The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (best books to read for students TXT) 📗

were doing at first, but it didn’t take long to see that they were climbing on top of each other, creating a rudimentary pyramid.

A pyramid of incensed Territory Ants that was growing taller by the moment.

Before it could grow taller than a foot, four of Sandra’s Rolling Forces smashed into the formation in a large explosion of smashed Ant and construct parts.  Although they were tiny insects in comparison to her metal balls of destruction, the Territory Ants had a surprisingly tough exterior and their digging mandibles were particularly sharp.  As a result, even though her dungeon monsters had squashed or otherwise killed dozens of the invading Ants, her Rolling Forces took quite a bit a damage as well.

One of her metal balls ended up being split in half, falling apart as some unlucky impacts against the sharp “weapons” of the Ants carved it up.  As it fell apart, Sandra could see what appeared to be some clockwork parts inside, though they were centered around a central core of an amorphous substance that glowed a dull blue color.  Of course, seconds after it fell apart, the entire construct disappeared, leaving behind the Small Copper Orb seed it was made from.

The other three survived but were gouged and dented in multiple places; despite the damage, they were still able to move, though one had a definite wobble to it.  She still had another three that hadn’t been involved in the attack, but now half of her rolling metal balls were damaged and wouldn’t fare well in another maneuver like that.

Then again, her forces had killed around three dozen of the Ants; it wasn’t quite an even trade-off, but it was better than her Clockwork Spiders.  Sandra’s original constructs moved surprisingly fast once she sent them to attack the falling Ants from above, but except for a lucky break where one was able to stab its leg into the neck of an attacking insect – decapitating it in the process – the rest were quickly overwhelmed and taken apart by the super-sharp mandibles of the Territory Ants.

Her Tiny Automaton performed remarkably well considering it couldn’t move quickly. Its strong, hammer-like arms nevertheless caved in a half-dozen Ant heads before it was eventually surrounded and picked apart.

New lines of Territory Ants were already heading for the smooshed graveyard of their brethren underneath Sandra’s Core, so she sent her Rolling Forces to disrupt anything they tried to create and roll over individual ones as they made for the center of the cave.  One-by-one, though, the self-inflicted damage caused by impacting the durable exoskeletons and deadly mandibles of the Ants were destroying her monsters.  Not only that, but her flock of Small Animated Shears had lost two of their number from attempting to slice into the ants and mistakenly hitting their sharp head weapons, which blunted their edge and caused them to fall apart within a few hits.

Sandra wasn’t idle, however.  She began to see how the other dungeons fell into the trap of wanting to kill everything they saw; Mana flowed into her faster than it ever had before from the deaths of the Ants.  Every second, her Mana ticked up another point or two – and sometimes even three.  From the initial destruction of the insect pyramid, she absorbed nearly twenty Mana in little more than a second.

Sandra immediately started to use that Mana to replace her destroyed Rolling constructs and even using the remainder of her Raw Materials to create a few Tiny Copper Orbs so that she could make more Animated Shears.  In less than five minutes, she had replaced and expanded her currents constructs, though the constant influx of Territory Ants was making it difficult to get any breathing room.

Eventually, she had to create three more Tiny Automatons.  They weren’t there to attack or defend, but to retrieve the fallen Copper Orbs that were now littering the cave so that she could make more defenders.  The issue she was running into, unfortunately, was the lack of Raw Materials.  Since she couldn’t physically change her one-room dungeon, she couldn’t absorb the dirt and stone from the walls to accumulate more.

Fortunately, that limitation didn’t extend to absorbing the corpses of hundreds of insects now littering the cave floor.  It was very strange at first, as the sensation in her Core was quite different from “eating” dirt. Somehow, despite the disgust she felt at consuming bugs, it was much more fulfilling – like a treat of some sort.  Although it “tasted” better, it took nearly twice the volume of insect bodies to equal the same amount of dirt wall; she wasn’t sure if it was because of its density or for some other reason.  However, since the supply was constantly arriving, Sandra didn’t care overly much about the conversion efficiency.

With access to both Mana and Raw Materials in a fairly constant stream, Sandra was able to finally get ahead and produce more than enough Rolling Forces to wipe out anything that hit the floor within seconds, and her flock of Shears had multiplied to three times their original number.  Two hours after the start of the attack by the Territory Ants, Sandra felt safe enough to look for a way to end the stalemate.  They should be running out of Ants soon, right?

The stream of insects seemed to be endless, and the confused Dungeon Core was beginning to wonder why.  Granted, she had initially seen thousands of the Ants roaming through the colony tunnels, but she estimated that her constructs had wiped out nearly 10,000 of them, so there couldn’t be that many left.

When Sandra focused on the Territory Ant colony, she discovered why they weren’t stopping.  The Ant Queen was frantically laying eggs by the dozen around the central colony room, which would harden, grow, and hatch within less than a minute, supplying a constant stream of brand-new Ants for the assault.  She hadn’t known