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

The seventh room was fortunately semi-negated by one of the Elite archers that had access to Water energy, because they would have all cooked alive.  While they couldn’t see any flames, the massive room – which led off to the right again, which hopefully led straight to the dungeon heart – was heated like an enormous oven, and only by sticking near the archer negating the trap were they able to keep from cooking alive.  Then, of course, they had to fight against a dozen birds that appeared to be made of fire, which Fyola called a Phoenix, that swooped down and tried to burn them alive.  They lost another few dozen Orc Warriors to them before his group fought back.

The remaining Elite archers and Rangers easily took care of them in midflight, but as they were leaving the room, they noticed that their corpses didn’t disappear.  Instead, the first one they killed suddenly flared back to life out of the ashes of its corpse, though it was smaller than it was initially.  “You idiots didn’t kill their resurrected spawn?” Fyola asked derisively.

“No we didn’t, because someone didn’t tell us we had to!” Wyrlin shouted back before filling the firebird with another enhanced arrow to put it down before it could lift off.  The other Rangers did the same with the other corpse piles, and after they were filled with more arrows they finally disappeared.

“Stop arguing; I can sense that we’re nearly there,” the Warlord had said to them as he walked by, as if he was their father and they were unruly children.  For some reason, Wyrlin felt a little ashamed…but he still wanted to kill the Elite, and he was sure she felt the same way.

The room after that – how many was that again? – was where he received his wound.  As soon as they all walked inside, it felt like they were outside again.  Dirt covered the entire floor of the room and there were oak trees lined up on either side of the main passageway through the room.

“I’ve got this; there’s a Natural energy trap in here, so I should be able to negate most of it.  Keep moving, however, and protect me,” Fyola said before she started to walk slowly forward with her hands out in front of her, as dramatic as seemed usual even at a time like that.

Around the bubble of her negation that reached at least 40 feet around her, roots erupted from the ground and tried to reach for them as they moved through the room at a good pace, but her energy dispelled them before they ever got more than a foot past her bubble.  They passed halfway through the room before they were finally attacked by something that wasn’t a root erupting from the ground.

A dozen naked Echos.

He was so shocked at the sight of Echo holding a strange-looking bow emerging from behind one of the trees to his right that he couldn’t even react.  The next thing he knew, an arrow was shot from the bow at incredible speed, tearing through his thigh and leaving a jagged gash, causing him to fall down.  That was probably the only thing that saved his life, because a second arrow – metal bolt, he later saw when he looked at one – went over his head, impacting one of his rangers and exploded.  It wasn’t a massive explosion like the ones he had seen earlier, but it was enough to kill the Ranger and one of the Orcs standing close behind him.

A couple other explosions erupted throughout the clustered Orcs and Elves, and there was an immediate counterattack of their own, including some suicidal Orcs that charged out of their protective negation bubble and ended up getting caught by the waving roots and ripped apart.  A single volley was all the naked Echos managed to get off before they were filled with arrows, most of them from the three remaining Elite archers who fired incredibly fast.  When the Echos collapsed on the ground and died, they transformed into a multicolored sludge first before dissipating.  As horrible as it was to see Echo being…copied?...by the monsters, it made her wonder if the one that came to their village was a copy.

Maybe she really is dead?  Was the Elite team that “miraculously” survived their trek through this dungeon copies as well?  He had no answers and no way to tell at that point, but after he got out of there he would find out.

In all, they had lost another 50-plus Orc Warriors in the attack, as well as most of his Rangers – including Ferio – in the sudden attack, mainly because they were all clustered up when the explosions hit.  As he looked down in sorrow at the corpse of the old Ranger, he vowed again that he would make the dungeon pay for what it had taken from him.  He thought that it had already taken everything from him, but Ferio was his friend, despite only knowing him a few weeks.  He didn’t have time to mourn right then, however, because they had to keep moving before Fyola ran out of the energy that was keeping the roots from getting the rest of them.

The nightmarish journey through the dungeon led them to the room that they had just barely made it through alive.  They had walked inside, exhausted from their ordeal and Fyola immediately said that they had just triggered a trap, but they didn’t see anything.  However, what he did see – how did I miss that before? – was a large shining gem floating in the air near the exit.  Suddenly, as if sensing that he had seen it, the large gem moved downwards and shot down the tunnel behind it.

“There it is!  There’s the dungeon heart!” he exclaimed, nocking an arrow to shoot, but the gem