Dungeon core academy 4, p.4
Dungeon Core Academy 4, page 4
Never mind. I didn’t have time for that.
Instead, I focused back on my post-battle notifications.
So, I had earned the float ability? Well, that was a pick-me-up after a horrible few weeks.
The last time I had unlocked an ability through killing heroes and leveling up my core self, I had gained the power of core control. Core control let me assume control of my dungeon monsters for a limited time. It was incredibly useful and meant that in times of crisis, I could wield my monsters like a hero wielded a blade.
There was no arguing that in terms of dungeon effectiveness, core control was more powerful than float. So, why was I a lot more excited to earn the float power?
Until now, there were only two ways I could travel somewhere. One was by using pedestal points, which would allow me to leave one room and materialize on a pedestal in another. This limited me to traveling to rooms that already had pedestals in them, which ruled out most of Xynnar.
My second way of travel was simpler but less dignified - by being carried. What sort of diabolical evil-doer likes being carried around like a cat? No, that wasn’t for me, and as such, it meant that I was confined to my dungeon and select parts of Yondersun.
But now…
“What are you so happy about?” said a voice.
A man strode into the core room. He wore a ridiculously frilly shirt, a velvet jacket with a golden brooch clasped to the hem, silk trousers the color of sunlight, and a pair of winkle pickers that must once have belonged to a jester. As he strutted toward me, I briefly activated my core senses and was rewarded with a smell of pungent perfume. I closed my core senses just as quickly.
“Gulliver!” I said. “A nice surprise. So that was why I heard cheering in the core room.”
For some reason, my dungeon creatures loved Gulliver. I couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t that I disliked him; as humans go, he was one of my best friends. For some reason, though, my creatures acted as if a visit from Gulliver was like having a king come to town.
“The one and only,” Gulliver said. “Yes, it’s yours truly. The greatest scribe in the whole of Xynnar, the greatest lover in the land, and a rather nice guy to boot.” He flashed me a smile. “It’s good to see you, Beno! What’s got you looking so cheery?”
“You can tell that I’m in a good mood?”
“You might be made of minerals, but I know when you’re pleased. Like the times when you disembowel a poor sap in your loot room, or when you see one of your monsters tear a hero to pieces. You get excited in an innocent, rather childlike way.”
“Watch this,” I said.
I floated off my pedestal and hovered in the air three feet away from it. It was a strange feeling, being suspended like that. Having no limits on where I could move. I felt as if someone had just cut through chains holding me back.
“See? How fantastic is that?”
Gulliver said nothing and betrayed not a hint of excitement. “Well?” he said. “What am I waiting for?”
“I’m floating, Gull! I’m moving around, and I’m not on a pedestal!”
“Haven’t you always been able to float?”
“Obviously not.”
“I don’t know…I’m certain you have.”
“Well, you spent so long in my dungeon that you wrote a bloody book about it! Why not check your writings and see if there’s mentioning of me being able to float around?”
“I might just do that, Beno. While we’re on the subject of books and favors that you owe me, I need to speak to you.”
“Favors that I owe you?”
“Why, yes. For the book.”
“The book that restored your career and earned you a fat wedge of gold? The one you barely needed to write, and instead got your inspiration directly from my dungeon exploits?”
“Let’s not pretend it didn’t earn you any coins either, Beno. I was true to my word, and I paid you fair royalties.”
“Fine, you stuck to your word and didn’t try to stiff me. But today isn’t the best day to discuss that. I’m a little busy.”
“Yes, I had a chat with Wylie before I came to see you. He was taking a wheelbarrow full of body parts outside, and the tunnel leading to your loot room is drenched in blood. Business is good, I take it? Lots of heroes coming to visit?”
“Not exactly.”
“It was rather a lot of blood, Beno.”
“It isn’t that a lot of heroes have come. It’s the same hero who’s visited several times. The bugger kept defeating me and making off with my loot.”
“He didn’t look like he’d made off with anything to me,” said Gulliver. “Not judging by the pile of flesh in the wheelbarrow.”
“Let me start at the beginning.”
I explained everything to Gulliver, starting with Cael and his brothers’ first appearance in my dungeon, the subsequent times they beat me, my hard work and new plan to get my own back, and ending with Cael’s vow of revenge.
Gulliver drummed his chin. “Hmm. You have a hero who is very capable, experienced, and has vowed to not just take loot from you, but to destroy you personally. Quite a quandary. Quite a quandary indeed. An awful quandary to be in.”
“Would you stop saying quandary?”
“Perhaps it would be better to have an old pal stick around for a while. Someone to run ideas by, someone to give you dollops of sage advice.”
“Let me guess; you need to write another book.”
“Ah, Beno. Always so cynical.”
“I’ll go one step further in my guess, then. Despite the success of the last book that you wrote about my exploits, you’ve wasted a mountain of gold, you’re broke, and you need to write another.”
“This dungeon is having a negative effect on you, Beno. It’s giving you a dim view of the world. Why so skeptical? Why not give your friend the benefit of the doubt? Is it completely impossible that I might have come to visit you for friendship’s sake?”
“Fine. I suppose I have misjudged you before now, and you proved me wrong. I’m sorry, Gulliver.”
“Apology accepted. Now, I have gotten myself into quite a lot of debt. I need gold, and that means I need to write another book. Hence, I need stuff to put in that book. So, chum, I’m going to hang around for a while and see if anything happens that’s worthy of another of my genius tomes. Since you have something going on with this Cael fellow, perhaps you could use the advice of one as seasoned and experienced as me? I used to be a warscribe, after all. First, how do we know this Cael fellow will even come back? People say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.”
“I killed his brothers, Gull.”
“All’s fair with heroes and dungeons. Everyone knows the risks they take when they creep into a tomb. If they don’t, then natural selection wins again. When Cael calms down, he might realize it’s best to write this off as a bad day, and find another dungeon to raid.”
“This is a matter of honor for him. He swore a vow and everything.”
“Ah. He’s one of those heroes, is he? The vowing kind. Right. So what’s the plan?”
“Three options, as I see it,” I said. “One, I leave this dungeon and open a new one far, far away.”
“Rather cowardly, Beno. Doesn’t sound like you.”
“No, but if we’re considering options, let’s consider them all. And…that’s done. Option one is considered and thus rejected. So that leaves me two choices; either pack my dungeon to the gills with creatures and traps to make it stronger than ever before, or…”
“Pack it with puppies and treats and make him think he’s got the wrong address?”
“Or, instead of waiting for Cael to show up here, I go hunting for him. Right now, he’s alone, tired, and injured. It’s the perfect time to strike, and he won’t expect it. Who has ever heard of a dungeon core leaving his dungeon and going hunting for heroes?”
“Ah. You might be on to something! I once served as Duke Kester’s warscribe back when he tried to spread civility to the remote settlements in the far west, across the river of Tanyor. Never mind that the civilizations out there are thousands of years older than ours and far more civil than some jumped-up duke…but anyway, we were crossing through dense jungle to shave a day off our travel time, when we were beset by vine reavers. Big, ugly, horrible beasts that love nothing more than to tear a man apart. Disgusting, bloodthirsty creatures. No offense to you or your dungeon monsters, Beno.”
“None taken,” I said. “I’m proud to have my beasts compared to vine weavers.”
“Reavers. Vine weavers are something else entirely.”
“I know.”
“You were making a joke? Beno, you have really changed!”
“Come on, do you think there’s a creature out there that I don’t know about?” I said. “I read every creature book in the Dungeon Core Academy.”
“Nobody likes a show-off, Beno. Anyway, we fled from them. All 200 of the duke’s soldiers running through the jungle like cats fleeing a broom. It didn’t matter how fast we ran; the reavers caught us and destroyed half our host before the first night was through.
We spent all that night discussing it, coming up with plans to get out of the jungle, to outrun these beasts who could sprint faster than a cheetah with its arse on fire. We had nothing. Not a single plan.
And then…we decided to just face them. To brandish our swords, to cast a few spells, and at least go down fighting. Do you know what happened? At the first sight of us taking the fight to them, the reavers ran away! They had rarely encountered men, you see. They certainly had never come across an animal that ceased behaving like prey and instead acted like a predator.
That’s why this might actually work, Beno. Nobody likes it when their opponent doesn’t act the way they expect. I say you’re right; let’s chase this Cael fella, hunt him down, and you can do your whole slaughter thing. What’s stopping you?”
“For one, even on his own, Cael is no joke. He’s a wartificer. They get their powers by having scars gouged onto their bodies, and they draw the shape of their scars on their weapons and armor when they need to wield their powers. Getting even one wartificer scar is excruciating, I’m told. So far I’ve seen Cael use at least five different runemarks. He’s not averse to discomfort.”
“Pain threshold or not, he can still die.”
“Which leads me to my next problem. See, throughout all my life as a dungeon core, through tons of fights with heroes, I’ve always ascribed to one rule; to kill someone, you need to know where they are.”
“Ah. Cael left via a portal.”
“Exactly. He used a portal stone, which means he could be anywhere in Xynnar. Although I can leave my dungeon now that I can float, the further away I am, the more vulnerable I become. My essence use outside the dungeon is weak at best, which means I can’t create more monsters when I leave it.”
“And you don’t want to be wandering around Xynnar asking every arse-scratching merchant or commoner excuse me, have you seen a hero named Cael?”
“That’s the size of it. I need to know where this cabbage brain is.”
“Well, Beno my friend, there exist in this fine world a thing called towns, though you might not realize it. In those towns are people called merchants, who offer goods and services in exchange for recompense. Some of those merchants…”
“Spare me the wit, Gull. I had enough of it reading your last book.”
Gulliver sighed. “Such disregard for language. You have no culture, Beno. If you want it said simply, then fine. Here it is. There’s a town fifty miles away, Hogsfeate, where a mage named Hardere lives. Among his many services, he can trace a person even if they hop through a dozen portals. Moneylenders utilize his services quite a lot. Unless you bribe him to refuse service to moneylenders first, of course. Not that I’m speaking from experience. But anyway, you just need some of your target’s blood, and Hardere will do the rest.”
“Blood? That’s good news! I have lots of it.”
“Not his brothers’ blood, Beno. Cael’s.”
“Yes? I have lots of that, too. He might have beaten me and taken my loot every time he came here, but I never made it easy. Let me check some of my bloodstains; I’m sure one belongs to him. Wylie has been keeping track of them, it’s something of a hobby for him.”
“There, you see? Good old Gulliver comes to visit, and all your problems are solved.”
“Not quite.”
“No? We’ll go to Hogsfeate, track Cael, and then you can murder him before he has a chance to recover, get stronger, and come back for you.”
“It won’t be that easy, Gull.”
“No? I thought I explained it well enough.”
“I told you; away from my dungeon, I can barely use my essence. I certainly can’t use it to create monsters. That means I’ll need to take an army of creatures with me once I know where he is. So far, Cael has been too strong for any of my monsters. I’ll need something new. A creature he can’t beat.”
“Why not conjure one while you’re in your dungeon, and then bring it to Hogsfeate with you?”
“Walk around town with a monster in tow? They’ll love that. No, Gull. Anyway, no monster I can make at my current core level is good enough to defeat Cael. But there’s a different way to get a better monster. I could persuade a wild one to join me.”
“We’re getting a little out of my area of expertise now, Beno. I’m not a monster tamer. Though I did once trap a wasp in a cup and release it outside a tavern.”
“Leave it to me. When we go to Hogsfeate, I’ll check the bounties board. Every town has a board where people post jobs for mercenaries to complete. Most of the jobs are mundane; ‘go kill the bandits who stole my coin purse.’ You know, that sort of thing. Every so often, a bounty will be posted asking for some man-at-arms to go take care of a monster plaguing the nearby area.”
“Ah. And if Hogsfeate has any monsters nearby, you’ll…what? Recruit them?”
“It is rarely that easy, but we’ll deal with that when we come to it. I take it you’re coming to Hogsfeate with me?”
“Then I can write the second book? Another tale of Core Beno and his treacherous army of darkness?”
“Hey! Less of the treacherous. But yes, you can write it. Pack your things, and we’ll go, and for demons’ sake, Gulliver…lose the winkle pickers.”
CHAPTER 4
“Move the trap nearest to your foot an inch to the right,” I said. “And the one just behind you isn’t set properly. See the spring? Please be more careful, Wylie. You’re not much use as a miner if you have no arms.”
A flicker of frustration crossed Wylie’s face before he hid it. I didn’t blame him. We had been playing around with trap configurations for hours now, and he was the one risking his limbs by moving all the devices around. I merely floated above him and barked orders, but hey, that was one of the perks of being the dungeon core.
“Dark Lord?” said a voice.
It was Maginhart, one of my kobolds. Kobolds were a mix of wolf and lizard, and while most of them had a heavier wolf weighting of appearance and instincts, Maginhart had much more of the lizard in him. Most of his skin was scaly, with few hairs growing in the cracks between them. Only his ears were hairy enough to be described as wolfish.
“What can I do for you, Maginhart?”
“I have a requessst,” he said, his lizard tongue rattling as he spoke.
“If this is about extending break times again, I already told Tarius that…”
“No, Dark Lord.” He looked at the ground and then took a breath, as if gathering his confidence. “I wisssh to leave the mining team, Dark Lord.”
This was the first time a kobold had ever asked me something like this.
“Excuse me?”
“I feel my talentsss may lie elssssewhere, in thingsss other than usssing a pickaxe.”
I quickly accessed Maginhart’s skill list from within my core.
Race: Kobold
Class: Miner
Level: 24
Weapon proficiency: Crossbow
Special Relationships:
Cynthia [Tinker]: Warm Acquaintance
Hmm. Although Maginhart had learned how to use a crossbow and had fostered a relationship with Cynthia the Yondersun tinker after running errands for me, there was nothing to suggest he should be employed doing anything else.
“You’re one of my most experienced miners, Maginhart.”
“You can alwaysss get more minersss, Dark Lord.”
“True, but it would be inefficient for me to move you to something else, losing 24 levels of mining progress.”
“But Dark Lord…”
“I’m sorry, Maginhart. Times are tough for us at the moment, with recent hero raids. I don’t have the luxury of catering to everyone’s tastes.”
“Dark Lord, I mussst sssay…”
“Enough. Our conversation is over.”
Maginhart walked out of the chamber, shoulders slumped. I felt like an arse as I watched him go, and I wished that I could change things around for him. I wasn’t just feeding him excuses; right now, I couldn’t afford to mess around with division of labor. Still, it didn’t feel great to have to disappoint him.
A loud stomping of boots came from beyond the chamber, making the walls, ceiling, and ground shake, and causing a dozen metal traps to rattle. Wylie, standing in the middle of a sea of deadly traps, froze on the spot.
“Easy,” I told him. “No sudden movements.”
“Sounds like you have visitors, Beno,” said Gulliver, who was leaning against the wall with his scribble book in one hand, a feathered quill in the other, having offered Wylie and me no help whatsoever. Then again, that was Gulliver’s way. He simply skulked in the shadows and made notes for his book, while occasionally offering us a sampling of his wit.
“Do you think? Ah. I finally understand why they say writers are so perceptive.”
“Heroes, do you reckon?” he said.
