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

A man sitting near me caught my attention. He had a bun in one hand and a beer in the other. “Psst. Core.”

There was no hostility in his voice, which was a novelty. Most folks in cities didn’t like to speak to cores. But I guessed in Heaven’s Peak, they were used to us.

“What is it?” I said.

“Which academy is down there?” he asked, nodding at the arena.

I looked at the symbols painted on the overseers’ robes. A yellow snake encircling a scorpion.

“The Academy of the Forked Sting,” I said.

“That explains the scorpions,” said the man.

The cores each occupied a semi-circle of the arena and summoned their first monsters. One had created a scorpion as big as a dog, with a pronged tail curving over its body. The other core produced a cobra with one head, yet two bodies.

Normally, dungeon cores can’t summon monsters when they are above ground. If that was the case here, it’d be a crummy tournament. From my reading, I knew that the arenas on God’s Fist were altered so that they interacted with a core’s essence in the same way that a dungeon would.

An overseer down in the arena held his hands in the air. “Ready? Begin!”

The scorpion and two-bodied cobra battled each other in their own styles. The scorpion lashed with its tail, while the cobra edged around it, slithering this way and that and waiting for an opening.

“My money’s on the scorpion,” said the man near me.

“The cobra,” I said.

“You’re having a laugh. The scorpion is bigger than a bloody wolf!”

“Size doesn’t mean anything.”

“Tell my wife that.”

The battle was over in a blink. When the scorpion, urged by its core, overcommitted itself with a sting, the cobra slithered under its guard and wrapped around its body, coiling itself tighter and tighter until the scorpion’s exoskeleton crunched.

The scorpion lay dead on the sand, but only for a moment. Light gathered around it, and its limbs filled out again and straightened. Soon, it was back on its feet.

That was the most reassuring thing about the tournament. It was an exhibition. Monsters wouldn’t die here, except for in the most extreme circumstances. It meant that between bouts, monsters who were defeated in one fight would heal a little in time for the next.

The cores took their positions again, with a single difference. In the semi-circle occupied by the Academy of the Forked Sting’s main core, a ‘1’ was etched into the sand.

“Best of three, ain’t it?” said the man near me.

“That’s right. Three rounds in each fight. The first core to get two wins is the victor.”

The man tore a strip from his pastry and offered me some. When I politely declined, he tossed it in his mouth. “If a core wins the first two rounds, they might as well stop the fight. The other core can’t win, can he?”

“In that case, they’d fight the third round regardless. They call it the honor round. It would be insulting to the losing core to end the fight after two rounds, even if he has already lost.”

“You know a lot about this,” said the man. “Are you fighting?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, good luck to you. I’ve been watching sparring all morning, touring the different arenas. There are some nasty, nasty cores competing this time. My dad brought me to the tournament when I was a lad. Must have been forty years ago now. The cores get meaner every time. See you around, core. Hopefully, not in an honor round.”

With the man gone, I focused on the arena. The cores summoned their monsters for round two. This time, the Academy of the Forked Sting’s practice core summoned two monsters.

One was a spider the size of a cat, the second a reptile of some sort. In the early rounds of the tournament, cores would be allowed to summon up to five monsters during a fight. If you were stupid, and you summoned four monsters in round one, that meant you would only be able to summon one monster for the rest of the fight. In that case, you’d have to hope your monsters didn’t get wiped out in round one.

This time, the main core summoned a little frog. This joined his two-bodied cobra. Winning the first round had given him an advantage, in that he could field two monsters around two, while only using one extra summon slot. The practice core had now used three summon slots in total.

The battle began, and the spider and reptile soon ganged up on the cobra. To my surprise, they managed to kill it. This left them just a little frog to face. I almost left the arena, sure that I knew the outcome and didn’t need to see more.

However, the frog opened its mouth and sprayed out a toxin of some sort. Within seconds the other monsters were motionless, and the frog hopped around in triumph.

It had happened so quickly. Much quicker than when I battled heroes. In a core-versus-hero battle, there was always time to strategize on the fly. Here, it was clear that a battle could be over in an instant. Not only that, but the caliber of monsters on show was worrying.

Only twenty minutes earlier, I been full of optimism. I was sure that I could watch each core spar for a while, and work out a way to beat them. Now, after watching just one core, I wasn’t so sure.

I didn’t have many monsters that could counteract venom or toxins. And that was just one academy. Some academies specialized in cores that made arcane creatures, water creatures. Any type of creature you could think of. Could I counteract each one?

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Looking at the core of the Academy of