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

separately. I changed the way I moved, the way I fought it, and I lopped off each limb one by one instead of trying to handle them all.”

“You think we should separate the group of men and fight them that way,” I said. “That might work.”

“More like, separate the witch from the blokes. We’ll kill all her pals, and then we only have her and her spells to worry about.”

“Good, good!” I said. “A few trick tunnels and false doors will separate them easily enough, and I know certain traps and puzzles that will get the job done. Razensen, I will also furnish you with a new unit of monsters. It seems that we have a plan, my friends, and now I have lots of work to do.”

CHAPTER 12

“Hello? Endliver? Pirates?” said Anna, turning in a circle, wincing when she put weight on her bad leg.

“Pirates?” said Utta, shaking his head. “Don’t you know their names? We’ve traveled with them for long enough.”

“I didn’t think it was important. I only remember Endliver’s because he keeps saying it all the time. Where are they, anyway?”

“The dungeon separated us on purpose. I’ve heard of things like this. Remember the module on dungeon cores at school?”

“I was never assigned that class,” said Anna. “I had to take Demonology Basics instead.”

“I suppose then that your Prophecy Tablet would have been about capturing a demon and taming its will, or something. You know, if we’d graduated.”

Anna nodded. “Well, I got a prophesy tablet all the same, didn’t I?”

“Not one that belonged to you, though. I wonder what happened to the poor kid we took it from.”

“Without his prophecy tablet, he wouldn’t be able to graduate. Not really my problem, Utta. Not yours, neither. Cheer up! He’ll be fine! Let’s focus on this pesky dungeon and its little tricks. Now, what are we dealing with?”

A stone door slid into place behind Captain Endliver and his men, trapping them in a tomb of some sort. It was dark. Not as dark as the sea as night, of course. That was true darkness. A beautiful kind, one that came with the sounds of the ocean, the sighing and screaming of that wild, watery beast. This darkness was soulless. That of a pit underground where there was no life and no beauty. Endliver missed his boat, and he missed the waves and the little fishies.

“Torches, lads,” he said.

The dungeon thus far had been lit by lamps, which Endliver thought was a considerate touch on behalf of the dungeon core. Now, they took their own torches out of their packs and sparked flints until they lit.

Under the glow of a dozen torches the true features of the tomb emerged. It was an oval chamber made from stone, with no means of escape that he could see. In the center of the room was a giant steel set of weighing scales. One scale was raised higher than the other, and it was empty. The second scale was close to the ground and was filled with dark lumps of some kind.

One of his men kneeled in front of the scales.

“There’s writin’, cap’n. Something is written here!”

“Then read it to us, seaweed brain!”

He cleared his throat. “While chaos reigns, no man might find his true way. Balance is needed to show the path.”

“What that mean?” asked Hogwash Jenkins, a particularly dull-brained man who was only good for lugging barrels around the ship, and who wasn’t even much good at that. Endliver had met him when he was a little orphaned boy begging for fish scraps on the docks, and he wouldn’t get rid of him no matter how useless he was.

“It means, Hogwash my lad, that we need to balance the scales. In other words, see the scale that’s raised up and empty? We need to fill it with something.”

“I know!” shouted Hogwash.

Before anyone could stop him, the brute of a man grabbed the raised scale and shimmied up it with surprising dexterity, until he could climb into its base. His great weight should have brought it down, but the scale didn’t move.

“Looks like we can’t balance it with just anything,” said Endliver. “Try taking some of those black lumps from the other scale.”

Two of his men each grabbed a chunk of rock from the scale near the ground. As they did, two things happened.

First, an ominous hiss filled the chamber.

Secondly, words appeared on the ground. Blood red words.

Balance cannot be achieved by robbing one side and giving it to the other.

Only blood may open the way.

Endliver gulped. His throat tightened, and he even wished that he had a bottle of rum with him, no matter how much he hated the stuff.

His men began coughing. Green smoke emanated from a hole in the wall.

“Poison!” cried one.

Endliver took a bandana from his pack and tied it around his mouth.

“Aye, its poison,” he said, his voice muffled.

He stared at the words again, the meaning of them sending an icy chill through his heart.

Balance cannot be achieved by robbing one side and giving it to the other.

Only blood may open the way.

Endliver Pickering hadn’t spent all of his pirating career just boarding other vessels and stealing what was there. He’d done other stuff, too. In his early years on the seas, he had done some good old, honest pirate work – finding treasure maps and decoding the riddles to find the booty.

As such, Endliver was adept at solving riddles, puzzles, and other cryptic shite like that. These words didn’t confuse him. Not one bit.

Only balancing the scales would open the chamber and save them from the poison, and the only thing that would balance the scales was blood.

The question was: whose blood?

I watched them from my core chamber. I wasn’t