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

The frog leaped across the room, colliding with the bard and sinking its teeth – yes, it had teeth- into his neck.

Bill and Lisle fought side by side, swinging their sword and staff, two brothers watching each other’s backs and striking the beetles again and again.

Sweat pooled on his forehead. His arm ached, and he felt a tremendous burning on his calf when a beetle bit him. The dungeon echoed with shouts, squeals, the whoosh of spells.

Then, as suddenly as the battle had started, it was over.

The beetles lay dead on the floor, their shells carved open. The stone troll was scattered in pieces. The frog lay lifeless on top of the bard.

The barbarian’s face was a mess now. Bruised, bloodied, his nose broken. And he hadn’t been much of a looker in the first place.

“Check them for loot,” the barbarian said, sounding like he had a clothes peg on his nose. “Mage, can you heal us up?”

“My mana will need to recharge.”

“Fine. Focus on my nose, please. Bard, get to your feet.”

But the bard didn’t move.

“Bard?”

Bill ran over to him. He dragged the dead frog off him, and then he saw the bard properly.

“Oh, gods.”

He was dead. His face pale, neck completely torn open.

“We’ve lost our bard.”

The barbarian picked up a fist-sized chunk of the troll and hurled it at the set of double doors on the far side of the room.

“Damn this place to hell!”

When the stone hit the doors, the strangest thing happened.

Both doors suddenly formed faces. One was a fat lion, the other a monkey.

The lion yawned. “Ah, time to work. Fine. Solve my riddle, so you may pass. You carry it when you travel, and it does not get wet. What is it?”

The monkey shook his head. “Idiot. You didn’t listen to the Dark Dork, did you? It’s you carry it everywhere you go, and it does not get heavy. What is it?”

Bill and Lisle looked at each other, shocked. They had just battled burning beetles, an overgrown frog, and a troll made from stone, but this…this was surprising. Bill had never seen a talking door before.

“It’s a riddle door,” said the barbarian, sighing. “And we just lost our bard. He was our riddle guy.”

CHAPTER 30

Vedetta began the journey home in the late afternoon. Even though she was, in a way, hundreds of years old, she was also just a little girl. So she stuck to the safer travelers’ road, even though it’d take longer.

She’d had to go to a neighboring village to find the books Tomlin needed, but she didn’t mind. In a way that was surprising even to herself, she had grown to like the kobold, and she looked forward to mining with him again.

She like the core, too. Sure, Beno was a new core, and his greenness shone through. But she could sense potential in him.

His only problem, as she saw it, was that he still held on to a glimmer of his old humanity. He might hide it, he might not even realize he still had it, but it was there. A faint goodness and kindness. It couldn’t have been plainer than in the way he treated his minions. He even called them his clanmates!

She just hoped this humanity wouldn’t get him into trouble, but she guessed he couldn’t help it. Vedetta knew what it was like to have different instincts inside you.

After all, for most of her life, she had been a regular girl. Then, when the witch told her about her past, it was like floodgates opened. She began to remember her life as a core, and some of those core instincts mixed with her own humanity, until she was different. She tried to hide it from her mom and brothers, but it was hard.

That was the contradiction. She remembered her old life, and that wasn’t supposed to happen to cores who earned a second resurrection. She knew what it was like to be a core, and deep inside her, she had a core’s utter ruthlessness.

At the same time, she still felt an overwhelming love for her family, and a desire to fix their problems. To cure her mom, to help her brothers get out of their slumps and pursue their dreams again.

Well, every journey is made up of little steps, one after another. Her father always said that. Now that she’d met Beno and made a deal with him, she at least knew she was heading in the right direction.

After an hour’s walk along the traveler road, it began to get dark. She wasn’t scared, because remembering her core past had removed any concept of fear, but she was still sensible. She knew that dangers lurked on the road, and that she was just a girl and needed to be careful.

That was why, when she heard the sound of raised voices somewhere ahead, she darted into the bushes and hid.

She stayed there for a few minutes, holding her books and her breath, until she realized the voices weren’t going anywhere.

Silently, she crept across the road and up an embankment, and she saw the source of the voices.

A group of people had made camp some way off the road. Men and women, some of them dressed in leather armor, some sitting by whetstones and sharpening their blades.

Heroes? Had Beno opened his dungeon already?

The longer she watched, the more she realized that these people weren’t heroes. She could tell by the things they talked about.

Bandits. These were bandits brazenly camping near the travelers’ road.

Oh well. Not her concern; the guards at the nearby town would get wind of them, and they would come to see them off. The bandits weren’t stupid, and they wouldn’t risk fighting the guards.

She was about to leave when she spotted something that chilled