The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) by Jonathan Brooks (english readers txt) 📗

that was to regulate the energy consumption of the construct while it was being controlled – otherwise anything the pilot did to manipulate the runes via infusions of elemental energy could become unstable.

If that happened, the same thing Violet was experimenting with could happen; the vast amount of elemental energy contained in the War Machine – and based on what she had calculated earlier, it was indeed vast – could cycle through every enchantment sequence, creating a feedback loop that could lead to an explosion of vast proportions.

At least, that’s what she assumed after Violet and Felbar had tried to explain what they knew about the enchantments on the large Gnome construct.  It was a bit technical and Sandra wasn’t quite sure if she had understood it correctly, but as far as she could tell that was the basis behind the whole theory.  But if she eliminated the potential for that type of catastrophic result – by utilizing a Limiter rune, perhaps – then the entire enchantment sequence could be put together piecemeal.

Now it’s doubly important that Violet figures that rune out.

Chapter 7

Violet spent the next two days working on the Limiter rune, growing more and more frustrated at her lack of progress.  Sandra and Felbar even tried their hands at it, but weren’t getting anywhere, either; they had hit a mountain of a bump in the road that seemed insurmountable, but the Dungeon Core knew that it was only a matter of time.  While they were working on it, the older Gnome was recovering nicely from his coma – to the point where he would possibly be able to travel long distances within the next day or so.

Echo came back once during that time at Sandra’s request to pick up another bag of Energy Orbs; the rest of the time the Bonded Elf spent either inside the village sleeping or going out to hunt in short sprints, using her hastily mended bow.  The hunts seemed to tire her out, but Echo persisted in going on them despite the fact that she missed about a third of her shots; the repair to her bow had altered it slightly, throwing off her aim – which Sandra could clearly see even from a hundred feet up in the air.

I have to see if I can make her a better one down in my dungeon, she thought – after seeing the Elf miss for the third time that day.  The residents of the village had fortunately warmed back up to Echo after the initial frosty reception, and if they didn’t treat her with quite the same affection as they had before, at least they weren’t openly hostile – unlike the male Elf that had broken her bow.  Sandra soon learned that his name was Wyrlin, and that he had been trying to convince the Elder that Echo was a danger to the other villagers, the village itself, and the Elven people as a whole.

Luckily, the Elder – and anyone else he approached – seemed disinclined to listen to his angry ramblings (probably because Echo was supplying Energy Orbs for her people via the dungeon); after a few days of no one listening to him, the Elf took off into the north-eastern woods one afternoon and didn’t come back.  Sandra watched him leave and followed him for another few miles into the trees, but he eventually hit the boundary of her Area of Influence and disappeared.  She assumed he was heading farther into the Elven lands to warn those about the new “dungeon slave”, but he was taking a strange route; when she mentioned it to Echo, she didn’t even want to discuss it and only said that she was glad he was gone.

Since Echo seemed content to live inside her village and come back to the dungeon every once in a while to deliver more Energy Orbs – which was essentially what Sandra was wanting – the Dungeon Core left it alone; there was no reason to invite trouble when there was no point to doing so.

In spite of the worry about Wyrlin and the lack of progress in the Limiter rune – there was something that they were missing, but none of them could understand what it was – Sandra and her dungeon were doing quite well.  In the two days the Gnomes were experimenting with enchantments, her AMANS had managed to accumulate and surpass 10,000 Shears; at that moment, it was currently sitting at just under 11,000 – and still growing.

Sandra was starting to see a marked decrease in how much they were funneling back to her Core as they continued to spread out, however, so she decided that she might bump it up to about 12,000 and see if that was a good balance.  Theoretically, she could continue to expand until she filled up her entire Area of Influence, but she had already seen that anything farther out from where her Shears currently roamed didn’t provide nearly as much ambient Mana every hour.  Whereas she was getting approximately 2 Mana per hour from a good portion of the Net above her dungeon (the outer edges of it she estimated to be about 2/3 of that amount), the Shears she had roaming around the border of the wastelands were maybe bringing in 2 Mana per day.

Sure, after a few weeks every Reinforced Animated Shears that she created would pay for themselves; with just over a half million Mana being funneled into her Core every day, however, she thought it was a good place to stop.  One reason was because she was starting to feel a major strain on her mind at having it split up and doing multiple things at once; another reason was because she was ready to start cleaning up the land around her dungeon and make it safer for future travel.

After creating her eighth additional room a while ago, Sandra had quickly used the