Dungeon of Chance: Even Odds: A Dungeon Core Novel (Serious Probabilities Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (interesting books to read TXT) 📕

inside, since he had amazingly collected the entire Elemental set!  However, he decided to mix it up a little, since he didn’t want a Hero to be overwhelmed by 5 rodents of unusual size, each the size of a medium-sized dog, all at once.

Clay’s first dungeon room consisted of:

1 Bilge Rat★

1 Flare Rat★

1 River Rat★

1 Stone-tipped Fern★

1 Shining Fern★

It wasn’t quite a full set of Elemental affinities, but he liked the variety.  Placing the Ferns right in the middle of the room, he stuck the 3 Rats just behind them to act as a bit of cover, so they weren’t just sitting there as soon as a Hero walked inside.  Still, though, they weren’t really camouflaged, and the Ferns were clearly not normal; one had greenish-brown fronds with sharp stone slivers stuck on the ends of its leaves, while the other glowed with an internal brightness that lit up the room even more than the torches lining the walls.  As for his Rats, one looked dark and slimy, one had little flare-ups of flames all over its fur (which looked neat, but didn’t seem as though they would burn anyone), and the last looked perpetually wet.

“Since you have some Chips left over, you might want to add some décor to this room; nothing extravagant, but it would probably do you well to have some additional non-monster ferns in the room, and possibly some tree trunks lining the walls for effect,” Dwight suggested.

Good idea.  Mentally picturing some more “normal” ferns, he placed about a dozen throughout the room, which helped to fill in the otherwise-empty spaces.  It did nothing to really hide his monsters, but it did help to highlight the area where the Heroes would likely fight his monsters.  After that was done, he looked to the walls and imagined them having half a tree trunk spaced out at irregular intervals, so that the torches weren’t blocked and could still give off enough light to see by.  All told, it cost him only 1 Crystal Chip to complete the environmental décor, which wasn’t that bad considering all that he put into it.

Nice; on to the next, I guess.  Since Dwight didn’t mention any problems with his selections – despite flying inside the room and checking it out herself – he supposed he had done alright for not really knowing what he was doing.  He briefly thought about adding his 1-Star trap to the hallway connecting the first and second rooms, but decided against it; as soon as I have more Stars I can use, then I’ll put some traps in.  Until then, I want to reserve them all for my monsters.

His decision for the next room was a bit easier.  Looking at what he hadn’t used before, he decided on “creepiness” for this one.  First, he used another one of his Chips to decorate the room with what appeared to be threadbare grey fabric, torn apart with strips hanging every which way from the ceiling.  Then, because of what monsters he was going to place inside there, Clay stuck moderately sticky spiderwebs extending from the floor to the walls, wherein some of his Spiders would lie in wait.  Finally, he removed two of the torches that lit up the room, making it that much darker and giving more than a few spots enough shadow to make it “spooky”. In addition, there was enough of a breeze coming in from outside the dungeon entrance that everything would slowly flutter a little, giving the illusion of something moving behind them.

“This is very strange-looking, Clay,” the baby dragonling remarked when he was finished setting it up.  “What made you decide to do this?”

If he’d had a body still, Clay would’ve shrunk back in embarrassment.  “Well…,” he started and then pretended to clear his non-existent throat, “when I was a bit younger, I had a delivery to this strange old man – who later passed away – and he wanted me to drop off a portion of his order into his cellar.  If you’d ever seen our cellar,” he continued with a bit of pride in his voice, “which was immaculate in comparison, you’d probably understand why I didn’t hesitate.

“However, as soon as I got down there with the first of the load, I was surrounded by darkness, cobwebs, and discarded clothing that had seen much better days.  Especially since they seemed to currently be used as nests for some mice, and were torn apart as if some monster had jumped the last person to venture into the basement, devouring their body so completely that there was no trace of it anywhere.  And the spiders I saw were probably the size of my hand, or that’s what I told myself, which caused me to immediately drop what I was carrying – which broke most of the jars inside – and run away without looking back.  I could’ve sworn that something was following me all the way back home, and it was only when I reached our front door that I knew I was safe.

“Looking back on it, though, I realize that none of that was real; the mice had just torn up some discarded clothing to use as bedding, the spiders weren’t any larger than normal, and there was nothing waiting to jump out at me.  There was even plenty of light to see by from the cellar entrance alone, but my observation at the time was that it was dark as pitch inside, so that only enhanced my fright.

“Therefore, knowing how scary and creepy I had found that situation, I figured I could do something similar for the Heroes.  They will have to face something even scarier and deadlier eventually, if the World Threat is indeed coming here, so I figured I could turn my childhood trauma into something positive.”

That was a lot more than he had wanted to share, but he found that the