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

warren of holes and tunnels until there was nothing but a single passageway that ended at a mud wall.

Strange. There was nothing down here. So what the hell was she doing?

He was about to leave when he heard muffled voices. The sound shocked him, and he almost dropped his lamp.

He approached the mud wall and kneeled beside it and he listened intently. It was hard to make much out at first, but the longer he listened, the more he could catch snatches of words. Soon he began to hear the voices a little better.

“No, Tomlin, no. Not there. The heroes will find it! What use is a dungeon switch if the heroes can find it? Demons alive, you’ll get us looted before we can even think!”

Loot? Heroes? Dungeons?

Bill felt a chill pass over him.

These words might have sounded strange to some people, but Bill understood their context. Years ago, Bill had considered joining a heroes’ guild. This was before he had decided to become a mage, and before his father’s death had robbed his motivation.

Now he understood what was down here, and the truth shocked him.

There was a dungeon underneath the ground! A dungeon full of loot, monsters, and traps!

This meant two things.

Vedetta was putting herself in great danger, and she probably didn’t even know it. He had no clue what she was doing down here, but it was risky.

Two, dungeons meant treasure. With treasure, maybe Bill could afford to buy the alchemist’s potion that would help their mother.

Maybe he could finally shake off his terrible lack of motivation and do something with his life. Perhaps it wasn’t too late!

He needed to wake up Lisle. He’d explain everything to him, and he’d convince him that they needed to go to the heroes’ guild, tell them about the dungeon, and maybe the heroes would accept them into their ranks.

Things weren’t so lost after all.

CHAPTER 21

My dungeon was almost complete. Of course, any core worth their essence is a perfectionist, and no core would truly think his dungeon was ever finished. I bet that not even Bolton, when he made the great Necrotomitlita dungeon, felt he was done. And that was one of the best dungeons ever made.

Still, I was keenly aware that the overseers could come evaluate me again at any time. Even worse, there was no set end for the overall testing period. If I hadn’t even opened my dungeon, much less defeated a party of heroes, by the time the overseers decided to end it, then I was done.

They’d pound me into gem dust, and that would be that. Second life finished. So, I was anxious to open this domain to a bunch of good-for-nothing, loot-greedy heroes.

With the blueprint and monster/trap requirements satisfied, this left two more. I needed loot for the loot chest, and I needed to make an entrance to the dungeon.

It wasn’t a requirement, but I also needed to create a boss monster for the loot room so that the heroes had a worthy final battle, should all my other dungeon stuff fail.

First things first, then.

A boss monster.

There are two ways to create a boss monster for a dungeon. The first is to create one in my crafting list, but I hadn’t unlocked any yet. I guessed this would happen if I leveled up. Even then, the boss monsters you could craft were pretty standard stuff. Elite-level kobolds, elite-level fire beetles, that sort of thing.

I wanted something more special.

The next way would be to create a melding room. A weird-sounding room, to be sure, and hard to explain. I hadn’t unlocked this room type yet, so I had more work to do.

It was level-up time.

I had learned my lesson from the bogbadug that wanted to eat all the essence in my core room, and I now knew what a coward Tomlin was. I wouldn’t mess up again.

This time, I went into room three. By now I had put lockable doors in each room, so I made sure these were closed and latched, which meant the room was completely sealed.

Tomlin, Wylie, and my two fire beetles were with me now. I had already explained what we were doing, and while Tomlin looked a little nervous, Wylie was smiling and holding his wooden pickaxe in his hand. The beetles scampered around the room, chattering in their high-pitched squeaks.

“Fight?”

“Kill!”

“Fight kill!”

Ah, you have to love fire beetles. So utterly fearless, yet delightfully bloodthirsty.

“Tomlin, time to make yourself useful. Just like before, I want you to dig into the wall a little. Create holes so that the smell of the essence leaf permeates through them.”

“Wylie,” began Tomlin. “Time to make yourself useful. Dig-”

“No, Tomlin,” I said. “Wylie is ready to fight, and you’ve already proven that isn’t one of your skills. If Wylie and the beetles are fighting, then you’ll have to get your hands dirty by digging.”

The kobold sighed, but to his credit, he began digging. I guessed that inwardly, he was happy I was sparing him from battle.

After he had finished making a few holes in the wall, I had him grind up two essence leaves. He pushed the essence dust into parts of the wall and left a trail that led into the center of the room.

Then we waited.

While we waited for critters to take the bait, drawn by the lovely smell of essence, I regaled them all with the Soul Bard story that I had finally completed in my head. I have great mental recall for this kind of thing, so I hadn’t needed to get the kobolds to write it down for me. Which was good, because we didn’t have a quill or paper.

I had just finished fascinating them with my literary skills (it was only a short story) when we heard sounds coming