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

nervous, exactly. Nor was I excited. I supposed I was feeling some approximation to those sensations. Either way, it amounted to one thing – I couldn’t wait to see what happened with my new trap chamber.

I had unlocked it on my last level up, and the idea of using it made me tense. Excavating the chamber had taken Redjack and the miners most of the day, which had been cutting it fine. I had spent a great chunk of essence constructing the trap, a new puzzle chamber, and then used the rest of my essence on furnishing Razensen with monsters.

Now all that remained was to see how the sacrifice chamber worked.

So far, it looked good. Poison was pumping from the walls, and it seemed to me that the leader of this band of fools had discovered the meaning behind it; that only filling the scales with blood would open the doors.

Of course, like most trap-puzzles, I was forced to provide another way of solving it. A simple way that didn’t involve self-sacrifice.

The question was…would they figure it out?

Well, it would keep them busy, that was what mattered. In the meantime, I had a more dangerous foe to focus on than 30 pirates. A teenage girl and her little friend.

“Razensen,” I said, using my core voice. “The witch is separated from the others. She doesn’t look much like a witch to me, though. And she is very young. There’s also a freckled-faced boy with her.”

“That’s them, alright, Stone.”

“I trust you can deal with her this time?”

“You doubt me? I will send her to the ice!”

Anna paced slowly around the tomb, gritting her teeth so she could endure the pain in her leg. The temperature in the dungeon wasn’t good for her at all, and the sooner she could kill the core and leave it, the better.

She inspected every inch of the place, running her fingers over the walls and feeling the stone flake away, tapping the ground with her good foot to see if there were any weak points or hidden doors or something.

“Boring, boring, boring,” she said. And then a song came to her head, one her mother taught her. “There once was a goblin, and he found a ring. A goblin ring! A goblin ring!”

“Do you have to sing? You know I hate your singing voice,” said Utta.

Behind her, she felt waves of fear coming from Utta. And although she’d promised him that she never would, she cast a small blanket in his mind. A nice one. Lovely and bright, and so light it was like silk. He wouldn’t feel it but instead would just lose a little of his fear. It was okay to lie if she was doing it to help her friend.

“What did our oh-so-perfect school tell you about dungeons, Utta? I don’t know much, but I know they have rules. They can’t just lock you somewhere until you die.”

“Every dungeon is run by a core, and every core has rules. If there are puzzles, they have to have solutions. The core can trick us, but there has to be room for us to figure things out.”

“Then what are we missing?”

“You’re missing the fact that rules can be bent, without breaking them,” said a voice.

Anna looked around. The voice had come from above them and around them at the same time.

“Core?” said Utta. “Is that you?”

“I prefer to be called the Dark Lord. The Master of Malevolence. The Prince of Pain.”

“The Prince of Pain?” said Anna. “Sounds like the name of a villain in a two-copper theatre show. Like you should be prancing around in tights and cackling.”

“Beneath your feet is a simple pitfall. A trap that I was reliably informed no hero would ever fall for these days, but I knew differently.”

Anna looked at the ground. It was brown and made of dirt and stone. It didn’t look trapped, but she supposed she was in a dungeon, so it would make sense.

“You have to offer the chance of a way out,” said Utta.

“Ah. Freckle Face knows about cores, does he?”

“More than you’d expect. And my father always says freckles are spots of wisdom.”

“Yeah, core!” said Anna. “Don’t you forget it.”

“Your father is a fool. Behind you are two levers,” said the voice.

Anna turned around, but she couldn’t see them. “Where?”

“Behind you.”

She moved a little. “Here?”

“Thirty degrees to your left. See? Where it is dark? No, no, you’ve gone too far. Wait…there.”

“Ah,” She said. “Two levers. Gotcha.”

“One lever will open a secret door. The other will open the pitfall beneath you, plunging you into the very depths of the underworlds, where demons will rip out your intestines and stab your arse with forks and other equally dreadful things.”

“You’re a dungeon core,” said Utta, “Not a demon or a warlock. You can no more access the underworlds than I can conjure fairies when I sneeze.”

“Fine. The pitfall will drop you a long way. Enough that your little necks will snap.”

“What do you want?” said Anna.

“So, you are prepared to talk? Good. Tell me, you wretch, do you have a kobold in your possession?”

The babble of voices was enough to make a man lose his temper, and Endliver Pickering always strove to be the kind of man who kept his temper safe so he never misplaced it and could always find it when he needed to. But right now, so many of his lads were talking at once that he couldn’t even think straight. Gods of the waves, he needed a drink! It was at that point that he realized although he didn’t like rum, he bloody well needed it.

“Shut yer flappers!” he shouted. The din gradually quietened, until they were all staring at him. “Let’s think about this loglostically, shall we? Eh? Use a little dollop of