The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (ebook reader with android os TXT) 📗

like some sort of mini mountain inside of the dungeon, with a relatively flat peak towards the top that he thought would then descend to the exit on the other side.  Still, he didn’t see any monsters, so he didn’t think it would be too bad.

Of course, that was until they entered, with the arrogant Elite ready to negate the trap if something started to happen; as soon as they walked inside, a herd of shining winged horses that he thought were called Pegasi emerged from above, where they were hiding out of view.  They immediately flew to the opposite side of the “mountain”, where they dropped down out of view before any of them could fire on them.

There wasn’t really any reason to wait at that point, and they had easily climbed up the mountain with a few groups of Orc Warriors leading the way.  As soon as they reached the top, out came flying the Pegasi from the other side and they swept down and started to pummel the Orcs with their hooves, knocking a half dozen from the mountains before the Rangers could counter attack.  While there were a score of the flying horses, only half of them were killed by his Rangers’ arrows; the rest were jumped upon by the Warriors on the mountain, where they literally killed the Pegasi by chopping into their necks – while they were essentially riding them.

Almost a dozen Orcs were killed as a result, but that was still better than the few rooms before.  After that, it was easy enough to climb over and get to the other side of the mountain and from there to the tunnel leading on further into the dungeon.  That tunnel, unfortunately, was where a serious disaster struck.  Wyrlin was already told that all traps were always inside the rooms of a dungeon, as if there was some sort of unknown rule that prevented them from being placed in tunnels that connected rooms.  Which was primarily why none of the Elites had been looking for any sort of trap as they jogged down the tunnel, trying to gain some sort of time back from all of their delays.

They were halfway down when there had suddenly been a series of *clicks* that came from the stone floor being depressed by at least a dozen of the Orcs ahead of them – which, honestly wasn’t that big of a deal to Wyrlin – but there were also some that came from around the group of Elites and his own Rangers.  Everyone stopped at the noise, which probably wasn’t the best idea, because those near where the floor depressed started to grow older – as in so old that they turned to nothing but skin and bones in a matter of seconds.  It happened so fast that there was no time to help those caught inside whatever was making them age, though one of the Elite archers managed to push the arrogant spell-caster out of whatever was causing it.

Instead of turning to barely visible skin on desiccated bones, the arrogant Elite just became…ancient.  Wyrlin had never seen an Elf that old before, nor heard of any reaching that age, but he had wrinkled skin like a raisin, white hair that was falling out, and what appeared to be crippled joints.  He didn’t really get a chance to check if they were indeed crippled, though, because as soon as the Elite was pushed out he collapsed on the ground, dead from what appeared to be dehydration and starvation.

Over 100 Orc Warriors were caught in some sort of larger area that did the same thing though on a slightly slower scale; they all still died, but instead of being ancient (as in thousands of years older), they were more like just over 100 years old.  Wyrlin lost 15 of his Rangers to the traps as well, and they lost 2 Elites: one archer and the arrogant caster.

“What type of place is this?  This is a nightmare; I blame you for bringing us here,” Fyola had turned on Wyrlin, obviously devastated by the loss of her fellow Elites.

“Hey, this isn’t my fault – you’re the one who wanted to take charge and drag us here when we weren’t ready!” he shouted back, knowing that was the truth.  While he had been contemplating assaulting the dungeon with who he had at that time, he wasn’t entirely sure he had enough.  Now he knew that he didn’t have enough, especially given what they had seen so far.

“Enough!  I’ve lost far more to this dungeon than either of you, and you don’t hear me whining, do you?”  Wyrlin and Fyola were both pushed out of the way as Rothgar pushed forward, the Orc Elites being a little more cautious in where they walked, pushing the floor with their Swords to see if the stone moved.

I’m nearly willing to forget destroying this dungeon if I can just kill her violently in front of everyone.  His finger twitched over his quiver as he imagined stabbing her in the eye with one of his arrows enhanced by his own energy.  The only thing that stopped him was the knowledge that not even a massive explosion had managed to kill her, so he wanted to make sure he had a distinct advantage before he killed her.

The next room was odd again, though it was because of the nature of the monster.  A being of pure light guarded the next room, sending arrows of focused light out at them, accompanied by a constant barrage of focused light beams that burned almost as much as fire from a trap that shot out in a stream of them at waist height.  They had no way to negate the trap, unfortunately, so after losing a few more Orc Warriors in the process, they managed to fill the being of light full of arrows, and then had to crawl under the barrage