All-Knowing Novice, page 28
Fan Shun quirked an eyebrow and looked him up and down. “There’s a story here, and you’re going to tell me every last bit of it. Or so help me divines, you will rue the day you found that damn journal.”
Taryn opened his mouth to respond, but a sound from inside his pants caught his attention. He frowned, mostly because nothing in his pants should have been capable of making a noise, so the fact that there was made him more than a little nervous.
He reached into his pocket—and immediately jerked his hand back as something bit him between his thumb and index finger.
The little floppy-eared rodent hung from his skin, a piece of dried jerky clutched between its tiny hands.
“I was wondering where he’d gotten off to. It’s the weirdest thing, the little rodent wouldn’t leave your side,” Fan Shun said with a grin. She was enjoying this, far more than Taryn would’ve liked.
Taryn shifted back and grabbed the rodent with his right hand and gently dislodged its teeth from his hand.
“I thought you died.”
The little rodent hissed angrily at him and scratched at his hand until Taryn set it back on the ground. It made a happy squeaking noise, then scurried over to the fire and lay down to better enjoy its snack.
“Hey, Taryn. Less staring at the rodent, more explaining why you look like that.”
Taryn opened his mouth to respond, then hesitated.
“What is it?” Xia Yawen asked.
“Oh nothing, I was just waiting to see if something would interrupt me again. You realize how often that’s happened since we left the city? It’s almost like—”
“Yeah, yeah, we can talk about this later. Get on with the story.” Fan Shun emphasized the urgency of what she was saying by clapping her hands together in front of her chest.
Taryn let out an annoyed sigh, then told them of his fight with Gu Qigang and the unexpected conclusion of the tower collapsing around them.
“Honestly, I’m just glad Duan He wasn’t there. I got the feeling that guy was far more dangerous than Gu Qigang,” Taryn muttered shortly after finishing his tale.
“He definitely was,” Xia Yawen agreed. “My only concern is where that scary bastard is now.”
“Well, wherever he is, let’s just hope he stays far away from us, agreed?”
Fan Shun and Xia Yawen simultaneously nodded their heads, Xia Wei shouted his agreement from over by the fire, and Taryn would later swear that he heard the rodent squeak, but surely not. That would be crazy...
Right?
DUAN HE STOOD ON THE wall overlooking Haven City.
Something had changed, he wasn’t sure what, but he could feel his boss approaching from the south. She was early. Duan He wasn’t expecting them for another week at the earliest. For her to be coming this way now could only mean that Duan He’s future was tenuous at best.
He looked over his shoulder at Haven City with a worried frown. He could only hope the boss would accept the city as it was and ignore the fact that Gu Qigang was no longer traveling with him.
The back of Duan He’s neck lit up like an inferno. He quickly pulled down the neck of his robe and grabbed at the faintly glowing tattoo placed there when he was a child.
The red tattoo was circular in design and depicted spiked ridges around the outer edge and two claws extending from both the top and bottom of the tattoo. At the top of the tattoo was the head of the reptile.
He released the neck of his robe and stared out over the horizon.
His boss was coming, and divines help anyone who stood in her way.
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Looking for more great books, and need them right this minute? Check out: Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons: Year One. Or keep reading to take a sneak peek.
BUILD A DUNGEON. SLAY Heroes. Survive Finals.
Wounded Army vet Logan Murray thought mimics were the stuff of board games and dungeon manuals... right up until one ate him.
In a flash of snapping teeth, Logan suddenly finds himself on the doorstep to another world. He’s been unwittingly recruited into the Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons—the most prestigious interdimensional school dedicated to training the monstrous guardians who protect the Tree of Souls from so-called heroes. Heroes who would destroy the universe if it meant a shot at advancement.
Unfortunately, as a bottom-tier cultivator with a laughably weak core, Logan’s dungeon options aren’t exactly stellar, and he finds himself reincarnated as a lowly fungaloid, a three-foot-tall mass of spongy mushroom with fewer skills than a typical sewer rat. If he’s going to survive the grueling challenges the academy has in store, he’ll need to ace the odd assortment of classes—Fiendish Fabrication, Dungeon Feng Shui, the Ethics of Murder 101—and learn how to turn his unusual guardian form into an asset instead of a liability.
And that’s only if the gargoyle professor doesn’t demote him to a doomed wandering monster first...
Chapter One
LOGAN MURRAY PULLED his truck into the driveway of his ranch house in Arvada, Colorado. The suspension creaked as the tires crunched onto the gravel beside his garage. The garage itself was full of tools, lawn mowers, replacement parts, and a big woodchipper named Wanda—not to mention a variety of equipment he only pulled out when he had specialty jobs to run. But that was fine. His big F-350 didn’t need a comfortable place to live. His business did. Logan’s Landscaping, though physically demanding work, kept food on the table and him out of trouble.
He killed the engine, but just sat there for a long beat. He rubbed his tired eyes with calloused hands and sighed.
It had been a long day, and he was glad to be done with it. The work had been the same as always, but he’d had to fire Tyler McWiggins. HR was easily the worst part of running his own business. But Tyler had it coming. The kid had three major issues in his life: he drank too much, worked too little, and complained like a defendant in divorce court.
Out of the three issues, the complaining was the worst. Tyler had called in to complain how sick he was. Logan knew better. His employee had the Monday flu after a weekend of Coors Light and kvetching, red wine and whining, Bud Light and bellyaching.
So Logan had to work the day alone, which he hated. His other guys were hammering together a deck in Cherry Creek. Logan had spent most of the day bidding jobs and most of the evening digging postholes for Grady Henderson in Thornton.
The setting sun streaked red and gold across the sky. After spending hours in the heat, Logan was sweaty, dirty, and his belly rang empty like the bell in an abandoned church. Dirt covered his hands and clothes, and mud encrusted his boots. When digging postholes, you soaked them down first, before you used the digger. One of the first rules of landscaping? Let water do the heavy lifting for you. Still, even with the water, digging postholes was backbreaking work.
His uncle had disagreed with Logan’s choice of careers. Uncle Bud called picks and shovels idiot sticks. Logan shrugged that off. He found the long hours, the heat, and the labor fun. Besides, any kind of manual labor was a thousand times easier than the grunt work and never-ending hours he’d pulled overseas in the Army. Logan had been a 25B, once upon a time—an Information Tech Specialist. Sounded fancy, though in reality it amounted to being a radio operator attached to an Infantry unit.
Now that had been work. Running line. Going on patrol. Lugging around the oversized PRC-77 radio—affectionately referred to as the Prick-77 by the poor souls who had to carry it. Landscaping had nothing on that. The work was fulfilling in its way. And the hours went by fast when he was with his workers, listening to the radio, talking trash, and building things. Nothing was as satisfying as taking nothing and leaving behind a masterpiece of wood, sod, and flowers.
Working with plants was fascinating.
Logan spent hours researching flowers, climbing vines, mushrooms, and different kinds of fertilizers. After five years of running his own business, he knew, down to the week, the life cycle of your typical lawn.
He popped open the door of his truck, stepped out, and winced as he put weight on his prosthetic leg. Unlike Tyler, he wasn’t a complainer. However, if he did have a mind to whine, it would be about his leg. Not losing it. He was lucky to be alive. But by god, it hurt after a long day. Phantom tingles raced up and down the skin that wasn’t there. The tingles were better than the raw pain that often lingered in his stump. They’d taken the leg just below the knee. Why? That was a long story, too long for a summer night when there were beer and voicemails to attend to.
Moving with a slight limp, he headed through his back gate and into the weeds and grass of his backyard. It was a jungle—the only thing it was missing was Tarzan and a few stray lions strolling through the savannah near the back fence. Logan spent his days perfecting the yards of his customers, but his own was liable to get a notice from the HOA any day. What was that old proverb? The shoemaker’s children have no shoes. It was like that but with more weeds.
He strode across the cracked patio cement and through the back door.
The scratch of nails on tile announced the presence of his three slobber hounds. The trio were only too happy to see him. He felt the same. Patting their heads and ruffling their fur, he let them race out into the wilds of his backyard.
The fridge gave him beer and some leftover fried chicken. He stuck a leg in his teeth and stood at the sink watching his dogs race through the tracks they’d created in the jungle. Those puppies were the best: Noodle Doodle, Princess Peach, and Booker DeWitt.
He caught a whiff of himself. “That’s the smell of money for a working man,” he muttered under his breath.
He’d get a shower. Eventually. But first he had voicemails to suffer through. His foreman, Ramon Garcia, said the deck was going well and that the team got more work done without him. It was an old joke between the two.
Then there were the clients, asking for updates or wanting him for more work. Always more, which was a good problem to have at the end of the day. Denver and its suburbs were booming. He’d have to replace Tyler—despite the kid’s failings, he hated having to let him go. He sighed again, resigned. Such was life. Truthfully, finding help was always an issue when you ran your own business, but it needed to be done. Hard work was always made easier by many hands. Too bad he couldn’t cast a spell and turn his dogs into people.
Speaking of spells, he had something special planned for tonight.
He would chew down some chicken, wash it down with a cold one, then grab a fresh beer for an evening of murder and magic. He was so damned close to beating the game, and what a game it was.
He grunted and sat down in a wood chair at the same dinner table he’d grown up eating at. His parents were gone now, both passed on, but they’d left him the house and a fair amount of their personal effects in the will.
Slowly, he unlaced his boots then threw them on the welcome rug by the back door. His pups were done with their jungle expedition and whining for dinner. He’d feed them outside so they could enjoy the night. He limped out, one foot in a holey sock, the other bare plastic. From the garage, he grabbed the food and filled their bowls on the back porch. They joined him, tails waggling, mouths drooling, nails clicking on the cement. The fragrance of dog and dry grass reminded him that he’d need to give them baths soon.
“Good dogs,” he said. Having the puppies kept him from feeling too alone. He’d have to try that dating thing again at some point. He still had his lapsed OkCupid account and a Lizzy-sized hole in his life.
That was a worry for another night, or maybe another year entirely.
For now? He had a date with destiny.
Beer in hand, he ambled back into the house and through the kitchen. His living room was bachelor sparse. Over the years, he’d cleaned out his mother’s stuff, then his father’s stuff, and now all that remained was his stuff—two big La-Z-Boys, flanked by end tables, faced a seventy-five-inch TV sitting on a shelf above his game consoles. The walls had some pictures of Logan, his dad, and Uncle Bud, but mainly they were for the speakers, which gave him perfect, crystal-clear surround sound and enough bass to stop the heart in your chest.
His newest game console awaited him, and it was strange to say the least.
It was a purple cube he’d picked up at a pawnshop for twenty-five bucks. Old-school. The single controller had a long wire—that told you exactly how old the unit was. He liked to think of it as a lost classic, probably some knockoff of the old-school systems like Atari and Intellivision. Maybe the purple cube had been one of Nintendo’s first competitors. He hadn’t been able to find anything out about the thing on Google, which was shocking in its own right, but he didn’t really care.
Logan liked the classic gaming experience. His Army buddies were all probably shooting it up in Blood Warfare 4: Blood Debt.
Logan needed to keep in better touch with his buddies. Growing up as an only child, struggling through high school, he hadn’t found true friends until he’d enlisted. Then? It was what the military called the esprit de corps, a fancy French term for morale. But it was more than that. It was that feeling of camaraderie that Logan missed. Going through hell with your buddies made you love every single one of them... Well, maybe some more than others. He would never miss Wheeler getting black-out drunk and barfing all over his bunk. There was plenty he did miss, though.
With a sigh, Logan promised himself he’d send more texts and make more calls. Just as soon as he beat this game.
He’d been hooked on the thing for the past month.
Only one controller. Only one game: The Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons. Zany. Wild. It had character. It was an outdated 2D Dungeon Keeper-style game. The graphics weren’t great, but the game play was fun and that was all that mattered in the end. And he was so close to finishing it. Stuck on the last level.
A stylized S, the black logo of the company, decorated the front of the purple cube. The power button was nestled in the top swoop of the S. He pressed the button and a mauve light winked on in the bottom swoop.
As the old game console rattled to life, he plopped down on his favorite La-Z-Boy. He unstrapped his fake leg and propped it beside his chair. It felt good to be free of the prosthesis—like taking off ski boots after a long day on the slopes.
He sipped his beer and set it on the end table. No coasters. If the dating thing turned into the girlfriend thing, she might insist on coasters. He wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of action.
The screen flashed, music tinkled out with 8-bit beauty, and his current progress showed him at 97% complete. He’d kept his dungeon safe from dozens of waves of greedy dungeoneers looking to steal his dungeon core from out of the inner sanctum. Tonight would be the night he’d kill the last, most powerful group. It was made up of five raiders, each a different class, all bent on his destruction.
Logan had prepared his dungeon carefully.
It was a deadly place, full of traps, monsters, and mazes. Logan had chosen the Spider King Guardian, so he had access to webs and arachnids of every size and shape.
Logan licked his lips and hunched forward, allowing the lead fighter to effortlessly hack through cobwebs he’d placed in an inner stairwell. Sure, let the tank through. Logan didn’t much care about that guy. However, the cleric in the party? His healing spells would only make Logan’s life harder.
At the perfect time, Logan pushed the X button. The floor opened up like a yawning maw and the pixel-y cleric fell onto venom-coated spikes.
“Hell yeah!” Logan crowed.
The cleric gushed blocky blood before flashing and dematerializing. The cube gave out the kill sound, “Wah-wah,” before promptly notifying him that only four dungeoneers remained.
The party’s magic-user, an Inferno Hellreaver, cast a fireball that fried a room full of giant spiders. That was the bad news. The good news? They’d missed the secret room that Logan had put behind them. One of his largest minions, Debbie the Drider—his name for her—scurried out of the hidden room on a host of arachnoid legs, raising her bow and unleashing a hail of poisoned arrows. The magic-user’s days of fireballs were over. Two arrows pierced him, shattering him like the glass cannon he was. Debbie was also critically wounded, thanks to the efforts of an elven ranger, before the party’s rogue managed to stab her in the back.
Poor Debbie.
The rogue undid Logan’s pressure-plate trap in the next room, and the tank took out his giant spider, Shelly Shelob. Logan frowned. Three raiders were still alive. He’d wanted to keep the party out of the inner sanctum. They’d taken a fair bit of damage, but was it enough?
The tank and the ranger slashed through the webs covering the entryway to the innermost chamber. Logan’s boss, a spidery wizard with web spells, poison missiles, and hard chitinous armor, waited for the raiders, protecting the dark gem floating over the sanctum’s pedestal. That dark gem was the heart of the dungeon, and if he lost that, the game was over. This was risky, and the fight could go either way, but he was too close now not to at least try.
