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

New Dungeon Monster unlocked through Advancement!

Transitional Golems (Air/Earth):

Animated Slab now available!

Animated Slab

Mana Cost: 25000 Mana

Sandra was, at first, a little worried when she saw how much Mana the Animated Slab cost, but then she remembered that amount was before her Advancements that reduced its cost took effect.  When she looked at her new Dungeon Monster in her Advancement Creation Options menu, fortunately, the updated cost was reflected at 17,500 – which was well within her available Mana of 19,558.

Advancement Creation Options

Name:

Mana Cost: (30% Reduction)

Goblin Foreman

56

Radiant Pegasus

7000

Rising Phoenix

10500

Unstable Shapeshifter

11200

Celestial Authority

12600

Animated Slab

17500

It was still a lot, though, so it took a little over an hour of waiting to accumulate enough – while still producing a smaller amount of extra Shears and Tarantulas for her ongoing absorption project – to try out her new creation.  Luckily, she still had two Small Dragon Glass Slivers in her treasury; they were the only two objects she still had in there that would allow her to gain some Mana back (when they were absorbed) in case she desperately needed it.  It was her reserve’s reserve, so to say, and once she used them that would be it until she built her treasury back up.

Therefore, when she had enough Mana at her disposal, she had one of her Automatons bring out the Small Dragon Glass Sliver from her treasury and deposit it on the floor near her Core.  She quickly infused the Monster Seed with the required amount of Mana – and gasped in shock at what was created.

This…this is perfect!

Animated Slab

Current Elemental Energy:

Air – 12500 energy

Earth – 12500 energy

Special Ability:

Levitation: 10 Air energy per hour

Manipulate Form: 5 Earth energy per minute

Lying flat on the floor of her Home, a large square slab of the same stone she used in her dungeon appeared, with each side of the Animated Slab at least 20 feet in length and approximately 6 inches thick throughout its entire form.  It was also fairly indistinguishable from her floor, and if it hadn’t been lying on top of the floor – and was, instead, placed in a hole in the floor – then someone could walk right over it without knowing.  It reminded her of a trap of some kind because of its ability to blend in with the stone; it turned out that it was so much more.

The “animated” part was easy enough to see when she instructed her new Dungeon Monster to “walk” around; a portion of the four corners of the Slab folded inward and downwards, forming a point that were used as basic-looking legs to move it around her Home room.  Seeing what else it could do, she instructed it to attack one of her Animated Shears she had floating around her Home, which she brought down specifically so the Slab could attack it.

When the Shears got close to the new Monster, the slab of stone stiffly pushed off its front legs and rocked backwards on its hind legs.  When it was nearly vertical, the front legs disappeared and folded back up straight, creating something that looked just like a wall that had feet; that didn’t last long, though, as the slab seemed to split down the middle and stopped three-quarters of the way down from bisecting itself completely.  The two partial halves bent forwards at sharp angles, folding their upper sections until they came to a point – which then stabbed out at the Shears, with one side impacting and completely destroying the flying metal construct with little apparent effort.

That might seem like a lot for the Animated Slab to go through to attack, but it did all of that changing in less than a second’s time.  It was quite impressive, and would likely prove deadly to any unprepared people trying to fight it…but that wasn’t why she unlocked the use of the Dungeon Monster in the first place.  She played around with instructing it to create different shapes, finding that it could fold its stone slab around like a giant, stiff piece of paper; all of the angles it could form were for the most part sharp, and it couldn’t shape itself into anything complex or with too many moving parts.  It was limited, granted, but she was also able to get the Slab to form short walls along every edge, which would aid in keeping things she wanted to transport on the Monster without worrying about them falling off.

She was even more excited to learn that, like her Animated Shears, it could levitate and fly around…until she observed the limitations there as well.  It could float off of the floor up to 10 feet high, which wasn’t horrible – if not ideal. What made it worse, though, was the speed that it could move around when levitating.  Or, lack of speed would be more accurate; it floated around slower than Sandra thought she could casually walk if she still had a body, and was much slower than all but her few original Tiny Automatons and Clockwork Spiders still present in her Home room.  Even trying to speed it up by pushing or dragging it with another construct or Monster wouldn’t work – as she found out when she attempted just that – as it wouldn’t move faster than its normal speed no matter what she did.

“I’m only assuming here, but my guess is that if they were able to fly around as fast as your Shears, the Animated Slabs would be entirely too powerful for it only being an Advanced Classification Level 1 Dungeon Monster.  Can you imagine how powerful it would be if it could just ram itself into a group of people and smash them flat?” Winxa added, after seeing Sandra’s