The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3) by Jonathan Brooks (the false prince TXT) 📕

“Sure.  Absolutely.”

They continued walking cautiously down the tunnel leading further into the mountain, the Gnoll Scout staying the same distance away from them, when her creature suddenly dropped from their view.

“Whoa!  Where’d it go?”  The leather-armored Hill Dwarf advanced cautiously, obviously expecting some sort of trap, but there wasn’t anything dangerous ahead.  Dangerously fun, maybe, but it wouldn’t hurt him.  “There’s a drop-off here, though it appears sloped instead of straight down.  What do you think it is?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious, especially if you consider that this might be an additional section of the dungeon.  If I’m not too far off, the first few rooms we’re familiar with are over that way,” Gwenda said, flicking her hands off to her right and a little ahead, indicating that she was referring to behind the stone walls.  “That being said, unless everything has changed drastically, there’s really no other place to put some new rooms…other than down below.”  With that, and before Sterge could stop her, Gwenda stepped off of the edge and promptly slipped onto her butt when her foot hit the polished and slick stone surface of the wide chute leading downwards.

Sterge just stood there with his mouth open, shocked as the other Hill Dwarf immediately disappeared out of sight as she slid down the curving shaft.  Gwenda screamed in fright at first, but Tacca could hear its tone change from fear to excitement in just a few seconds.  The slope gradually steepened from the gentle decline to one that sped her up even further, as she practically flew down the stone-made slide at nearly insane speeds.  Eventually, the slope leveled out little by little, becoming nearly horizontal; when Gwenda finally stopped, 20 feet before the end of the chute that ended in a blank wall, she was practically laughing.

Sterge, on the other hand, was screaming in worry and fright as he plummeted after the female Hill Dwarf, banging his face a few times with the shield he held on his left arm when it would smack against the side of the slide.  Tacca felt a little sorry for him, but if he had just relaxed he would’ve been fine.

That worked better than I had hoped.

“Gwenda!” Sterge immediately called out when he came to a stop and picked himself up.  “Where are—oh.”

The Gnoll Scout that had gone first was nowhere to be found, as Tacca had it slide down and disappear down one of the other rooms almost before Gwenda had taken the plunge.  While she could control the Gnoll somewhat near the entrance if it kept a certain distance away from the Raiders, as soon as the pair of Hill Dwarves were inside a room with any of her creatures, it would be difficult – if not impossible – to prevent an attack from happening.

“That was one of the dumbest—”

“Sterge—look!”

Gwenda clearly ignored Sterge’s admonition as she took in the sight of the placard in front of her.  In reality, it was a thin, 8-foot-wide and tall wall that Tacca had hastily constructed when she first saw the pair walking up the mountain, and the Dungeon Core had finished carving words into it just as the Hill Dwarves had entered her dungeon.

“I knew it!  I was certain that the dungeon didn’t have anything to do with what happened!” the female Raider exclaimed after a few seconds.

“What are you talking about?”

Gwenda waved at the large carved placard that Tacca had constructed.  “This is describing the attack on the other Raiders in detail, describing the ones that did it as ‘blue-skinned, six-armed, monstrous people’ that had some sort of magical shield that prevented them from being hurt.  The dungeon, the ‘Core’ it says, was damaged in the process of defending itself and took months to repair back to normal.  It ended up killing the invaders, but—oh, that’s not good.”

Tacca could see Sterge reading through the information the Core had placed on the large sheet of stone, though he was much slower at it than the Caster.  “What?  What’s wrong?”

“Here—do you see?” Gwenda said with a shaky voice, pointing to a particular part towards the end.  “It says that while the invaders were destroyed, they weren’t the only ones.  Towards the north of Abenlure, supposedly, these ‘monstrous people’ are attacking and destroying dungeons.”

“So?  That’s a long way from here; why does that matter?”

Gwenda put her hands on her hips and turned to Sterge.  “Don’t you remember what they did here?  Did you suddenly forget the corpses of the Raiders that were killed just outside of the dungeon?”

Tacca, for one, couldn’t forget the frightening scene of slaughter outside of her entrance.  The 5 invaders that had arrived seemingly out of nowhere outmatched even the strongest Raiders that had been nearby, though the majority of them had been low Level.  That didn’t mean that they were invulnerable, but it took literally everything that the Dungeon Core had at her disposal to destroy them, and she had barely made it out of it in one piece.  In fact, it was quite possible that she hadn’t made it out unscathed, as she was still stumped by the etchings all over her Core, as if she had been shattered and pieced back together.

“No, I’ve not forgotten.  But how do we know, uh, this—” Sterge pointed his finger at the placard— “is even telling the truth?  This could be some sort of trick—”

Gwenda, thankfully, just shook her head.  “I don’t think so, Sterge.  I also remember what happened to the dungeon when we were inside of it, how everything seemed to just disappear after that shockwave blasted us against the walls.  Even those more experienced Raiders with us, such as Jesper, knew that the dungeon had been destroyed; it’s kind