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

on the backs of unsuspecting Spiders; their weight alone was enough to snap their thin stone-covered bodies, cracking them like a chunk of iron dropped on an egg.

It didn’t take long for a response, however, as the Desolate Spiders swarmed over the slices of Sandra’s constructs within their midst.  Watching from above with two dozen Reinforced Animated Shears, she lost sight of them as they were buried under thousands of Spiders trying to bite or stab them with their sharply pointed legs.  Sandra could sense that three of her Rolling Forces had been destroyed, but not from the incessant arachnid attacks; from what she could tell, quite a few Force slices had impacted something harder than Spider shell – like a sharp protruding stone jutting from the ground – which severely dented and mangled them, causing the few remaining segments of those constructs to dissolve into the ground and disappear, leaving behind their Monster Seeds.

While the horde of Spiders were – for the most part – ineffectually trying to damage her Dividing Rolling Forces, her other constructs attacked with brutal efficiency.  Steelclad Ape Warriors leapt into the air and slammed down on small clusters of Spiders, flattening and killing dozens within seconds as they flailed around them with their fists.  The Mechanical Jaguar Queens and Dire Wolves crashed into the arachnid forces like a wave, stomping down with their paws and crunching the Spiders apart with their jaws.  Within 30 seconds of the attack starting, over a thousand of the enemy had already died, while none of her larger constructs were harmed seriously…except for one unlucky Ape.

Venomous bites and stabs with pointy Spider legs did absolutely nothing against her metal-formed Dungeon Monsters…but that didn’t mean they were invulnerable. Enough blunt-force damage could hamper or destroy most of her constructs, while others had other vulnerabilities; her Apes, for instance, were animated by a glowing “core” inside their well protected chests.  One of her Steelclad Ape Warriors was swarmed by hundreds of Spiders at the same time, and a half-dozen managed to squeeze their way inside the few gaps in the Ape’s torso; within seconds, the deadly arachnids had bitten, stabbed, and destroyed its vulnerable power source, killing her construct.

Seeing that happen, Sandra made sure the others were aware of that happening and to avoid being overwhelmed; while they couldn’t exactly acknowledge their receipt of that information, she saw them retreat and jump away when too many were surrounding them. After that, the rest of the battle was relatively anticlimactic; thousands of Spiders died in just under 10 minutes to Sandra’s forces, leaving heaps of smashed, oozing corpses spread out over hundreds of feet of wasteland.

Other than the Steelclad Ape Warrior, which she had already replaced and was sending to join her extermination force, she had lost three dozen of her Rolling constructs.  A few were from the initial impact at the start of the battle, but the others were from another vulnerability she wasn’t previously aware of; apparently, if the slices of them were kept apart for long enough – for at least two minutes was what she determined – then not being able to reform into a single construct would be just about the same as losing half of their pieces.  The press of Spiders had been so thick in some places that some pieces couldn’t get to each other, resulting in their loss.

Checking on Violet, she found that the Gnome had made some progress with figuring out the Limiter rune; Sandra was still a little saddened on how the method of getting the rune to work had been discovered – with the whole Felbar being charred to a crisp – but Violet seemed to have no obstacles towards her experimentation.  Hopefully within the next few days we’ll be able to start actually applying the rune to help power a number of things.

The deaths of all the Desolate Spiders had also supplied a massive amount of Mana – nearly as much as a full day of ambient Mana absorption from her AMANS.  She used some of it to replace the Ape and Rolling Forces that had been destroyed, but the rest she fed into more Elemental Orbs.  She would’ve rather used them to create Monster Seeds that could contain some of her more Mana-expensive Constructs, but she was a little short on Raw Materials; she was still actively making some rooms to help provide those, but her excavation was only so fast.

Fortunately, as much as it would be disgusting, there were now thousands of corpses that could be “recycled”; Sandra had already thought ahead and created a small army of Hyper Automatons, the advanced form of her Tiny Automaton.  The new Hyper Automatons were only slightly larger than the original and appeared to be made of the same soft metal material – but they made up for those similarities with something else: strength and speed.  Whereas the older ones walked slowly around, their stiff-like legs making their pace a toddling amble; the Hyper ones, however, had fully jointed legs and could run – and run fast.

They weren’t the fastest of Sandra’s constructs by any means, but they could move quickly for their size.  Not only that, but they could lift and carry things that seemed impossible; a few experiments with some blocks of iron showed that they could lift something that weighed up to 100X their own weight – sort of like she had heard some insects could do.

As a result, they were the perfect transportation service for corpses big and small; they could work together to lift and carry something larger, but even on their own they could drag something twice or three times their size.  As 200 of them ran out of her dungeon and towards the battlefield that wasn’t much of a battle, she saw each of them use their hands to grab three or four Spider legs and start to drag them back towards