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

Redjack died? He and a few miners were excavating a tunnel in the northeast of the dungeon, far away from the witch and her pirates. In any case, all of my opponents were accounted for. What had happened? Had I missed something?

As much as it pained me, I switched my core vision away from the sacrifice chamber and to the tunnel, where I saw two kobolds on the ground.

“What? Klok is dead too?”

But he wasn’t, I realized. Klok was lying down against a rock, sleeping. Redjack, meanwhile, was in a puddle of his own blood.

“Razensen,” I said, using my core voice. “I need you to go investigate the new tunnels in the northeast. The enemy may have split into three groups before we trapped them. I suspect they have rogues sneaking around, ones skilled enough to avoid detection.”

“Impossible.”

“Redjack is dead, Razensen. And unless he fell on his own pickaxe…”

“I mean, Stone, it is impossible for me to go there. Those tunnels are too cramped for me. It is a matter of fitting. I am too big!”

“Damn it. Gary? Brecht? Rusty? I need you to head north…”

The situation was all spinning away from me. I needed to keep control. To remember that it was the witch who posed the biggest danger to us all.

I switched back to my view of the pitfall room.

“Hellooooo?” said Anna, walking in a circle, trying hard to not betray the pain shooting up her leg. “Hellooooo?”

“He’s gone,” said Utta.

“Impossible. I was just talking to him. Maybe he just fell asleep, or something.”

“What?”

“What?” she said, making a face at him.

“You’re an idiot sometimes, Anna.”

“You’re an idiot all the time, Utta,” she said, and then smiled.

“I don’t have the time to play games anymore,” said the voice, audibly more exasperated than before. “Do you have a kobold in your possession or not?”

“What’s a kobold? Oh, you mean the weird wolf-goblin thingy?”

“Wolf-lizard. Yes. The one who you tortured to learn about my dungeon and its traps.”

“Oh, I didn’t torture her,” said Anna. “She’s perfectly fine. I had a chat with her, and now we get along amazingly.”

“You…had a chat?”

She strolled over to the levers on the wall. “A fifty percent chance of safety or death depending on which lever I pull, yes? One lever opens the door, the other makes me and Utta plunge to our deaths. And the alternative you offer is one where you hold ultimate bargaining power over us?”

“As you see, you have little choice but to tell me what I want to know. Now, where is-”

“We are Chosen Ones, core. There’s a certain destiny implied in being a Chosen One. There are no odds that don’t favor us. Do you really think Utta and I are fated to die in a no-mark dungeon in the middle of a desert?”

Utta shouted as she reached for the lever. “Anna, what are you doing?”

“Relax!”

She grabbed the first one.

Then changed her mind and grabbed the second.

“Anna!”

She pulled it, and she tried not to let the effects of her hammering heart show on her face.

Something rumbled. The walls shook. She felt her stomach soften just a little.

And then a door slid open on the side of the chamber.

Pete Leaf was such a skinny shrimp that his blood barely covered the base of the scale, let alone filled it. All the same, the experiment had been useful. It told Endliver that another eight or nine of his men would have to make heroic sacrifices to fill it completely.

He looked at them now. Saw some of them bickering. Others arguing. A few of them searching the place, trying desperately to find another solution.

Some of the lads had been with him since they were teenagers. Others had only joined him recently. Some of them came from good families and wanted to taste the pirate life, others were criminals who felt that the deck of Endliver’s boat offered more protection from their pasts than any other place in Xynnar.

They were pirates, murderers, robbers. Kind-hearted scum, black-hearted animals. And yet, most of them had their good sides. Yes, they mainly dressed in black and white, but their characters were far from it. A sea of greys, the lot of them. Neither one thing, nor the other. Not good, not bad.

How was he going to choose who got to live?

“I don’t suppose any of yer fancy volunteering?” he said.

Not many of them met his stare. Whether it was because they didn’t want to answer or because they were scared of him after seeing what happened to Pete Leaf, he didn’t know. They shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d reacted that way, though. He was a Pickering, and Pickerings had hot blood. Even his nephews, the goody-goody heroes, were prone to fits of temper if their reputations were to be believed.

He wondered where those lads were nowadays. He could really have used them in a place like this. They’d know what to do in a dungeon like this one. Course, he hadn’t seen ‘em since they were nippers. That was the problem with pirate life; it didn’t leave much time to be a good uncle. All he’d heard was that they’d joined the heroes’ guild.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” he said. “We’ll just have to use our superior intellects to get out of here, I suppose. Or…we have a lottery.”

“Lottery?”

“Perhaps we let Lady Chance decide who lives.”

“And does that include you, Endliver?”

“That’s Captain, to you! Don’t forget your manners just because we’re about to die!”

Two of his men stood up. One of them reached for their blade.

Mutiny. It happened to every captain, at one time or another.

Endliver was about to draw his cutlass when something happened. Words fell into place in his old, rum-addled noggin.

“Sacrifice,” he said.