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

“What are you going to do? Start beating us? Let me by!”

The man tried to push past the soldier. The guard drew his sword, but the man was flush with anger, and it made him stupid. He got smacked with a sword hilt for the effort. Tottering back, he stumbled on the step behind him and fell. The crowd caught him, dragged him away.

“The same treatment won’t work on me,” I said. “I’m made of gemstone. Your little toy will break if you try and rough me up.”

One soldier nodded to the other. His friend took a whip out of his pocket and unraveled it. Lashings of light buzzed from it.

“Is this toy any better, Core?” said the guard.

Ugh. A core whip. His sword might not have been able to hurt me, but the core whip would. It wouldn’t kill me; it wasn’t powerful enough for that. But it’d hurt like hell. And I didn’t like hurting like hell.

At the same time, something had happened in the bakery, and Gary was a part of it. I had to find out.

I tried to think about what might have happened.

Gary was supposed to be somewhere last night, wasn’t he? Some kind of party…a meeting…

Oh, hells.

He was supposed to be playing his new song at the Scorched Scorpion, and I’d promised I would be there. I’d been so wrapped up with the traders and Ulruk that I’d completely forgotten.

Was it true to just say forgotten, though? That implied a mistake. Something I hadn’t meant to do. Much more accurate to say I’d chosen to miss Gary’s show. I had prioritized the traders over one of my most loyal monsters.

I needed to get past the whip guard and his friend and find out what had happened. If Gary had gotten himself into trouble, I owed it to him to get him out of it.

“Listen,” I told the guard. “I’ve been on the town council for six months. I’ve fought battles to save this place. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be serving a duke right now.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said the guard.

“You don’t appreciate what a precious thing freedom is. Yondersun doesn’t swear fealty to anyone in Xynnar, and I’m part of the reason for that.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart, was it?” said the whip guard.

“If he even has a heart,” said the other.

I couldn’t believe their attitude. I was on the town council. I was running in the chief elections. For all they knew, I was going to win and I’d become their boss. They were stupid not to at least show me respect.

Unless they thought I wouldn’t win.

It was the only way to explain this change in attitude. Damn it, people used to fear me around here! Maybe I’d let them become too used to me. Too familiar. I should have kept an air of mystery. Maybe murder the occasional townsperson to keep things fresh. Ah well. Too late for that now.

The only way I’d get past the guards was to play dirty. Luckily, I’m a core. Playing dirty comes naturally.

A while ago, an anti-core movement had been getting popular in town. They hated cores like me and my friend Jahn and wanted us out. Their reasons were flimsy, but the essence of it was that their leader wanted power. To get it he needed support. To get support, he needed to give his supporters something to hate, and then to offer them a solution.

Cores are easy things to hate. We aren’t human. We live underground. We can create monsters, and we are trained to kill. I can’t blame people for being wary of us, and it doesn’t matter that some of us are pretty nice when we’re not murdering heroes.

To deal with the anti-core movement, I planted pieces of my dungeon in the houses of influential members. I then used my core vision to create a link to the pieces of the dungeon, allowing me to spy in their homes.

It worked so well that a while ago, I’d expanded my operations. I’d given every person in town a gift. Piece of dungeon rock that Maginhart made look like fancy ornaments by applying a chemical to them.

Of course, this gave me the option to see what was going on in people’s homes. And when you do that for long enough…you start to learn secrets.

So now, I tried to use my core vision to see inside the bakery, but it didn’t work.

Hadn’t we planted an ornament in there? I was sure we had.

Ah. Now I remembered.

The bakery had been remodeled last week.

I used my core voice to speak to one of my dungeon creatures.

“Jopvitz?”

A few seconds passed before he replied. The guards stared at me. The crowd bunched into groups. They murmured and gossiped. Still no sign of anything inside the bakery. No movement.

“Yes, Dark Lord?” said Jopvitz.

“I need you to check your notes.”

“My spy notes?”

“I told you, we don’t call them that. It makes them sound creepier than they already are.”

“My reconnaissance notes, Dark Lord ?”

“Exactly. I need to know about a guard. Red hair. Bushy eyebrows, like an owl.”

Silence.

Jopvitz would be cross-checking his big ledger of notes. Like Maginhart, Jopvitz had started dungeon life as a miner. During the whole anti-core thing, he’d helped with my spying…my reconnaissance…and he took a liking to it. Showed a real flair, too. I was edging on promoting him, but not just yet. The longer I made him wait, the more grateful he’d be. I needed loyalty among my monsters.

“The guard’s name is Segul.”

“Seagull? Like the bird?”

“Don’t call him that, Dark Lord. My notes say he doesn’t like it. It’s spelled S-E-G-U-L.”

“Are there any secrets he might not like me to talk about, as well?”

Silence. Segul stared