Actually working it out herself helped her understand exactly what the problem was that the Gnome homeland was facing; even if they could teach the exact way to create the enchantment, those who could learn how it was put together didn’t have the necessary elemental energy to actually do it. Even the Master Enchanters needed to work together to supply that much energy, so unless they had dozens of Apprentice Enchanters collaborating on a single, complex rune sequence that would likely take years to learn how to create properly – which sounded like a disaster with that many trying to mesh it all together – then there was no way it was happening. Sandra began to see why the Gnome leadership thought they were doomed.
Now, working on the smaller model she had created, Sandra thought that something quite a bit smaller than the War Machine might be plausible – like maybe something a little bigger than a Gnome; as it was, however, there was no chance of getting something like what she had built to work…at least, not yet. In the future…perhaps…but right now? No.
She knew that even if she managed to create something small enough, she still had to work with Violet to pull together all of the thoughts she had about getting the rune sequence to function properly; while she wasn’t going to try to duplicate what the Master Gnome Enchanters did, the same principle of enchanting the entire construct all at once still applied. Once the enchantment was in place, only then could individual enchantment runes be replaced and repaired—
Wait…
That thought sent a jolt of inspiration through her mind, though it wasn’t fully formed quite yet. She was beginning to see how it might be done, but it was going to take a bit of trial-and-error to see if it was more than just a feeble hope. The reason – as far as she understood it – for the original sequence having to be done all at once was because everything had to be tied into the central enchantment; the purpose of that was to regulate the energy consumption of the construct while it was being controlled – otherwise anything the pilot did to manipulate the runes via infusions of elemental energy could become unstable.
If that happened, the same thing Violet was experimenting with could happen; the vast amount of elemental energy contained in the War Machine – and based on what she had calculated earlier, it was indeed vast – could cycle through every enchantment sequence, creating a feedback loop that could lead to an explosion of vast proportions.
At least, that’s what she assumed after Violet and Felbar had tried to explain what they knew about the enchantments on the large Gnome construct. It was a bit technical and Sandra wasn’t quite sure if she had understood it correctly, but as far as she could tell that was the basis behind the whole theory. But if she eliminated the potential for that type of catastrophic result – by utilizing a Limiter rune, perhaps – then the entire enchantment sequence could be put together piecemeal.
Now it’s doubly important that Violet figures that rune out.
Chapter 7
Violet spent the next two days working on the Limiter rune, growing more and more frustrated at her lack of progress. Sandra and Felbar even tried their hands at it, but weren’t getting anywhere, either; they had hit a mountain of a bump in the road that seemed insurmountable, but the Dungeon Core knew that it was only a matter of time. While they were working on it, the older Gnome was recovering nicely from his coma – to the point where he would possibly be able to travel long distances within the next day or so.
Echo came back once during that time at Sandra’s request to pick up another bag of Energy Orbs; the rest of the time the Bonded Elf spent either inside the village sleeping or going out to hunt in short sprints, using her hastily mended bow. The hunts seemed to tire her out, but Echo persisted in going on them despite the fact that she missed about a third of her shots; the repair to her bow had altered it slightly, throwing off her aim – which Sandra could clearly see even from a hundred feet up in the air.
I have to see if I can make her a better one down in my dungeon, she thought – after seeing the Elf miss for the third time that day. The residents of the village had fortunately warmed back up to Echo after the initial frosty reception, and if they didn’t treat her with quite the same affection as they had before, at least they weren’t openly hostile – unlike the male Elf that had broken her bow. Sandra soon learned that his name was Wyrlin, and that he had been trying to convince the Elder that Echo was a danger to the other villagers, the village itself, and the Elven people as a whole.
Luckily, the Elder – and anyone else he approached – seemed disinclined to listen to his angry ramblings (probably because Echo was supplying Energy Orbs for her people via the dungeon); after a few days of no one listening to him, the Elf took off into the north-eastern woods one afternoon and didn’t come back. Sandra watched him leave and followed him for another few miles into the trees, but he eventually hit the boundary of her Area of Influence and disappeared. She assumed he was heading farther into the Elven lands to warn those about the new “dungeon slave”, but he was taking a strange route; when she mentioned it to Echo, she didn’t even want to discuss it and only said that she was glad he was gone.
Since Echo seemed content to live inside her village and come back to the dungeon every once in a while to deliver more Energy Orbs – which was essentially what Sandra was wanting – the Dungeon Core left it alone; there was no reason to invite trouble when there was no point to doing so.
In spite of the worry about Wyrlin and the lack of progress in the Limiter rune – there was something that they were missing, but none of them could understand what it was – Sandra and her dungeon were doing quite well. In the two days the Gnomes were experimenting with enchantments, her AMANS had managed to accumulate and surpass 10,000 Shears; at that moment, it was currently sitting at just under 11,000 – and still growing.
Sandra was starting to see a marked decrease in how much they were funneling back to her Core as they continued to spread out, however, so she decided that she might bump it up to about 12,000 and see if that was a good balance. Theoretically, she could continue to expand until she filled up her entire Area of Influence, but she had already seen that anything farther out from where her Shears currently roamed didn’t provide nearly as much ambient Mana every hour. Whereas she was getting approximately 2 Mana per hour from a good portion of the Net above her dungeon (the outer edges of it she estimated to be about 2/3 of that amount), the Shears she had roaming around the border of the wastelands were maybe bringing in 2 Mana per day.
Sure, after a few weeks every Reinforced Animated Shears that she created would pay for themselves; with just over a half million Mana being funneled into her Core every day, however, she thought it was a good place to stop. One reason was because she was starting to feel a major strain on her mind at having it split up and doing multiple things at once; another reason was because she was ready to start cleaning up the land around her dungeon and make it safer for future travel.
After creating her eighth additional room a while ago, Sandra had quickly used the AP she earned from the project to unlock the additional reduction in the Mana Cost of her Dungeon Monsters. That helped to speed up production of her Shears a little since it brought the total cost of each one to an even 50, though it also required her to excavate more rooms for the Raw Materials to produce them. Therefore, in addition to the eight rooms she had excavated, she added another ten to that total; looking at everything from a distance underground, her neatly spiral-shaped dungeon looked like it had a very long tail.
With the influx of Mana inside her Core, and with her AMANS and excavation projects wrapping up, Sandra was ready to start assembling a strike force that could wipe out the creature-based threats around her dungeon. It was about time, too, because she had observed a gradual migration of the new ones she had discovered; since they weren’t confined to a cave lair like the Bearlings or a colony like the Territory Ants, the groups of Spiders and Wolves were able to place themselves where they wanted. Apparently, where they wanted was the pathway that Echo used
to reach Sandra’s dungeon, as well as the winding route that the Gnomes had used to leave with their wagon.
It was almost as if they could somehow sense where their potential victims had been traveling, so they moved to intercept them when they came back; it made sense, unfortunately, as Sandra had heard that many natural predators tended to congregate where they knew prey was likely to frequent. Therefore, Sandra warned Echo not to journey back to the dungeon until she made the way safer, which the Elf readily agreed to.
Getting her army ready for the first assault – which would be a large group of Desolate Spiders – Sandra felt like she was going on a shopping spree where everything was on sale. She pulled up her Constructs Creation Options and saw that the new 30% total reduction in cost was already making quite a difference.
Constructs Creation Options
Name:
Mana Cost: (30% Reduction)
Clockwork Tarantula
18
Reinforced Animated Shears
35
Hyper Automaton
70
Dividing Rolling Force
88
Lengthy Segmented Millipede
350
Iron-banded Articulated Clockwork Golem
525
Roaring Blademaster
1050
Large Armored Sentinel
1400
Mechanical Jaguar Queen
2800
Mechanical Dire Wolf
3500
Martial Totem
5600
Automated Sharp-bladed Digger
7000
Multi-access Repair Drone
11200
Steelclad Ape Warrior
16800
Titanium Anaconda
22400
Steel-plated Behemoth
28000
Gravitational Devastation Sphere*
15000
Advancement Creation Options
Name:
Mana Cost: (30% Reduction)
Goblin Foreman
56
Unstable Shapeshifter
11200
While she couldn’t yet afford to create a Titanium Anaconda or a Steel-plated Behemoth, the previously out-of-reach Steelclad Ape Warrior was now only 16,800 Mana; she was very excited to finally have them back, because they were both better suited for crafting and versatile in combat. The only problem, though, was that each one she produced was going to be expensive in terms of both Mana and Raw Materials; while she had previously unlocked a few options that would be able to contain the construct, they were expensive to create.
Monster Seed Origination
Name:
Raw Material Cost:
Mana Cost:
Min. Mana:
Max. Mana:
Small Dragon Glass Sliver
40000
14000
5000
20000
Small Faceted Sapphire Sphere
24000
7000
3500
17000
The Small Faceted Sapphire Sphere was the least expensive of the two options, but when she added all the costs up, she was going to have to use a total of 23,800 Mana and 24,000 Raw Materials to create a single Steelclad Ape Warrior. The Mana itself wasn’t that big of a deal now that she was receiving that much practically every hour, but the Raw Material cost meant that she was back to excavating more rooms. Fortunately, every two hours of excavating gave her enough to produce another Monster Seed, so the only thing holding her back now was time.
So, the next day saw Sandra alternatingly doing multiple things again, though her AMANS project wasn’t one of them. Excavating more rooms only took minimal concentration for a part of her mind, so she didn’t feel the strain as much as she had before; almost as soon as she stopped the constant creation of Reinforced Animated Shears for the Net, she had felt like a weight had been lifted off her mind. The two other things she concentrated on were easy enough to focus directly on, so she didn’t have to divide her focus again.
First was the creation of her creature eradication army; it consisted of four Steelclad Ape Warriors (which were just slightly larger than the original Ironclad Apes, but were made of a shiny steel material), a dozen Mechanical Jaguar Queens, a dozen Mechanical Dire Wolves (which, like the Jaguar Queens, were basically large wolves made from stronger metal than their predecessors), a single Multi-access Repair Drone (it looked nearly identical to the regular Repair Drone, so she wasn’t exactly sure what the difference was yet), and…300 Dividing Rolling Forces.
The last entry into the lineup was something Sandra put in as an impulse, mainly because she knew she was going up against the Desolate Spiders. The Dividing Rolling Force was about half again as large as the original Rolling Force and made from a metal that was a bit heavier, denser, and could withstand a little more damage; the largest difference, however, was that the construct could divide. Not just in half, but into at most six different parts of roughly equal mass. That didn’t seem like a benefit, but it was the dividing action that made it spring into the air a couple of feet, where it could propel forward if it had enough momentum, or slam down into the ground from normal gravitational force.
It would’ve been even more effective if the separate parts were sharp, inflicting cuts on an enemy, but the blunt force they enacted on a target was brutal enough. After they sprang apart, their divided parts would slowly gravitate toward each other and reform into a perfectly round ball again, ready to fight some more. Through some quick experimentation in her dungeon, however, Sandra found the downside to the new Rolling Force; if more than half of the divided segments were destroyed, the entire construct would cease to function and be destroyed shortly thereafter. If there were at least three of the segments still “operational” when they came back together, then it would form together again into a smaller ball – that was able to be repaired by a Drone if necessary.
Still, Sandra was planning on using them effectively against the Spiders, because having a lot of extra targets to attack would hopefully let the other constructs do their thing without too much hassle. As much as she didn’t like to think of her constructs as “expendable”, losing the new Dividing Rolling Forces wouldn’t be too much hardship; she was just glad that none of them could be poisoned by the Desolate Spiders, so she was hoping they would survive with few casualties.
The other thing that Sandra was focusing on between creating constructs for her threat-eradicating army was building another Hauler and wagon. Even though Violet and Felbar were dedicated to figuring out the Limiter enchantment rune, she could tell that they were anxious to get home. Now that the older Gnome had pretty much fully recovered, getting back to their homeland was a priority; Sandra would miss them and their help, but they weren’t prisoners or anything – and having another representative to vouch for Sandra and her dungeon to the Gnome leadership was always good.
When the Dungeon Core told the two Visitors about her project, she was proven right in her assumption that they wanted to leave; they doubled their efforts with their enchantment experiments, saying that they wanted to do as much as they could before they left. Sandra definitely appreciated it, so she made sure to include as many materials as she could in the wagon they were going to take back to Gnomeria – which included blocks of Titanium.
The new metal she gained access to – because of the Elite Elf Porthel’s broken sword – was extremely useful for crafting weapons and armor, and it would also be useful for the Gnomes in the construction of whatever defenses they could. Although it was approximately as strong as Steel, it was less dense; this made Titanium lightweight with a better tensile strength (meaning it could bend more without breaking) and it resisted metal fatigue from repetitious use, which helped to prevent cracking. It was also able to withstand higher temperatures – it had a melting point that was even higher than Iron – and it was thought that because of that, it could handle being the focus of certain enchantments for longe
r periods.
Not that you couldn’t use just about any enchantment on any material, but Sandra knew that some were better suited for certain ones; for instance, if you had an enchantment that would light something like the tip of a sword on fire when it was activated, it probably wouldn’t work very long or successfully on something made of wood or a softer metal with a lower melting point.
Sandra was excited to use Titanium herself in her crafting, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to experiment yet. Once the wasteland was “safe” and the Gnomes had left, she was planning on digging into a lot that had been neglected from the recent emergencies. In fact, her Core was practically vibrating from excitement at the thought of having a little peace and quiet to get back to her crafting.
The next morning, her construct army was complete, the wagon was essentially filled to the top with materials, the Hauler that would bring it home was enchanted by Violet (the doing of which Sandra watched intently and learned some valuable tips from), and the Dungeon Core was actually able to start stockpiling Elemental Orbs and other Monster Seeds for future use with her excess Mana. She had already finished all of her stages towards the next Core Size upgrade – which took nearly 240,000 Mana all told – but she had already determined to hold off on doing so; since she didn’t have to worry about accumulating more Mana for that, once her current self-imposed obligations were taken care of, she was…free. Free to craft and free to plan more for the future.
The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) Page 8
