The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3)

by Jonathan Brooks

  Of course, that morning when Sandra was about to strike at the first massive clutch of Desolate Spiders getting a little too close to the route Echo usually took to-and-from the village and the dungeon, the problem with the Limiter rune was finally solved…in spectacular fashion.

  * * *

  Violet was getting thoroughly frustrated with the strange rune that Sandra had shown her on the wooden pillar in the Enchantment Repository Room. There were eight concentric circles and what she assumed were eight wavy-looking access lines, which would theoretically help to designate the “limit” of energy being funneled through it. However, the only thing she had to go by was a slight difference in one of the lines from the Core’s examples, and Violet thought that it would be easy to figure out the difference, using even more slight differences to see how they would change the performance.

  As it turned out, they didn’t have any effect at all.

  In fact, the original rune – which Sandra helpfully called a Limiter – didn’t do a single thing that she could tell. She had tried incorporating it into the original enchantment over the Energy Orb, tying it to the tiny Stasis Field she had created, and even kept it completely separate – all with no discernable difference at all to the amount of energy being transferred. At first she thought that Sandra was just mistaken, and the rune was nonsense, but some innate Enchanting instinct told her that it was correct – but she was missing something, some vital piece of information to get it to work.

  She had tried altering the circles little by little, then changing the positions of the access lines themselves, then straightening them all out and shaping them one-by-one, and so on and so forth. She had essentially given up the day before, but she was stubborn enough to keep trying for some sort of result even when she thought she had tried everything.

  Felbar had even joined in on the experiments, because the Limiter rune was fairly easy to create; even old War Masters could learn new runes, it seemed, because he picked it up within minutes. She had enchanted his very own tiny Energy Orb for his use and had even set up another tiny Stasis Field for him – which was easy enough for him to see, since he also had access to Spirit elemental energy. Despite his earlier enthusiasm, though, he had just about given up and was playing around with different ways of creating the rune sort of how Violet herself was, hoping that it would finally do something.

  “Have you…tried creating the rune with your Natural element? That might make a difference,” Felbar asked her, which made her jump since it had been at least an hour since either of them had said anything.

  “Of course not, because Sandra said that it was created from Spirit only – so I doubt it would have any effect, either. I can almost feel like it should be working with the one I have, but there’s something preventing it that I can’t see,” she answered, having done everything she could with the Spirit Energy Orb, Limiter rune made from Spirit elemental energy, and the Spirit-based Stasis Field. Though now I’m beginning to wonder if he has a point; have I been going about this all wrong?

  Before she could try it herself, Felbar answered. “It probably can’t hurt to try…hopefully…so I’m going to test out my Fire element to see if that works; if it doesn’t, I’m out of ideas – not that I had many to start with,” he said, before creating what she could only assume was the Limiter rune using his Fire element. She couldn’t see or manipulate it, so she had to assume he had done it; he had been creating the other one out of Spirit over and over for about a day and a half, so she had faith that it had been done correctly – or as correctly as they could assume, given Sandra’s spotty recollection of it.

  Felbar had only lightly connected the rune to the Spirit Energy Orb he had been using, because he didn’t quite have the Enchanting skill to weave it into the rune sequence around the Orb; when he brought it close to the Stasis Field, Violet held her breath…and let it out in disappointment as the Field started to brighten slowly like it usually did when they connected the Orb and the Stasis enchantment. I guess that wasn’t it either.

  “Oh, well – it was worth a try, Felbar,” she said, failing to keep the disappointment she was feeling from her voice. “I’m going to try a couple of other things, but then I’m giving up for now; at least we have this rune that we can take back, and maybe one of the Master Enchanters still around will know what to do with it.”

  “That’s fine; I can’t wait to get back – these old bones can’t take the cold of this dungeon for this long,” he said, putting the tiny Energy Orb next to the others on his neck as he leaned back against the wall. They had found that two or more Energy Orbs could increase the regeneration rate of elemental energy, so it was a common practice for them to do so when they were feeling a little drained from all the Enchanting. “In fact, I’m going to heat this little area up if you don’t mind using a trick my father taught me.”

  Violet was barely listening as she looked at her own experiments – trying to see a different way to test what she had already been testing – so she just grunted out an affirmative. The next moment, she was practically blown onto her back from a wave of heat and force coming from Felbar’s direction. A scream was abruptly cut off as she looked up to see Felbar stumbling towards her on fire, before he collapsed on his face – unconscious or dead.

  Before she could even react, two of Sandra’s healing constructs were there, having moved from their position in the corner of the room; they had been stationed there since the beginning, mostly in case something disastrous happened – kind of like what just occurred. She crawled over to Felbar’s unmoving body, seeing burns all over his skin, which was easy to see because all of his clothes had been burnt off.

  Within moments, though, the burns started to heal rapidly, the angry and blackened skin flaking off as new skin was revealed underneath. Violet sighed in relief as she saw Felbar’s back moving up and down as he started to breathe deeply again, which meant that he was certainly still alive. She had seen the healing constructs work miracles before, and now was definitely not an exception.

  It took another few hours for the old Gnome to fully recover from the ordeal, get some clothes, and shove his face full of food to replenish what had been lost during the healing. When Felbar – now completely healed, though his entire body was now completely devoid of any hair – was finally able to explain what happened, Violet sat back and stared at him in surprise, because he had just solved the problem.

  That’s…so simple.

  Felbar had used a simple temporary enchantment on the floor of the room that would warm the immediate area around him by 10 degrees; when it had enveloped his body, it interacted with the Energy Orbs he had on his chest. Normally, that would’ve just resulted in the enchantment absorbing energy at a rapid rate, which would make it increasingly hotter and hotter until he moved the Orbs away. However, because he had the Limiter on one – and it was obviously touching the Fire Energy Orb – it acted as a catalyst that kicked the rune into working. Instead of the expected trickle of energy leaking through, the Limiter was apparently cranked all the way up; the energy in the tiny Spirit Orb was expended all at once, as well as some of the Fire Orb.

  The tiny Spirit Orb was entirely fine, but Felbar’s Fire Orb had been reduced by a quarter, or perhaps even a third; Violet could only be thankful that the relatively minor heating enchantment was relatively safe in the first place, otherwise the heat and flames would’ve been…deadly. Fortunately, it hadn’t been and Felbar was alive – if a bit shaken from the experience. Not only that, but Violet thought she had figured out how to use the rune, though it would still take some very cautious experimentation to control it.

  Spirit energy was also thought of as “living” energy, found in almost everything that was considered alive; this made a difference in this case, because it was apparently the catalyst for initiation. Going back to Sandra’s description of how Humans would cast their spells through the enchantment, the Spirit element was applied by the living Human; it was probably a failsafe built into the
rune so that it wouldn’t be activated by stray elemental energy. When they “initiated” it, only then would the Limiter activate to do what it was supposed to do.

  All of that ultimately meant that every enchantment that they were hoping to power – like the Stasis Fields – needed a Spirit Energy Orb for “initiation” and one supplying the actual energy. In Felbar’s case, the tiny Spirit Orb started the process with the Limiter rune and used his Fire Orb as energy – and consumed a good portion of it in the span of a few seconds. In any further experiments, Violet knew she needed to supply at least a Spirit Orb to start the process, and a second one to act as the power source.

  Felbar rested for the remainder of the day from his harrowing experience, but Violet was now eagerly waiting to experiment some more now that she thought she figured it out.

  * Just be cautious, Violet. Felbar was very close to dying there; I know it was an accident – even if you may have learned something from it – but that doesn’t mean you can be reckless. Just in case, I’m placing an additional two Repair Drones inside your workspace, bringing them up to four; two was barely enough to save Felbar, and I don’t want you dying because I didn’t have enough help for you…but that doesn’t mean you should throw all caution to the wind. *

  “I know, Sandra; don’t worry, I’m planning on being extra careful from now on, especially seeing what happened to Felbar,” she told the dungeon, safety a very conscious thought on her mind. “Did you know that the rune could extract the energy at a faster rate than usual? I thought it was only to limit the amount already coming out?”

  * I didn’t – which is why I want you to be extra careful. I don’t know what other unexpected things will come from this whole experiment. *

  “Me neither, Sandra, me neither. But I hope a lot of good comes from it as well.”

  * That’s my hope as well. Well, I’ve got some deadly beasts to kill that are inhabiting my wasteland, but I’ll be keeping an eye on you, nevertheless. My Drones have instructions to heal you on the chance that you need it, but I’d rather they not be needed – if you catch my drift? *

  “I do, I do,” Violet said, walking back into the Enchantment Repository Room. “You go have fun, and I’ll call if I need you—actually, can you create a whole lot more Orbs of different sizes?”

  * Already on the way. Good luck. *

  “Thanks – you too.”

  * Oh, I don’t need luck; I’m going to absolutely annihilate these things and make it safer for everyone to travel through these lands. *

  Sandra said that with such conviction and confidence that Violet had to chuckle a little. As she settled down in her little corner of the room she had designated as her workspace, she rubbed her hands together and smiled in anticipation. Hmm…where to start, where to start?...

  Chapter 8

  “Annihilation” turned out to be putting it mildly.

  Sandra’s force of Ape Warriors, Jaguar Queens, Dire Wolves, Dividing Rolling Forces, and one Repair Drone poured out of her alternate dungeon entrance connected to the workshop one after another until they were gathered outside in – if she did say so herself – an impressive display of might. When they were all assembled, she immediately sent them towards the massive Desolate Spider cluster that was now fully moved to the pathway Echo used to travel towards her dungeon. It was now clearer to Sandra than it had ever been that she needed to eliminate the deadly creatures of the wasteland if she wanted to maintain a relatively safe environment.

  She sent her Dividing Rolling Forces in first, bringing them to within a dozen feet of the leading edge of the cluster; with what looked to be a perfectly choreographed action – but in reality was just that the Rolling Forces decided that it was the right time – they all sprang apart. More than a thousand heavy slices of the constructs shot into the air, their forward momentum launching them up and over the first ranks of Spiders. When they reached the apex of their vertical arc, the pieces of Rolling Forces rained down on the backs of unsuspecting Spiders; their weight alone was enough to snap their thin stone-covered bodies, cracking them like a chunk of iron dropped on an egg.

  It didn’t take long for a response, however, as the Desolate Spiders swarmed over the slices of Sandra’s constructs within their midst. Watching from above with two dozen Reinforced Animated Shears, she lost sight of them as they were buried under thousands of Spiders trying to bite or stab them with their sharply pointed legs. Sandra could sense that three of her Rolling Forces had been destroyed, but not from the incessant arachnid attacks; from what she could tell, quite a few Force slices had impacted something harder than Spider shell – like a sharp protruding stone jutting from the ground – which severely dented and mangled them, causing the few remaining segments of those constructs to dissolve into the ground and disappear, leaving behind their Monster Seeds.

  While the horde of Spiders were – for the most part – ineffectually trying to damage her Dividing Rolling Forces, her other constructs attacked with brutal efficiency. Steelclad Ape Warriors leapt into the air and slammed down on small clusters of Spiders, flattening and killing dozens within seconds as they flailed around them with their fists. The Mechanical Jaguar Queens and Dire Wolves crashed into the arachnid forces like a wave, stomping down with their paws and crunching the Spiders apart with their jaws. Within 30 seconds of the attack starting, over a thousand of the enemy had already died, while none of her larger constructs were harmed seriously…except for one unlucky Ape.

  Venomous bites and stabs with pointy Spider legs did absolutely nothing against her metal-formed Dungeon Monsters…but that didn’t mean they were invulnerable. Enough blunt-force damage could hamper or destroy most of her constructs, while others had other vulnerabilities; her Apes, for instance, were animated by a glowing “core” inside their well protected chests. One of her Steelclad Ape Warriors was swarmed by hundreds of Spiders at the same time, and a half-dozen managed to squeeze their way inside the few gaps in the Ape’s torso; within seconds, the deadly arachnids had bitten, stabbed, and destroyed its vulnerable power source, killing her construct.

  Seeing that happen, Sandra made sure the others were aware of that happening and to avoid being overwhelmed; while they couldn’t exactly acknowledge their receipt of that information, she saw them retreat and jump away when too many were surrounding them. After that, the rest of the battle was relatively anticlimactic; thousands of Spiders died in just under 10 minutes to Sandra’s forces, leaving heaps of smashed, oozing corpses spread out over hundreds of feet of wasteland.

  Other than the Steelclad Ape Warrior, which she had already replaced and was sending to join her extermination force, she had lost three dozen of her Rolling constructs. A few were from the initial impact at the start of the battle, but the others were from another vulnerability she wasn’t previously aware of; apparently, if the slices of them were kept apart for long enough – for at least two minutes was what she determined – then not being able to reform into a single construct would be just about the same as losing half of their pieces. The press of Spiders had been so thick in some places that some pieces couldn’t get to each other, resulting in their loss.

  Checking on Violet, she found that the Gnome had made some progress with figuring out the Limiter rune; Sandra was still a little saddened on how the method of getting the rune to work had been discovered – with the whole Felbar being charred to a crisp – but Violet seemed to have no obstacles towards her experimentation. Hopefully within the next few days we’ll be able to start actually applying the rune to help power a number of things.

  The deaths of all the Desolate Spiders had also supplied a massive amount of Mana – nearly as much as a full day of ambient Mana absorption from her AMANS. She used some of it to replace the Ape and Rolling Forces that had been destroyed, but the rest she fed into more Elemental Orbs. She would’ve rather used them to create Monster Seeds that could contain some of her more Mana-expensive Constructs, but she was a little short on Raw Materials; she was still
actively making some rooms to help provide those, but her excavation was only so fast.

  Fortunately, as much as it would be disgusting, there were now thousands of corpses that could be “recycled”; Sandra had already thought ahead and created a small army of Hyper Automatons, the advanced form of her Tiny Automaton. The new Hyper Automatons were only slightly larger than the original and appeared to be made of the same soft metal material – but they made up for those similarities with something else: strength and speed. Whereas the older ones walked slowly around, their stiff-like legs making their pace a toddling amble; the Hyper ones, however, had fully jointed legs and could run – and run fast.

  They weren’t the fastest of Sandra’s constructs by any means, but they could move quickly for their size. Not only that, but they could lift and carry things that seemed impossible; a few experiments with some blocks of iron showed that they could lift something that weighed up to 100X their own weight – sort of like she had heard some insects could do.

  As a result, they were the perfect transportation service for corpses big and small; they could work together to lift and carry something larger, but even on their own they could drag something twice or three times their size. As 200 of them ran out of her dungeon and towards the battlefield that wasn’t much of a battle, she saw each of them use their hands to grab three or four Spider legs and start to drag them back towards her dungeon at a run. A few times some of the legs got ripped off in the process and the Automatons had to grab another, but within about 10 minutes the first of the corpses were dropped off inside her entrance and she immediately started to absorb them.