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

was younger.  Her manipulation of her Holy element was extremely useful fighting against its opposite; while she wasn’t adept at many of the more offensive casts that the Elites could perform, she had fairly balanced control and could use it effectively against most Nether-based monsters.  The most useful attack she could perform was to charge her arrowheads with Holy energy, where the energy would release upon impact and doing quite disproportionally explosive damage to the undead.

As she cautiously walked toward where she thought the branch had disappeared, she saw another few figures of shiny undead wolves and what she could’ve sworn was a large cat – but, luckily, none of them saw her.  At one point, however, she almost lost her concentration and dropped her camouflage when she inadvertently saw a glimmer in the air above her.  As she stared upwards to see what had captured her attention, she saw something that finally started to blunt the curiosity that had driven her.

While she couldn’t make them out precisely, she could see small metallic specks nearly 200 feet above her spread out in a large…net, was probably the best word.  As she looked at them, the setting sun reflected off of them all at once as they moved at precisely the same time, drifting in one direction to another.  There were entirely too many to count, but she estimated that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of the objects floating above her head.

Wh-what is going on here?

Echo almost turned back, but something drove her on to discover what she was dealing with.  She was fairly confident in her active camouflage, so she pushed on and tried to ignore the metallic-looking objects poised above her head.  While she didn’t know what they were, she could almost guarantee they didn’t bode well.

Another few minutes later led her to the approximate location where the oak branch had disappeared, and she looked around the area cautiously.  Years of tracking and hunting had let her read the environment well enough for it to tell her a story – and the location she found herself in told an interesting one.

What appeared to be Orc tracks led all around the area; Echo could tell they were Orc by their large size and lack of anything resembling caution – they were more likely to run in yelling than try to sneak up on something.  They seemed to be following some other tracks she didn’t recognize at all, though whatever made them was heavy; deep impressions in the dry, cracked dirt was evidence enough of that.  She also saw what appeared to be Bearling tracks – almost two dozen different sets – that led to an area where some sort of battle had taken place.  Dried blood stained the ground in multiple areas; some of it was the slightly greenish-tinted red blood of Orcs, but most of it was the pure-red blood of the Bearlings.

It looks like a Warband tracked something out here and found a lair of Bearlings.  Looking around further, she couldn’t see much evidence of anything else, though she saw plenty of prints made from the shiny undead wolves scattered about.  It was when she looked to see where the Orcs had gone after they had obviously defeated the Bearlings that she saw the hard-to-spot cave entrance in the nearby hill.  As she approached, she could see different tracks leading out of the cave; they appeared to be a person’s because they only had two feet, but they weren’t familiar to her in size.

Letting that mystery go for the moment, she herself approached the cave cautiously and peered inside – but it was too dark to see much.  I…have to go inside, just to see…  In her head, her mind kept telling her it wasn’t a good idea and for her to just leave, but she had already gone this far – she couldn’t turn back now.  Before she stepped inside, she noticed for the first time the scratches along the edges of the opening; based on what she had seen so far, she assumed they were made by the Bearlings, though why they were trying to get in the cave was a mystery.

Taking a deep – but silent – breath, Echo took a step inside the cave and she instantly knew where she was: a dungeon.  The walls of what was now obviously a tunnel were uniformly cut – unlike a natural cave – and down the tunnel she could, for the first time, see a room beyond the passageway.  It was lit up – not brightly, but with more than enough light to see by – in some unseen and unknown manner, which was another indication that where she traveled was unnatural.

From what Echo could see of the room from her position just inside the entrance, it looked fairly plain, empty even; if she hadn’t seen the shiny undead monsters outside – as well as the floating net of metallic objects in the air – she would’ve guessed that the dungeon was old and abandoned.  She knew better, though – but she also needed to see more; she wasn’t going to run back to the village without getting a little more information.  If this was indeed a dungeon, they couldn’t allow it to survive and thrive out in the wastelands; with nothing stopping it, the dungeon could grow out of control and threaten not only her people, but the other races living nearby.

She wasn’t old enough to have experienced the brutal war against the dungeon that had been in the wastelands before it was destroyed, when it was still healthy land – but there were plenty of her race that remembered it with horror.  If this was something that could threaten them all again, her people needed to know; in fact, all of the races should know, but she would leave that communication to those in charge.

A dozen short paces was all it