Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Alex Oakchest (list of ebook readers .TXT) 📖

“Go through the trapped tunnel?”

“The other three are just as likely to be trapped, we just don’t know it yet. This one, however…we already sprung the trap. Isn’t that why we brought our ferrets?”

The obese goblin nodded. “Ferrets!” he shouted. “Come back to Gerk!”

The bard sighed, while idly drumming his fingers on his tambourine. “Gerk? How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling yourself that?”

“It sounds better than my real name!”

“How does it sound better?”

“More goblinesque. Tougher.”

“Use your real name. Whitley. It’s a nice name. I know you idolize parts of our culture, but the days of monosyllabic names are over. We’re different now.”

Whitley nodded, and his great shoulders slumped a little. “Okay, Rupert.”

The humans arrived back, only three of them this time, each looking terrified.

“Ferrets,” said Whitley, once again hitting his palm with his warhammer, “Walk on. That tunnel there, where the other ferret went.”

I couldn’t see which way they went now; I’d have to go ahead a little. Something held me back. I guess it was that I needed to process what I had just seen.

For one, the Seekers appeared to be a highly sophisticated goblin race. They spoke well and they were well equipped.

Secondly, they kept humans as slaves of some kind and used them to disarm traps not with skill or deftness, but by blindly walking into them.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “Why don’t the humans fight back? They have swords.”

“Perhaps for a similar reason your monsters do not fight you,” said Shadow. “I have paws and claws, do I not?”

Well, that put me in my place, didn’t it?

“Let’s get forward, catch them up a little. Not too close, though.”

“Thank you, Core,” said Shadow. “As a scout, I would not have thought to avoid getting too close.”

As shadow crept forward, I had a little time to plan.

I knew I was facing a party of seven Seekers. The three humans didn’t worry me, and it was more than likely they’d succumb to traps anyway given the goblins’ creative way of disarming them.

So, that left the bard, warrior, ranger, and the warhammer brute. I wasn’t going to take them lightly. With my present resources, they would pulverize any offensive force I could put against them. I could summon maybe five kobolds. Or four angry elemental jelly cubes. Or two sinister owls. Not enough by far. That wasn’t even a posse, let alone an army.

So, what about traps?

Again, I only had 340 essence points, which meant I could afford to place 3 pitfalls. With only a thin spread of essence vines so far, it’d take days before my essence regenerated. That was a no go. Three pitfalls wouldn’t take care of seven Seekers.

This left puzzles, something I hadn’t considered yet. While traps and monsters are there to inflict physical pain, puzzles are usually placed early on in a dungeon, to mentally drain the heroes. A good riddle door or two can sap a hero's brainpower just enough that later, in battle, they lose a second of their instinctual response. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

The problem is that by themselves, puzzles won’t wipe out a party. Nobody ever died by guessing a riddle wrongly.

Hmm. What could I devise with the meager resources I had, that would either wipe out a party of seven or force them to flee?

CHAPTER 10

First-leaf Godwin removed his boots and put his feet in the goat’s milk soak. It was hot enough that he could feel it seep into his skin, but not so hot that it burned. Getting the right balance was difficult, and he was finding it harder and harder lately.

As he sat there, in his home with the door shut and bolted and the windows covered, he let his face relax. Lately, the skin under his chin had begun to sag so much that it made him look like a toad. So, he’d started clenching his jaw whenever he was in public, and this made him look stern, and his voice sounded gruff.

“It won’t get any better,” he told Goldie, his pet Labrador dog who walked over to him now, tail wagging.

No, it was only going to get worse. Every year brought more wrinkles, more aches, more sagging skin. And for what?

So many people in Xynnar searched for the fabled mana springs that were said to be underground, and so few ever found them, even after years of searching, even after a lifetime of dedication to that one goal.

What none of them realized that everlasting life didn’t mean everlasting happiness, and especially not everlasting health.

Of course, it wasn’t everlasting life, was it? It was merely extended life, stretched centuries beyond what any mortal should have. First-leaf was a smooth-skinned, young gnome when he first filled a bucket with mana from the spring, and he hadn’t understood it back then.

Now, though. Now he knew what it really meant. It was as if life was a rock. It was the way it was, no changing it.

The mana spring turned life into a piece of dough so that it could be stretched out again and again, becoming hundreds of times longer than it should have been.

“What happens to a piece of dough when you stretch it too far, Goldie?” he said.

His best friend licked his shriveled hand.

“It weakens. It gets thinner and thinner, until it’s good for nothing, and then it snaps.”

You only had to walk around the cavern to see that this was true. Every person, every gnome, every orc who lived in the caverns looked like a shred of their former selves. They shambled around like the undead, with immortality taking its toll on them. Every year they grew weaker. There would come a time when all the First Leaves were bedridden, yet