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

reform into a perfectly round ball again, ready to fight some more.  Through some quick experimentation in her dungeon, however, Sandra found the downside to the new Rolling Force; if more than half of the divided segments were destroyed, the entire construct would cease to function and be destroyed shortly thereafter.  If there were at least three of the segments still “operational” when they came back together, then it would form together again into a smaller ball – that was able to be repaired by a Drone if necessary.

Still, Sandra was planning on using them effectively against the Spiders, because having a lot of extra targets to attack would hopefully let the other constructs do their thing without too much hassle.  As much as she didn’t like to think of her constructs as “expendable”, losing the new Dividing Rolling Forces wouldn’t be too much hardship; she was just glad that none of them could be poisoned by the Desolate Spiders, so she was hoping they would survive with few casualties.

The other thing that Sandra was focusing on between creating constructs for her threat-eradicating army was building another Hauler and wagon.  Even though Violet and Felbar were dedicated to figuring out the Limiter enchantment rune, she could tell that they were anxious to get home.  Now that the older Gnome had pretty much fully recovered, getting back to their homeland was a priority; Sandra would miss them and their help, but they weren’t prisoners or anything – and having another representative to vouch for Sandra and her dungeon to the Gnome leadership was always good.

When the Dungeon Core told the two Visitors about her project, she was proven right in her assumption that they wanted to leave; they doubled their efforts with their enchantment experiments, saying that they wanted to do as much as they could before they left.  Sandra definitely appreciated it, so she made sure to include as many materials as she could in the wagon they were going to take back to Gnomeria – which included blocks of Titanium.

The new metal she gained access to – because of the Elite Elf Porthel’s broken sword – was extremely useful for crafting weapons and armor, and it would also be useful for the Gnomes in the construction of whatever defenses they could.  Although it was approximately as strong as Steel, it was less dense; this made Titanium lightweight with a better tensile strength (meaning it could bend more without breaking) and it resisted metal fatigue from repetitious use, which helped to prevent cracking.  It was also able to withstand higher temperatures – it had a melting point that was even higher than Iron – and it was thought that because of that, it could handle being the focus of certain enchantments for longer periods.

Not that you couldn’t use just about any enchantment on any material, but Sandra knew that some were better suited for certain ones; for instance, if you had an enchantment that would light something like the tip of a sword on fire when it was activated, it probably wouldn’t work very long or successfully on something made of wood or a softer metal with a lower melting point.

Sandra was excited to use Titanium herself in her crafting, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to experiment yet.  Once the wasteland was “safe” and the Gnomes had left, she was planning on digging into a lot that had been neglected from the recent emergencies.  In fact, her Core was practically vibrating from excitement at the thought of having a little peace and quiet to get back to her crafting.

The next morning, her construct army was complete, the wagon was essentially filled to the top with materials, the Hauler that would bring it home was enchanted by Violet (the doing of which Sandra watched intently and learned some valuable tips from), and the Dungeon Core was actually able to start stockpiling Elemental Orbs and other Monster Seeds for future use with her excess Mana.  She had already finished all of her stages towards the next Core Size upgrade – which took nearly 240,000 Mana all told – but she had already determined to hold off on doing so; since she didn’t have to worry about accumulating more Mana for that, once her current self-imposed obligations were taken care of, she was…free.  Free to craft and free to plan more for the future.

Of course, that morning when Sandra was about to strike at the first massive clutch of Desolate Spiders getting a little too close to the route Echo usually took to-and-from the village and the dungeon, the problem with the Limiter rune was finally solved…in spectacular fashion.

*        *        *

Violet was getting thoroughly frustrated with the strange rune that Sandra had shown her on the wooden pillar in the Enchantment Repository Room.  There were eight concentric circles and what she assumed were eight wavy-looking access lines, which would theoretically help to designate the “limit” of energy being funneled through it.  However, the only thing she had to go by was a slight difference in one of the lines from the Core’s examples, and Violet thought that it would be easy to figure out the difference, using even more slight differences to see how they would change the performance.

As it turned out, they didn’t have any effect at all.

In fact, the original rune – which Sandra helpfully called a Limiter – didn’t do a single thing that she could tell.  She had tried incorporating it into the original enchantment over the Energy Orb, tying it to the tiny Stasis Field she had created, and even kept it completely separate – all with no discernable difference at all to the amount of energy being transferred.  At first she thought that Sandra was just mistaken, and the rune was nonsense, but some innate Enchanting instinct told her that it was correct – but she was missing something, some vital piece of information