to fight it. The problem was, the goyle bugger had eight arms, and he was holding clubs in each one.”

“Is there a point to this poxing tale? I hear enough of this rubbish when the blighted core tries to tell me about the latest book he has read!” said Kainhelm.

“Well, my narkleer pal, there’s a point alright. I stopped thinking about fighting the goyle as one impossible-to-beat beast and instead imagined its eight club-wielding arms were eight little beasts that I had to deal with