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

the end, and that the Undead Core was panicking.  Still, with it at least marginally aware of her presence outside the second entrance, it kept some in reserve to prevent her from coming in.  With the reduced number of Specters in the tunnel, though, she figured it was about time to go for it – she couldn’t wait any longer.

So she sent her ground forces inside and they pushed back at the undead inside.  They were making fairly good progress, but additional ones started to reinforce them from further inside; the Undead Core was probably working to replenish those that Sandra killed, and it made their progress stall.  That’s when she sent in half of her Shears to see if she could get through.

As if reading her mind, the remaining Specters assembled across the tunnel in an unbroken wall of mist.  Her Shears hit them at full speed and punched through but dissolved soon after from the powerful essence of the undead; her constructs just weren’t powerful enough to survive even the briefest contact.  However, it wasn’t as if her Shears had no effect; the wall of Specters appeared to have shrunk from the touch of her own constructs, but it was still full enough to prevent anything from getting through.

She sent some of her Pegasi in next, using their Nether-negating Auras to try and thin it out.  It worked, but as soon as they got close enough to use the Aura, the Specters would rush forward and overwhelm the individual Pegasi; she lost four of them before she decided to just go for it and send the remaining 16 she had in – because she was running out of both time and her other Dungeon Monsters fighting the Undead down below.

With her own “wall” of Pegasi using their Auras, she managed to thin the Specters enough to send her Shears back in; 500 of them went first and punched through the mist, but only one survived to keep going.  She wasn’t sure if that was enough to succeed in destroying the crystalline Undead Core, so she pressed her Pegasi to close the distance with the Specters.

Their Auras ended up destroying most of the Specters, but it ended up killing half of her Pegasi in the process. The other 1,000 Shears then were free to go towards the Core, while her forces in the tunnel were slowly being taken apart.

The single pair of Shears that made it through from the 500 that had tried rushed ahead, seeing the Core in the distance.  As soon as it entered the room, however, she saw Echo releasing an exploding arrow at the Core from the ground, but her scream let Sandra know she was in quite a lot of pain.  The world seemed to slow as she saw the arrow knocked out of alignment as Echo’s wrist snapped and the bow went flying; there was nothing she could do, however, as the delay between her orders and the Shears actually doing anything was too great.

Luckily, the Shears had been coming in the room at a lower elevation as it passed through the tunnel, and it had to angle itself upwards to hit the Core.  Through some miracle or sheer accident, the construct hit the exploding arrow and knocked it back on course; when the Core shattered along with the arrow’s explosion, it took her Shears with it.

From there, Sandra managed to get in contact with those left alive – she felt horrible that the Shieldmen didn’t make it – and was able to facilitate their escape before everything collapsed.  The rest of her forces perished along with all of the undead, though she supposed that it was quite possible there were more scattered around the forest that hadn’t been called back.  She doubted it would be many, however.

As for the Shieldmen, Gerold and Felbar told her when they got back to her dungeon that they were smashed by a tree wielded as a club by a giant zombie.  Glancing blows from that same club were also what damaged their Deep Delvers enough that the Dwarf and Gnome couldn’t move inside of them, so they escaped from the constructs and made a run for it.  The Giant was apparently still alive at that point, and it had killed the rest of the Undead in the final room with the incessant flailing of its club, but the surviving Gnome and Dwarf were small enough that they were able to sneak past as it kept stupidly smashing ineffectually at the deceased bodies of the Shieldmen.  The Undead Core had obviously been occupied in other matters – namely Echo’s and Sandra’s efforts to reach the Core – to direct the zombie Giant and stop it from doing that.

“So…what do we do now?” Echo asked later, when everyone was safe and healed up back in the dining area of her dungeon.  Kelerim and Violet had joined the three that had survived the destruction of the other Core and its dungeon.

Speaking of that, the notification had come up from the destruction of the Undead Core as soon as the dungeon had collapsed completely, and Sandra wasn’t looking forward to what would happen soon. The Area of Influence for all of the remaining dungeons in the area – and possibly even farther, as the Distance Threshold had increased – would start to expand, the Cores would begin to accumulate Mana at a faster rate than they did previously, and they would start to upgrade their Core Sizes even faster than normal.

Temporary Dungeon Core Enhancements

(Your Core is not currently eligible for any enhancements)

Current Nearby Dungeon Cores Destroyed:

4

Current Distance Threshold:

138.0 Miles

Current New Core Threshold:

Core Size 25

Previous Temporary Enhancements for 3 destroyed Cores:

Includes all previous Temporary Enhancements, plus: Ambient Mana Absorption directly by the Core is increased by 10000%, Area of Influence is increased by an additional 10% over the