Maginhart said nothing. He gave me a shrewd look, which I wasn’t surprised by. There was always a hint of shrewdness about him.
Wylie said nothing too, but there was nothing crafty about his look. He probably didn’t know what a union was, bless him.
Karson and Tarius, meanwhile, looked rather smug, believing their talk of unions would scare me.
“Oh, hang on,” I said. “Actually, I just remembered something. I’m the core of this dungeon.”
Karson’s smiled faded.
I continued. “If you join a union, I won’t be helpless, after all. I would simply command Gary or my mushroom boss monster to tear you apart, and then I’d conjure new kobolds to take your place.”
“Gary wouldn’t eat us,” said Tarius.
“Agreed,” said Karson, nodding. “Gary is delightful, even for a spider-troll-leech hybrid.”
“Want to make a bet on that?” I asked.
“What with? You don’t pay us.”
“I have to say,” said Gull. “I spent time with Gary yesterday. I was interviewing him for a chapter I call, Working Under Beno. I feel it will highlight sides of you nobody has ever seen, my friend. Show the world that yes, dungeon cores are evil, but they have softer sides to them. Having talked with Gary I would have to agree with Karson, here. Gary is a perfectly pleasant chap.”
“You guys have taken my last nerve and stomped on it like elephants,” I said.
I’d had enough of this now. I rarely ever got heavy with my creatures. I worked on a system of trust and respect, but I simply couldn’t abide talk of unions when Dylan had just had his belly ripped out by whatever lay beyond the hole in the dungeon wall. I had better things to think about.
Whatever was in the next, unexplored part of the underground landmass was stopping my progress, and I couldn’t afford that. Right now, my dungeon was a means to an end. I needed it to buy me my freedom, and I couldn’t afford my expansion to be stopped.
“Maginhart, did you get a look at what creature did this?”
He nodded.
“And what was it?”
“I do not know itsss name, Dark Lord.”
“Hmm. What did it look like?”
“It walksss on two legsss,” said Maginhart. “Itsss face and body are made of bonesss.”
Made of bones. Hmm. There were plenty of things made of bone that could live underground, so this wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t even a surprise that there was some kind of room on the other side of the hole.
Dungeons have been around for a long time. Longer than any of us realize, I suspect. In the academy, we were taught that the first dungeon was made thirty thousand years ago, and was intended to be a tomb for the Antygian people, an extinct race of bullbipeds, to lay their dead to rest.
That’s just one example, but there are miles and miles of tunnels, lairs, labyrinths, and crypts hidden under the soil of our world. A good reason that archaeology is one of the most taught university subjects, second to Darmenior Poetry, which I suspect is a course taken solely by students who want to disappoint their parents.
So, it’s no surprise when a dungeon core orders his creatures to start tunneling, and they dig into preexisting labyrinths. The lands under Xynnar are filled with old and forgotten tombs.
It’s also not surprising that creatures roam these places. Sometimes they are creatures left behind when a dungeon is abandoned, other times they are monsters who simply seek underground habitats, find a lonely dungeon, and take it as a home.
There’s an entire ecosystem right under your feet in some places. People just don’t realize it, and that’s hilarious to me. I tell you, if people in Wrexex, the biggest city in the whole of Xynnar, knew what the rats and gadkins were doing just twenty feet below their feet, they’d flee the city.
But anyway, something made of bones…something made of bones.
Hmm. It could be plenty of creatures. I had a whole encyclopedia of them in my head, since I had studied hard at the academy. Not only did I pay attention in Creature Lore class, but I had borrowed every book on monsters from the academy library, and I had soaked in as much as I could.
My mind started racing like a horse pulling a nobleman’s carriage after getting its bottom whipped. A multitude of creature names flashed through my head; bone golems, skull devils, reaper wraiths…
The thing is, it’s easy to overcomplicate things. Always start with the simplest solution.
“Was it a skeleton?” I asked.
“Worse than a skeleton.”
“It sounded much bloody worse,” added Karson. “We’d never have this kind of thing if we were in a union.”
“You aren’t in one right now,” I said. “And if there’s any more talk of unions, I’ll send you through the hole first. What else can you tell me about this thing?”
“Ssskin,” said Maginhart.
“Skin. Right. As descriptive as ever, Maginhart. I thought you said was made of bones?”
“It had ssskin over itsss back. Almossst like a ssshawl.”
This got my attention.
“Long fingers?” I asked.
“Yesss.”
“Long toes?”
He nodded.
“Big, empty eye sockets and a gaping hole where its mouth should be?”
Tarius and Karson both shuddered.
“You know the creature?” Maginhart asked.
“It sounds like a narkleer,” I said, gravely. Seriously, I really tried to make my voice sound as grave as possible, as befits any mention of a narkleer.
The effect was lost on my miners. One thing kobolds lack is fear. It just isn’t written into the fiber of their being. The only fearful kobold I ever met was Tomlin, my first ever kobold who I had promoted to the role of Lead Essence Cultivator.
“Narkleer?” asked Maginhart.
“Horrible things,” I said. “Years ago, and we’re talking around two centuries ago, the League of Necromancers owned a settlement in the distant west. This was a different west, not like the one today. It was before the Blue Baron built his pleasure city and made it so popular.
Anyway, nobody was ever allowed within ten miles of the settlement, and the necromancers never spoke of it. As you can imagine, that made everyone at the time extremely curious about what the necromancers were doing in their secretive settlement.”
“Raising corpses,” said Wylie.
Tarius nodded. “Yes…that is a necromancer’s job.”
“But which corpses? And why?” asked Karson.
“I’m getting to that. So we have our secretive necromancers in their secret little lair. Unluckily for them, the king of Xynnar at the time was Alkrick, notoriously the most paranoid and jealous monarch to ever wedge his fat rump on a throne. Alkrick, learning about the necromancers, sent a battalion of his best men to their underground settlement.”
“What did they find?” asked Tarius, enraptured by my tale. Another thing about kobolds; they are genetically predisposed to getting really wrapped up in stories. It makes them an easy audience, and I often try out my made up stories on them. I’m told that Bard colleges have their first-year bard apprentices sing their early tales to kobolds, to build their confidence.
Enjoying their attention, I continued. “Tarius, my friend, when the king’s men visited the necromancers’ settlement, they discovered a lesson waiting for them; don’t stick your nose in other people’s business. They managed to overcome the necromancers, and when they did, Alkrick’s soldiers discovered a necromancy chamber deep underground.
In it, the necromancers had been reanimating dead noblemen and women whose corpses they had stolen from family graveyards. They were resurrecting these rich people and then interrogating them to learn the nasty little secrets of all the great families in Xynnar. Why else do you think that so many lords and ladies sponsor the league of necromancers these days?”
“Blackmail,” said Maginhart.
“Yes, he’s got it! Blackmail, my friends. The king put a stop to t
he whole resurrection side of it, but not before the damage was done. And of course, this settlement of necromancers was just a subset of the League of Necromancers itself, which is flourishing these days.”
“Excellent idea!” said Karson, punching the air.
“Yeah, pretty good,” I admitted. “Fifty seasoned dungeoneers and soldiers died trying to get into the underground prison, meeting their end because of just two creatures guarding it. Guess what those creatures were?”
“Gnomes?” asked Wylie.
“Narkleers. The necromancers had built a tunnel around the underground prison, and the narkleers patrolled it.”
“Not good,” said Wylie.
“If you look into a narkleer’s eyes, it can infect your mind. If you get too close to one, they can tear out your guts without even touching you. That’s right – telekinetic disembowelment. Then, right before your petrified eyes, your guts slop onto the floor and float across the room, where narkleer gobbles them up.
They absorb whatever nutrients they need from the body parts, and the excess grows on their backs, like a flap of skin. The more flappy skin a narkleer has on its back, the more things it has killed. This is a defense system from when narkleers used to live in the wild; their back skin served as a warning to predators.”
“Delightful,” said Maginhart.
“Doesn’t end there,” I said. “A dark kind of energy surrounds a narkleer. To even get close to them, is to breath in this invisible energy. It soaks into a man’s skin, infecting him from the inside. Spend a minute in the same room as one, and sure, you might feel nauseated for a just a little while and then recover. But spend an hour with a narkleer, and it won’t be long until your hair falls out and your organs liquefy.”
The kobolds all rushed away from the hole now, until they were on the opposite side of the room.
“Relax,” I told them. “The narkleer isn’t close enough to hurt us right now, or you would have felt it. If it is in the room beyond, then it is still far enough away that it can’t cause us injury.”
“How fighters kill narkleer in necromancer prison?” asked Wylie.
“They didn’t.”
“Then how we kill this one?”
“How do we kill the narkleer, you ask?” I said, then paused for dramatic effect. “…we don’t.”
Wylie nodded and clapped his hands together. “Seal hole, boys. Dark Lord being sensible for once.”
The miners looked relieved.
“I’m not finished. We won’t kill it,” I said. “We’ll capture it.”
Wylie hung his head. “Dark Lord being stupid.”
I could forgive him for thinking that. I forgave him slightly less for actually saying it, but his sentiment was an understandable one. Looked at one way, we were incredibly unfortunate to have a narkleer on the other side of the wall. It meant we wouldn’t be able to dig that way. It’d cut off a whole area of expansion for my dungeon.
But that was a coward’s way of thinking.
I thought about the narkleer, and two things sprang to mind.
Firstly, for a narkleer to be on the other side of the wall, it had to have been placed there. Which meant that at some point, someone had stored something here that they felt was valuable enough to have a narkleer guarding it. I needed to get my mitts on whatever that was.
Secondly, when I thought of the narkleer itself, I saw an opportunity. See, there are four ways to bring creatures into a dungeon. The first is to make them from essence. This is the standard way for us dungeon cores, since we can absorb essence from essence plants, and our core bodies convert it into physical material that we reform into other things, both biological and otherwise.
The second, and most boring way, is to simply buy creatures.
Pah. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the sense of achievement in slapping gold in the hand of someone else, depriving yourself of the skills you’d earn if you simply learned how to make monsters yourself?
Thirdly, you can breed creatures. You know, the traditional way.
No thanks.
I do not need the sound of horny kobolds filling up my dungeon.
But the fourth way a dungeon core could bring a creature into their employ was by capturing it. Wild monsters and critters could be caught in such a way that they would agree to bond with a dungeon, and become a clanmate.
Just think of how incredibly dangerous my dungeon would be if I had a bony, skin-backed narkleer patrolling the tunnels? The first set of heroes to encounter one would run for their lives, with urine trailing out of the bottom of their silly hero trousers.
Of course, I’d have to dig a separate part of my dungeon for the narkleer to patrol, so that it didn’t come into contact with my other creatures and harm them with its invisible death rays. But that was easily done.
Demons below, I had never felt so excited!
I had to have the narkleer. I doubted there were more than 1 or 2 other dungeons in the whole of Xynnar that could boast of owning one.
“Thisss kobold hopesss you do not think of him asss insssolent,” said Maginhart. “But how would we capture the narkleer, much lesss kill it?”
An excellent question, and a tough proposition to be sure. But, I had been turning the problem over in my head for the last 3 seconds, and I had an answer.
Also, it took me 3 seconds to come up with the idea?
I was getting slow.
The way I saw it, there were a few problems to deal with when capturing a narkleer. We’d need to be able to get close to it but to do that, we’d have to deal with the life-sapping energy it emitted.
We’d need something that stopped its vision from corrupting our minds, as well as a tactic to stop it using its telekinetic disembowelment.
After that, I just needed a way to persuade this incredibly ancient, hostile, and deadly creature to serve me.
Simple.
“Where do you suppose the narkleer makes toilet?” asked Gulliver. “Perhaps he just holds it in. Imagine the relief when he is finally allowed a potty break. I tell you, if there’s ever a fellow who should join a union, it’s the poor chump next door.”
The kobolds, growing used to Gulliver’s habit of thinking aloud, ignored him and instead waited on an order from me.
“Boys,” I said, addressing the mining crew. “I’ll need an angry elemental jelly cube, a grain sack, and five giant mirrors.”
CHAPTER 4
“You seem excited,” said Gulliver. “It’s rather touching. I didn’t even know cores could get excited.”
“This could be it, Gull. The narkleer could be the missing piece in my bid for freedom, in becoming a core beholden only to myself and not owned by a clan. Finally, I might have an edge. Something the Wrotun and Eternals clans wouldn’t expect. Something I can use to leverage my liberty.”
It was as I prepared to pedestal-hop out of the room that I heard a sound.
“Warrane!” yelled Wylie, and dashed across the room.
“Ah, it’s Warrane,” said Gulliver, clasping his hands together. “A clansman of few words, few of which ever make sense.”
“Gull…” I said, using my warning voice. “You aren’t here to mock people. A dungeon is no place for insults.”
“I only kid, Warrane. Well met.”
There, standing under a tunnel arch, was Warrane. The glow of the mana lamps illuminated his green skin and his three eyes, and highlighted his body that was growing more toned by the day. Though he wore a stained shirt and trousers, it was impossible not to notice that Warrane had gotten more muscly lately.
After being promoted from a Fifth-Leaf to Fourth-Leaf in the Wrotun clan, Warrane had taken on more duties. Lately, he had been supervising the transportation of rocks and boulders from my dungeon and to the surface, where they would be used in construction. It was a grueling assignment, lifting so much rock with so little a workforce, but Warrane’s muscles were getting the benefit of it.
“Your three eyes look especially stark today, Warran
e,” said Gull. “And the smell of sweat that wafts with your every step is really…something.”
Warrane grinned. While some clansmen took Gull’s ribbing to heart, Warrane was able to take a joke. He gave Wylie a hug, nodded at me, and showed Gull the skin of his thumb, which was a rather foul gesture among the Wrotuns.
“Always a pleasure, Warrane,” I said, genuinely meaning it. Most of the Wrotun clan treated me as a tool, whereas Warrane greeted me as a friend.
“This leaf thinks likewise.”
“How are your folks?” I asked.
Warrane was quiet for a minute.
“That’s a touchy subject for poor Warrane,” said Gull. “Like asking a gelded dog where his plums are. Sorry, Warrane; our dungeon core lacks tact.”
I changed the topic. “Not that it wouldn’t be good to have a cup of tea and a natter, but you’ve caught me at a busy time.”
“This leaf always finds the core busy.”
“Well, I have dungeon expansion to do, strengthening defenses on Chief Reginal’s orders. When I’m not toiling down here, I’m learning how to use my skills on the surface. I’m telling you, a second life might be many things, but it isn’t relaxing.”
And when I’m not doing either of those things, I thought, I’m working out ways to trick and deceive Reginal and the others, so I can become free.
“It is Chief Reginal who sent this leaf,” said Warrane. “He requests that you join him on the surface.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“He said you must join him immediately.”
“Immediately? Really? Well, tell him I’ll be ten minutes.”
Warrane rolled his eyes at my small display of rebellion. I didn’t blame him, but I couldn’t help myself. I hate being told what to do; it’s a flaw I have never successfully eradicated since being resurrected as a core.
Gulliver sat by the wall now, with one leg crossed over the other and his book resting against his thigh. He scribbled in it, with his tongue sticking out.
“What are you writing?” I said.
“I write many things.”
“Let me see.”
Gulliver sighed. “Would you constantly ask a magician to reveal his tricks?”
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 37
