The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1)

by Jonathan Brooks

Large Copper Orb

  800

  80

  5

  200

  Large Tin Orb

  800

  80

  5

  200

  Large Bronze Orb

  8000

  800

  50

  3200

  Large Iron Orb

  8000

  800

  50

  3200

  Average Steel Orb

  16000

  1600

  500

  8000

  Large Steel Orb

  32000

  3200

  5000

  16000

  Large Air Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Earth Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Fire Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Water Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Holy Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Nether Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Natural Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Large Spirit Elemental Orb

  0

  800

  5

  400

  Locked Seeds:

  Unlock Requirements:

  Mana Cost to Unlock:

  Min. Mana:

  Max. Mana:

  Small Dragon Glass Sliver

  2 Tiny Dragon Glass Flakes

  14000

  5000

  20000

  Average Dragon Glass Shard

  4 Small Dragon Glass Slivers

  56000

  5000

  80000

  Large Dragon Glass Chunk

  2 Average Dragon Glass Shards

  112000

  5000

  160000

  Sandra had also unlocked the Average and Large Steel Orbs, as well as all of the Elemental Orb sizes, which gave her a whopping 53 choices of Monster Seeds to use. The only ones she still had to unlock were the larger sizes of Dragon Glass – but creating even a single Tiny Dragon Glass Flake was still beyond her. Regardless, she had plenty to choose from and had access to seeds that could be used for any of her constructs.

  Speaking of that, although she didn’t receive much of anything other than a resource capacity increase for upgrading to Core Sizes 12 and 14, she unlocked a new construct at Size 11, 13, and – just recently – 15. At each upgrade, the new constructs were right on the edge of her maximum Mana capacity, which meant that they took a little bit to save up for; even though she had some – ok, a lot – of extra Orbs piled around her core, she was planning on keeping those for an emergency.

  The first one was an Automated Digger, which was essentially a floating wheel 2 feet wide and 4 feet long with buckets attached to it, similar in shape to a water wheel she had seen used in a grain mill by a river before – though on a much smaller scale. It rotated around a central axis that also turned in any direction it wanted, giving it a full capacity to reach just about anywhere; when she experimented with it, the digging wheel tore up dirt and stone faster than she could absorb it. The Digger deposited the material behind it in neat piles, so she ended up using it to start hollowing out her new rooms and using some of her smaller constructs to move the dirt into piles arranged along the edges, where she could use it later if she needed it.

  As great as her Automated Digger construct was at digging, it wasn’t really useful for crafting or even defensive purposes; it floated where she wanted it to go slowly, and rotated just as lethargically, so it obviously wasn’t designed to attack or defend. Which was fine with her, because she already had plenty of things that could do that – and they would hopefully do it well.

  At Core Size 13, the non-combat construct trend continued, as she acquired access to something called a Repair Drone. When she was able to create it, she found that it was an unassuming-looking, white-colored, apparently seamless metal cylinder two feet high that floated an inch off of the floor. And it did nothing.

  Well, nothing until Sandra brought it near her Small Armored Sentinel, which was starting to look a little worse-for-wear after spending countless hours near a super-hot forge. It was actually her seventh Sentinel, as the others had their joints and vital areas melted from the intense heat; even the slow self-regeneration her constructs enjoyed wasn’t enough to keep up with the constant damage. Fortunately, they were inexpensive enough Mana-wise that she didn’t mind having to replace them periodically, especially as they always dropped their Seed when they stopped functioning.

  When her Repair Drone got near the Sentinel, however, two thin, single-jointed arms with small metal pads on the end seemed to emerge from nowhere on the floating cylinder. The metal pads immediately pressed up against her little melted crafter and the construct froze in the middle of hammering a double-bladed axe on the anvil. Sandra saw lightning-shaped streaks of every elemental color flow from inside the Drone’s body, down its arms, and into the Armored Sentinel. Within seconds, the melted parts of her handy Dungeon Monster started to form itself back together; to Sandra, it was like looking at all the damage over hours of intense heat reverse itself right before her eyes. In less than a minute, her Sentinel was back to looking brand-new, as if there had never been any damage in the first place.

  She watched, amazed, as the Repair Drone’s metal pads released the other construct, before retracting its arms back inside its shell, sealing up the slits on the outside of its cylindrical body as if they never existed. And then it just sat there, waiting for…something to happen, Sandra guessed.

  Curious, she took control of her Sentinel and deliberately placed its arm and hand inside the forge – though only for about five seconds. Still, the powerful heat from a dozen flame-jets heating up its appendage was enough to almost completely melt it away, along with a good portion of its side closest to the forge.

  Normally, that kind of damage would make it nearly unusable, and Sandra would just finish the job and deliberately melt it more so that it would be destroyed – where she would then create another. This time, however, her Repair Drone went back to work, placing its metal pads on the sides of the heavily damaged Sentinel and doing its healing work. It took about five times longer than the first repair, but she thought it was probably because the damage had been much more extensive, and its arm had to be almost completely rebuilt.

  Her experiment had been a success! But it also raised some questions.

  I thought you said that my constructs couldn’t use elemental energies because they weren’t alive; I’m pretty sure that’s what I just saw, she mentally asked Winxa, who was watching as amazed as Sandra was as her Repair Drone finished repairing her Sentinel.

  “That’s…not precisely what I said. I said they can’t control the elemental energies they are made from to craft the Enchantments that only living creatures can create. As crazy as that was watching all of the energy emerging from it, that show of power was essentially the same as watching one of your other constructs use their innate energy to float or rotate with seemingly no power source – but that energy is the power source; you just don’t normally see it working.”

  It was a pretty simplified explanation, but it made sense, she thought. Regardless of the validity of the explanation, Sandra still tried to take control of the Repair Drone and use it to craft an enchantment on the double-bladed axe her Sentinel had just finished making. After ten frustrating minutes of not even being able to get her construct to extend its arms from its pristine white shell, she gave it up as a bust. There’s got to be a way! Nevertheless, she gave it
up and kept the Repair Drone near the forge, where it would periodically fix the slowly melting parts of the Sentinel as it got too near the heat.

  The one downside of doing that, however, was that whenever her little crafter needed “healing”, it would pause as the Repair Drone did its work. She tried to force it to continue but found that it was completely frozen in place for the duration. Fortunately, as they were usually minor fixes, the process would only take a few seconds, but the interruption made the movement of hot metal from the forge to the nearby anvil sometimes inconvenient.

  Eventually, Sandra gave the Drone instructions to do the same thing most of her other constructs were doing – gathering ambient Mana. She didn’t really need it in the room to do that, of course, but the slow path she set it on brought it near the forge – and her Sentinel – only once every hour or so, which made the interruption a little longer for the repairs, but much less frequent.

  As for the Dungeon Monster construct that had the potential for replacing her constantly repaired Sentinel, at Core Size 15 Sandra received access to something called an Ironclad Ape. As soon as she could afford to produce the Ape, which cost 6,000 Mana – almost her new Mana capacity – and required an Average Steel Orb, the largest Monster Seed that she could actually originate, she was overjoyed and couldn’t wait to see what it could do.

  Made entirely of Iron – as opposed to the other constructs’ softer, unidentifiable metal – the Ironclad Ape stood only 4 feet high when it stood on its back legs; despite not being that tall, the new construct had solid iron plates of thick “skin”, in addition to a complete iron skeleton. It was more animated than her clockwork or mechanical constructs, because when she was able to see through some of the gaps in its outer “armor”, she could see a faint glowing bluish light right in the middle of its body. Since it didn’t have any obvious weak points along the outside, Sandra figured this light was what animated it and was its vulnerability.

  The sheer weight of the construct was staggering; she estimated that it weighed nearly 2,000 pounds, which was evidenced when it simply walked/stomped around and started to leave cracks in the stone beneath it. Sandra spent the next few hours using every drop of Mana repairing the cracks and then strengthening the stone flooring, hopefully preventing her from having to repair it in the future. By the time she had finished all 24 rooms she now had in her dungeon, she had spent almost 5,000 Mana on the project.

  The best part of the Ironclad Ape, however, wasn’t its weight or shape – it was the fact that it was animated and could move its arms (and fingers) in any direction it wanted. Not only that, but as it was larger and stronger than her Sentinel, it could finish projects faster; where her little Armored crafter would need five or six strikes to flatten out a section of red-hot metal, she figured that her new construct could probably do the same in one or two – if the strike was precise enough, of course. And with her practice lately, Sandra thought she could quickly adjust herself to the different “feel” of the Ape and make that preciseness a reality.

  Another added benefit was that fact that it was made of Iron, which wouldn’t melt nearly as easily as her Sentinel did when it was near the forge. It would likely still get damaged if it stayed there for too long, but as there wasn’t any real point to doing that, Sandra thought it would be safe. Overall, her new construct was larger, stronger, and could handle higher temperatures for longer – which meant that she could build a bigger forge and start crafting larger pieces.

  However, all of her upgrades and expansion meant that she was extremely close to the surface. The desire to see the sun again was almost overwhelming; in her previous life, she had spent so much time outside that being trapped inside her dungeon felt uncomfortable and foreign. Sandra didn’t have the same kind of semi-claustrophobic tendencies she had when she was alive as a human, but her Core still desired to reach out from its confines.

  Therefore, before she did any more building of forges, crafting of new items like armor, or even gathering enough Mana to upgrade herself again – which was going to take something like 50,000 Mana when she thought about it – she decided to throw caution to the wind and invite the outside world in.

  Chapter 24

  Sandra wasn’t stupid, though. Despite resolving to throw caution to the wind, she listened to the information her Dungeon Fairy provided before she committed to the act.

  “For completely informational purposes only, I need to tell you about what you will likely face up there. I don’t have any specific knowledge of what it looks like aboveground, but as you are near the spot where the final battle between the races and Wester was held all those years ago, the landscape has probably drastically changed. From what I remember hearing of it – since I wasn’t there with him at that point anymore – the war wasn’t exactly delicate on the surrounding land.

  “That being said, whenever a dungeon breaks through to the surface, they usually have already made sure that they are fully defended in case they pop up in the middle of a group of hostile figures. This includes having a good supply of Dungeon Monsters at the ready, and traps set up and prepared for almost anything. Typically, dungeons start off with weak Dungeon Monsters and traps first, and then increase their strength as they progress further – but it’s entirely up to the Core doing the defense. You already know about those Bearlings, but there could be something different – either more or less powerful for you to worry about.

  “Also, keep in mind that you won’t be able to absorb anything up there that isn’t connected to your dungeon. You might be able to see and funnel ambient Mana through your constructs, but you can’t affect much more than that. And lastly, once the entrance to the surface is created, the standard tunnels and rooms cannot be changed to be made smaller – only larger,” Winxa told Sandra when the Dungeon Core announced her intention to break through to the surface. The Dungeon Fairy seemed to want to say more than that, but she was likely constrained by whatever force prevented her from giving advice.

  Sandra got what she was trying to say, though; she needed to make sure she was properly defended in case those Bearlings decided to attack right away when she arrived on the scene. As things currently stood, all she had was the small little pit trap near her Home, and a single wall-slamming trap in the narrow tunnel just before the last room.

  That last room was inside a jutting earthen and stone hill that she assumed rose above the normal ground level, as it was just as high as the hill that the Bearlings were currently sleeping comfortably in. As her Area of Influence expanded, she could see more of the jutting hills piercing upwards all over, and the “normal” ground level was a series of small bumps and valleys – like it was a torn-up planting field that the earth decided to rise up from underneath and destroy.

  As it would only take at most an hour to dig a good-sized tunnel through the side of the small mountain, Sandra left that step until the very last. Instead, she did something that she had been putting off, as she wasn’t really fond of crafting traps that would kill something. Though, when she really thought about it, she was kind of doing the same thing when she crafted weapons; considering trap construction in that different light, she realized that they were almost one and the same.

  The issue was that it would be her doing the killing, even if it was in the form of a trap. With weapons, they were made for other people to use, but her traps seemed more…personal. Sandra briefly thought about the whole Territory Ant massacre she had been forced to commit; although she didn’t like bugs and the Ants had attacked her without (at least what she considered) provocation, the whole situation left a bad taste in her figurative mouth. To deliberately plan for the killing of beasts – or worse yet, someone of a sentient race – was something she was having a hard time with.

  Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it – she had the Bearlings constantly making themselves aware at the edge of her attention. They weren’t making any threatening moves, or even acknowledged her existence, but Winxa had ment
ioned that they might not stay that way once she broke through to the surface. As much as she didn’t want to kill them if they attacked her dungeon, she would be prepared to defend herself when it came to that.

  Therefore, with that mindset that she was purely doing it “just in case”, she started to place traps throughout the last rooms in her dungeon closest to the surface. Instead of following the same plan that other dungeons seemed to take – with having weaker Monsters and traps at first – Sandra went the opposite direction and put most of her strongest constructs and traps first. It didn’t make any sense to her why it would be done the other way; she thought that having the best stuff first would be better for eliminating the problem quicker.

  She also used every extra scrap of Mana she had to create more constructs, though she limited it to ones that weren’t very expensive because the traps that she wanted weren’t cheap. All in all, she spent five full days constantly low on Mana from her expenditures, as it was used on nothing but defense. It pained her to put crafting on hold for that long, but she knew it was for a good cause: her continued safe existence.

  Sandra also dug into her “treasure hoard” of orbs piled up around her Core for their contained Mana, as well as converting many of the dirt piles her Automated Digger had created in its excavations. She thought it was worth it to use nearly 150 of her smaller Orbs for the project, otherwise she expected that it would’ve taken another day or two to finish – which was a day or two longer than she wanted to be away from her crafting and ultimately delaying her first glimpse of the outside.

  She leaned on all her knowledge of the elements to make her traps, though she had to admit that she wasn’t great in the practical use category. Her expertise lent itself to using elemental energy on enchantments, and not how Heroes used it in battle against dungeon monsters. She knew they could do things like throw fireballs, shoot sharp icicles, create damaging whirlwinds, and even cause isolated earthquakes; however, she never paid attention to that because they never did those things when she was around.