The Lethality dungeons are the top sport across the world. Real divers go into real dungeons and fight real monsters. The pain is real. The deaths are real. The treasure is real. Join Aurea as she begins her journey as a diver and attempts to make it out alive.
For the past year, I have been working on a book series and I hope you like it. The book is in the LitRPG genre and is inspired by so many of the things we write about on this blog. From monsters to stat points, and from dungeon runs to celebrity sponsorships, if you love storming dungeons and fighting dragons—You’ll love LitRPGs.
Part 1 - The Manticore Training Dungeon
Chapter 1
Character Aurea; Level 1; Class Rogue; Hit Points 20/20; Mana 11/11; Stamina 32/32; XP 0; Next Level 100 XP needed; Rank Unranked; Followers None; Lethality Trivial
“Aurea Finn!” Vita shouted, my head jerking to attention. Vita was our training instructor for the Roosevelt Diving School, one of the best diver schools in New York and was responsible for more than a few of the top divers in Lethality. Vita was cycling through our diving party, shouting each of our names.
“Colin Firth!
“Elise Vesna!
“Huck Langorn!
“In five minutes, the alarm will sound and you will begin your first dive. I expect that you will shit yourself and forget everything I spent the last months trying to teach your shit-for-brains. You will be competing against three other teams, whoever wins the dive will be invited to join the Roosevelt’s team. Everyone else won’t.” Vita let the silence hang in the air, her threat lingering.
I wasn’t going to let her get to me. She had been hard on us every day and every hour of training. Vita was naturally an abrasive person, constantly yelling and screaming at us like a drill instructor for the army.
Over the past month, we had been forced to do push-ups, run laps, or fight her one-on-one with wooden weapons, and soundly got beat, whenever we did anything she didn’t like. Which turned out to be most things. If she didn’t like a single push-up out of the hundred she assigned, we got to do more. If she didn’t like that another party lapped us on the field, we got to do more laps. It was never enough for her and she constantly reminded you about how much of a fuck up you were.
Instead of listening to Vita’s words, I closed my eyes and rolled my head, feeling a satisfying pop in my neck. I was nervous as my fingers tapped against the hilt of the kukri strapped to my waist. This was only the second day with the metal weapon, though I had been practicing with it, along with several other weapons, as wooden training blades. The weight felt unfamiliar and strange, and I couldn’t tell if I wholly liked how it felt on my left side and how Vita had instructed me to wear it. I had seen other divers wear similar swords with it strapped to their back, across their lower back, and even one diver who had made a custom made sheath that held a short sword - really it was an extra long dagger - upside down and in the center of the chest. It looked awkward and uncomfortable, but that diver was in the top 1,000 so what did I know.
I was ripped to awareness when I felt someone tugging on my arm, and saw that it was Colin. He was a strange sight in the blackened armor. Chubby, thin curly brown hair buzzed short, and dark skin - he looked more like he should be in a library than being squished into a set of black cloth and plastic-tech armor that we had all been given, though his was stripped down for a mage. I could see that the armor once had logos and sponsors plastered over it, but most of them were ripped or torn off, with just bits of stickers and deep cuts criss-crossing its surface.
“You aren’t paying attention,” he said with his flat, accusatory tone. “Huck is talking, he is the team leader since you wouldn’t vote for me.”
I looked over at Huck and noticed that Vita had already left the cramped, small room we were in. Huck was standing near the dungeon brick door, which stood out in the white sterile room we had been in for the last half hour, wearing a similar set of armor to Colin, but his had thicker plates of black plastic and, instead of cloth, it used a leather-synthetic for added sturdiness. Elise and I were a lot less protected with simpler armor.
In addition, his actually seemed to fit properly and had a minor energy-field protection no one else got due to him being a warrior. It didn’t hurt that he was easily over six feet tall, eight inches taller than anyone else here, and looked to have gone to the gym all his life. His black-gloved hands were holding the top of his chest plate, arms hanging down as he stood tall, watching me. There was a hint of a small smile that played across his lips. He looked every bit the Lethality warrior he wanted to be.
I stared back at Huck. When Vita had divided the class of 40 into parties, Huck had quickly made himself party leader by simply giving out commands. I wasn’t sure if he was a natural leader or just thought he was better than everyone else with his perfect tanned skin, short-crop brown hair, and athletic build. If he could survive the dungeons, he’d pry become the poster boy for Lethality with his charming personality and good looks.
Neither of us said anything for several seconds, so I gave in. “Sorry,” I muttered and looked down.
“It’s alright, Aurea,” he said, “with Vita gone, I just wanted to go over our plan once more and make sure we not only get through the dungeon, but we get through it first.”
I glanced over at Elise who was nervously chewing the inside of her cheek. She had her long, dark blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and staring intently at Huck, hanging onto his words. Her hair had originally been a deep brown when we started, but it had faded quickly over this past month of training. I pulled my eyes away from her, and looked back at Huck who had been talking about something I wasn’t paying attention to, forcing myself to listen.
“… and Colin, make sure that you’re close enough for your burning wave spell - you like to be a bit further from the frontline for it-“
“If I get closer, I’ll get hit!”
“I understand that, but you have twelve hit points - you can take a single hit and be fine. Plus, Elise will be there to patch you up. Right, Elise?”
She didn’t respond, instead she just nodded. I think she was more nervous than me. Normally you couldn’t get her to stop talking, even when Vita was punishing her for chatting.
“See Colin? You’ll be fine. You also have me and my shield,” Huck patted a glossy black circle coated in past damage behind him, “and Aurea won’t abandon you again.”
Huck looked at me with a meaningful look.
“I hadn’t abandoned him,” I defended myself, “the two sims were harmless and I needed to deal with the main threat!”
“They weren’t harmless!” Colin shouted back, “They each dealt three damage on their hits! I was almost knocked out!”
“I already said sorry about that! You said you could take care of them and I thought that meant-“
“I said I could take care of them once my mana recharged! I-“
“Guys!” Huck shouted over us, “We now know that we need to be more specific Colin, and Aurea you now know that Colin’s mana recharge requires some consideration when going for glory. This dungeon isn’t going to be like the sims. We are going to have to be on it from our first step in there. Just work on your teamwork and we won’t have any problems. Alright?”
Colin and I just nodded in response. It was over a week ago and I hadn’t stopped hearing about Colin’s ‘brush with death’ every day since. They were sims, solid light projections that barely hurt when they attacked, like being stung by a bee. They weren’t real kobolds.
“Do we know what monsters we will be fighting,” Elise said in the break of conversation, hoping to keep us from bickering even more, no doubt. “Did they happen to tell you any more at the leaders meeting last night?”
We all turned our attention to Huck. We hadn’t gotten a chance to speak with him about last night’s meeting. Only the leaders of the four teams had had a meeting with Vita and the Dungeon Runner to go over the basics of the dive, where they could ask questions and gain insights into what we would be facing.
“They didn’t go over any specifics beyond some of the basics for the dungeon,” Huck began, settling into a more comfortable stance now that all attention was back on him, “It was mostly what we had guessed. The dive should only be an hour or two at most, there is a hoard at the end that we need to win, the rating is only Trivial, and that the boss will be on theme. They didn’t specify what the theme is, but I suspect undead. You know - skeletons, zombies, that sort of thing.”
I nodded along. Undead was a common theme for Trivial and Minor and made sense for a dungeon that wouldn’t be casted to the public. The bones of slain monsters were cheap and you could reuse skeleton and zombie monsters multiple times since it was just the system animating them. They were just corpses being controlled like puppets. Since they had no sentience, they were easier to be controlled by the Lethality AI.
“So just a simple dive for treasure? No special rules or requirements?” Colin asked.
“Yup, just go in - grab the treasure and make it to the end. The other teams will be fighting over the same treasure but we can’t engage in PvP.”
“Wait, how does that work?” I asked, a bit confused. If we were fighting over the same treasure, how were we supposed to get it if we couldn’t attack the other teams.
“I’m,” Huck began slowly, “not entirely sure. They said we weren’t allowed to attack each other but we could get in each other’s way. We are fighting over the same treasure, but I got the impression that whoever gets the treasure first is basically the winner unless a mob takes them down. If all the mobs are dead, its probably first touch wins.”
I nodded. Smash-and-Grabs, as it was typically known, was an uncommon style of dive but not unheard of. In it two or more teams raced to complete the dive and capture whatever the loot happened to be. They then had to return and avoid the other teams competing. If another team found you, then they’d fight and try to take the loot for themselves and be the ones to bring it to the surface. You were awarded XP based on how long your team had the loot, how many monsters you fought, how well you did against the other teams, and got a massive boost for bringing the treasure out. You also won the dive if you brought the treasure out, which gave you a larger share of ticket sales and commercial revenue.
Some people died in PvP, but it didn’t happen very often due to the Lethality rating of the dive. Few people were willing to risk Severe divers in team vs team events like Smash-and-Grabs or Dungeon Ruler.
“Did the Dungeon Runner give any hints about traps or puzzles?” I asked. I was in charge of disabling them for the party and, so far, I wasn’t that great at them. I only got a few skill points for 1st level, I had put 2 points in Trapfinding and only 1 point in Disable and Stealth each. Hopefully it’d be enough for this dungeon so that the system would highlight the traps or puzzles, give some hints on disabling, but otherwise I was on my own. While it meant I was better than the others, thanks to the system prompts, I still had a ton to learn. The less I relied on system prompts, the better.
“No - they said that there shouldn’t be any destructive traps and the puzzles will be fairly routine. Based on the forums,” Huck said, “I think this first Roosevelt dive is meant to be straightforward and just test the basics on the team. I’m pretty-“
Huck was caught off as a warning flashed before my eyes and the system forced itself open in my feed. I scanned the words that appeared in front of me as the base of my skull, where my wetware was implanted, grew warm.
Roosevelt Announcement // The beginner’s dungeon dive will begin in one minute. You have sixty seconds before the dungeon doors will open. Reminder to all teams that attacking the other teams is expressly prohibited in this, and only this, dive. Breaking this rule, or any Lethality rules, will result in immediate dismissal for you and your party of adventurers. The Roosevelt Training School wishes good luck to all prospective recruits. Whoever wins the treasure at the end of the dive will be crowned the victors and awarded the coveted spot of Roosevelt’s Lethality Minor team.
Good luck future Divers. Conquer the Dungeon.
I read the announcement as the simulated voice spoke the words into my mind. It spoke faster than I could read and I ended up just skipping sentences. I hated that I couldn’t dismiss the text prompt, but the Lethality system was odd in that way. Other apps I could disable the text pop-ups, but Lethality liked to make sure their prompts were read for whatever reason.
Once the voice stopped, I could mentally close the prompt and looked at the others. We only had thirty seconds left to get ready after the announcement was over and Huck was already moving so that he was standing in front of the brick dungeon door, shield ready. I stepped up to his right side and a foot back, pulling our my kukri and gripping it tightly, my knuckles white.
I watched as the seconds continued to creep by, far slower than I thought time should work but eventually the counter in my feed finally hit zero. The brick door in front of us slid back and then to the side, revealing a cavernous tunnel ahead.
My diver heads-up display flickered into my vision as I looked past the door and into the tunnel. My health bar increased from black to red to green, and my Stamina and Mana bar quickly followed suit.
The tunnel itself looked like rough-mined rock with white scratch marks along it as if tools had carved it out. Huck and I were both holding our breath, letting it out in unison as we saw no monsters immediately within the tunnel. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had kind of thought we’d have a monster immediately to deal with based on Vita telling us about how we wouldn’t last more than a minute in a real dungeon.
Huck led the way into the five-foot wide tunnel and I followed close on his heels with Colin and then Elise behind us. My heart was beating in my throat, and I could feel myself trembling in anticipation.
The tunnel continued for twenty feet and we slowly picked our way down it, my eyes shooting back and forth, along the floor, ceiling, and walls for traps. We reached the end of the tunnel, stopping in front of a thin wooden door with a simple lock and latch on the outside. Huck had to sheath his longsword at his side as he tested the latch and then spoke, “It’s locked - Aurea you’re up.”
I nodded, then realized that in the dim light of the tunnel nobody could see me. The only light was coming from behind us in that cramp room we had waited in, its light barely reaching.
“Gotcha,” I verbally responded and slid my kukri back into the sheath, my nerveless fingers making me attempt the maneuver twice before I got the sword stowed. I pulled out a small leather bag that hung on my black canvas belt and crouched next to the door.
The lock looked simple and I had worked on several of these types of locks when we first began training and I had chosen the rogue class. I slid a pick and lever bar out, placing them against the lock and started testing each of the pins.
Weird, I thought to myself. I could only feel a single pin but there was something in the back of the lock.
Trapfinding Success // Spring Bolt
The system voice whispered in my mind and I understood immediately from the hint. This was a trapped lock. If I pushed too hard on that back of the lock, I’d release a spring bolt hidden within the lock itself when I pulled out my tool. The only problem was that to get to the single pin, I had to apply some pressure to that spring bolt.
“Well?” Colin asked from behind. His voice cracked slightly, it was obvious the nerves were getting to him.
“It’s trapped,” I responded.
“Well detrap it or whatever,” Colin said.
“Colin,” Huck said in a flat, reproachful voice. “Aurea, do we need to break the door or can you handle it?”
“It’s not a problem, just need a different tool,” I responded, with a flicker of annoyance. It was the first trap in the dungeon, I wasn’t about to admit defeat when I hadn’t even tried anything.
I pulled back my standard rake pick and brought forth a small hook pick. I bent the hook 45-degrees to the side, so I could still fit the pick into the lock but allowed me to angle it around the trap. I felt for the spring bolt and slid the improvised head of the pick over the bolt and felt the pin above it. The pick was sandwiched between bolt and pin now, so I slowly applied pressure lifting the pin, while avoiding placing any pressure on the bolt. With the pin set, I pushed the lever in my other hand and rotated the lock and the door gave a ‘click’ as it opened. I quickly pulled my tools out and dropped them in my bag, returning it to my belt and unsheathing my kukri.
With that done, Huck nodded for me to return behind him and he pushed the unlatched door open with his foot, holding longsword and shield at the ready.
Beyond the door lay a sparsely decorated room. Two beds with footlockers at the foot of each bed were against the east wall, while a large statue of some grotesque woman holding a scale was along the north wall. The west wall held a small wooden table with a scattering of coins along it, while the south just had the door we came into. We slowly moved into the room, my eyes flickering from dark corner to dark corner, ignoring the text and game statistics that were floating before my eyes. There was no light in this room and the feeble light from our starting room barely made an impact here.
“Can we get some light?” Huck asked, slowly putting one foot in front of the other, as if afraid there was a pressure trap on the floor.
“Y-yeah,” Elise stammered as she lifted a small symbol of a sun. The sun was attached to a linen cord necklace she wore, and she had to pull the symbol out from under her armor to grasp it. She uttered the word lux and snapped her fingers. Instantaneously, a ball of light appeared about six inches from Elise’s head appearing like a halo above her head.
I didn’t understand the technology behind how magic worked in the dungeon, no matter how many documentaries I had watched. There were micro-light projectors implanted in every room, thousands of them, that could form all sorts of illusions and tricks but I still didn’t get it. I don’t know how light could be hot or solid or anything else, but I didn’t care. It was for the best that I didn’t understand it, or else magic wouldn’t feel so special.
It was magic, that’s all I needed to know.
With Elise’s torch spell, the room was bathed in light and we began searching. I headed over to the statue while Huck and Elise moved to the footlockers. Colin immediately went over to the table and began grabbing the coins and putting them in a bag. Coins were XP, so we needed every bit of treasure we could find, though I did hope Colin was planning on sharing those coins with the rest of us. It was one of the only ways, apart from sponsors, to get better gear for Lethality.
I studied the statue and saw that the grotesque woman was supposed to be an orc. Large tusks protruded from her cheeks, like a boar, and it was hunched over. The Lethality orcs didn’t look anything like the ones in the movies. They shared more in common with boars than the human-looking orcs in pop culture. Thick fur, tusks, hooves for hands, and a tail that was capable of holding things. From what I understood, to make orcs, Lethality had spliced monkeys, pigs, and other creatures. That amalgamation gave it a sort-of-human-but-mostly-monkey body, with a useful tail and thick boar tusks. That useful tail was what was actually holding the scale in front of the statue, instead of its hoof-hands.
In addition, there were words above the statue, in English, that read: “Balance the scales and leave. Four takes three. The red claims the remains.”
It was a bit cryptic, but I did see that the scale could move up and down. I tested it with the tip of my kukri and the scales descended on one side while raising on the other.
“Hey Colin,” I called, “I think we need those coins for the scales.”
He came over with a huff and looked at the statue and then the carving above it.
“No, it doesn’t. The coins are mine. It just says balance the scales,” he said, “so make the scale balanced.”
“With what?” I asked, lifting my kukri off and watching the scales return to their normal position.
Before Colin, could respond, Huck called, “Hey guys, found something.”
Colin and I looked over and saw that Huck and Elise were standing over the opened footlockers. We moved over and I looked down, seeing that the footlockers had a pile of bones within each, beneath the bones in one box was a single red gem about the size of my thumbnail. My breath caught in my throat, I had only seen jewelry on vid-casts. If it was real, I could buy dinner for a month with that.
“Do you-“ I began, feeling drawn to the tiny jewel.
“It’s probably not,” Huck said, though with a longing in his voice. From what I knew about him, he had a large family and none of them had much of anything. They lived on a farm but it was owned by the government, anything they produced was used for government purposes and they weren’t allowed to keep any of it.
“It’s not,” Elise said, scooping it out of the footlocker and examining it in the light of her torch spell. “It’s just imitation jewelry, I have lots of it at home.”
I sighed heavily. We were only in our first dungeon and I was already getting caught up thinking we found real jewels.
“Well, I think its obvious,” Huck announced as he walked over to the statue, reading the words. “We need to place the red, that jewel, on one side of the scale and put the coins, minus three, on the scales.”
“I don’t think that’s it at all,” Colin said, putting a protective hand over his coin pouch.
Great, I thought, he’s one of those divers. Fucking loot leech.
“Colin,” Huck said with a commanding tone, “Just let us use those coins and we’ll give ‘em back to you for you to hold for the rest of the dungeon.”
Colin looked like he was about to argue, and then sighed and pulled the small leather bag off his belt and handed it to Huck without a word.
“Also,” Huck continued as he poured twenty-two glittering silver coins into his palm, “we share all the loot we find - that’s the rules for being on my team.”
“We never agreed to that,” Colin interjected quickly.
“We just did,” Huck said as he waved Elise over with the jewel and studied it and the coins.
I walked over and eyed Colin who was sulking. He looked like a kid who just had their lunch money stolen by a bully. I had been that kid a lot of times, though more often than not, they had just stolen my lunch. I rarely had money.
“Are you sure it’s as simple as taking out three coins?” Elise asked as she also studied the writing, “That seems too easy.”
“Jewels hold a lot of value, 19 silver coins for the jewel, even if fake, seems right to me,” Huck said, picking a coin up between finger and thumb and looking along its side.
Everything in Lethality had a value assigned to it by the system, and the more loot you earned in a dungeon dive, the more you had to spend on equipment, scrolls, spells, weapons, potions, and more.
The issue was that you never knew the value of an object until you got to the end of the dungeon and the system shared it with you, though things tended to stay the same value across the entire system. If you picked up a 50 silver piece jewel in one dungeon, and then found that exact same jewel in another dungeon, it’d still be worth 50 silver pieces. I suppose you could take the Appriasal feat but I didn’t see the point in that.
“Can’t we just keep adding coins to the scale until we get the right value?” Elise asked, placing the jewel on one side.
“Trap,” Colin interjected, “I bet there is a trap unless you do it right the first time.”
Huck hmm’d in agreement and picked up three silver coins and offered them to Colin to take, which he did quickly. Huck then held the other nineteen towards us.
I shrugged along with the others and Huck placed the silver coins on the opposite scale. For five seconds, nothing happened and I breathed a sigh of relief, but then the side of the scale holding the coins jerked several inches down and that sigh stuck in my throat. We had guessed wrong, and the sounds of clattering rang through the room.