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

Holy hell. She was in my core room!

“I’m sure you know,” she shouted. Even as a little girl, her shouting voice sounded better than mine. “That mana lamps can be smashed. And when a mana flame touches essence…”

The essence vines! She was going to burn them. I didn’t want to exaggerate the danger of the situation…but this was bad.

I decided to call her bluff. “So burn them, then. I’ll murder your brothers and I’ll still pass my graduation.”

“Your evaluation doesn’t end just because you kill a party of heroes, Beno. Come on, you know that. It ends when the overseers say it does, and from what you told me, you’ve annoyed them. Let’s say you kill my brothers. But now that your dungeon is open, more heroes will come. With your vines scorched to cinders, you won’t have essence. Which means, my little core, the next heroes to find their way in will kill your clanmates and then smash you into dust.”

She had a way of getting her arguments across, I’ll give her that.

The biggest problem was that everything she had said was true. Winning against this party of heroes wouldn’t automatically end the evaluation. It would just put me in a good position for judgement when the overseers called a stop to things.

But without essence, I was defenseless. Like she said, when other heroes inevitably came, I’d have no resources.

At least if I let her and her brothers leave and spared my essence, there was a chance I could beat the next set of heroes. Or that I could at least talk the overseers round.

That was my choice. Death by a hero’s sword, or death when the overseers smashed me up.

Sometimes, there are real drawbacks to being a core.

“Get out of here,” I told her. “You and your brothers.”

“Just wait,” said Vedetta. “Wait here, Beno, and I’ll fix this. Thank you.”

“Wait here? Where in all hells else would I go?”

CHAPTER 34

This should have been a time for celebration, for basking in the deaths of my enemies, for stripping their corpses for loot while practicing my cackle. I had been so, so close.

Now I was in a dungeon filled with heroes corpses, yet every single body and bloodstain was a symbol of how so near to victory I had gotten, yet had failed miserably.

Tomlin and Wylie and Gary tried to comfort me, but I was in a horrible mood. I couldn’t bring myself to loot the heroes or to do any work. I floated restlessly, spending hours going from one dungeon chamber to the next, turning it all over in my mind, considering all the ways I was absolutely screwed.

And then I heard footsteps.

Someone spoke to me.

“Core Beno?”

My first thought, in a flicker of hope, was that Vedetta was back with some miraculous solution.

“Core Beno, please join me in your core room.”

It was Overseer Bolton. Here to gloat, no doubt. Here to deliver his judgment that I be smashed into thousands of pieces, and those pieces used to create a core for a new soul.

A brief, crazy idea sparked in my head. That I should order Gary to kill the overseer.

No, that was both idiotic and useless. A core’s creatures couldn’t harm an overseer.

The best thing I could do would be to get things straight in my head. Work out my arguments, and somehow convince the overseers that I shouldn’t be immediately pulverized.

I gave my kobolds and my spider-leech-troll monster a sad smile. “It’s been great getting to know you all,” I told them. And then I didn’t have the heart to say anything else.

I tried to make myself resolute. To face whatever happened next like a true core.

As I prepared to hop into the core room, I heard something else.

Footsteps and voices, but coming from the dungeon entrance.

Heroes? Now?

I hopped into the room next to the entrance room so that I could hear them without being seen. It was then that I heard a familiar voice. The voice of a little girl.

“Just down here,” she said. “I told you, didn’t I?”

A deep, harsh voice replied to her. “Very good, girl. You weren’t lying after all. You say there’s treasure down here?”

“There sure is. You just need to walk through that door.”

I cast my core vision to the entrance, where I saw a man step into my dungeon.

A tall man wearing leather armor, with a patch over his right eye, and a piece of wood where his left leg should be.

This was no hero, I knew that much. I could sense the foulness coming from him. The complete lack of morality. I could see, just by looking at him, that he had a dark aura. Not that it was his eye patch or peg leg that made it so. After all, many pirates are said to be lovely guys when you get to know them. It was more that I could sense the corruptness of his soul.

So he certainly wasn’t a hero, no. Not in the moral sense, anyway. Yet, he had walked into my dungeon willingly, seemingly led here by Vedetta in search of treasure.

Vedetta stayed by the dungeon door, not stepping foot over the threshold. The door slammed shut, trapping the man here. Trapping the man who, by voluntarily walking into the Whispering Caverns of Gary Fight Kill, had just deemed himself as a hero. Technically.

Now I understood what Vedetta had meant by fixing things for me.

Sort of.

Was this man a bandit? Could he even be the bandit who had killed Vedetta’s father?

“Core Beno,” said a voice across the dungeon. “I am not accustomed to waiting.”

Aha! Vedetta had delivered me a second chance. If I killed this man, this