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

the sound and arrow came from.  That appeared to be enough to arouse some more movement, as a blur that was hard to pinpoint moved very quickly out of her dungeon entrance and back out into the wasteland.  The sun was still a slight sliver on the horizon, so it wasn’t hard to see what seemed like a blurry shadow streak away towards the southwest, leaving a sort of echo of its form in its wake.  She immediately dispatched one of her Shears to follow overhead, though she made sure to stay far above, which made it nearly imperceptible to anyone on the ground at that distance.

The shadowy echoes were easy to follow because her floating Shears were quite fast and the form – while quick – had virtually no chance to outrun it.  Two-thirds of the distance to the Elven lands, the echoes started to become less frequent and closer together, almost as if whatever it was had been slowing down; another 500 feet passed, and the flicker was almost non-existent.  Eventually, it stopped altogether, and Sandra thought she had lost track of whatever or whoever had entered her dungeon.

Her construct continued along the same route the echoey shadows had been heading for a while, which seemed to be aiming in the general direction of the Elven village along the wasteland’s border.  Sandra was about to give up when at the edge of her Shears’ vision she saw a form pop out from seemingly nowhere.  The faint remnants of Holy elemental energy faded away from around the form in a matter of seconds, and the person wearing the same type of brown and dark-green leathers turned around while walking backwards and looked off toward her dungeon – and then into the air.

I think they can see me.  She was worried for a moment that her construct had been spotted, but the figure below didn’t look right at it; instead, the Elf – for that was likely who it was – just let their vision pass over the sky without stopping on anything in particular.  The Elf turned away after a moment and crossed the distance to the village within a matter of minutes, moving at a fairly quick and alarmed pace.

This isn’t good…

“What isn’t good?” Winxa asked, and Sandra realized that she hadn’t communicated what had happened.  With as quick an explanation as possible, the Dungeon Core got the Fairy up to speed.

“It looks like you’ve been found out, alright.  You should get your construct in closer so that you can listen in; even if they see you, it’s likely not going to matter.”

Good point.  With only a slight hesitation, Sandra brought her Shears down closer to the village, making sure to stay out of the line of sight of the figure walking towards the village.  Sandra was even bold enough to go drop down completely, where her construct was able to touch and hide flat against the roof of one of the village’s outermost “houses”.

And then she just waited, curious at what was going to happen.

*         *         *

Echo pushed back her hood, the sweat running down her back in rivulets – and it wasn’t just from the exertion of running through the wastelands.  What she had seen there scared her more than she wanted to admit.

It was almost impossible to keep up with the floating branch as it flew into the wasteland, but there was plenty of light to see where it went.  She let her active camouflage drop while she ran at a full sprint toward the unknown, using her Air element to speed her on her way.  Slightly reducing the air resistance in front of her running body while gently pushing from behind was all she could really do with it, but it helped to speed her up until she was almost flying through the dry, broken land.  She envied the Elite practitioners back in the capital that had a greater Air affinity than she did – they could literally fly…though only for short distances at a time.

About 20 minutes and nearly 4 miles later, she slowed down as she started to near where she thought the branch had gone.  As usual, she hadn’t seen anything in the wasteland – there were occasionally some random beasts that roamed around it at night, but rarely during the day – but she was too experienced to go into an unknown situation without caution.  Using her Holy element again, she wrapped it around her body, where it would bend the light and make her essentially invisible to the naked eye.  With her active camouflage in place, Echo walked – crouch-walked, rather – toward the spot where she had seen the branch descend and disappear.

Within 100 paces, she was extraordinarily glad that she had hidden herself again, because there were strange creatures roaming slowly around the landscape.  They were hard to spot at first because they actively worked to conceal themselves behind outcroppings and small hills, but she had been hunting for decades – not much escaped her notice nowadays.  She froze for almost a minute while she stared at the spot where she had seen the closest one; she was soon rewarded when what looked like some sort of creature made up of shiny bones came stalking out from behind a large upright rock about 15 paces away.

Echo tensed up and slowly – but expertly – slipped her bow off her shoulder and nocked an arrow in one smooth motion.  The bony…wolf?...looked right past her location without seeing her, fortunately, and then ambled off in the opposite direction.  She released the tension on the bow’s string but kept the arrow in position as she kept walking.

Is that wolf an undead?  I’ve never seen any undead like that, but I can’t think of another explanation.  While she had never actually been inside a Nether dungeon, she had fought against undead a few times when she