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

As soon as they passed over the threshold of the dungeon, Sandra felt her connection to them become muted, similar to what happened before in the Reptile dungeon.  Commands to them immediately became difficult to get through and were delayed, and she again felt that she couldn’t give them more than basic commands.  Fortunately, she had been expecting that, and she had already given them specific orders before they went in – which they had no trouble following.

Sandra immediately saw through her constructs that the first room was dark; she could tell that the ambient light inside it had been turned all the way down to its lowest allowed setting by the Core, which was even darker than what she herself had done in the bathing room she had designed.  Luckily, her constructs didn’t rely on physical light to see by – mainly because they didn’t have eyes – so everything in the room was visible, if not well-defined.

There were a dozen humanoid-looking zombies inside the relatively small 30-foot-wide ovoid-shaped room, who reacted immediately to the invasion by her constructs by shuffling quickly towards them.  For their part, her Dungeon Monsters completely ignored the Undead – which was one of the specific orders they were given – and instead rolled or flew around the room, looking for traps.  She knew that her constructs might have been able to do some serious damage to the zombies, if not kill them all, but that wasn’t their purpose; their purpose was to trigger traps and unveil surprises waiting for her other forces.

They found the trap near the exit tunnel to the next, right where someone who had confidently destroyed the zombies would trigger it on their way onward.  Hundreds of shadowy tendrils shot out of the floor and nearby wall, latching onto everything in range – which happened to be more than half of her constructs in the room.  The shadow tendrils seemed to pulse with a deeper darkness as the Nether-based trap ate away at the captured constructs, destroying them in a matter of seconds.

Her other Shears and Forces tried to bypass the trap and move on to the next room, but as soon as they got close to the trap, more tendrils shot out and grasped onto them.  Within moments, all of her constructs had been caught and destroyed, leaving her blind to what was happening inside the dungeon.

* Ok, so…new plan.  There’s a trap in there that we may need to neutralize first, otherwise I’ll just be throwing my sacrificial constructs away.  Eventually the energy in the defense will run out, but I’m not sure how long that will take; I’m sending in some of my Monsters to see if I can speed up the process. *

 She sent in 6 of her Apes and 6 of her Angels, and then asked Felbar to follow them – but to stay just inside the room near the entrance.  Her constructs led the charge with their warhammers and made short work of the zombies, blasting them apart with a few swings of their weapons.  She knew from her own experiences and from what Winxa had told her that most Cores put their weakest Dungeon Monsters first and had stronger ones as the invaders made their way down, so she wasn’t going to start getting overconfident in how easy they had been destroyed.  The Undead in the dungeon were the least of her concern – it was the traps from the last dungeon that had destroyed so many of her constructs, and it was likely that the ones inside the current one would be similar.

Once they were down, she had her Celestial Authorities use their special Arrows and send them forth over the space where she knew the Nether-based trap was.  As she hoped, the shadowy tendrils shot out faster than she could even see them and snatched the arrows of Holy and Spirit energy out of the air; unlike the constructs, what the trap grabbed wasn’t quite the same.  Within a second, the Arrows’ lights started to dim, but the Mana inside the Nether trap was strained in order to do it; with Nether and Holy being opposites, it made sense to Sandra that they would react that way.

Out of the 30 Arrows shot and caught by the trap, 2 of them were released to finish their previous journey down the exit tunnel as the Mana in the trap ran out.  As soon as she saw that happen, Sandra brought in another group of 100 Shears and 50 Rolling Forces and sent them through the space where the trap was…and nothing happened.  She was going to have to act fast, though, because she knew that the trap would eventually regenerate from the ambient Mana around it, though she didn’t know how long that would take; to have a little forewarning, she had one of her Shears and one of her Rolling Forces stop where she felt it trigger before, acting as a way to know when it was active again.

As her constructs rolled and flew down the tunnel leading to the next room, something struck her as odd.

Winxa, why would the Monster Seeds still be inside the first room from my destroyed constructs?  I’m quite sure that the Core could’ve absorbed them, even though Felbar was in the entrance tunnel.

She thought about that for a moment.  “You’re right, it should’ve been able to. Either it deliberately didn’t do so for some unknown purpose…or it isn’t paying attention.”

It’s not paying attention?  It’s being invaded, and it doesn’t care?  That doesn’t make sense—or are you saying what I think you’re saying?

“I don’t know for sure, but yes – the Dungeon Core could already be upgrading its Size again.”

If that were true, it was both a good thing and a bad thing; on the one hand, it meant that spur-of-the-moment reactions from the Core would be almost