The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2)

by Jonathan Brooks

  Learning from the previous incursions, she also placed a second trigger on the threshold to the room that would deactivate the trap if every person who had crossed it exited the room. That way, they couldn’t just activate it and run out, waiting for it to expend all its Mana before entering again; well, they could just do it multiple times in a row and slowly deplete the Mana inside of the trap, but she was hoping that no one would know enough about how it worked to realize that.

  There was one other way someone could deactivate the trap, however. Inside the small corridors of the maze, there was a Steel Python located in the room towards the exit, which was the catalyst for the trap. Every room that had more than one element in its trap needed a catalyst to maintain its presence within the room; in this case, it was the Python, and destroying it would deactivate the trap. Through some experimentation, she found that she could retie the trap – with a comparatively small application of Mana – to another Python if the original was lost, so replacing it in the future didn’t mean she would lose the trap for good. Of course, getting to the Python was going to be difficult, as one would need to traverse the entire maze in order to get there.

  In the tenth room – if anyone managed to get that far – she flipped some things around. Previously, when she applied the Spirit element to a trap, she had caused those affected by it to imagine they were trapped inside a large spider’s web and attacked by multitudes of spiders, which also had the benefit of ramping up their Fear quite a bit. When she combined Spirit with Holy in this next room, however, she went in the opposite direction.

  Dozens of large, densely packed, and bright floating lights would hover throughout the room – which she didn’t change from its previous 30X30X10 size – when the trigger was activated by someone crossing the threshold. The trap would last for a little more than 20 minutes, which was plenty of time for the 30 Singing Blademasters she had placed along the rear of the room – because those who touched one of the bright floating lights likely wouldn’t even know they were there.

  The lights weren’t harmful by themselves, however – just the opposite; if someone allowed a portion of their skin to come in contact with the floating light, they would experience the greatest euphoria they could ever imagine as long as they stayed touching her Bliss Globes. Or, that’s what she decided to call them, because pure bliss was what she was hoping people would “suffer” from. When they were incapacitated and in their joyful, introspective world, her Singing Blademasters would attack when they weren’t prepared for them. Simple, and yet – hopefully – effective.

  She had tried to make the entire room one whole euphoric experience, but the effects would only last for about 20 seconds; as soon as it was activated, the timer started, so that if only one person walked in and was caught by it, the others outside in the tunnel leading inside would be completely unaffected – not the ideal situation.

  In the eleventh room, Sandra combined the Natural and Earth elements to design something that she thought was going to be extraordinarily lethal. First, she expanded the room to be about the same size as the ninth room with the maze, but instead of walls – she built pits. A narrow, 2-foot-wide, zig-zagging walkway wound through the room, with a deep, 30-foot pit filled with extremely sharp jagged rocks tipped with Dragon Glass (for extra penetration). The walkways actually came fairly close to each other as they crossed through the room, but to avoid the chance that anyone could just hop over the pit to another walkway, there were Natural-element-created vines hanging down from the ceiling. Normally, this would probably look like a way to swing across, but the vines were connected to a very lightly wedged piece of heavy stone created by her Earth element; if the vines were pulled on even slightly, the stone would plummet down from the ceiling and impact anyone nearby.

  Sandra even placed a few vines in the middle of the walkways, which were difficult – but not impossible – to pass by. To make it harder, she placed over 100 Rolling Forces along the walkway and created small ramps that pointed at anyone walking towards the exit. Her constructs could pick up speed and either run into someone’s foot or propel themselves through the air via the ramps, where they would – hopefully – hit them when they were least expecting it. The traps were tied to the very last Rolling Force in the room, which acted as the catalyst, and if it were destroyed, the vines and the falling rocks would disappear; if anyone managed to survive more than 15 minutes the trap would disappear as well, but she didn’t think anyone would last that long.

  The next room down was technically Kelerim’s old Forge and workshop, but she branched off and made the real exit to the walkways on the wall adjacent to the tunnel leading there. She couldn’t seal it off yet because then there wouldn’t be access to her Core and her Home room, but she was planning on that to happen in the future when she was done.

  Sandra started to hollow out the thirteenth room down, when she took a mental step back and evaluated where she was at. She now had three more fairly deadly rooms to add to her defense, and though she knew that likely wasn’t enough, she felt it was time she worked on the third thing she needed to do to ensure she succeeded in her future enterprise of saving all of the people nearby: crafting.

  Chapter 4

  It had only been about 24 hours since Sandra had completed her AMANS project, and she had used all but 10% of the Mana she had accumulated on constructing her new rooms, the traps located therein, and the Dungeon Monsters that populated them. She also completed four of the ten stages needed to progress to the next Core Size, and she thought that was fairly good progress. Although she still didn’t like the experience of losing control of her dungeon and constructs – as well as “the trapped in her head” feeling – that upgrading her Core brought with it, she knew it was necessary…but she was just fine leaving it for later.

  With a little better defense in place, Sandra split her concentration between hollowing out more rooms to help with that defense as well as working on her new crafting project. Before she found out that Kelerim had been followed, she had been excited to start working with the new materials he had brought back with him. First, though, she wanted to unlock their larger forms to be of use as Monster Seeds, which – due to her increased Mana intake – didn’t take as long as she feared.

  Monster Seed Origination

  Name:

  Raw Material Cost:

  Mana Cost:

  Min. Mana:

  Max. Mana:

  Tiny Salt Cube

  20

  5

  5

  10

  Tiny Clay Cube

  80

  15

  15

  150

  Tiny Nickel Orb

  200

  20

  20

  200

  Tiny Silver Orb

  3000

  300

  40

  400

  Tiny Gold Orb

  4000

  400

  50

  500

  Locked Seeds:

  Unlock Requirements:

  Mana Cost to Unlock:

  Min. Mana:

  Max. Mana:

  Small Salt Cube

  2 Tiny Salt Cubes

  10

  5

  20

  Average Salt Cube

  4 Small Salt Cubes

  40

  5

  80

  Large Salt Cube

  2 Average Salt Cubes

  80

  5

  160

  Small Clay Cube

  2 Tiny Clay Cubes

  30

  15

  300

  Average Clay Cube

  4 Small Clay Cubes

  120

  15

  1200

  Large Clay Cube

  2 Average Clay Cubes

  240

  15

  2400

  Small Nickel Orb

  2 Tiny Nickel Orbs

  40

  20

 
; 400

  Average Nickel Orb

  4 Small Nickel Orbs

  160

  20

  1600

  Large Nickel Orb

  2 Average Nickel Orbs

  320

  20

  3200

  Small Silver Orb

  2 Tiny Silver Orbs

  600

  40

  800

  Average Silver Orb

  4 Small Silver Orbs

  2400

  40

  3200

  Large Silver Orb

  2 Average Silver Orbs

  4800

  40

  6400

  Small Gold Orb

  2 Tiny Gold Orbs

  800

  50

  1000

  Average Gold Orb

  4 Small Gold Orbs

  3200

  50

  4000

  Large Gold Orb

  2 Average Gold Orbs

  6400

  50

  8000

  Sandra now had access to Salt, Clay, Nickel, Silver, and Gold as both seeds and materials; the wood that he had brought back, she belatedly remembered, didn’t work out. What she did have, however, was Flax Seed as a material, which she could grow and eventually turn into linen. She knew there were other types of cloth out there that could be – and were – made from plants, but she didn’t have the seed available to make them; she was hoping more would become available to her soon – or else she might have to start looking for some on her own.

  While she wanted to use the Nickel, Silver, and Gold to start working on some jewelry, she held off for the moment for a few reasons; for one, the fine art of crafting and perfecting rings, necklaces, pendants, earrings, chains, bracelets, circlets, brooches, hairpins, torcs, armlets, and even hairpins took a steady hand that could do delicate work – which none of her constructs could quite accomplish. While her Tiny Automaton was actually a great size for the smaller, more precise work that required a keen eye, it didn’t have any type of dexterity to accomplish more than the most basic of tasks.

  Secondly, most of the jewelry she had seen being crafted in her former life usually had some sort of gemstone accompanying it. These gems were the material of choice for enchanting, because the runes involved in the process could be created directly into the harder stone without as much fear of it being destroyed. Since most – but not all – of the jewelry she had seen made over the years were primarily to enhance some aspect of the Heroes battling against the dungeons, it only made sense for the runes and enchantments in general to be as durable as possible. And since she hadn’t found any gemstones yet in all of her excavations, she was out of luck when it came to those.

  Granted, she could theoretically practice making some of the bulkier jewelry items that didn’t take as much finesse, but she still decided to hold off on that for the third reason: there were plenty of other things she could do. For instance, the clay that she received as both a Monster Seed and a material could be used for all sorts of different pottery crafts. The salt she received was an additional component to improve the tanning process; it could be used to improve her cooking skills (though she really didn’t have a way to test it out), and also during some simple paper-making processes.

  But those weren’t what she wanted to craft; some of those different crafts were missing materials that she didn’t have access to, or she couldn’t easily perform the actions that were needed (such as jewelry making and even pottery). Instead, she wanted to work on something that she had already partially started on earlier while she was excavating Raw Material for her Small Animated Shears dotting the sky outside her dungeon.

  She had ended up clearing a room that branched off of the room with her boiling vats, where she had previously used them for cleaning off raw Bearling skins for tanning purposes. Now, however, it would serve another purpose – cleaning the bark off of Flax plants. Well, she hoped it would if she could get everything to work properly in her new room.

  Sandra couldn’t produce cloth as a material at the moment, because she thought that it was technically a finished product that could be used for clothing and protective defensive purposes – just like leather and metal armors. Therefore, she had to start from scratch…which meant growing Flax plants from the Flax Seeds she had received approximately a week ago from Kelerim’s foray into the nearby village. He had brought back some linen cloth, which she assumed was why she had received the seed – because it was needed to produce it from the very beginning.

  To this end, Sandra filled the bottom of her new 100X100X40-foot crafting room with 5 feet of plain old dirt. Then, with an extra application of Mana, she created very narrow walkways leading through the room by turning the dirt into stone, separating long 10-foot-wide plots of dirt from the others. The walkways were going to be useful in moving some smaller constructs she was planning on using to seed the ground with her Flax seeds – and for harvesting afterward.

  So, she had dirt and seeds – but there were three other issues that she had to address. One, the dirt she had supplied had very little in the way of nutrients that plants needed to survive, grow, and thrive. Two, there was no sunlight in the room to help them grow – the ambient light provided by her construction of the room wasn’t nearly enough. And three, they needed water – and most likely lots of it.

  The easiest solution would be to create a trap that combined three different elements: Natural (substituting for the nutrients the plants needed and to speed up growth), Holy (for the light needed by the plants to grow), and Water (for…water, obviously). She attempted to do this by placing a Natural-based trap inside the dirt, which would supply what was needed there; she placed another Holy-based trap in the ceiling, which would shine light down on the growing plots; and lastly, she placed a Water-based trap on the walls, which would spray out water when it was activated.

  And every time she tried to tie it to a catalyst, it completely failed.

  Sandra even sent one of every construct she had access to (other than her Iron-plated Behemoth), and every single one of them had no luck. She tried to tie multiple constructs together as a catalyst without success; trying to tie it to a stationary object didn’t seem to work, either. She wasn’t sure what was going on or what she was missing in the whole process, and neither did Winxa.

  “Using multiple elements in a trap is a little beyond my knowledge. If I hadn’t seen you do it already with two elements already, I would’ve said it was impossible.” The Dungeon Fairy shrugged in apology. “It’s just unfortunate that you have to place them all in the same room, otherwise I think you have a good idea.”

  Yes, that is unfortunate—but wait…do they all have to be in the same room? That really got her to thinking. After running a few scenarios through her head, she thought she might have a solution. Thanks, Winxa – you figured it out!

  The Dungeon Fairy looked confused but pleased at the same time. “Um…you’re welcome?”

  Sandra had been thinking that she had to have everything in the same room to get it to work, but that wasn’t necessarily the case; ironically, she could split things up to make it all come together. With this new thought in mind, she began excavating a room above her growing room. It didn’t have to be very large, fortunately; in fact, while it was the same length and width as the one below, it was only 6 feet tall – just enough to be classified as a room and have a trap installed into it.

  She created a steep tunnel that curved sharply up to the new space to make it an “official” room in her dungeon, and then she added some more stone dividers so that it looked like a replica of the growing plots down below – minus the dirt. Instead, she created a Rolling Force construct and sent it up to her newly built room and created a stone pathway that led across the separated plots. Lastly, she drilled multiple holes in the floor per plot equidistant from each other, so that they led directly down to the growing room.

  Going back to the dirt-filled plots, she created and brou
ght in a veritable army of 50 Articulated Clockwork Golems, created a big pile of Flax seeds on either side of one of the 10-foot-wide plots, and set her constructs to work digging holes and transporting seeds. Their clamp-hands worked just fine digging through the dirt and even clamping onto seeds, and they were able to cover the seeds back up once they were planted without difficulty. Once they were done, she picked a single Golem for a catalyst and began her trap preparation.

  First, Sandra infused the dirt in the planted plot with the Natural element, which would locate, sustain, and enhance the growing speed of the seeds planted there. Next, along the ceiling she placed large orbs of the Holy element that would shine brightly down and illuminate just the plot of dirt that had been planted; she wanted to concentrate on just the single 10X100-foot section of the room to make sure her experiment was working.

  Unsurprisingly, since there wasn’t really anything too Mana-intensive with the trap she was making, it only required about 500 Mana for the entire dual-element trap to be placed and tied to the Golem – which meant that it would be easy enough to fill the entire room later…if it worked. She also placed an activation trigger at a central point in the room where her construct could turn the trap on and off as necessary.

  Next, in the upper room, she placed a simple water-producing Water trap in the corresponding plot above the planted dirt. It would fill slowly, however, because she didn’t want to flood the ground below; while plants needed water, there were only a few that she personally knew of that could grow while they were drowned underwater. She also placed an activation trigger on the “walkway” where her Rolling Force was located, so that she could activate it when it was needed.