The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (read novel full .txt) 📕

portentous; altogether, however, it shouted, “watch out” and “stay away” to those with a particularly superstitious bent to their thinking.

Unfortunately, that was almost every single Fairy in existence.

Now with her Mentor being killed within moments of her arrival, accompanying the tragic fate of her parents shortly after she was born, she was even more likely to be shunned by anyone she met.  Luckily, Tacca herself didn’t believe in any of that nonsense, so all she had to do was convince the Dungeon Core she would be working with that she was an asset rather than a liability.  It can’t be that hard, could it?

After leaving the DAPS building, the newly graduated and Mentor-less Dungeon Assistant took the long way to the distant DPRC headquarters; she could’ve Translocated directly above it after being mentally sent the location by the Head Instructor, but she was in no hurry.  Her eagerness surrounding graduation and further hands-on training with a Mentor was completely gone, extinguished by the events of the last few hours.

Instead of Translocating directly there, Tacca spent the 10-hour flight across the landscape trying and failing to think about anything other than what had happened to Expert Assistant Cobalt and his Dungeon Core. Is this really what I want to do, still?  Am I going to end up like my parents and my Mentor and quickly perish within a dungeon?  Are these so-called “omens” correct and I’m just bad luck?  She didn’t think that she had any more bad luck than any other Fairy, because there was no indication of it when she was brought up by the kindly older faculty of DAPS, nor during her actual schooling.  In fact, she honestly thought it was good luck that she had managed to be raised by a place that taught the only subject she was passionate about and being a Dungeon Assistant was the only thing she ever wanted to be.

Maybe it’s only “bad luck” when it has to do with actual dungeons and Dungeon Cores?  She refused to give into the same superstition as all the students – and Head Instructor Lapis, obviously – had concerning her, however, so she dismissed that thought.  Besides, Expert Assistant Cobalt and the dungeon he was a part of were already being invaded when I arrived, so my being there had nothing to do with it, Tacca firmly told herself.  Or…was my impending arrival enough to justify it being bad luck?  A little part of her mind refused to be silent, though, and stray thoughts like that kept popping up.

To distract her further, she finally pulled up the menu she received the day before as part of the entire Dungeon Assistant program.

Dungeon Assistant Information

Assistant Name:

Tacca GloomLily

Assistant Rank:

Novice

Assistant Stage:

1/5

Experience:

0/100

Experience Pending/Countdown:

0 in 1 Year

Fairy Mana (FM):

100/100

Fairy Mana Regeneration:

5 per minute

Abilities:

Core Bond

Instant

50 FM

Translocation

Instant

70 FM

Hibernate

Sustainable

1 FM per minute

Invisibility

Sustainable

3 FM per minute

Repellant Shield

Sustainable

2 FM per minute

There wasn’t a lot to it quite yet, mainly because she was just starting out as a new Novice-Ranked Assistant.  There were 5 stages per Rank, and 5 Ranks total (Novice, Adept, Expert, Master, Supreme), so she was at the lowest of the low.  The only way to grow and acquire access to greater amounts of Fairy Mana and Abilities was to acquire “Experience”, which was only possible when bonded to a Dungeon Core – and only after a requisite amount of time.  At her current Rank, she had to stay bonded to a Dungeon Core for an entire year before she actually acquired that experience; she knew that those time frames would only increase as her Rank progressed, but a year was more than long enough for her right now.

With a really productive and smart pairing between an Assistant and a Dungeon Core, Tacca knew it was theoretically possible to raise her Rank all the way up to Adept in a single year if the Core followed her strict strategic planning – which she had developed over dozens of hours of analyzing different historical dungeon models and growth rates.  That was what she was most looking forward to, because as she improved in Rank, so too did the Dungeon Core get stronger – though it was an entirely different progression than her own; as much as she would appreciate being more versatile herself, she yearned to be part of a bond with a Core that might eventually be one of the world’s most powerful.  Something like that would likely take centuries, but when Fairies could live for hundreds of millennia, that amount of time was practically nothing.

Thoughts of her potential future sustained her throughout the flight and by the time she arrived she was quite tired; even though she didn’t need to eat like most creatures – she was sustained by the constant regeneration of ambient Fairy Mana alone – she still needed to sleep for short time periods every once in a while.  She had been awake for quite a while at that point, because she was too excited to sleep the night before because of her impending graduation, and that lack of sleep was starting to catch up to her.  I’ll just see where they are going to assign me and then try to catch a nap.

The DPRC building was not so much a structure as a grand entrance on the top of a mountain that led deep inside the natural formation.  Rumor had it that Mount Whipporwhill was originally the home of a powerful Dungeon Core, and its vast array of rooms were reinforced after it was destroyed and repurposed for the benefit of the Dungeon Placement and Regulatory Council.  All Tacca knew from her studies on world history was that it had been there for a long, long time – so whether or not that rumor was true was