Dungeon of Chance: Even Odds: A Dungeon Core Novel (Serious Probabilities Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (book recommendations txt) 📖

started to tap on the pale yellow-colored Spawn Eggs.  This time there were 7 of them, with 2 of the darker yellow and a similar golden-colored one he assumed was going to be the guaranteed 3-Star again—it better not be another cat!

After 6 of the pale-yellow Eggs he opened – with more 1-Star Common monsters inside (no cats, thank goodness) – the 7th Egg contained something different.  It still had a glass slab being presented to him, but it wasn’t a monster of any sort: it was his first trap.

The image inside of the slab was of a hallway not too dissimilar to his own; near the ceiling of the hallway there were holes that had what appeared to be sharpened wooden stakes protruding and pointing towards the floor.  For some reason, Clay got the impression that they were moving at high speed, and were meant to impale whoever passed beneath it.  The description below certainly implied that, as well.

Vertical Impalement ★

Type: Piercing

Material: Wood

Location: Hallway

Damage: Low

Low damage?  I would think that those would hurt quite a bit, even if they were only dropped from a few feet. 

“You should—never mind.”  This time, there was very little time between Dwight starting to admonish him for knowing something as a Hero and stopping herself in mid-sentence.  And, even better, her annoying tone was nearly gone when she explained further.  “Heroes are a lot more resilient than your normal Human, as their Classes afford them a measure of damage and pain mitigation, even in some of the physically weaker spell-casting Classes.  You’ll find that if you raise the Star rating of this trap, the material will begin to change, the speed of impalement will increase, and the trap will become much harder to detect – among other things.”

Before he opened up the rest of the Eggs, Clay looked at his Available Traps through his Transcribed Status.

Available Traps

Name

Location

Quantity

Required for Evolution

Vertical Impalement ★

Hallway

1

5

Unlike his monsters, there wasn’t a Rarity to the trap, and it only required 5 of them to go through an Evolution to the next Star rating.  What was more, there wasn’t a limit to how many he could possess at one time, so he wouldn’t have to sacrifice them to the Altar to make room for additional traps.

Of course, the whole idea of traps still made Clay a little squeamish.  His monsters could potentially be used for anything, but this trap was made specifically to kill people.  The impression he got was that unless there was a threat of potential death for the Heroes, then they would never really face a challenge, never get stronger as a result, and then when a World Threat emerged, they would be ill-equipped to kill it.  That logical reasoning didn’t really help to ease his mind, however.

Egg number 8 was another Kobold, though it had a Dark Element rather than a Fire one.

Gloom Kobold ★★

Attack Type: Stealth

Rarity: Uncommon

Element: Dark

The other dark-yellow Spawn Egg, however, was something new…and disturbing.

Explosive Shambler ★★

Attack Type: Melee, Magical

Rarity: Uncommon

Element: Fire

It was a dead Human.  Walking upright.  And apparently it could explode?

All in all, it was disturbing looking at the image of what he assumed was some sort of undead monster, and calling it Human might have been a bit of a misnomer.  If it had been Human at one time, it certainly wasn’t anymore – for at least a number of years; its flesh was dried and rotted on its bones, the clothes that it had worn at one point were no more than scraps. And it had no eyes, it bore no nose, and it only possessed half an ear.  The main difference between this undead thing and a Human, however, was the fact that its fingers were at least twice as long as “normal” and had sharp fingernails attached to the ends of them.  In reality, they were more like claws than anything else.

Moving on, Clay opened up his golden egg, hoping and praying that it wouldn’t be another cat…

Leaping Cat ★★★

Attack Type: Aerial, Melee

Rarity: Common

Element: Air

NOOOOO!!!!!  WHY!!!!!  If he could cry, his BOO would be full of the tears born of his frustration.  I swear that blasted cat is doing this somehow! 

Immediately opening up the Sacrificial Altar, he got rid of his new cat monster without hesitation, netting him an additional 3 Chips in the process.  Then, he turned back to the Summoning Portal and figuratively crossed his toes in a gesture of good luck as he bought another Bundle Pack #1….

Chapter 12

As strange as the whole situation was, it turned out that Jeska and Arcen weren’t the only ones to acquire a Class Orb Tier 0 in their city.  In total, there were 28 additional people between the ages of 19 and 34 that woke up that morning to find a strange ball of light floating near their beds.  Jeska and Arcen – at ages 20 and 22, respectively – were at the younger end of the spectrum of new Heroes, but overall, the age difference didn’t really matter.  What did matter was the giant upheaval that was going through Chardelia at the sudden emergence of their new presence on Sunfall Island.  Not just because of the overarching reason they might be needed, but on a socio-economic level.

Or that was what Jeska was told by their father later that day.

There were new Heroes that came from almost all walks of society, including 3 beggars, 2 sailors, a seamstress, the only child of the owner of the largest shipping conglomerate, 2 prostitutes, a handful of merchants, a fishwife, 2 shipbuilders including one Master-skilled shipbuilder, 3 fishermen, and a variety of different professions throughout the city.  While there were thousands of people living in the city, the loss of some of those