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

to a fledgling Dungeon Core anyway.  And your skill also seems to need Elemental Orbs instead of just straight Mana to ‘transmute’ the materials, so that could change some things as well.” Winxa shrugged in a gesture that portrayed her confusion and lack of knowledge.

Thanks – I’ll have to play with it a little and see what I can find out.

Before she did that, however, she checked her Core Selection Menu to find out what else had changed.

Core Selection Menu

Dungeon Classification:

Constructs

Core Size:

18

Available Mana:

943/12517

Ambient Mana Absorption:

10/hour

Available Raw Material (RM):

12500/34674

Convert Raw Material to Mana?

12500 RM -- > 500 Mana

Current Dungeon Monsters:

11252

Constructs Creation Options:

16

Monster Seed Schematics:

85 (3)

Current Traps:

30

Trap Construction Options:

All

Core-specific Skills:

5

Current Visitors:

1

Other than an increase in her maximum Available Mana and Raw Material, nothing much had changed.  It was strange seeing that she had over 11,000 Dungeon Monsters, but when she considered that 10,000 of them were Shears floating 200 feet above the wasteland, it wasn’t so hard to comprehend.  The rest were filling up various workshops, her Home room, and of course the trapped (and currently non-trapped) defensive rooms.  The one thing that didn’t change like it normally did was her Ambient Mana Absorption, which looked like it had completely maxed out at 10 Mana per hour.

Sandra took control of her Golems near her churning water vats to check on the progress of the Flax retting and saw that it was still going to take a couple of days for it to complete.  With that still for the future, and with no other crafts calling out to her for attention, she turned to her waiting defensive rooms and decided to fill another couple of them with strong traps now that she had a greater amount of maximum Mana at her disposal.

But the whole time she was thinking about what she could do with her new skill.

Chapter 6

Crouching down behind some brush near one of the giant trees that marked the boundary between the Elven and Gnomish lands, Echo took careful aim at the small boar shuffling noisily through the dead leaves carpeting the forest floor.  It appeared to be just wandering aimlessly around, without any particular purpose; it was that reason – along with the blank-seeming consciousness behind the eyes – that clued the young Elf Ranger into what she was hunting.

She let the fingertips of her right hand release her arrow, while at the same time using a small application of her Air Element on her projectile.  While she didn’t have great strength in Air as opposed to her Holy element, it was more than enough to correct the slight imperfection in her aim for her arrow to slam right into the boar’s dead-looking eye, driving straight into its brain.  A small squeal escaped its mouth before it collapsed to the ground as its legs folded under it, the critically shot Ironwood arrow vibrating slowly as it buried itself so deep it likely impacted the rear inside of its skull.

I hope that didn’t chip the arrowhead; I must’ve put too much into that draw.  Within seconds, the boar stopped twitching and…disappeared, leaving behind her arrow and something else on the ground.  While her perfect shot through its eye was ideal when she was hunting natural game – thereby not damaging its hide or ruining any of its meat – it didn’t really matter that much when killing the dungeon’s nearby monsters.  It helped with killing the boar quickly and efficiently, however; she wasn’t real adept at fighting up-close and if she had missed, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to kill it with the long knife that was strapped to her right thigh.

Echo froze and looked and listened around her for almost five minutes before she stood up and dropped her active camouflage.  She only felt a little drained from the use of the Holy element to bend the light around her, causing her to be cloaked in a near-invisibility that gained her the name everyone knew her as now; while she wasn’t completely invisible, there were only faint “echoes” of her form left behind when she moved at more than a snail’s pace through the forest.

She slipped her artfully crafted bow over her shoulder, resting it against the supple brown and dark-green-accented leather jerkin she wearing, which matched her tight-fitting bottoms; the last thing she wanted while sneaking through the underbrush of the forest was to have her clothing snag on something and give her away.  Her arms and hands were also covered up – as well as a hood covering her fine, waist-length silver hair – because anything that caused her to stand out amongst the trees in the few times that she didn’t have her active camouflage working could be deadly.

It was hot back in the village of Avensglen, where there weren’t towering trees blocking the sunlight and gifting her with the cool air that she reveled in when she went hunting.  From the elder’s stories, their race used to live primarily amongst the trees, but ever since the dungeons along their border started to become more and more dangerous, they had taken to living in the wide-open plains of Symenora, their Elvish homeland.  Only Lyringlade – their capital city in the middle of Symenora – had the towering trees that were representative of their people.  Which was probably why there were so many of their dwindling race living there now.

There were only a few villages and towns located around the border of their land that were still inhabited and that hadn’t been overrun by dungeon monsters.  The village of Avensglen – where she was based out of – and the others were vital to maintain because they provided much-needed dungeon loot that wasn’t readily available anywhere else.  While the Elites working out of the