The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (top 10 novels txt) 📗

Chapter 5

Crafting didn’t take a lot of Mana, and neither did expanding her dungeon to include new defensive rooms, so most of her Mana was used to finish up the rest of her upgrade stages – and to create more Shears for the air aboveground.  Sandra also created more constructs for her new rooms, though she hadn’t placed any traps in them quite yet.  What she did do, though, was expand her Home room where her Core was located, because she finally decided to check out the new construct she had received when she upgraded to Core Size 17.

Now that she didn’t have to worry about any Territory Ants discovering her and attacking, it was easy enough to expand her room upwards and outwards – to the point where her ceilings were 50 feet high and her ovoid-shaped room was now over 100 feet at its longest.  Her Core was now floating 25 feet above the floor – right in the middle of the room – so she figured it was safe enough to create her newest Dungeon Monster: the Iron-plated Behemoth.

She created a Tiny Dragon Glass Flake, which was actually about half the size of a Tiny Copper Orb – a very strange Monster Seed for something that could contain so much Mana in a construct.  When it was ready, she selected it and infused 10,000 Mana into it to create her new Dungeon Monster…and found that she was very glad that she had expanded her room.

The Behemoth was a monstrous 15-foot-tall, 30-foot-long, and 6-foot-wide construct that appeared beneath her Core; it reminded her of stories about an animal called an elephant that was found far to the south of Muriel – the Human lands where she grew up.  Its main body was completely covered with Iron-plate scales that draped off its back to the ground, and four tree-trunk-like legs supported the massive frame with additional iron plates.

 The strangest thing about it, however, was the fact that it had two heads – one on each side of its body.  Though, “heads” was a bit of a misnomer; on each end there was a long chain attached near the top that had a large spiked ball attached to it, kind of like a strange flail-like weapon.  She directed her new construct to walk away from her and she watched it ponderously move forward – it was extremely slow in comparison to any of her other constructs.  When it turned, however, it could turn quickly, and the spiked balls were flung outwards at tremendous speed; anything that they ended up hitting was not going to have a very nice day.

Rather than have it wait in her Home room where it might inadvertently damage her core if it was forced to fight, she started to create a massive room that branched off from it.  She had to make the tunnel leading to it quite large to fit her new Behemoth, but she had plenty of Mana to spare in the construction process – so it was no big hardship.  In fact, she almost had too much Mana still coming in and she couldn’t spend it fast enough.

Splitting her concentration between new room construction, producing more constructs to fill those rooms, blacksmithing, producing more Shears for aboveground, and trying to automate the growing process (all of the extra Flax produced was actually a good source of Raw Materials) was time-consuming and kept her thoroughly occupied.  By the time an additional five defensive rooms and one extra-large room (for her Behemoth) were connected together and were complete, she had added an additional 1,000 Small Animated Shears to her AMANS outside, bringing it to a total of 10,000 and bringing in an additional 25 Mana per minute.  She spent almost a full day filling in the rooms that were just made with more constructs, but she held off on adding any traps to them until she had upgraded her Core at least one more time – so she could make them extra powerful.

Once that was done, she cautiously filled in the tunnel leading from the eleventh room down to Kelerim’s old Forge room with stone and found that there was no issue with sealing it back up.  There was now a route from the entrance through the original eight trapped rooms, leading to nine partially trapped constructed rooms filled with her Dungeon Monsters, which led to her Home room.  From where her Core resided, another tunnel branched off to her various crafting workshops, her growing room, and the VATS system that would allow for rapid transportation up and down her dungeon.

That was about all that Sandra could reasonably do for the moment; she knew she could continue to craft and even attempt a few of her other crafting options, but she realized that she was just putting off the inevitable.  Might as well just do it to get it over with…besides, the retting of the Flax might be done by the time my upgrade is complete.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad – I’ll be right here keeping you company.”

Thanks, Winxa – you’re one of the only things keeping me sane during those times.  It didn’t take long for her Mana to fill up completely again, so within a few minutes she had activated her Core Size Upgrade.

Sandra was doubly glad that the Dungeon Fairy was there to keep her company – even with her talking about nonsense that didn’t really interest her – because the change in her elevation meant that she couldn’t hear or see any of her little constructs roaming around her Core.  She technically didn’t even need them anymore because she had more than enough constructs throughout her dungeon absorbing and funneling the maximum amount of ambient Mana that she could get from it, but she had kept them around because they were her…companions, of a sort.

Most of them had been there from the very