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

were unhappy that they had to discuss sensitive attack strategies with a sleeping kid nearby. Reginal wouldn’t budge on it; Devry had to stay there with his bed and orb.

“Chief?” called a voice.

“Send her in please.”

The girl was tall and skinny. She had a human’s white-pink pallor, but a goblin’s eyes. Yeah, there was definitely goblin in her ancestry some way down the line. Looking like that would get her into trouble in some cities, Reginal thought with a sense of heaviness in his soul.

She wore thin cotton trousers and a shirt, with a tight leather cuirass over it. The leather was scorched, scratched, and covered in all manner of marks that you’d expect from a trapper. Gaining Tavia’s loyalty was a big score for the Eternals clan.

“Tavia?” he said.

“You’re the chief? Not gonna lie, chief, I expected someone bigger. You’re kinda wiry.”

“Goblins are built differently. We’re made for stamina, not strength. We’re made to outlast things.”

“Things like the Wrotun?” asked Tavia.

She glanced at Devry then, and Reginal instinctively moved for his dagger. He stopped himself, but the problem was he didn’t quite trust her yet, and he was way too protective of his boy.

“Relax,” said Tavia. “I must have been searched five times before they let me see you.”

“Five times? They’re getting lax. Take a seat.”

Tavia ignored his request and walked to the model of the tunnels. She paced around it, her eyes widening. “This is really good. It looks just like them. You really mapped it out well.”

Reginal was surprised at her attitude. Most of the older Wrotun defectors had needed several meetings with Reginal before they truly accepted the reality of things. Their mind washing had been so ingrained that it had been like trying to pry a barnacle from a whale’s arse.

The most difficult ones had been the family. Two parents, green-skinned and with three eyes. They had sought the surface just like the rest, but they hadn’t wanted to betray their people. They had seen the light in the end, though.

But this girl. She didn’t seem worried in the slightest.

“How much do you know?” asked Reginal.

Tavia picked up a little clay model of a bear trap and moved it just an inch to the right. “I usually cluster the bear traps around here,” she said. “Just by the corner. See, when people are turning corners they tend to look what’s ahead, not beneath.”

“You talk casually about the tools you used to kill my people.”

“Kill your people? I was defending my home. At least I thought I was.”

“Then you are starting to understand?” said Reginal.

“Maybe,” said Tavia. “But you guys really need to change your approach.”

“How so?”

“The dreams. It’s the wrong way to go about it.”

Ah, the dreams. It was many years ago that the clan decided that mindlessly attacking the tunnels through the surface doors wasn’t going to work.

So, they had made their minds up to infiltrate the Wrotun. The only problem was that the Wrotun were suspicious of goblins, so there was no question of sending someone into the caverns as a spy. This meant they needed someone from within the Wrotun to join them.

To get a Wrotun member to turn on their people, you needed to talk to them. How can you talk to people who live deep underground, rarely come to the surface, and feared you so much they would attack a goblin on sight rather than speak to them?

That was when Mage Acton had an idea. Then again, he always did.

Mage Acton was one of the eldest members of the clan. If you traced the clan’s family trees, he was probably Reginal’s fourth uncle or something like that. Goblin family trees tended to branch a little too close to each other.

He was an illusionist by training, having left the clan when he was ten years old to attend the Westharpeth Mage College, returning when he was twenty-one, a fully-grown goblin with mana in his veins and spells in his head. He had loyally served every clan chief since then, treating each equally. When the chief elections came around, Mage Acton always stayed out of the politics side of things.

Action’s idea was to use his illusionism to cast dreams into the minds of the Wrotun. It depended on choosing the most suggestible of them, which in turn meant picking the ones who might be unhappy with the leadership of the First Branch, or whatever stupid name the Wrotun elder had.

So Mage Acton fired illusions deep into the ground, penetrating the minds of numerous sleeping Wrotun people. He then focused on those who enjoyed the dream fully instead of waking up, though Reginal didn’t understand how he did this. He didn’t try to, either. He both needed magic desperately and feared it greatly.

With their targets selected, Mage Acton then cast more refined dreams, invading their target’s sleep with night-time visages that explained to them how the Eternals clan had been the rightful owners of the underground cave and the springs, and how the Wrotun had cast them out.

Reginal couldn’t believe how widespread the Wrotun elders’ stories were. The first-branches had all been around at the time of the invasion, but the branches after them had been born in the caverns, and they fully believed the propaganda that said it had been their home for centuries.

But dreams are a powerful thing indeed, and it was one year after beginning their plan, that the first Wrotun people left the cavern and sought out the Eternals clan to see if their dreams were true.

Now they had scored one of their biggest prizes yet; the Wrotun’s chief trap maker.

“Are you ready to help us?” Reginal asked her.

“I wasn’t. But I spent time in your camp. I can’t believe you let me come and go.”

“We want your willing service, or