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

ground, looking for more Desolate Spiders; before she could react, the floor of the wasteland seemed to explode in a shower of dirt, and her construct was enveloped in something she didn’t even get a chance to see before it was destroyed.

Racing another pair of Animated Shears to where her previous one was lost, she saw a creature that was about half again as large as one of her Iron-plated Behemoths spitting out the Tiny Copper Orb left behind by the destroyed construct.  It was colored similarly to many of the other beasts she had seen inside the wasteland – in greys and browns – but its skin looked scaly and even slightly shiny; with short front legs and long back legs, a bulbous body that looked like a distended bladder, and a frighteningly large mouth filled with hundreds of teeth, it looked like a giant toad minus the sticky tongue.

Looking around for where it had sprung from, she couldn’t see a hole anywhere, only a slight depression underneath it.  Where did it come from?  Her question was answered shortly afterward in spectacular fashion, as the…hmm, I’m going to call it a Rock Toad…seemed to deflate rapidly, almost like it had been full of air and a large hole was poked into it.  It collapsed into the depression underneath it, lying so flat that it looked like a pile of skin with no bones, muscles, vital organs, or even blood inside of it.  When it finally settled to where Sandra suspected it had started, the mouth appeared to have been opened completely wide, leaving an oval-like shape flat against the ground that looked like little rocks scattered across the landscape.

Looking at it both at a distance and up close, it was as invisible as the others she had seen – and obviously just as deadly. The jaws of the Rock Toad appeared to be able to swallow even a Bearling whole, which meant that anyone walking over – or even too near – would be swallowed just as easily; Sandra was just glad that the Hauler and wagon the Gnomes had been driving hadn’t encountered one of them, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have survived.  Searching the rest of the wasteland from above revealed the tell-tale pattern of their teeth in four different places – but anything traveling at surface-level would have great difficulty identifying the danger before it was too late.

All of that new information meant one thing to Sandra: danger to the people she was trying to help.  She wasn’t exactly sure how all of the different creatures she found survived inside the barren wasteland, but if what she witnessed with the Bearling and Desolate Spiders was any indication, they found a way; there might even be some sort of prey that they hunted she hadn’t even seen yet, but that didn’t really concern her right now.  The main thing she worried about was the future dealing with the races around the wastelands – Sandra couldn’t have them (or whoever/whatever she sent to help them) dying to the dangers of the “barren” landscape.

What is it my father used to say?  “Make twice the profit with just one sale”?  Something like that, I think.  Regardless of whatever the correct adage was, the meaning behind it applied to her situation: eliminating the dangerous creatures of the wasteland would both make it safer and provide her with much-needed Advancement Points.  Actually, it’s almost three times the profit, because I’ll get some Mana from their deaths, as well.

Even though it seemed like the best course of action, Sandra hesitated.  The expansion of her Core and Area of Influence as an instinctual need was in the back of her mind, and she worried that she was justifying the deaths of “innocent” beasts and creatures to further her own power.  Actually, when she really dug down and thought on it, the current situation wasn’t really the problem; she had experienced first-hand how dangerous at least some of those creatures were, and there was every likelihood that they would attack her or hers at some point.

No, it was the future that worried her.  Will I begin to think the same thing about the different races around here?  That they are a danger to me and my increase in power and Influence?  If the Orcs, let’s just say, attack me again – will I needlessly justify their deaths as a necessity so that I can help the rest of their race?  And would I then destroy the village on the border so that they won’t have a staging ground for another attack?

Those questions rattled around in her mind for roughly an hour before she silenced them with a firm thought.  No, I will not debate every decision I make now in the fear that it will influence my future self.  Sandra was of her own mind, and the instinctual drive to kill everything that the other Cores suffered from was controlled and pushed away, never to show itself…at least, she hoped so.

Once the wastelands were safe for travel, she could concentrate on the one thing she would never compromise on: crafting.

Chapter 4

To help with an assault on the different lairs and colonies, however, Sandra had to put most of her crafting on hold and work on building her AMANS back up – and perhaps even expand it; while she still had nearly 5,000 Animated Shears in it, she was running at half of what she was used to gaining from the ambient Mana absorption.  Now that her dungeon was defended with at least an adequate defensive force of constructs – and her traps, of course – she divided her focus again to start building it up again.  The problem she had to figure out was how to rapidly scale up the operation again now that they cost five times as much as they used to, while still maintaining her other project (creating more rooms)