The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (the dot read aloud TXT) 📖

– because the seventh was her Boss Room; there was no way – luck or not – that they would be able to defeat what she had arrayed inside there, mainly because it held more creatures than all of the other rooms combined.  She was expecting them (if they got through the sixth room easily enough) to turn back as soon as they saw what they were up against…but she had been surprised by their “luck” enough that literally anything was possible.

I’m going to have to do something about that in the future; I may just need to go as deep as possible and thoroughly defend my Core more than what is recommended.  She had already camouflaged the tunnel leading to her Core Room from her Boss Room by hiding it behind a tree, which was usually enough for Raiders to know that going farther was a bad idea; she thought she might even put in some signs in Common Tradespeak – if she could figure out how to do that without calling attention to her origins – with warnings on them.

Regardless of what she decided to do in the future, she knew it would be a challenge to do it with Shale watching over her shoulder the entire time.  If only there was a way to get him on my side, let him know about who I really am, and not have him report it back to the Council; I don’t know what that would take, but I’d be willing to do it if it meant not having to worry about accidentally revealing what I don’t mean to.

That seemed impossible, but she held out hope that it would happen one day.  In the meantime, she had more “lucky” Raiders to watch…

Chapter 26

Sterge collapsed to one knee, the pain and exhaustion from the fight finally getting to him.  His ragged breathing only seemed to increase the pain in his chest where he got hit by…something…and the multiple bites from what felt like dozens of different beasts attacking him all at the same time were starting to sting all over his legs and arms.  He had lost his new left leather vambrace at some point, so he could see puncture marks and the torn flesh from those bites, but they fortunately weren’t too deep and had stopped bleeding already.  All in all, it felt really bad, but he’d had worse days on the farm – though not much worse, of course.

He looked around to see only eight piles of rewards scattered about the relatively small stone-covered dungeon room.  I could’ve sworn there were at least two dozen of them.  Sterge shook his head as he caught his breath after the frantic fight, trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

The room had appeared to be “normal” enough, with ferns, wildflowers, and trees lining the perimeter; it wasn’t very big in fact, so he didn’t expect there to be many creatures within – but he was wrong…oh, so wrong.  As soon as he stepped two feet inside the room, he felt the tell-tale tingle of a trap and tried to retreat, but it seemed as though when he triggered it the trap couldn’t be evaded.  The next minute was extremely confusing – which he assumed was the point, as confusion seemed to be the objective of the trap.

All he remembered was not being able to focus on one thing at a time, as more of the tree-based dog-wolf thingies jumped down from their branches, the brown foxes rushed out from the roots of the trees, and an army of the green-striped beasts emerged from out behind the ferns.  At least, it felt like an army, but it was obviously only two or three of them, but at the time he couldn’t really tell.

Sterge did have a memory of pulling his shortsword from his belt with his left hand – after letting go of the shield handle – before he was quickly overwhelmed by beasts trying to bite and rend the flesh from his bones; after that, it was a bit of a blur.  His upper arms and shoulders, despite being relatively free from actual wounds, were sore – as if he had been swinging around his weapons without stopping for hours.  I must’ve just laid into whatever was around me; I’m glad Gwenda wasn’t near when I started to do that—

He abruptly looked around for her, as she had been completely forgotten when the massive confusion settled in on him.  She was near the entrance with a slightly strained look on her face and a limp as she walked over to him.  “Are you alright?  You sort of…seemed lost there for a minute or so.”

“Uh…I think so, but I hurt so much that I don’t think it would be wise to go on.  I’m not sure we can rely on finding something else to heal us…and I’m putting my foot down on that,” Sterge replied, before looking down at his best friend’s foot, which Gwenda was doing her best to keep weight off of.  “Speaking of that, what exactly happened to your foot?”

She winced as she shifted her weight – likely in an effort to get more comfortable.  “Well, after you went a little wild and just started swinging your weapons at everything randomly, I tried to stop one of those brown foxes from jumping on your back by shooting it with my Magistrike spell.  I ended up killing it as it got flung against the wall, but its two friends didn’t like what I did; they broke off their attack on you and raced towards me.  I managed to hit another one back towards you, which you accidentally stepped on and crushed its head, but the other made it to me and latched onto my foot.  I ended up bashing it to death with my staff—” she said sadly as she held up her now-shortened wooden stick— “but