Summary
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...
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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.