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

example, were quite numerous and more difficult to kill because of their ability to continue even when most of their bodies were smashed apart.  Two of the Elves that usually hung back while the leader did the fighting were injured as they were swarmed by the millipedes, in fact; it wasn’t more than superficial, however, because they were destroyed by a frenzy of elemental spells that practically obliterated them.  Any wounds were quickly healed by Alanthia with her Holy energy anyways, but the fact that they weren’t invulnerable was good to know.

She also noticed that they took special care to reserve as much energy as they could while delving deeper into her dungeon; their teamwork and attention to detail was superb as well, though she couldn’t help but notice whenever she checked on their progress that not everyone was pulling their weight.  Other than a few times when they were forced to defend themselves or be overwhelmed by numerous constructs, most of the work was being done by Porthel with his quick movements and his excellent weapon.  It wasn’t necessarily the fault of the others, though – it was just that all of them specialized in manipulating their elemental energy in the form of spells, many of which wouldn’t work well against her constructs.

Using Natural energy to poison a monster?  Her constructs didn’t have blood to poison.

Trying to burn them with Fire energy?  Unless it was superheated to dangerous levels, it wouldn’t do much.

Drowning them with Water?  Her constructs didn’t breathe.

Slicing them up with blades of hardened Air?  Mere scratches on their hard bodies for the most part.

The only things that tended to work against them were projectiles like rocks made with Earth energy or restraining them with concentrated masses of elemental energy, though that took a bit to do for anything large enough to be a real threat.  Sandra was sure that there were other things they could try – she wasn’t an expert on manipulating energy in that manner, after all – they held off for the most part because their leader was doing just fine.

Except that, after a while, she could see that even he was starting to look ragged, after having essentially destroyed 95% of Sandra’s constructs by himself.  Sandra thought that he was probably going to run out of elemental energy at any time – but he just kept going, regardless.

But as that really wasn’t her focus, she only periodically checked on their progress on their way down to her Core.  Instead, she was embroiled in her own fight against a six-headed monstrosity that wouldn’t move out of her way.

Sandra first attempted to get it to shift out from the exit tunnel – on the off chance that it actually worked – but the only thing that she accomplished was learning that the snakes could strike much faster than she could believe something that large could move.  She was expecting them to be relatively slow like the Saurian she had fought outside the Gnome village; on the contrary, each snake head could dart forward and snatch up one of her Shears in less than a second, before rearing back into position.  They only had four teeth – two fangs on the top and two on the bottom that dripped with a clear venom – that slid in and out of an internal pocket in their jaws, so her Shears weren’t so much “bitten” as “crushed” in its mouth.

As she had figured, no amount of baiting could get the hydra-adjacent monster to move more than an inch or two; however, she did notice what seemed to be its drawback – when it did move, the body moved very slowly, which indicated that it couldn’t travel very quickly.  It was quite possible that it could drag itself with its snake heads by grabbing onto something ahead, but if it were in an open field, it could probably only move a mile every day or two.

Sandra managed to maneuver one of her equally fast Steel Pythons up to its side and a little underneath it, somehow avoiding a dozen strikes by the snake heads and hiding protectively underneath the bulk of the Dungeon Monster.  She hoped to be able to bite into the side of the creature and find a way inside of it like what had happened when she killed the Ancient Saurian, but all her Python’s bites did was scratch the surface of the hydra-thing’s extremely tough skin.  After about a minute of that, she was starting to make some progress as some chunks were being ripped away, but then the entire bulk shifted without warning and flattened her own metal snake like a piece of copper in a press.  The enormous weight of the monstrous snake was, to put it bluntly, impossibly unreal – but the same could be said considering some of her own constructs, she supposed.

Sandra and her constructs were running out of time.  While she was doing all of those tests to see if there was an easy way past, her waiting constructs had been attacked by a small force of reptiles that emerged from somewhere behind them.  It was a small force, thankfully, but she did manage to lose another Mechanical Wolf to a crocodile; if she didn’t hurry, her force would continue to be whittled down until there was nothing left.  While the Core could easily provide unending waves of reinforcements, she couldn’t quite do the same at the moment.

Therefore, it was decision time; should she attack all out and hope to be able to do enough damage to kill the massive monster, or should she keep trying out different scenarios to see if there was one that might end up being more effective?  As she looked back in her dungeon to see that the Elves had just passed through the thirteenth room in her dungeon with only four more to go before they arrived at her