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

They fought to earn themselves some distance, and they produced slingshots filled with little black balls. Each of them flicked flint and sparked the balls alight, and then fired them.

Flashes of light met with loud cracks. A burning smell filled the air. Balls tore holes in bogbadugs’ arms, in bone guys’ chest cavities. Razensen’s monsters prowled forward, only to get hit with a second volley of exploding bearings.

“By the axe!” bellowed the barbarian, charging with his axe while the pirates filled their slingshots. He reached them and took down two with one downward swing, carving through one man’s belly and another’s kneecaps.

Razensen charged forward now. A volley of balls hit him and exploded on his chest, burning his fur and spreading a deep, searing pain through him.

He felt his head horns grow hot and felt his eyeballs itch, a sure sign they were changing color.

As the pain spread, the color changed from yellow to orange to red, to a deeper red, and finally to the deepest red of all. That was when Razensen, son of Goralsen, was in charge of himself no more.

A great weight crashed into Eric’s back and knocked him to the ground. He felt the weight on top of him, but the impact had sucked the breath out of his lungs, and his chest and back ached so much that he couldn’t suck in more air.

He wheezed and shrugged the weight off him so he could turn around, and only then did he see it was the corpse of a pirate, his body crushed, and his bones broken, that had been thrown into him.

“Holy hell…”

The ice monster’s eyes glowed the color of demon blood. His muscles rippled and were visible even beneath his blood-drenched, scorched fur. He grabbed hold of a pirate and squeezed, and the resulting cracking of bones made Eric feel sick.

He watched man after man get crushed, get slammed into the wall, get thrown all the way across the chamber like a stone.

He watched the pirates’ leader flee down a tunnel, and Eric didn’t blame him one bit. That man’s fear wasn’t cowardice, it was sense. His fear would save him.

With the pirates dead, the monster’s fury didn’t abate. Eric realized that Razensen was focused on him now.

He scooted away on his arse, but his back still felt like someone had slammed a warhammer into him.

“Razensen, lad, try and see my face. It’s me. Good old Eric. Come on now…”

The chamber shook with the monster’s every step. His blood-red eyes were the brightest thing around. The blood on his fur was two coats thick.

Eric got to his feet just as the monster lifted his leg and stomped.

He was quick, but not quick enough.

His leg was caught under the monster’s foot. He heard his bones break, felt his adrenaline instantly spike, but it wasn’t enough to even begin to dull the pain. He found himself crying, spittle spurting from his lips, tears streaming down his sweat-soaked face.

He reached for his axe but couldn’t find it. He grasped for something, anything, finally grabbing hold of a weapon.

A stupid, thin rapier. The most pointless sword ever invented.

The monster stomped forward.

Eric pictured his mother’s face. His sister’s. His wife’s, the gods take her soul.

And then, as the barbarian made peace with his end, the monster’s eyes lost their red tint and began to turn orange.

It was only then that pain in Eric’s busted leg reached its peak. He didn’t even try to hide the scream.

The sounds of battle reached the cultivation chamber, ended only by the loudest, most pain-filled scream that I had ever heard. I only hoped it had come from one of the pirates and not any of my dungeon mates.

The girl and her friend walked further into the room. Purple mist gathered around Freckle-Face, wisps of it that thrummed with energy ready to be unleashed.

Anna took a flint stick from her pocket. She kneeled and cracked it against the stone, producing a flame.

“I am your master now, Mr. Core,” she said.

I laughed. “Having you been drinking?”

She stared at me so hard that her whole face scrunched. It took me a second to realize what she was doing, and I had to laugh again.

“Your powers don’t work on me, you air-brained hag. Cast whatever spells you like, they won’t touch my mind. Go on, try all day. I have the eternity to spare. Your mortal body, I strongly suspect, does not.”

She shrugged. “Everything’s worth trying once, my dad always said. He died trying to tame a wild grizzly when I was a girl, though, so I suppose he wasn’t so clever. I want everyone to leave but the core.”

Tomlin, clearly straining to keep the bowstring taut with his underdeveloped muscles, eyed me.

“I give the orders, Tomlin. Not this girl.”

Anna teased the flame toward an essence vine. The fire caught hold, wilting the vine.

Sudden, intense fear flashed through me as I stared at the burning leaf.

That was when I knew I was in trouble; when a remnant of human emotion such as fear penetrated my nothingness.

If the essence vines burned, I wouldn’t be able to replenish my essence. I would be useless as a core.

But she was testing me. She had to be. If she burned all my essence now, she lost any kind of hold over me.

Though every urge in my core was straining to tell her to extinguish the flame, I didn’t. I held my nerve.

One leaf burned.

And then another.

Tomlin, who spent his whole working life tending to these leaves, was visibly pained. The bow shook in his grasp. “Stop her, Dark Lord! She is burning Tomlin’s plants!”

“My plants. Let the girl play her little games,” I said, trying to sound amused.

Two burned leaves became