What in all hells was he doing?
I kept the question to myself. I sensed that the First-Leaf was up to something now, and I felt it was in my best interest to get him out of the dungeon, even if it meant taking Gary and Wylie away.
I needed time to think and to plan, without the First-Leaf being there.
That was why I said little as reinforcements arrived, and the Wrotun took Wylie and Gary out of my dungeon. I didn’t want to look at Wylie’s scared face but I forced myself to, and I tried to appear as confident as possible.
“Don’t worry,” I said to him and Gary. “You’ll be back before you know it.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” said the First-Leaf. He pointed at Warrane. “Fifth-Leaf get back to the caverns. There will be a general meeting tonight.”
“This leaf will stay. It is his duty.”
“He will go where his First-Leaf tells him to. Caverns. Now.”
CHAPTER 20
I’ll be honest with you. I couldn’t have cared any less about the dead goatief boy. Even if you’d said to me, “Beno I will pay you all the gold in Xynnar if you just shed a tear for the goatief”, then I still wouldn’t be able to. It’s just not in my nature to care.
Part of the forging process in the academy does something to a core’s emotions, and it makes it hard to shed a tear over sad puppies, stories of unrequited love, and pompous goatief boys who decided to explore a dungeon.
Maybe I would have pretended, though. Gold is gold, after all, and if someone was offering all the gold in Xynnar, why not try to cry a little? Then again, who would ever offer that much gold? It’s like the game kids always play. The hypothetical if a mage put a wand to your head, would you kiss a pig’s bottom? You know, that kind of thing.
Anyway, the only thing I was bothered about was Wylie and Gary. Every time I thought about Godwin and the others leading them out of my dungeon, I felt rage boil up inside me.
I could only calm myself down by trying really hard to dredge empathy from the bottom of my core soul. Or if not empathy, then a close imitation of it. How would I feel if my son had died in a dungeon?
Impossible to say. I don’t have a son.
Hmm. Empathy is hard.
Ah, wait a second. How would I feel if I had created a kobold, sent him to the caverns, and someone there had slaughtered him?
I would be angry. I would want to come up with some diabolical plan to wipe them out completely. To make them pay for what they’d done by killing every last one of them, grinding their bodies into gristle, and feeding the slop to my creatures.
And now, after those soothing thoughts, I felt a little more relaxed.
Now that I had calmed down, I tried to approach this rationally. No matter what angle I viewed it from, I couldn’t see how Wylie or Gary had killed the boy. The Wrotun were safe from my creatures unless I willed otherwise, and my creations would only attack them if I gave the order.
What else, then? Could a Seeker have done it?
Doubtful. It didn’t seem logical that a Seeker could sneak in, murder the boy, and then creep out again. For one thing, the timing would be very coincidental. What were the odds that a Seeker would be there near the surface door at the same time the boy was? I mean, Godwin had brought them to me unannounced. It wasn’t a planned visit.
What else could have happened? Could the boy have done it to himself? I didn’t see why or how. He had three long, deep gashes on his chest. He couldn’t have done that to himself. The same logic meant it couldn’t have been an accident of any kind.
Fine, so I wasn’t going to work things out that way. I needed a different approach.
Who could have benefited from this? That was the question.
Well, the Seekers benefited, since I had two less creatures in my dungeon, and Gary had been one of my toughest. There was nobody else who I could think would benefit from this.
I felt a stirring in my core. Somebody was in the dungeon.
Checking my core vision, I saw that Galatee had entered my core room.
I hopped there to find her waiting beside my pedestal. She was wearing a tight set of leathers that made her old gnome body look toned. The leather chest piece looked like it would withstand a sword lunge or two, but it was also trimmed with gold so that it looked nice. Her face was graver than a…than a…a grave?
“Core Beno,” she said. “Your monsters have been placed in two cells near the cavern, where they cannot harm anyone. They will not be destroyed until we are satisfied that we know happened today.”
“Surely you don’t believe they did it?”
“Try to think like someone else would, core. This is a dungeon full of monsters. One of our people died in a room where you had stationed a beast. What is the most likely explanation?”
“The most likely explanation isn’t always the right one.”
She wavered a little now. I could see it in her eyes. She was just parroting what the First-Leaf had told her to say, but at least a part of her didn’t believe it.
“Perhaps not always, but you can forgive a grieving family for latching onto passing debris of logic to keep their minds afloat.”
“Galatee, I-”
“Enough,” she said. She sounded like her father when she said that.
Come to think of it, was the First-Leaf her father? She had never called him that, but I was sure that was how their tree structure worked.
“I have come to give you this, as requested,” she said.
She opened the satchel around her shoulder and produced a crystal. It was the size of an apple and jagged, with a slightly blue tint that stopped it being fully transparent.
“Core Jahn has a crystal in his dungeon, too. This will allow you to speak to him. It is only to be used to coordinate your efforts in the event of an invasion on both doors.”
She placed the crystal on the pedestal.
“Got it. Thank you. I need to ask for one fav-”
Galatee didn’t even answer me. Instead, she just walked away, and soon her footsteps became distant echoes, and then disappeared completely.
I glanced at the crystal that she had left on my pedestal. I could talk to Jahn, at least. It would be good to hear a friendly voice. To find out what he was doing, to…
Wait a second.
I had an idea. There was something I had to do, but I needed to be quick.
“Hello? Beno?” said a voice.
It came from the crystal. It sounded distant, as though he was shouting from across a valley. I could still make out the words.
“Jahn?”
“Beno! Thank the forgers that it’s you! I was worried. They won’t tell me anything about you.”
“Are you okay, Jahn?”
“I’m fine. A little homesick, but fine.”
“And your essence? Tell me that you didn’t absorb it.”
“I cultivated it into vines,” he said proudly. “Two walls of them, growing happily. I might plant a third wall too. And guess what? I fou-”
Core Jahn could talk for days if you let him, and I was suddenly filled with an urgent need to at least try the plan that had just occurred to me. To do that, I needed to use the crystal. It pained me, but this chat was going to have to be brief.
“Is there anything you need to tell me, Jahn? Anything I should know?”
“Well, two days ago I began digging a tunnel toward the east. Then I excavated one to the north, and I carved two rooms. I went for an oval shape, because-”
“Jahn, is there anything vitally important I should know, or anything that you’d like to know from me?”
“I said to myself last week, Jahn, you need to-”
No, I wasn’t getting anywhere. Jahn was going to talk for hours. Ordinarily, I would have let him, but this was an emergency.
“Sorry, Jahn, but I have to go. Take care, my friend. We’ll talk soon.”
“Beno? Why do you need to go?”
I realized then that I had no idea how to stop him from talking t
o me. So instead, I sent out an order using my core voice.
“The first kobold to come to the core room, pick up the crystal and take it to the alchemy chamber gets to be temporary leader while Warrane and Wylie are gone.”
Ten minutes later, after getting help from one of Wylie’s miners, I was in the alchemy chamber, with the crystal placed down on the deconstructor sphere.
The kobold eyed me warily. He was one of the miners I had created to help Wylie in his digging and excavation, and he’d spent his time in the dungeon under Warrane’s supervision.
His name was Maginhart, but I hadn’t been involved in naming him. I guessed it must have been Warrane, as his supervisor. Afterall, Maginhart was another of the Soul Bard’s middle names. My dungeon was starting to grow so large that I was losing my personal involvement in things. I guessed that was both a good sign and a bad.
Maginhart kept glancing at me. As one of my creatures, he would get a vague sense of where my eyes were. Even if they weren’t visible, he would know when he was catching my gaze or not.
“Do you have something to say?” I asked.
Maginhart nodded. He had inherited more of the lizard side of the kobold genes, and his thin tongue stuck out of his mouth and rattled when he breathed. “Thisss kobold doesssn’t want to sssound rude,” he said, his tongue seeming to spin over every ‘s’ sound.
“I never killed anyone for talking plainly,” I said. “I don’t remember doing so, anyway. Wait, have I? There was the…nope. I definitely haven’t! Go on, Maginhart.”
“Thissss kobold…he…” he began. His grasp of language was somewhere between Shadow and Wylie. “He wondersss why you are playing with cryssstals, and not helping Wylie and Gary.”
“That’s a good point. It might look like I am just playing, but I have a plan. Watch.”
Focusing on the crystal set on the deconstruct sphere, I gave a command.
Deconstruct crystal.
After a whirring sound and a flash of light, which startled Maginhart, I was left with a pile of dust.
It looked like crushed glass, and for a second I had a sickening feeling that this wouldn’t work and that I had just wasted the communication crystal.
“Maginhart, could you just feel the crystal dust for me? Careful you don’t cut yourself.”
The kobold kneeled beside the pile. He prodded it, and then picked up a pinch and let it drift from his hands. “It isss sssoft.”
“Good. We’re getting somewhere.”
Next, I created a leech. The squelchy thing was barely bigger than a slug, and its skin was dark brown and covered in slime.
“Leech,” I said. I knew I wouldn’t get an answer back, but it would understand me as its creator. “Eat some crystal dust.”
After the leech slithered over to the dust and ingested some, I felt my nerves play up. I reminded myself that my nerves weren’t real and that I was just excited to see if this would work.
The leech didn’t look any different after eating some dust. I had no messages to tell me anything had changed. Maybe I had messed this up. Still, I had to see for sure.
“Okay,” I told it. “Go north in the dungeon and stop when you find the rest of the kobolds.”
The leech left the room. Normally I would have chatted with Maginhart to see how he felt about the dungeon, and how well he had settled in, but I was too on-edge for small talk.
Have you ever felt like that? When you’ve just fed a deconstructed communication crystal to a leech, and you’re anxious to see if it was a waste or not?
I checked my map and saw that the leech had stopped now, which meant he had found the kobolds.
At first, I heard nothing. I had messed this up, hadn’t I?
“What’sss thisss?” said Maginhart. Kneeling beside the pile of crystal dust. He lifted a pinch of it and held it to his ear. “Huh?”
“What is it?” I said.
“It isss talking. Lisssten.”
He walked to me and held the little pinch of dust close. I heard voices now. Kobold voices that sounded far away, but voices none the less. The first was male, the second voice female.
“Does Shadow think that Dark Lord will rescue Wylie?”
“Cores aren’t sentimental, Tomlin. Why would he rescue him when he can just create another?”
“Tomlin doesn’t believe Dark Lord would abandon him.”
I looked at Maginhart. “That’s enough. Thank you, you can place the dust over there, separate from the other pieces.”
My plan had worked! I had guessed that the essence of the crystal was its ability for two-way communication over vast distances. Broken down, it would retain that ability while losing its bulky crystal structure.
By having my leech eat it, I had imbued the leech with its power.
Relief washed through me. This hadn’t been a waste. And what’s more, I now had a way to eavesdrop on the Wrotun general meeting Godwin said he was going to hold.
I wished that I could create an army of 10 leeches and send them out as spies, but I had reached my dungeon monster capacity. I would have to level up to be able to create more.
Using my core voice, I ordered the leech to slither out of the dungeon and to the Wrotun cavern, where it would find the cavern meeting and listen in for me.
“Maginhart, could you take this crystal essence and put it safely in the inventory room?”
“Yesss, Dark Lord.”
While I waited for the leech to reach the caverns and Godwin’s meeting to begin, I had a boss monster to meet. I had even more traps to make. The last thing I needed was to get caught in a Seeker invasion right now, so I couldn’t let this stop my preparations.
CHAPTER 21
I had combined an angry elemental jelly cube, some hivemind shrooms, and a bone guy. The melding room had worked its magic, and now there was a new boss monster waiting to serve me. As a core, I don’t get to open many presents, but I guess this was the closest thing. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
I kept my excitement in check as much as possible. When it came to the melding room, I had learned that it was fine to hope the monster would turn out one way, but it was sensible to expect something completely different.
I hoped to get something that had a bone guy’s ability to take a battering, combined with the flexibility and elemental damage of a jelly cube.
What I was equally likely to get was a kind of bone-hard blob that refused to die, but barely moved. Impossible to tell. I mean, the last time I’d used the melding room I had ended up with a giant troll-spider with leeches for legs.
So it was with this knowledge that I calmed my thoughts, telling myself that I would accept the result no matter what it was. I hopped away from my core pedestal and into my melding room.
It took me a second to focus. With my senses on, I smelled spent essence. I looked around, but I couldn’t see a boss monster anywhere.
Huh?
Had the room failed, or something?
Another thought hit me, this one a punch to my non-existent stomach.
Had my new boss monster killed the goatief boy? Was he lurking elsewhere in my dungeon?
I had gotten the melding complete message while I was with the First-Leaf and the Rushdens. What if my monster had left the melding room and explored the dungeon, passing his time by slaughtering the first person he came across?
I mean, I have nothing against my monsters picking up a hobby. But this had caused me a lot of trouble.
It was a hard thing to have to swallow, but it was the best explanation for what had happened, given the monster’s absence. I had created a monstrosity in my melding room. A mix of creatures that came together to form an abomination that had no right to exist.
Normally that would have been a good thing. But today? Something had gone very, very wrong.
I was glad when a voice distracted me from my thoughts.
I was very, very confused when I didn’t recognize it.
“There he is.”
“He�
��s here! He’s here!”
“We’d like food. Hero meat, please.”
“It could be darker in here, y’know. This place needs more darkness!”
I heard them then. A single voice at first, before more joined in, then even more, until dozens of voices were talking to me.
Looking up, I saw them. The melding room ceiling was covered in a growth of black fungi. They looked like rotten mushrooms, but with tiny eyes and mouths. Some of them were pure black and some were speckled red, white, and gold.
“Silence!” boomed one of them.
Well, I say boomed, but it was more of a squeak, to be honest. Just a louder squeak than the rest. At any rate, it shut them up.
“We will think as a hive, not as single minds,” it said. “There is too much individuality on display here! In the presence of his Dark Magnificence, your voices will silence themselves and the hive will prevail.”
“Hive prevail.”
“Hive prevail!”
“Hive prevail.”
“Rid your minds of these notions of the self. Embrace the tides of collective consciousness. Do you not understand the concept of silence? Or of the hive?”
“Sure! It means a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence.”
“Yeah, you pompous arseface! It doesn’t mean we all speak as one; we just share our knowledge and opinions with each other.”
I felt dizzy trying to tell which mushrooms were talking at any one time. The only thing I could work out was that one of them was trying to quieten the rest, but was having a tough time of it. As a master of nearly a dozen kobolds, I could sympathize.
When they descended into a babble of arguments, I began to lose my patience with them all.
“Enough!” I said.
They stopped talking now. All their strange little faces turned toward me. It was disconcerting, having more than fifty eyeballs looking at me. Even worse was when they seemed to slip into their hivemind, and they all blinked at once.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 29
