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

she slowed it down and looked down on a small village made up of only about two dozen smallish buildings in the middle of a grassland far away from the nearest forests.  They appeared strange-looking to her and she risked getting closer to see why; instead of cut planks of wood, or even whole logs from nearby trees, it appeared as though the homes and other buildings she could see were grown.  They weren’t full-on trees reaching for the sky, however – they appeared as though they were trees that ballooned outwards when they started to grow and then just stopped when they were as large as they needed to be.

There were a few tall people walking in between the buildings that had silver, gold, and even deep-bronze-colored hair; most of them were wearing clothes or leathers that reflected the brown and green colors of nature, which blended perfectly even in their current village environment.  In fact, if the squat tree-buildings were in the middle of a forest, she might’ve passed them by without a second glance; as it was, though, they kind of stood out as the only real structures around.

Although she wasn’t close enough to see their faces – or their pointed ears that they were famous for – she assumed they were Elves, since they definitely weren’t Orcs, Dwarves, or Gnomes.  And, although things might’ve changed in the 200+ years she was “dead”, she didn’t think Humans had the metallic-looking sheen of hair she saw on so many of them below.

Out of the corner of her vision, Sandra saw two figures run across the grasslands from the direction of the forest to the east, though it looked almost leisurely instead of with any type of alarm.  They slowed as they got close, and a few others went out to greet them as they neared the outskirts of the village; she could see them exchange greetings and say something else, but she was nowhere near being able to hear more than a faint sound so high up.  As much as she wanted to hear them talking – and relieve a little of the loneliness that still affected her after Kelerim left her dungeon – she didn’t dare get any closer for fear of discovery.  What she was doing was reckless enough and she didn’t want to push it any more than that.

The sun was starting to finally touch the horizon when Sandra watched most of the people enter the “houses” and disappear, and she was left without anything to really see.  Knowing that most people didn’t leave the safety of a village at night – at least, she assumed that Elves took the same precautions as did Humans – she took off towards the trees to the east to complete the mission she had assigned herself.

Within minutes her construct was there on the edge of the forest bordering the wastelands where her Dungeon Core made its home.  Before she had the Shears descend, she looked around and searched for anyone nearby for almost a minute; when she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, she had it slowly approach the nearest tree and aimed the construct for one of the small branches near the edge.  If she was correct, the closest tree was an Oak tree, and it would have some acorns that would work excellently for a seed to grow the tree from.

Finding an acorn was easy; keeping ahold of it with a pair of scissors was much harder.  The first one fell before her construct could try to catch it; the second was temporarily caught by its handles before it could fall, but a slight jostling caused the acorn to plummet to the ground anyway; she had slightly more success with the third by using the actual shears part to grab ahold of the acorn, but it soon cut into the Oak seed and it slid out and onto the ground below.

It was time to rethink her plan.

Fortunately, she knew that cuttings from most trees could be re-planted to grow a new tree, though there was some difficulty if there wasn’t already a root system in place.  Luckily for her, she had her Natural-element trap to help with that back in her growing room, so she wasn’t too worried about it.

Her Small Animated Shears, while relatively sharp on their cutting edges, weren’t quite suited to sawing off a small-sized branch.  With a little cutting work, and more than a little tugging at the small branch, she was able to free it from the tree.  Before it could fall to the forest floor, she instructed her construct to quickly slide its open ovoid handle along the bottom of the branch, where it slid down and stuck in place when the smaller offshoots snuggled up against it.

After she was sure it was secure, Sandra instructed it to fly back to her dungeon, though she made sure it moved much slower because she didn’t want to drop the branch along the way.  Satisfied that she was successful – and without alerting anyone else to her presence – she started moving her Golems around in her growing room, making room for her new acquisition.  If everything worked out the way she hoped, she’d soon have access to the Oak tree she had snagged the branch from.

Which was just another step in the direction of crafting with an even greater assortment of materials.

Chapter 8

Despite going slow, it still didn’t take more than 15 minutes for her Shears to return to the dungeon, fly inside, enter her VATS, and make its way down to her growing room.  The branch was almost lost when the powerful air-traps blew the relatively lightweight Shears upwards because of the extra surface area, but she saved it by getting rid of the traps in the whole transportation system before they could destroy it.  As soon as it was through, she reinstalled the traps,