The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (read novel full .txt) 📕

“Was that today?  I lost track of time with everything that’s been going on – you’ve come at a bad time…Tacca, was it?” he asked absently, looking over her shoulder with his expression turning sour again.

“Y-yes—”

Expert-ranked Assistant Cobalt interrupted her curtly before she could even finish. “You need to leave right now; Translocate out of here before it’s too late.”

What?  What is going on? 

Rather than argue with her Mentor in the first minute she had met him – and since he seemed genuinely concerned with her safety – she tried to do just that, picturing the sky high above the DAPS building, as it was the only thing she could think of after just leaving it moments before.  She activated her Translocation Ability and…nothing.

“I can’t Translocate right now because I don’t have enough Fairy Mana—”

He flew down to her and before she could react he grabbed her arm.  “Fine, we’ve got to hide you, then.  We don’t have much time; Emmalynn, can you create a tiny alcove?”

Tacca was about to say that her name wasn’t Emmalynn, but she realized that Expert Assistant Cobalt’s face was looking the other direction.  Moving her own head to peer over at what he was eyeing, she saw a spherical, glowing, bluish-red gem that was floating in the middle of the room – and she realized immediately what it was.

A Dungeon Core!  It’s more beautiful than I even imagined!

The sound of stone cracking along the far wall – of what she now knew was the Core Room – tore her attention away from the glowing Dungeon Core; she had been distracted before, but she could’ve sworn that the wall had been amazingly smooth and now it had a slight indentation in it.  Before she even knew what was happening, the larger blue-haired Fairy wrapped his arms around her and flew towards the indentation; she instinctively tried to fight him because of all of the abuse she had suffered over the last decade at DAPS, but he was too strong.

“Stop squirming!  Get in here and don’t move – and don’t make a sound!  If everything works out, I’ll come get you in a few minutes,” Cobalt said, before shoving her into the small space on the wall.  Her wings had to be folded up tight against her back to fit, and even then she was forced to stand upright in what was essentially a hidden crevice in the smooth wall barely big enough for her to squeeze into.

Tacca froze, scared about what was happening; it was so completely opposite of what she assumed would happen when she woke up that morning that her mind was having trouble processing everything.  She thought that her difficult schooling was over when she had graduated, and she wasn’t prepared to be roughly handled by her Mentor and squeezed into a crack in the wall against her wishes; despite her confusion and the abrupt way everything seemed to be happening, the squished Fairy knew better than most just how dangerous a dungeon could be to those unacquainted with their particular hazards.  The fact that her parents only lived for just shy of a month inside their newly assigned dungeons after she was born was enough to attest to that.

Her head was facing towards the opening and she caught a glimpse of the light that was emanating from the Dungeon Core – but that was all that she could see. The squashed Fairy fought with her body to slow her breathing down – because it sounded loud to her ears – as she strained to hear anything outside of her refuge.  She had no idea what she was expecting, nor even what the perceived danger was that Expert Assistant Cobalt seemed to think was there, but it certainly wasn’t what she eventually heard after a few long eternities of being crammed into a small hole just over a minute later.

“…didn’t work?  This is bad, Emmalynn, this is very bad.  Have you tried—?  Of course you have, I’m sorry; this is just so unexpected that I’m a little flustered.  How many Goblin Thugs and Brutes do we have left?”

It was telling how stressed her Mentor was by the way he was talking out loud instead of communicating through his bond with his Dungeon Core; Tacca could only hear one side of the conversation, of course, but what she heard didn’t sound good.  Objectively, she knew that her Mentor was paired with a Core whose main monster type were Goblins, but actually being there and knowing that a few…Goblin Thugs and Brutes…were all that stood between the Core and whatever it was that was making Assistant Cobalt nervous was something else entirely.

Suddenly, a wild, deep-throated – but relatively high-pitched – scream coming from a distance away echoed throughout the Core Room and her little crevice; it was followed up by a dozen more in varying volumes, coming closer and closer to the Core and her Mentor.  She didn’t know exactly what had made the horrific noises, but she pictured Goblins getting hacked to bits in an effort to protect the access to the Core Room.

“…No, I’m well aware that it’s not going to be enough.  Why are they even here?  We followed every single rule laid out by the DPRC, so there shouldn’t be any reason why—NO!  I’m going to let you break the bond, Emmalynn; there’s no way I’m going to abandon you now when things are looking a little bleak.  Besides, with my last Rank increase, I have some things that’ll help.  If your Core Room entrance trap works the way it’s supposed to, then we may have a chance.”

Tacca was now even more confused.  The DPRC, also known as the Dungeon Placement and Regulatory Council, was responsible for placing Fairy