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

threw a pair of grubby underpants at me. “The scribe is right, Beno. The wise man never loses. But an even wiser man knows how to take victory from his loss. Take this is a lesson and move on.”

“If you two could stop being so pessimistic and listen, your attitudes will change. Last night I discovered another, rather interesting tournament bylaw. If we can get another academy to drop out from the tournament, the tournament will have to allow a different academy to take their place.”

Bolton put down his bag and sat on his bed. “Interesting. Do you have a way to make an academy drop out from a tournament they have probably been preparing a decade for?”

“Perhaps. But we need to decide who to target. For this to work, it would have to be a small academy. As much as I’d love to stick it to the Dungeon Core Academy, they’re too big.”

“I hear that the Academy of the Moneyed Fist is competing this year,” said Bolton. “They have links to rogue forgers, but nobody’s ever been able to prove it. Regardless, they are probably one of the smallest academies in the tournament. Aside from Beno and Jahn’s Dungeon Core Academy, of course.”

“So they’re small enough for us to target. And because they work with rogue forgers, I don’t even have to feel bad about making chumps out of them.”

“What you have in mind?” asked Bolton.

“We’ll have to get Tomlin to travel here,” I said.

Gulliver stood up and pointed while holding a pair of his underpants. “I told you we should have hired another mana carriage!”

It took Tomlin four hours to get here in yet another mana carriage. This, along with renting the room at the Two-Headed Swan for another day, completely cleaned me out. This just had to work. Otherwise, I would go back to my dungeon having sunk more gold into this than I wanted to, and with nothing to show for it.

Tomlin met us in the bar of the Two-Headed Swan, where Bolton insisted on sampling a pint of every beer that they served on tap. When he walked into the tavern, none of the other patrons even looked at him.

In most cities, the sight of a kobold would at least draw a stare, if not downright hostility. But in Heaven’s Peak, where the whole economy was built around a dungeon core tournament, the sight of a kobold was as common as muck.

“Tomlin!” I said. “Thank you for getting here so quickly. Do you have what I need?”

“Tomlin has it, Dark Lord,” he said, holding up a bag that bulged with essence leaves.

“And Shadow?”

“Shadow will be here soon, Dark Lord. She passed a bakery, and is buying a bun.”

“Tell her to get one for me, Tomlin, lad,” said Bolton. “I’ve never tried the buns in Heaven’s Peak. I hear they are delicious.”

Gulliver shook his head. “Trust me, Bolton. Never get food in a place full of tourists. It’s always cheap rubbish. You'd be better off-”

“Enough about buns,” I said.

The sky was dark. The stars were out, but they were hidden from view by the God’s Fist that covered the sky. Shadow looked up at it as she sneaked across the plains on the outskirts of Heaven’s Peak. She looked up at the bowl that they said was an arena. It was so high up that the gods, if they were any, would have a close view of the tournament.

Shadow admired Core Beno for his doggedness in all of this. She didn’t necessarily believe in the benefits of competing. Not because the rewards didn’t exist. Everyone, even overseer Bolton, agreed that the rewards of winning the Battle of the Five Stars were legendary. She just doubted Core Beno could do it. Especially after what she had heard about his core quality. Not that she would ever mention it to him.

Focusing on the task at hand, Shadow crept towards an encampment. There were half a dozen wagons parked there. No horses outside, which meant they were mana carriages. The overseers and staff of the Academy of the Moneyed Fist would be sleeping inside, but they weren’t her prey today.

Instead, Shadow crept through the camp until she found a hole in the ground. There were dozens of such holes all around Heaven’s Peak, and each one led to a tunnel system underground. It made sense. With so many cores descending upon the city for the tournament, they needed an underground place to stay until the tournament began.

Using the See No Evil skill she had earned upon reaching level 15 as a scout, Shadow combined it with her Scout Feather Toes perk. She then crept down into the hole, into the lair where the Moneyed Fists’ core would be staying.

She put all her roguish skill into sneaking through the tunnels. There was no sign that the core was aware of her when she reached an essence cultivation chamber. The walls of this chamber were nothing like the ones in Core Beno’s dungeon. There was nowhere near the same amount of essence. But then, this dungeon was a temporary one, just hospitality shown to visiting cores. It wasn’t the Moneyed Fist core’s real dungeon.

All the same, it would be drawing its essence from this place for the next few days, and that was the key to it all. In the cultivation room, Shadow opened the bag that Tomlin had given her. Inside were dozens of leaves. She had watched him prepare them. Their natural color was sickly grey, but he had painted them with a purple dye, so they looked like normal essence leaves.

She clipped true essence vines from the wall and replaced them with the ones Tomlin had given her. As he had promised, his leaves bonded to the vines on the wall and became part of them, as though they’d always been there. Shadow was amazed. She