The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) by Jonathan Brooks (english readers txt) 📗

seeds, rhizomes, and cuttings as she needed to make more.  She didn’t spend a lot of time on them, however, because she had neither the time nor the Mana to devote to something like that at the moment; what she had done with them was more of a proof of concept than anything else.

She didn’t have much time to look at the new food she could grow for a couple of reasons; namely, she was directing her ever-growing force of Dungeon Monsters and, of course, she was crafting.  Starting on the second day, she had 5 Steelclad Ape Warriors armed with the new enchanted Titanium warhammers as well as 2 Radiant Pegasi and 6 Celestial Authorities with which to start destroying the larger, more powerful Undead roaming around the forest.  With a trio of Phoenixes roaming the sky looking for Specters, she was finally gaining some ground with what was already outside the other dungeon.

Her Apes, with their new more-powerful weapons, performed better than expected; half of them had the Fireburst enchantment on their warhammers, while the others had Holy Light – and both worked just as well as she had hoped.  The first Undead her small force of Monsters tackled was another Ogre Skeleton; the Apes with the Fireburst enchantment managed to get in close and smash their weapons into its leg, blowing out chunks of bone from both the impact and small explosion of flames.  Not only that, but the bones around the impact site – maybe because they were dry or for some other reason – caught fire, burning through the surrounding skeletal figure at a fairly rapid pace.

The Holy Light enchantment was equally impressive.  Upon being struck, a brief flash of very bright light enveloped the point of contact, spreading out and causing a large part of the bones around it to crack and virtually fall apart.  Both enchantments were about equal as far as the damage they inflicted, but Sandra suspected that the Holy Light enchantment might have an even better result against some of the Undead that were protected by Nether-based effects – like those Liches that Echo had mentioned.

The Celestial Authorities were equally impressive, using a surprising agility to jump into the fray and avoid being smashed by the Ogre’s huge bone club.  Every slice of its longsword made of pure light cut completely through bone like it wasn’t even there; even though it wasn’t quite as “destructive” as the warhammers her Apes were wielding, it was possibly even deadlier – especially when they could slice and slash their longswords much more rapidly than the Apes could swing their weapons.  The only downside was that their light seemed to dim a little after each strike, but when the battle was done they were back to their original brightness; she took this to mean that interacting directly with a Nether-based Monster – while effective – “hurt” them a little, though it was obviously not directly proportionate to the damage they doled out.

The Pegasi, for their part, dampened the Ogre’s special ability that it tried to use to speed itself up; they had to be within about 15 feet for it to work, but that wasn’t a problem, because they were flying circles around the Undead.  Every other second, one of them would swoop in and stomp their hooves on the head of the Ogre, cracking it apart bit by bit.  That didn’t really even matter, though, because within 15 seconds the Undead Monster was blown or hacked apart – all without even touching one of her own.

When her force entered the forest, they set about destroying every Undead Monster in their path; there were a few times when there would be gatherings of the Undead in another attempt to trap her forces, but rather than risk them dying she went around them and mopped up all of the stragglers she could find.  Sandra figured that she would eventually be able to get into a pitched battle with them – just not quite yet.

By day three, all of the Specters above the trees that Sandra could reach were eliminated, though she could visually see a large number of them in the Undead Core’s Area of Influence further to the east that she couldn’t reach.  That alone let her know that it was quite possible the rest of that area was crawling with Undead, which was likely still funneling quite a bit of Mana to the Core; as far as she could estimate, though, her own intake was at least twice as much at that point from her various constructs roaming around.  In fact, she estimated that she was gaining just about 650,000 Mana every day, which was only increasing as she created more Dungeon Monsters and sent them out into the world.

By the end of the fourth day, she had added enough of her Dungeon Monsters to finally take down one of the gatherings of Undead that had plagued her so far.  With dozens of Apes, Pegasi, and Authorities comprising her force – along with two Repair Drones, which really hadn’t been needed yet – she pitted them against a dangerously large force of over 100 Undead of various types, which also included Liches, the black-colored armored undead, ghouls, large zombie beasts, and even a couple of Ogre Skeletons.

But she also had a secret weapon – Felbar had joined the fight with his War Machine.  After he asked her to soften them up with her Celestial Authorities’ special long-range Arrows of Spiritual Ascension attack – which literally punched holes in the Undead wherever they hit – he waded into the small horde like a madman.  A particularly skilled and deadly madman that laughed as he destroyed the Undead with abandon, at that.

His Flame Cone attack swept across the front line, lighting on fire and burning at least two dozen of the enemy in the first few seconds, before he swept away those close to him