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

“Yes, my little friend.”

“Wylie alchemist miner!” he said, jumping and punching the air.

“We’ll start with the goblin bard,” I said. “Could you drag him to the middle of the red sphere?”

My kobolds followed my orders, and it all worked as well as I had hoped. Using the deconstructor sphere, I deconstructed the Seekers’ corpses until I was left with just their life essence.

The end result was a pile of dust with certain properties relating to the corpse it had come from. Much like the leech from which I had created vampiric dust, but the goblin dust was more concentrated since it had come from tougher, more complex lifeforms.

The goblin bard deconstructed to leave a pile of bard dust. The ranger left ranger dust, the warrior who had used a warhammer left barbarian dust, and the final goblin left a pile of standard warrior dust.

Unfortunately, the human corpses left nothing but their ashen remains. It seemed that none of them had earned a specialized class, and it was rather pathetic. It made me feel sad that they had spent their lives as slaves, never earning a class, never pursuing a destiny, only to die in a pit deep underground.

Still, you can't always get what you want, can you?

With the specialized dust I had gained from the goblins, there were unlimited possibilities. I had an idea for how I wanted to use them. The theory was sketchy, but I vaguely remembered reading something about it in the academy library.

“You can all leave,” I told Wylie and his crew. “I need a few trap and puzzle rooms carving out.”

“Wylie dig,” he said, giving a salute.

 Alone in the alchemy chamber, I felt my excitement begin to bubble again and I had to force myself to be calm.

I focused on the empty space ahead of me.

Create kobold.

My essence left me, becoming a spiral of light until it took the shape of a kobold. This one was the tallest kobold I had made by far, and it had a shock of red hair on its head and a red mustache above its wolf-like snout.

“Your name is Brecht,” I told him.

“The core chooses wisely, if I might say.”

“Good, you already seem reasonably clever. That’ll help with what I want to try.”

“Can I ask where my name comes from? A kobold must know his past.”

“Brecht is the middle name of the Soul Bard.”

“Soul Bard?”

“Right, you won't know who he is. It’s a fiction series about a bard, that’s all. You should read it. In fact, I might be able to get one of the books, and maybe you could join our book club? But anyway, one of his middle names is Brecht. He actually has 12 names in total. Gets tiresome when he says them all at once.”

“Delighted to meet you. And what may I call you?”

I could have just said Core Beno. Or Beno. Or even had him call me Dark Lord, like Tomlin did. But it’s good to freshen things up once in a while. Besides, Dark Lord was so vain a title. We can all use a little modesty from time to time.

“You can call me…His Dark Magnificence.”

Brecht suppressed a grin by covering his mouth. At least he knew the pecking order around here, if he was aware enough to hide his laugh. “A quite…fitting…name, my Dark Magnificence.”

“Now that’s settled, I have a job for you, Brecht. See that pile of orange dust on the ground?”

“Ah, I am to sweep the floors?”

“No, I want you to eat it.”

Brecht, to give him all credit, picked up a handful of the goblin dust and ate it. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t make a weird face. In fairness though, the wolf side of kobolds means that they’ll pretty much eat anything.

When he was done swallowing, I waited. And waited.

Did I get this wrong?

But then a message appeared, and a flood of excitement rushed through me.

Brecht is now a [Bard]

He begins as level 15.

Woah.

Level 15?

Just as I had expected, deconstructing the goblin bard had left his bardy essence behind. By ingesting it, Brecht had earned the bard class. This was amazing, because it opened up all sorts of choices for me. The more Seekers I slaughtered, the more chance to get different kinds of class dust.

But level 15? That was way, way beyond what I expected. It couldn’t have been my kobold proficiency, because that was only [minor]. Besides, more proficiency had only boosted Shadow to a level 5 scout.

It must have been the dust itself. I guessed that the goblin bard had been a high level, and remnants of his strength were in the dust.

“Brecht, in a moment you can head to the inventory room. There should be a magic tambourine in there.”

The inventory room was a space I had asked Wylie to excavate. The problem with killing loads and loads of people was that your dungeon became cluttered. I liked my dungeon to be somewhat tidy. Any items I looted, like armor and weapons and stuff, would go in the inventory room from now on.

“I will go now.”

“Hold on a second, my lovely bard. We still have work to do.”

The next thirty minutes were bloody brilliant, I don’t mind saying.

I spent them creating kobolds, one after another until I had eight including Brecht. I asked these beautiful creatures to eat different kinds of goblin dust, eventually ending up with a crack team of kobolds.

They had different ranges of classes and levels, and were far, far beyond any kind of offensive team I had hoped to make just an hour earlier.

Staring at them, I gave another command. This was something cores could do, but I hadn’t really created any creature worth doing it