Shadowcroft's Academy for Dungeons Chapter 28

It took another month to get through all the material in their classes and to work through the seemingly endless sea of students who needed to take their Placement Exams. The staff ran the Tartarucha Cells twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to get through the school.

For Logan and his friends, it was largely business as usual—cultivating in the Akros Coliseum in the morning, perfecting the Boundless Wheel technique, studying in the Codex Athenaeum at night, and doing their best to survive Rockheart’s Core Calisthenics.

The stony-faced professor had become even more vindictive since their trip to the Slaughter Pits, pushing them to the very limit of their capabilities. Obstacle courses. Duels. New monsters. Even an Inferno pit, designed to roast Logan alive—he had to constantly circulate Apothos along his meridians and through his skin or risk being burnt to a cinder. Yet, instead of breaking Logan and the others, it only pushed them to excel. Logan had pushed his way up to Iron Trunk cultivator, Rank 7, and even Marko had reluctantly started to give half a damn.

The satyr still spent far too much time getting blackout drunk with the Gelatinous Knight, but his attitude had shifted since the field trip. Seeing a real dungeon core in action had seemed to spark something in him. Either that, or the fight against the dungeoneers. Either way, he was taking their morning meditation seriously. The Boundless Wheel hadn’t really been working for him, but he’d stumbled upon a different technique called Drunken Master Falls Down Well—not a joke, an actual technique—that seemed to do the trick. Marko was also putting in extra hours at the library and had even started fiddling around with dungeon designs with Professor Arketa.

Logan was feeling better than ever about their chances, both as individuals and as a team.

The opposite seemed to be true for everyone else at Shadowcroft, though.

Once the rest of the first-years started taking their Placement Exams, an air of darkness and stress filled the hallways and dormitories. Even though the weather was warm again—the chill of spring rains turning into the furious blaze of summer sun—everyone was working too hard to really enjoy it. Also, rumors ran rampant. There were stories of dungeon cores who completely failed—botched their Placement Exams so badly they never stood a chance in the upcoming Winnowing. Other gossip told of students who did so well it spelled doom for one clan or another. It was hard to get to the heart of those rumors, but one thing was certainly true: the standings on the leaderboard seemed to change nightly.

Logan and his cohort checked their DCGs for their schedule, and of course, the Terrible Twelfth would be going last. First Marko at six a.m., which was a recipe for disaster, then Logan and Inga as soon as the simulated dungeon was cleared and reset, which generally took an hour. Then Treacle would go dead last—a sign that the gnome lord turned minotaur insisted was a bad omen. But then he sort of thought everything was doom, gloom, and bad omens by the bucketful. The days leading up to the exam were hard, and some cohorts had a hard time staying focused.

Not the Terrible Twelfth.

Marko was handling the stress relatively well. Yes, he’d been spending time with the Gelatinous Knight—drowning out his worries—but he’d also worked in the library, sketching out the dungeon for his exam. Meanwhile, Treacle spent untold hours at the World Forge, crafting gear. Logan and Inga hunkered down on strategy and cultivation. There was very little chance that Logan could advance to Rank 6 before the exam, but he certainly tried his best. Any extra bit of Apothos he could access might mean the difference between success and failure for the pair of them. Time seemed to pass in a herky-jerky fashion, both too fast and too slow all at once.

The day of their Placement Exam dawned bright and hot, turning Arborea into an oven, which Treacle also insisted was a bad omen. It only got progressively more bizarre from there. Logan had been tossing and turning all night, restlessly worrying about both his own survival and that of his teammates. Although the Placement Exams and the Winnowing were individual tests with individual results and consequences, the Terrible Twelfth had spent nearly every waking moment together. Working. Studying. Bonding. Logan felt responsible for each of them.

So, at a quarter to five, Logan headed into Marko’s room, fulling expecting to have to drag the satyr out of bed… Only to find the goat man not only awake but alert, a book spread out on a narrow wooden desk while he gently finger picked at a lyre he’d crafted.

Stranger still, Marko was sober.

The satyr seemed remarkably clearheaded—he’d skipped drinking the night before, which never happened—and excited about the exam. Over breakfast, which consisted of a loaded omelet for Marko and decaying vegetables for Logan, the satyr confessed that he and the Gelatinous Knight had actually been studying for the past month instead of drinking. Marko had been too embarrassed to ask for help. Besides, Logan and Inga were so busy he hadn’t wanted to impose, and trying to get Treacle to leave that damned forge was the next best thing to impossible—though the minotaur had helped him craft the lyre.

Still, GK was rather accomplished so long as he was sober, and Marko felt like he actually had a decent chance to pass.

Unfortunately, Marko’s good attitude had vanished when he stepped out of the Tartarucha Cells several hours later. The man looked deeply shaken, his hair wild, his eyes strangely hollow. He mumbled a few vague words to Logan and the others before taking off to Vralkag. He left what remained of his broken lyre lying on the floor. The tests were proctored by the professors, so students couldn’t watch what happened. Since Marko wasn’t talking, there was no way for them to know what had gone down inside his test.

Logan wanted more than anything to chase his friend down and demand some answers, but he had less than forty minutes before his own exam began, and he couldn’t risk taking off for Vralkag. Everything was riding on this, and Inga was depending on him. He wanted to help Marko, but not at the expense of his other friends. After sharing a few quick words with Treacle, the minotaur lumbered up the Stairwell of True Seeing in pursuit of the satyr. His own exam wouldn’t start until around 8 p.m., so he had the time.

Logan’s thoughts were still lingering on Marko when Professor Rockheart appeared like an avenging specter, ushering them into the Tartarucha Cells with a sneer.

Doing some simple deep breathing techniques, Logan cleared his thoughts, banished his worries, and became fully present in the moment.

They had to jump in and get to work.

Logan and Inga were used to rushing through their hour each Monday night, barely having enough time for Brandybutter to run through their creation. So six hours? Six hours of prep time seemed positively stress free by comparison. But they had far more to do this time around, Logan reminded himself as they worked. They weren’t going up against a single dungeoneer, but five, all of them far more powerful than anything they’d faced before. Thankfully he and Inga had already workshopped this scenario a hundred times over and knew exactly what to do. At this point it was just grit and elbow grease.

After assuming control of the simulator, Inga broke off to carefully build out the inner sanctum, while Logan created the antechamber that had killed Sir Rosencrantz Brandybutter so many times before. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it was an adage Logan still adhered to. From there, they added a minion room, a funnel with a kill room, and a nonstandard trap room, which was nearly an exact copy of the swiveling walls chamber that they’d stumbled into in the Slaughter Pits. Logan also added a trapdoor in the ceiling, which would send three giant centipedes cascading down into the room if the raiders weren’t killed by the spiked walls or the grenade mushrooms.

While Logan and Inga had improved drastically over the past months, they still didn’t have a ton of Apothos to play with. They both had many brilliant ideas, but they didn’t have the space or resources to craft them all. No, every creation, every crafted item, took precious energy from their gem cores.

So, they kept the design simple. Simple but efficient as all good tools were. Sure, it would’ve been nice to have something a bit more elaborate, but a meat cleaver did its job well enough even if it wasn’t particularly fancy. They positioned the entrance at the top of a corkscrew staircase that would dump interlopers into a hallway that split off to the left and right—that was Inga’s idea. She wanted to see if they could split the party. Logan was against it. He’d watched way too much Scooby Doogrowing up. Sending Shaggy and Scooby off on their own was objectively a terrible idea.

But, partnerships were about both teamwork and compromises. She wanted the T-juncture, so he conceded.

The hallway to the right led to a small room with an enticing lure set out in the open. A gleaming silver sword. The sword wasn’t magical—neither he nor Inga had managed to inscribe runes yet—but it was an Exogenous manifestation that would fetch a pretty penny. The only problem was, there was an artfully concealed trapdoor, which would send the hapless heroes plummeting into a kill room, which was nothing but gleaming spears of spun moon glass sharper than any scalpel. However, if they somehow survived the fall, there was a narrow corridor that led to the antechamber—the one with the Mucal-Film floor and the two mushroom-filled alcoves on either side of the short hallway that connected to their inner sanctum.

The sanctum itself was filled with Inga’s Spike Flies and Logan’s Spore Wargs, all tucked away within a veritable forest of fungal growth, which included Ghoul’s Snare and Blister Wart. Logan didn’t have the juice for that forest, but Inga did, and she willingly donated the energy.

Placing the majority of their minions in the inner sanctum was a risk, but it was also something the dungeoneers wouldn’t expect. Their presence not only protected the room, but if things went south they could also summon the mushroom dogs and flies to help in the antechamber. They could even flood the narrow corridor that led to the kill room with their minions.

Logan was hoping the dungeoneers would take the left hallway, which connected to another staircase. That led to a snaking hallway filled with blind corners, switchbacks, and the conveniently placed swivel-wall trap room. Eventually, the hallway doubled back, through the minion room, then around to the front end of the antechamber. In essence, they had five rooms, including the sanctum, which wasn’t that many. What they lacked in space, they made up for in triggers, traps, and minions. And given that Inga was Inga, they had contingency plans for their contingency plans.

Once they got their setup taken care of, it was mostly a matter of waiting for the mushrooms to grow. Logan helped that along with a little aid from Rapid Growth, but he used his power sparingly since he wanted to save as much Apothos as possible for the battle itself. Rationing supplies was one of the pillars of success in tactical warfare.

It was late afternoon, they still had nearly half an hour to spare, and Logan was amped up and ready to rock and roll.

Inga, though, kept sighing. Well, as much as she could sigh as a shared entity inside their respective gem cores, which floated over the pedestal. Their guardian bodies waited patiently in the antechamber’s alcoves, hidden by huge Opal Truffle mushrooms. Logan’s fungaloid form still wasn’t all that impressive, but he did what he could with what he had. He was wearing a pair of rough-spun pants, thin leather boots, and a leather bandoleer that offered virtually no protection at all but secured his ruby shield. The shield on his back, combined with his fat fingers, made him look comically like a mutated turtle of the teenage variety.

He also had his rusty dagger sheathed at his side, but that wouldn’t do much against a real dungeoneer. Eventually he’d need to get some actual armor and a weapon that wouldn’t induce laughing fits when raiders saw it. But that was a worry for another day.

<Are you ready?> Logan asked.

Instead of answering that question, Inga lost it. <Very well, Logan, you don’t need to pressure me! I’ll tell you about the Stringentia Strigiformes Exam!>

This was one of her most violent non sequiturs to date.

He kept calm. <Not sure I was pressuring you. I was just growing some proto spores, kicking it, relaxing a little before we take the most important test of our lives.>

<Kicking what?> Inga sent that thought with a great deal of annoyance. <Never mind. It is probably one of your backward world’s idioms. No matter. You know when Tet said she’d trained her entire life to prepare herself for the Reaping?>

<Yep. Like a pianist with a tiger mom. Another culturally specific reference from my backward world. Go on, Inga.> He tried to make a joke, to lighten the mood, but it didn’t help.

Still more sighs. <Well, this was never a part of my plan. The only reason I’m here at all was because I failed the single most important test of my life. Once upon a time, I was the Grand Archivist of the Eastern Aerie Archive. As you can rightfully imagine, such a position made me incredibly wealthy, famous even. But I wanted to be so much more. I had my sights on the coveted position of Imperial Bibliognost. A Libro Generalissimo of the Sacred Tombs of Books. Perhaps the single most coveted position on Toriopa.

<It takes decades to accumulate the knowledge to pass the Stringentia Strigiformes Exam, which is the only way to become an Imperial Bibliognost.> She snorted virtually. <It is a grueling exercise in alphabetizing, synthesizing, indexing, and collating information across the world, across history, across reality itself. It is a working knowledge of the Brusalka Concordance.> This she followed up with an even bigger snort. <I don’t have to tell you how many people have been driven insane by trying to remember even the first volume of the Brusalka.>

Logan wasn’t going to argue… but talk about culturally specific. He simply agreed, and then let his consciousness float through the halls, stairs, and rooms of their dungeon. It was almost time. While he drifted, he listened.

<When we first bonded symbiotically, you saw me enter into the Sacred Tomb of Books, yes?> Inga asked.

Logan remembered the cave entrance at the top of the mountains, with the other owl people perched regally on iron bars protruding from the rockface. <Yeah, I did, and it looked as intimidating as hell.>

<Worse than you can imagine, Logan. I didn’t emerge for three days. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. Instead I worked. Worked my fingers bloody alphabetizing and cataloging. I believe I did more in less time than any exam candidate before me. It was a triumph…> She seemed to preen at the words, despite not having feathers anymore. <Right up until the very end,> she finished, deflating.

<You see, in the end I had to select a specialized field of study, and because I’d excelled beyond all imagining, I had forty-six different areas to choose from. And I couldn’t. The idea of forever picking only one area of study crippled me, Logan! It crippled me. I spent the rest of the exam reading through all the possibilities. I ran out of time and failed the test because I couldn’t make a choice. Which technically meant I had failed. The most important test on my world, of my life, and I failed.>

<What happened next?> Logan asked. He’d figured something like that had happened. Inga could be so scattered at times.

If Inga had been in her body, she would’ve been crying. <My superiors were shocked. All the Archivists on Toriopa were shocked. It shouldn’t have happened. I should’ve been better. And yet, there I was, a failure.>

<Could you have gone back to your old job?> he asked.

<No.>

Inga didn’t send any more to him for a long time. He waited, and yet, he wanted to make sure he was listening and that he cared. He moved his fungal form out of the Opal Truffles in the alcove and went to Inga’s. He took her hands in his.

Inga’s astral moth body gripped his thick-fingered hands. <An Acolyte of the Word may only take the Stringentia Strigiformes Exams once. Many do not survive the attempt, but those that survive and fail are cast out from the ranks of the Archive. Knowledge is a powerful tool, the most powerful, and only the humble should wield it. Overestimating one’s own abilities is the height of hubris and proof that such an individual is not worthy of the knowledge of the Archive. I could go back to my home, to my family. But I would never be allowed to set foot in any Archive again.

<The thought of failure was more painful than you can imagine. So many of the elite on Toriopa were counting on me. I’d disappointed them. Then there were all these people who were so jealous of me. Remember, not only was I rich and successful, I was also a beauty queen, with my fine beak, my elegant plumage, and my well-shaped talons. My enemies took this opportunity to ridicule me. But worse even than that was the thought of never having access to my books again. That was unbearable. Shadowcroft has the finest library of all the dungeon academies. So I decided I would rather live in a monstrous form with the light of knowledge than live as a queen in the darkness of its absence. Using my vast stores of information, I found the nearest reaping dungeon and the rest is history, as our people say.>

<How did you finally decide on your guardian form?> Logan asked.

She answered morosely. <I spent a year analyzing the various dungeon cores available to me. I still feel like I rushed the decision.>

She went silent, obviously upset.

Honestly, Logan was impressed by her story more than anything. She might have considered herself a failure, but in his eyes, she was just the opposite. She’d crushed her test, and even after failing to make a choice, she was dedicated enough to learning and growing that she was willing to die for it. That was dedication.

Still, his thoughts didn’t matter right then because clearly she thought of herself as a failure. Logan wanted to comfort her, but he wasn’t sure how. So he told her a story. <Listen, my uncle Bud failed at more things than anyone in the history of failure. He wanted to be a doctor, but he failed organic chemistry. Twice. He wanted to be a lawyer, but he couldn’t pass the bar. He took it three times. He wanted to be an Air Force pilot, but he was color blind, and between you and me, a bit too girthy.

<The point is, Uncle Bud found his home in business, and when I started my landscaping company, he helped me even though he thought mowing other people’s lawns was beneath me. Then it was my turn to fail, over and over. I lost clients. I killed lawns. I lost not one but two lawnmowers because I didn’t change the oil. And every time I wanted to give up, Uncle Bud would say that you fail your way into success. And for him, that meant changing careers. For you, that might mean changing everything.>

<I understand most of what you said.> Again, she was quiet.

<Listen, I’m sorry you didn’t pass that exam,> he said after a time. <But I’m not sorry that you wound up at Shadowcroft. And come on, Inga, people like Tet worked and prayed to get into this school. For you? This was your plan B. You’re amazing. I’m so glad that you agreed to join up with me.>

<I’m glad too.> Her guardian form smiled. <Still, I’m nervous about tests now. What if I break under the pressure like I did then?>

<There’s a difference, Inga. You aren’t alone now like you were then. And I may not be a Grand Archivist or even the sharpest tool in the shed, but if there’s one thing I can do, it’s make a snap decision. That’s why we make such a good team, and that’s the reason we’re going to crush this thing.>

She sniffled. <I suppose having you here does make me feel better. I never had to be a Grand Archivist alone—we always had a team—and I don’t want to be a dungeon core alone.>

<Neither do I.>

Keep Reading Here: Chapter Twenty-Nine