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

More skeletons, zombies, and other undead met them along the way – including some of the hated Liches.  She knew that rationally they weren’t actually undead Elves that had chosen to embrace their Nether element and practice Necromancy, but from the glimpses she had of their hands and the barest hints of their faces she couldn’t picture them as anything else.  She had sent countless Lightstrikes in their direction (which were then copied by her Shapeshifter forces), interspersed by an arrow or two, which kept them so off-balance that they were unable to respond and were destroyed before they did any damage.  Of course, she ended up almost completely draining herself of Holy energy at the time, but it was worth it even though it regenerated slowly over the next hour or two.

As for traps, which were still the deadliest foes they faced in the dungeon, there were some variations of what they had seen before, but many of them were brand new.  There was a trap that had walls of Nether set up to act like a maze, where if you touched the walls it would essentially burn with an intense cold; that one was actually a little frightening, because undead could emerge from the walls and attack out of nowhere, which was difficult to defend against.  Another trap had super-thin diamond-shaped slices of pure darkness randomly descending from the ceiling like raindrops, and whatever they touched would get sliced up; after they had attempted to traverse the room while avoiding the “raindrops” and Starlight had her head severed from her body, they found that the dark slices couldn’t penetrate through metal – only flesh – so the Apes acted like shields for her and her Shapeshifters as they crossed through the room.

The deadliest trap so far had been one that was activated as soon as one of the Apes stepped into the room, but it didn’t manifest for nearly 15 seconds, when dozens of their monsters were already inside the room, fighting some puny skeletons.  “Whoa, stop – call them back, Felbar!” Gerold had said (or she assumed that’s what he said, since she didn’t have a translator handy), just as he was about to enter the room ahead of the other Dwarves.  It was too late for most of them, however, as little black motes were scattered all around the room, and where they touched the Angels and Apes already inside the room it somehow ate away at them.  Luckily, Felbar was able to save some of them, which immediately got fixed up by the healing Drones, but the damage was already done.

The one thing that had prevented all of them from dying, strangely enough, was Gerold’s strange Nether-sensing ability, which highlighted many of the trap triggers – but certainly not all.  Over half of the traps that could’ve taken an even larger toll on them – and possibly kill some of the living elements of their group – were never even activated, as they were bypassed after they were found.  The use of that ability, though, took a higher toll on him than normal; he was looking the worst out of all of them; a few times his Deep Delver had even stumbled and fallen, and it took a few moments for his exhausted body to respond and pick himself up.

The dungeon seemed never-ending, and Echo was starting to despair that they wouldn’t ever escape from there with their lives, let alone actually destroy the vile undead Core.  Just as she was starting to think that, they entered a room that was at least 5 times bigger than anything they had seen so far; her first glimpse around the room had her questioning her sanity.

If this nightmare isn’t the final room, I don’t even want to know what’s next.

Chapter 33

There were only three visible undead in the room, but they were monstrous.  Two of them were massive piles of various corpses all smashed together in a horrific abomination that brought the bile in her relatively empty belly up to her throat, threatening to make her gag and throw up whatever was actually still in there.  She had heard mention of one of them outside of Sandra’s dungeon when they were basically under siege but hadn’t seen it in person – and wished that she hadn’t even now.  If nothing else was proof enough of why we destroy undead dungeons immediately when we find them, those things should convince even the most hesitant.

The one that was outside of Sandra’s dungeon had been destroyed along with everything else when she used that disturbingly destructive construct, so she wasn’t even sure how powerful it was.  She was told that it had some sort of “healing” aura – if fixing undead that were damaged could be called healing – that had manifested itself before it was destroyed, but that was all she knew about whatever they were.  It’s a good thing there isn’t a horde of smaller undead in here, otherwise this could be even more difficult.

Those were the least of her concerns, however, because it was the third undead in the room that worried her the most.  The ceiling of the room was almost impossible to see over her head because of the same dim interior that the rest of the dungeon had, but she suspected it had to be over 200 feet tall; of course, she was basing that on the horrifically tall giant zombie she was looking at, which towered in between the two abominations.  It appeared to be an actual Giant that had been turned into an undead, with open wounds all over its body, rotting flesh falling off of it in chunks that didn’t seem to make a difference in its size, and open eye sockets that looked like the eyes had been forcibly removed from.

It was wearing a loincloth that was hard to tell what color it started as – because it was