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

more explosives than I had essence. The stalemate was over. I didn’t have enough essence to hold him back.

It was then, as I saw the last steel door shatter, that a message submerged from my inner core.

Fight [Warrior Beetle Level 16] has died!

What?

Two cries rose out. Louder than the explosions. Mournful, full of pain.

“Death!” shouted one beetle.

“Kill!” shouted the other.

Switching to my core vision, I saw a pond-green gas seeping from both dungeon entrances and spreading through my lair.

With the doors blown, Riston had released some kind of toxin.

It had already claimed Fight, and now his best friend Death and Kill were fleeing from it.

I felt sick.

Fight, Death, and Kill had always come as a package. A trio. And now they were running for their little lives from toxic gas, while Fight lay on his back, legs curled in the air, eyes shut.

“Cynthia?” I said. “What the hell is that?”

She took her goggles off. Her eyes suddenly looked red and tired.

“A gas Reginal asked me to make. They found obscillian deposits in a cave twenty miles south of town. The caves were infested with hostile vermin, who were attacking the miners. Reginal wanted a gas he could use to get rid of them.”

“And now Riston is pumping it through my lair. I have never, ever wanted to flay the skin off a man’s bones more than him. If it was only me here…”

“Well it isn’t,” said Gulliver, kindly. “And you’re doing the right thing. We need to leave.”

“Everyone out. We have no choice but to leave the dungeon,” I said.

“Where?” said Wylie. “Both ways out blocked. Lots of guards.”

“There are other ways. Come on.”

Just then, the sound of scuttling grew louder.

“Death!”

“Kill!”

My beetles both shouted at once, their tone full of sorrow. They were looking in my direction as if their cries of “Death” and “Kill” were for me only. They were telling me what had happened to our dear friend. I hated it. It just sounded plain strange to hear Death and Kill without Fight preceding it.

As my monsters, my friends, and I left the loot chamber and escaped through an emergency tunnel, I cast my core vision. I saw guards prowling through the dungeon way behind us. I watched them dismantling traps. Smashing puzzles. In the first chamber, a guard was using a crowbar to pry up the pieces of the tile puzzle.

I watched them lay waste to everything I had built, and I felt such a tremendous surge of anger that my vision went blank for a second. I was lost in a void of my own thoughts. Fury surging through me, white-hot. I had never, ever felt such a feeling since my resurrection.

Before I knew it, they had reached my essence vine chamber. I watched as they raised torches to my essence vines and set them alight. The flames leaped from plant to plant, leaf to leaf, becoming a spread of burning orange and yellow that devoured every wall.

Gone. My only means of regenerating my essence, gone.

I was no use as a core anymore. Without a way to regenerate essence, I was exactly what people said.

A lump of floating rock.

Tomlin, who sent most of his life tending the essence vines, seemed to sense what had happened.

I didn’t know how. He had no core vision. He couldn’t see through walls. We were way south of the essence vine room, in an emergency tunnel. He shouldn’t have known.

“No!” he shouted.

He began to sprint back down the tunnel, toward the dungeon. A lifetime of cowardice forgotten in that horrible moment.

Shadow caught up to him and yanked him back. They both fell onto the ground.

“Breathe,” she told him. “Think. If you go back, you’ll die.”

“But my vines…”

“I know.”

Tomlin stood up.

He punched the wall. Once. Twice. Three times.

His knuckles split and blood welted from them.

Shadow went to stop him, but Tomlin fixed her a look of boiling fury, and she shrank back.

Tomlin, the renowned coward of the dungeon, terrified some of us right then. Wylie could hardly take his eyes off him.

Only I really understood how he felt. The vines meant as much to Tomlin as they did to me. Without the essence vines, I couldn’t regenerate my essence. I couldn’t create traps, summon monsters. And without the vines, Tomlin had no purpose. No calling.

“We won’t let this go unanswered,” I said.

“When will we answer?” said Tomlin.

“Soon.”

CHAPTER 12

We followed the tunnels for hours. We walked through passageways wide enough to march an elephant through. Ones so cramped Eric had to expel all the air in his lungs so he could fit. Tunnels that had formed naturally rather than being mined, which Wylie critique as we walked. He pointed out how much more structurally-sound his tunnels were than nature’s.

“I think someone misses their old mining days,” I said. I was trying to sound as light-hearted as I could, to keep morale up. “If you like, Wylie, I can always make someone else dungeon enforcer. You can go back to mining.”

“No way, Dark Lord!”

Only four hours later did we see a shaft of light at the far end of one passageway. There was an incline that started gentle, then got steeper. I knew that if we followed the slope for another twenty minutes, we’d emerge into the wasteland, far away from Yondersun.

Shadow’s four hounds, more like wolves these days, gave excited yips.

“We’re not going out for a walk,” said Shadow.

“Let’s rest here,” I said.

“Finally!” said Eric, who was the first to slump against the wall. Shadow followed, sitting close next to him. Leaning on him. It was natural, like they were good friends. Tomlin sat alone, stewing on his thoughts.

“Come, Ash Whiskers,” said Cynthia. “You will tell me the table of elements in order, and