Monster Core: A Gamelit Harem Dungeon Core Page 7

  I slid off the bed and found my tunic and trousers in a crumpled heap on the floor. I still had no pockets but couldn’t afford to leave the dungeon core in here. Time was pressing, the minutes ticking down, and the longer I stayed here, the sooner Gavin would arrive.

  My reinforcements still hadn’t shown up, and it was probably best to assume they weren’t coming.

  Bertha fastened her leather bodice around herself, and I let my eyes wander over her form appreciatively for a moment longer as I dressed. She’d boasted of her own abilities, but even with her by my side, I didn’t want to get into an extended engagement with her family. My new champion was the only enjoyable aspect of troll hospitality, and I had no intention of finding out what else her mother and brother had in mind.

  Bertha picked up her weapon and spun it. It was a short-handled poleaxe with a broad blade that curved into a point. The half-troll performed a flashy display for my benefit, but as her eyes flickered across to the main room and back to me, it was clear she was all business now.

  “Your orders, Master?” She grinned slyly and looked at me from the corner of her eyes.

  “We need to leave,” I told her. “Getting to the mountaintop—that’s our priority.”

  Bertha bent down to pick up the cleaver from where she’d tossed it. With a calm smile, she offered it to me.

  Acquired Item!

  Cleaver (Troll Iron)

  Rarity: Magic

  Damage Type: Physical

  Seals: None

  I took the heavy weapon and turned it over in my hand. It was fashioned in the manner of a meat cleaver, not the kind of agile, light weapon that would complement my elfish agility. I was almost a super-elf now that I possessed Bertha’s strength, so the cleaver would probably work well.

  At least, it’d work well until we got outside and I found a better weapon. I cast my mind back to the layout of the cave. The exit was on the right, but we’d have to blitz through the trolls’ kitchen first.

  I picked up my dungeon core and cursed Jeff for leaving my makeshift sling behind. Fucking idiot could’ve at least done me the courtesy of bringing the thing down with him. Bertha read my mind and retrieved a pouch from among a pile of rags and bones in the corner.

  “Here,” she said as she offered it to me.

  “I don’t have a belt for the pouch,” I told her. “Better if you take it.”

  I was putting my life in Bertha’s hands, but I trusted her now. There was something about fucking someone that broke down defenses, for better or worse.

  “I’ll protect you with my life,” the half-troll promised. She took my core reverently and tucked it into the small leather pocket before fixing it to her waist.

  I tested the cleaver with a bit of a swing and grimaced at the weight. The strength boiling in my bloodstream was still very much present, but the weapon felt ungainly, awkward, and badly balanced. It was definitely more suited to a troll than an elf.

  Bertha stepped past me, that berserker grin widening, and I reached out to touch her shoulder; we needed to work together on this. Even with her on my side and my newfound power, speed was key. The sooner we were outside and could put some distance between ourselves and Gavin, the better.

  “We only kill them if they’re in our way,” I told her. “We can’t waste any time.”

  I would have liked to enact some revenge on the other trolls, but my thirst for retribution came second to my desire for efficiency.

  Bertha gritted her teeth but nodded. “I understand.”

  We left the bedchamber, moved silently through the passage, and halted at the entrance to the main chamber. Nothing untoward struck my elf’s ears—it sounded dead out there. The silence didn’t stop a fresh charge of adrenaline rushing through my bloodstream.

  “You be done already, Bertha?” Ma’s voice echoed through the chamber. “Mr. Core be not lasting long.”

  Fuck. Well, so much for the stealthy approach. Time to go in loud.

  “All yours, Bertha,” I told her. “Kill Jeff.”

  Her savage grin widened, and she exploded out of the passageway with the speed of a panther and the power of a runaway bus. I stepped in behind her, just in time to see Jeff dive out of the way of my champion’s poleaxe. The curved blade arced downward and missed him by a hair.

  “The elf done something to Bertha, Ma!” Jeff screamed as he dodged another powerful swing from Bertha.

  Ma’s eyes turned upon me as she strolled casually forward. She seemed to have all the time in the world and not a single care.

  She was wrong.

  I felt a wicked grin split my face as I stared at the massive flesh mountain in front of me. The kitchen—if you could call it that—stood in the way of my freedom. A table full of bloody meat, a collection of rustic, clumsy blades, and the ugliest fucking mother I’d ever seen in my life were my only obstacles.

  Jeff howled beside me, and I spared him a glance. He was grappling with Bertha, trying to keep the blade from sinking into his face. A line of blood coursing down over his eye, told me my new champion was everything she had said she’d be. He was twice the size, and still struggling to hold her off. I saw Ma move, hurling her knife, and I barely managed to duck as it ripped past my head, showering sparks as it collided with the cavern wall.

  Ma watched the battle between her children, spectating as if I didn’t plan on entering the fight at some point.

  “What was that you were saying about not lasting long?” I challenged her.

  Ma howled some probably-unkind troll curse before marching toward the kitchen bench.

  “Old, slow, corpulent, revolting, abusive.” I rattled off the litany of the first words that came to my mind as the troll-mother lunged for a knife. “How did a monster like you make something as impressive as Bertha?”

  Ma’s whole chest was heaving with rage, and spittle clung to her tusks and lips as she finally got her stubby fingers around a carving knife. Her feet crashed against the ground and her mounds of flesh rippled as she charged across the room. Only a few feet from striking distance, I prepared to cut her down with my gifted cleaver. The monstrous troll drew her arm back and aimed her carving knife to gut me.

  Then she froze.

  I was about to use the fortuitous opportunity to my advantage when I recognized the reason she’d stopped suddenly.

  A howling cacophony of demonic cackling echoed through the exit. The ear-piercing noise bounced off the walls, turning Ma’s face a pale shade of green. Jeff and Bertha were locked in battle as they traded knees and headbutts, oblivious to the sounds.

  I could have dealt with the frozen troll then and there, but I was too interested in these newcomers. She was obviously terrified, which meant this wasn’t Gavin or the guild.

  In fact, I knew exactly who had caused her petrified state.

  The cavalry.

  The creature and his tribe had finally come to rescue me.

  It was about damned time, too.

  Chapter Nine

  “Imps,” Ma muttered, her knife hanging loosely from her fingers. The demonic laughter grew louder, and she recovered almost instantly. “Jeff! Imps be coming!”

  Jeff slammed his shoulder into Bertha and finally tore the poleaxe from her grip. He leaped between his mother and me, facing the exit. They obviously thought these imps were a greater threat than anything Bertha and I could throw at them.

  First one, then two, then a whole cloud of bat-like creatures swarmed into the grotto; it was a teeming mass of bloated grey flesh, beating wings, teeth, claws, and grating screeches that sounded familiar.

  They were no Infernal Dragon, but I’d take a golden opportunity when I could get it.

  “Where is the dungeon core?” an imp demanded. His wings flapped as he hovered above the troll-mother’s head.

  “You not be getting it!” Ma snatched the imp out of the air with a warted fist, smashed the creature into the wood of the table, and slit its throat with the carving knife intended for my face.

/>   Then all hell broke loose.

  The other flying creatures wailed at the loss of their comrade and swarmed the troll. The imps ripped at the mother troll with their talons and tore into her with their fangs. Blood sprayed from the wounds, but Ma ignored the lesions. Her carving knife swept through the air while her enormous left hand snatched imps in mid-flight and crushed them.

  Still, they came, an onslaught of black hide and bone-white claws. They were everywhere, all over her, ripping at her skin, tearing at her eyes, and coating the flowery dress in dark blood. Ma’s screeches of pain added themselves to the noise reverberating in the cavern, and I breathed in the carnage.

  I sought my champion and found Bertha already on her feet, but the incensed little devils weren’t following the game plan; they were attacking everyone and everything in sight.

  I ducked under a swipe and watched my champion smack an imp out of the air as she charged for Jeff. She seemed uninterested in the potential new threat; she was still following my command with every ounce of concentration in her rippling body.

  We needed to leave with haste, but the brother-sister pair was already grappling again. Bertha showed her training when she batted aside the stolen poleaxe with an elbow, leaped into the air, and smashed her knee into Jeff’s jaw. I almost heard the crunch of it cracking as he howled and reeled backward. Bertha wrenched her weapon from his suddenly-loose fingers and ripped the blade across his torso, rending flesh. A well-placed kick sent him smashing into the wall, and she raised the poleaxe, looking for the final kill…

  “Bertha!” Ma screamed. “Leave him!”

  With a deafening roar, Ma broke free of the imps and barrelled toward Bertha, murder in her eyes. As my champion looked to me for another order, I lunged to intercept her mother’s charge. Blinded by blood and pain, the troll-mother didn’t see me as I raced in from the right. I had to make this quick; my avatar was running out of time with each second, and if the imps kept this up, Bertha wouldn’t be able to escape the combined forces of her family and the hellspawn I’d convinced to come here as a distraction.

  I dodged under Ma’s wide swing and caught a fistful of her blood-matted hair from behind. She roared and flailed her arms, her carving knife desperate to slash me open. I launched myself onto her back with my hands still gripping her hair and tugged to bare her throat.

  Then my cleaver tore her stony flesh open easily. Ma’s skin felt more like leather than stone under the edge of Bertha’s weapon. I roared with triumph just as the she-troll’s elbow hit me. I grunted, felt my grip vanish, and crashed into the table, sending bloody meat and cleavers skittering everywhere. I rolled off the table and onto my feet, but when I went to finish off Ma, the imps swarmed in.

  Suddenly, my world was nothing but beating, wings of leather and fucking sharp teeth. I felt them tearing at me as they tried to rip me to pieces. I’d lost Bertha’s blade somewhere in mid-air, but I forced through the thick of enemies and searched for a weapon that had fallen from the table.

  My hand found something heavy and meaty. My fingers wrapped around a rolling pin large enough to be a two-handed club. There were no text boxes appearing in my vision, and I guessed Lilith had programmed them not to show up during battle. Good; they would just get in the way.

  I smacked my new rolling pin into the nearest imp, feeling the end mash flesh and crush bone. An imp dropped to the ground, its spine shattered from my blow. My boot slammed into the creature’s skull and shattered it. I swung above my head with unbridled ferocity, my rolling pin pounding into imps left, right, and center. It was almost like playing a game of whack-a-mole, and the monsters dropped around me like dead flies.

  Eventually, the cloud of imps scattered, not willing to try their luck against an elf who knew how to swing a club. With the brief respite, I spotted Bertha’s cleaver glinting dully in the flickering firelight. I couldn’t wield both weapons since the club required two hands.

  I glanced up when I heard Bertha’s deep roar, just in time to see my champion sweep under her mother’s arm and catch her around the waist. Her poleaxe had fallen somewhere on the cavern floor.

  My hands closed around Bertha’s cleaver, and I looked up. Bertha’s muscles rippled as she tensed and planted her feet. In an insane display of strength and leverage, she lifted her mother from the ground and then arched back. Ma’s howling curses came to an abrupt end as my champion drove her down through the dinner table. I could almost hear the snap of the mother troll’s neck breaking, but that may have just been the table exploding in a cloud of splinters and blood.

  Troll furniture could probably stand up to a dead cow or two, but a half ton of troll flesh? Not so much.

  Bertha got an arm under herself and slid back to her feet. Blood trickled from a cut on her cheek, and one of her eyes was beginning to swell. She still wore that battle-frenzied smile as she waited, ready for my next instruction.

  Loyal. A force of nature under my command.

  “Nicely done,” I said to Bertha as I handed her my cleaver.

  “You take it. My gift to you. I’ll have the rolling pin.” We exchanged weapons, and I took a second to appreciate the cleaver.

  “We’re not done yet,” she said.

  I heard a roar from Jeff. He struggled to his feet with his free hand holding half his intestines inside his gut.

  “Fuck, I thought you dealt with him,” I said to my champion.

  “It seems my brother is a difficult troll to kill, but I wasn’t talking about him.” Bertha nodded above, the imps now regrouped. They screeched and swept toward us again.

  This was the last time I’d make a deal with these flying little bastards; they were more trouble than they were worth.

  “We’ll draw the imps to Jeff,” I said. “Let them finish each other off. Ready?”

  Bertha nodded, then we made our move.

  I dived left, and she went right, but the swarm of little bat-winged cretins were already upon us. The imps circled back when we changed directions, none of them seeming to agree on which of us to pursue. Bertha and I circled her injured brother, and he appeared to think we were taunting him. He let out an enraged cry as he struggled to keep his insides from falling out of his stomach.

  The imps regrouped but still seemed confused by our movements. Rather than chase us down, they took the easy kill—Jeff. The troll howled as they tore into his face and stomach, but I didn’t have time to watch them start dissecting him.

  “Run!” I yelled to Bertha, and she started for the exit.

  I followed after her, but then an imp caught hold of my tunic, its claws eager to rip into my throat. I reached over my shoulder and plunged the cleaver through its gut. The creature went limp, falling out of the air in a shower of blood and bile.

  More imps fled toward me, came, obviously finished gnawing the flesh from Jeff’s bones. The swarm didn’t stop to attack when they reached me; instead, they continued to the exit and ensured Bertha couldn’t escape. She struggled to fend them off with the club as they harassed her. She needed a better weapon, like her poleaxe, but it was probably halfway buried beneath the piles of imp corpses scattered in what used to be her mother’s kitchen.

  I was wrong about Bertha needing a better weapon. In a matter of seconds, the imp cloud was reduced to a single member, Bertha crushing the final creature’s skull with a well-aimed swing of the rolling pin.

  The last imp was dead.

  Something clawed at my ankles, but I stomped forward, my boot crunching through a skull with a grisly crack.

  Okay. Maybe that was the last imp.

  Then the wooden window panes splintered, and more imps arrived. There was almost as many as before, but they were now led by two different kinds of imps. The pair in charge looked more muscular and bore a single purple stripe of flesh running down their spines.

  Great. These two were probably the Infernal Realm’s version of boss-imps.

  Was one of these two bastards the creature I’d spoken to? Either way, they were
going to die.

  Infernal Essence swirled around their hands, convalescing into orbs of energy. That was new—I’d never seen any of the creatures here use magic before. Boss-imps who could wield fucking magic balls of death? This was going to be fun.

  “Do not let them hit you with the shadow-spheres!” Bertha yelled as she sprinted toward me.

  I dived behind the wreck of the table just as the orbs crashed into the wall and floor where I’d been a moment before. A foul-smelling black mist, like boiling ammonia and brimstone, erupted inside the cavern and made the trolls’ fireplace flare up. Heat punched outward like a fist, and I hissed as my skin prickled painfully in response.

  I glanced over the table and saw Bertha hiding behind her mother’s rocking chair while the elite-imps assaulted her with their exploding spheres. The rest of the imps watched, and I guessed they didn’t want to come between us and the elite’s exploding projectiles.

  I caught hold of a hunk of meat and hurled it into their midst. The hurtling object forced the pair of imps to split, their orbs dissipating in their hands. In an instant, I was on my feet again and racing back into the fight.

  The first imp-elite couldn’t evade my slick elf’s speed as my fingers closed around a leathery wing. I ripped the imp open with my dagger, spilling viscera and gore all over my hands. Bertha leaped from her hiding place to charge the next one, and it must have considered me an easier fight because it made a desperate dive toward me. Its glowing red eyes were aflame with hate, and I fixed my eyes on those tiny, devilish beads.

  The creature paused, drawn into my elf’s irresistible gaze.

  Charm Test… Success

  Squallish the Infernal Imp Enthralled!

  Half a second gave me a moment to wonder if Lilith was watching this chaos, and I felt a shit-eating grin cross my face. She was definitely getting her fill of evisceration.

  “Kill your brethren, in the name of Lilith,” I told the imp.

  Squallish started to fire shadow-spheres into the ranks of the lesser imps, and they scattered in confusion at the sudden friendly fire. Before I could admire the slaughter, the last Infernal Imp rushed me, diving for the exposed flesh near my throat. Squallish quit blasting the other monsters and tackled his fellow tribe-mate. They tumbled through the air in a whirl of blood and talons, but Squallish had the upper hand. He tore at the other imp’s wings, back, and anything else he could get his hands on.