Succubus 5 (Hardcore Dungeon Core): A LitRPG Series

by A. J. Markam

  Now Quint and his men were advancing to the next floor, where the elemental spirits awaited.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I hastily resurrected all the skeletons and placed them in ranks behind the fire, water, earth, and air monsters. I was just about to add in the mythological creatures too, when I figured I ought to check on the palace guard first.

  Not doing nearly as well as the Dungeon Guild.

  In fact, they were getting slaughtered.

  The slime mold bosses were dispatching the soldiers in a multitude of disturbing ways. A dozen guards were impaled on the rusted swords used by some slime molds as a carapace. Other creatures clung to the ceiling and launched pseudopods to engulf the men’s faces, then lifted them flailing up into the air.

  But most of the giant amoebas were absorbing the soldiers one by one.

  Over and over again, I saw desperate men submerged to their waists in green jelly, screaming in panic as they were slowly engulfed.

  Most of the slime molds contained dead bodies – and some not-so-dead bodies. Soldiers thrashed frantically within the gelatinous ooze, trying to claw their way out of the translucent green protoplasm.

  They failed. Their final exhalations were trapped like bubbles in amber, and then their bodies ceased moving as the slime molds began to slowly digest them.

  Ugh.

  One bright spot, though: no need to allocate the mythical creatures to the palace guard. They would get wiped out soon enough.

  But I needed to deal with Quint now, before the Rogue Dungeon showed up.

  When that would happen or what it would look like, I had no idea – but I wanted to neutralize Quint before we reached that point.

  Easier said than done.

  I zoomed back over to Quint and found him and his men beating the shit out of the elementals.

  “Throw your worst at us, dungeon!” Quint howled with glee, his face drenched with sweat beneath his black helm, his eyes shining crazily. “It’ll make my victory all the sweeter when I send your soul back to Hell where it belongs!”

  Jesus. He was just a little too into this.

  The newly resurrected skeleton bosses hadn’t even had an opportunity to move in yet, the dungeon floor was so crowded with elementals – although the elementals’ front line was disappearing at a furious pace in bursts of fire, puffs of steam, splashes of water, and crumbling piles of earth.

  Fuck it.

  Time to start playing dirty.

  First I sent all the wyverns to the top of the atrium and had them attack the Guild through the windows. The flying velociraptors got a few Guild members that way, though I lost five times as many wyverns in the process.

  In the meantime, I ordered all the mythical creatures up to Floor 4. It would take them several minutes to get up there, but once Quint had hacked his way through the elementals and the skeletons, he would have to face off against a multitude of gryphons, centaurs, harpies, and gorgons. And then even more resurrected elementals and skeletons.

  If I couldn’t kill the Guild all at once, maybe I could slow them down until Deek finished with Alaria and could take back control.

  Speaking of which –

  “Deek?” I called out.

  No answer.

  “DEEK?!”

  Silence.

  Shit.

  I was on my own.

  I mentally cracked my knuckles and set my mind to work.

  Time to get my ‘Cask of Amontillado’ on.

  I entered Design Mode and began to cut tunnels into the walls of the dungeon. I was hoping that the Guild would enter them, and then I could just seal them up alive –

  like that paladin in the sinkhole

  My stomach turned at the memory. I began to worry about what would happen when the Rogue Dungeon broke through –

  Stop it! I told myself. Focus!

  I pushed all thoughts of the Rogue Core out of my mind, and continued to construct my dead-end tunnels.

  Unfortunately, the layout of the first few floors was way too regular and standardized for my haphazard traps to fool Quint.

  “Ignore anything but the main corridor, men!” he yelled. “Head for the monsters – that’s the way through!”

  Dammit, he was right. All they had to do was keep to the bosses, and the Guild would bypass all my traps by default.

  I considered trying to create a fake pathway and put a bunch of monsters there, but decided against it. Too time-consuming.

  Instead I started laying down pits and trap doors – dozens of them, side by side in multiple rows, an impassable Maginot Line of certain death.

  Didn’t matter. As soon as Quint’s frost mages saw them, they cast ice bridges across the pits so the troops could pass over safely.

  SHIT.

  I started building walls to stop the Guild’s forward progression, but the warriors just slammed them with their war hammers, the hunters blasted them with explosive-tipped arrows, and the mages obliterated them with magical spells.

  FUCK!

  Nothing I was doing was slowing down the Guild. Not enough, anyway.

  And then… then the entire dungeon shook with an unearthly, subterranean scream.

  The Rogue Dungeon.

  It was coming.

  I actually flinched the tiniest bit.

  I wasn’t the only one. No matter how badass the Guild Members were, every last one of them paused for a second and looked around in fear.

  Everyone but Quint.

  “Ignore it, men!” he yelled as he hacked his way through a fire spirit. “Our path is forward! Disregard everything else!”

  I figured I should check just how close the Rogue Dungeon was, so I zoomed out until I could see all four underground quadrants.

  Except… there weren’t four quadrants anymore.

  I stared in disbelief at what I was seeing.

  Deek’s dungeon layout had been an orderly, symmetrical pattern of four structures.

  But two of those structures had been absorbed into…

  …a thing.

  It looked like an amorphous blob made of empty space, with tendrils reaching through the earth like roots growing in time-lapse photography.

  More than anything, it looked like a tumor. Like a cancerous, pulsing mass growing at an astounding rate.

  And it was absorbing everything in its path.

  I zoomed into the slime mold dungeon to see what had happened –

  But the slime mold dungeon was gone.

  Instead I found a twisting labyrinth of nigh impassable tunnels curling in every direction – up, down, sideways, around and around.

  The tunnels were dark, but in the shadows I could see things… nightmares scuttling about. The air was filled with their squealing, chittering, skin-crawling shrieks.

  I thought I saw something faintly recognizable, though. A glint of armor, a few human shapes.

  I zoomed in and used a Light spell from the menu –

  And immediately wished I hadn’t.

  The remaining members of the palace guard were being feasted upon.

  Black, fungal shapes slowly crept up their bodies.

  Tiny, vicious insects swarmed through the joints of their armor.

  And slimy tentacles slowly pierced the men’s bodies – their mouths, their eye sockets, their ears, and god knows where else.

  The worst thing of all?

  The men were still alive.

  The ones with unchoked mouths screamed in unrelenting horror.

  The ones with eyes still left to see looked around in terror, their minds pushed beyond the edge of sanity.

  And all of them waited to die while slowly being violated by all the horrors of Hell.

  JESUS.

  I immediately shut off the video feed.

  Shit – this was above my fuckin’ paygrade.

  “DEEEEK!” I yelled, panicked.

  No answer.

  Shit, shit, SHIT –

  I zoomed out even more to see just how big the Rogue Dungeon was.


  Apparently the crystal had sunk hundreds of feet into the earth before it started to grow. It was mostly extending outwards, towards Deek’s orderly dungeon –

  But it was also growing upwards.

  Towards Vos.

  I could actually see it metastasizing in fast forward, boiling up through the ground.

  Within minutes, it would break through the streets of Vos – and kill every man, woman, and child in the city.

  FUCK.

  I knew they were all NPCs. I knew I shouldn’t even bother, not when Alaria and Deek were in danger –

  But everything I’d seen the palace guard suffer?

  There was no way in hell I wanted that to happen to women and children, NPCs or not. I wouldn’t be able to sleep for weeks if I didn’t try to save them.

  I have to get someone up to the Duchess and tell her to evacuate Vos!

  I zoomed in on the lowest floor of the dungeon – Deek’s throne room. It looked like a Renaissance dollhouse decked out with paintings and statues.

  Suddenly I had an out-of-body experience as I viewed my own body posed like an action figure in a playset.

  There I stood – only two inches tall, my outstretched arm touching Deek’s tiny purple shard. Next to him on the pedestal, Alaria’s pink crystal looked like a grain of sand.

  A few feet away lay Alaria’s flesh-and-blood body, unmoving on the stone floor.

  Damn, she looked insanely hot even in miniature…

  Stig and Fugly sat on the ground looking at the two-inch-tall version of me, though I couldn’t tell much more than that because they were both the size of marbles.

  I could send Fugly up to the Duchess – he can fly –

  Shit, no, that won’t work. He can’t do anything but grunt, and she won’t listen to a fucking gargoyle, anyway…

  Then something caught my eye.

  Up above the toy-sized still life, a tiny yellow spark darted through the air.

  Wylla!

  SHE might be able to pull it off!

  “Guys!” I shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  The two marble-sized figures on the ground jerked around in surprise.

  - Boss? Stig’s voice croaked inside my head.

  “Yes! Wylla, can you hear me?”

  - Oh no, the Big Thing is inside my head! the Marilyn Monroe voice whimpered.

  “Wylla, this is important – you have to go up to the surface and warn the Duchess that a Rogue Dungeon is about to destroy the city! She has to evacuate everyone! Do you understand?”

  - But I can’t leave Mistress –

  “DO IT NOW, or Mistress is going to DIE!” I lied. Or at least I hoped I was lying. “She’s going to die like everyone up in Vos unless you do what I say! Do you understand?!”

  - Yes! the fairy whimpered. But how does I get up there?

  I thought about opening up the stone slide that led to the first floor, then decided now was not the time for following rules.

  Instead I zoomed out until I could see Vos sitting atop the dungeon like a LEGO set. I figured out where the castle was and drew a tunnel all the way up to the Duchess’s bedroom – a straight line through a thousand feet of rock.

  As soon as I hit the ‘Dig’ icon, stone and earth crumbled away, leaving a shaft in the ceiling of Deek’s throne room.

  “Go up there and find her, NOW!”

  Wylla took off like a shot into the dark tunnel.

  Suddenly the entire dungeon shook with another booming, rumbling howl.

  “Stig and Fugly – get ready, shit’s about to get real!” I barked.

  - Great, Stig muttered.

  I ignored him and zoomed out to find Quint.

  The Guild was still making their way through the dungeon. They had carved their way through the elementals and skeletons, and were now battling the ranks of mythical creatures.

  Then the Rogue Dungeon suddenly burst through.

  The stone walls split open like an infected wound, and nightmares poured out.

  The first wave looked like the xenomorphs from Alien, if H.R. Giger had decided to make his creation out of gangrenous flesh.

  Behind them were gigantic blobs of Lovecraftian horror – asymmetric, writhing balls of tentacles, headless mouths filled with fangs, eyeballs on stalks, and obscene orifices that sucked and gasped and howled.

  And underneath them all, thousands of tiny insect monstrosities crawled over the ceiling and floor like an undulating, pulsing carpet. The air filled with the sound of hell-born locusts: ch-ch-ch-Ch-CH-CH-ch… ch-ch-ch-Ch-CH-CH-ch…

  Every single one of Deek’s mythical creatures took one look and fled in the opposite direction.

  So did a few of the black-robed Guild.

  Not Quint.

  “HOLD, you cowardly sons of bitches!” he roared as the gangrenous xenomorphs raced towards him. “This is the moment you trained for! FIGHT LIKE MEN, AND TO HELL WITH THE COWARDS!”

  Despite their fear, the Guild rallied with a roar, and raced headlong into the fray.

  I didn’t have time or the stomach to watch.

  Instead I brought up the video screen of the Duchess.

  She was alone in her bedroom, pacing back and forth nervously in the morning light, when a bright spark flew in front of her face and startled her.

  “What in Darath’s name – ?”

  “Hello, Big Thing Lady!” Wylla squeaked as she flew around the Duchess’s head. “I has flown up here to tell you there’s a Big Ugly comin’, so you has to get all the people out of your city before it eats ‘em!”

  The Duchess’s head whipped around, trying to follow the frenetic little spark zipping through the air. “What on earth are you talking about?!”

  “I just told you – a Big Ugly is abouts to eat you and everybody else! I gotta warn you so I can save my Mistress!”

  The Duchess reached out for the nearest handy object – an iron poker from the fireplace – and began swiping it through the air like a baseball bat. “Get out of here, you talking insect!”

  “Aaaaah!” Wylla screeched as she zipped out of the way. “Why you trying to hurt Wylla, when all I want is to save you from the Big Ugly?!”

  Okay, this was not going as planned.

  In desperation, I shouted out, “Duchess!”

  She stopped swinging the poker and looked around her in shock. “…is that YOU, imposter?!”

  Dammit – if I had known that simply talking out loud would work, I wouldn’t have bothered to send Wylla.

  “You have to evacuate the city!” I yelled. “A Rogue Dungeon is about to break through the streets of Vos and kill everyone!”

  The Duchess frowned and continued to look around in the air. “Where are you?! How is it that I can HEAR you but not SEE you?!”

  “NEVER MIND THAT! You have to evacuate the city!”

  “I’ll not fall for your tricks again, imposter!” the Duchess snarled. “To the Seven Hells with you and your lies!”

  “This isn’t a lie! The Rogue Dungeon – ”

  “Quintus Deathlock is a fool! The dungeon has been stable for generations – it’s not a rogue!”

  “IT’S not, but Urik planted another dungeon core that IS! And it’s about to destroy Vos!”

  A look of panic crossed the Duchess’s face – but then she got ahold of herself and shook her head. “No… not even that idiot would do something so insane…”

  “He WOULD and he DID! You have to – ”

  “No! No, I shall not listen to your lies!” she screamed, and covered her ears with her hands. “You’re a liar – this is witchcraft, black magic – I shall not listen, I shall not – ”

  Fuck this. It was pointless.

  “Wylla, fly out in the streets and start telling people to get out of the city!” I yelled.

  The tiny glowing spark through a window.

  I left the Duchess screaming her denials, zoomed out over the city of Vos, and brought up a video screen. In the streets I could see thousands of people nervously looking
around as the ground shook beneath them.

  Could I talk to them directly?

  It worked with the Duchess. Might as well try.

  “People of Vos!” I yelled.

  Every single person in the streets looked around in terror.

  “There is a Rogue Dungeon that has been planted deep in the ground by the Church of Eternity! It’s going to destroy the city in the next few minutes! You HAVE to run to safety, NOW!”

  The NPCs reacted in various ways. Some stood there in shock; others screamed; but the majority began to race across the cobblestone streets, making for the nearest city gate.

  “I SAID MOVE!” I roared, and the shell-shocked laggards began to finally scurry away.

  “To any players out there,” I yelled, “PLEASE try to help the people of Vos out of the city! I know they’re NPCs, but consider this an unofficial humanitarian quest! And get the hell out of the city as soon as you can, otherwise you’re going to get sent for a respawn in the worst possible way!”

  The streets had been transformed into pandemonium. Hundreds of people were running now, clutching their children to their chests and rushing en masse for the city gates.

  Dozens of players were lending a hand, helping the women and children get to safety.

  Good.

  That was all I could do.

  Now I had other shit to deal with.

  I looked back to Quint’s video feed to see what had happened –

  Fuuuuuck.

  The Dungeon Guild was getting torn apart.

  Literally.

  Half of them were dead on the ground, their corpses being desecrated by the xenomorphs and Yog-Sothoths.

  The other half of the Guild were still fighting, but from the frantic looks on their twitching faces, they were on the verge of losing their minds.

  Not Quint.

  He looked like he was actually enjoying it.

  “To hell with you slatterns and whores!” he roared as he hacked his way through monster after monster. “I’ll gut you all! I’ll have your heads on pikes before the day is through! I’ll find your master, shatter his crystal hide, fuck your dead bodies with his corpse, then kill your unborn children just for the hell of it! HAHAHAHAHA – ”

  Shit.

  The guy was fucking scarier than anything he was facing down.

  He was madness personified, the perfect match for the horrors he faced.