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

but now that her constructs were being wiped out they apparently decided to join in.  Raising arms out to their sides, Sandra saw their robes slip off of their hands, revealing dry-looking, desiccated skin – though not rotting like a zombie’s flesh – tightly covering thin, fragile-appearing bones.  From what she could see, its physical appearance looked more like a dried-out animated corpse without much strength behind it, but she quickly found that it wasn’t there to get into a fistfight.

Billows of pure darkness emanated from their hands until there was a growing cloud of…whatever it was…floating in front of each of them, darker than even the current night-time environment of the forest.  They blocked out Sandra’s view of the hooded figures, in fact, but other than that the dark fog-like substance didn’t look very threatening; if it was designed to blind her constructs, she doubted it would have any major effect on them – because many of them didn’t use physical eyes to see.  It was also why the darkness of night didn’t really affect them, because they didn’t necessarily need light to see by.

After 20 excruciating seconds of her remaining constructs getting slowly destroyed by the other Undead, the now-significantly larger clouds shot forwards in the blink of an eye, splitting up and surrounding all of her remaining Martial Totems, half of her Jaguars and Wolves, and even two of her Repair Drones that were trying to fix some Apes that had been smashed across the clearing either by an Ogre’s bone club or the flat of one of the armored Undeads’ claymores.

She couldn’t see what the clouds did – even when she ineffectively tried to look through the “eyes” of one of her Mechanical Dire Wolves surrounded by one – but she didn’t have to wonder long.  After 15 seconds of total obscurity, the dark clouds dissipated, leaving behind her constructs – or what was left of them.

The best she could guess from the holey and weak sections of metal she saw on her Dungeon Monsters, the robed Undead figures had manipulated Nether-based elemental energy and sent a devastating spell towards her constructs – not unlike what many Human Heroes and Elves did.  The difference was that the spell they cast was extremely potent, much more potent than anything she had heard of or seen before; she wasn’t sure if it was designed to eat away at metal specifically, or if it just sped up the aging of whatever was inside of the cloud, but the results were essentially the same.  Those constructs that were enveloped in the dark fog spell were practically falling apart and collapsing in on themselves as they tried to continue fighting.

With that final blow to the formerly cohesive and powerful eradication force Sandra had assembled, she knew the battle was lost – though she doubted she would’ve “won” even if those last two Undead hadn’t been there.  The fight wasn’t going her way almost from the beginning; she thought she had a group of constructs that could tackle virtually anything and prevail – but she was sadly mistaken.

As the spell-weakened constructs were quickly finished off, the last few Jaguars and Wolves were surrounded and systematically destroyed.  Sandra tried to save her remaining Repair Drones by having them flee, but they weren’t very fast compared to the surviving Undead Ghouls; they were quickly hunted down by the fast-moving creatures and literally ripped apart – only for the Undead to be brutally killed themselves when her constructs exploded in a fiery conflagration of metal shards.  Hmm…I forgot about that.

Brief thoughts of the damage her Repair Drones could do if they had been destroyed in the middle of the Undead army flashed through her mind as she watched the destruction of her last constructs.  Even one of the two Reinforced Animated Shears she had watching the battle from above was caught by one of the mist-like Undead.  It didn’t have a “power source” like her Apes, but that didn’t seem to matter; it was almost like the Mana involved in her construct’s creation was eaten away rapidly and it was done so quickly that it didn’t have a chance to fly away before it dissolved in the middle of the air.

Watching that happen from her other pair of Shears – which she had flee as soon as she could – she saw the already smaller-sized mist creature shrink even smaller as a result of the attack on her construct; she could only assume that some of the mist was consumed in the attack, but she still didn’t have enough information about them to know for sure.

With disappointment and frustration mounting, she brought the only surviving construct from her eradication force out of the forest and set it to watch the trees, waiting for the Undead to come pouring out and head towards her dungeon.  After a few minutes, however, none of them showed; Sandra realized that there was no point for them to come out from the safety of the trees, because the Undead Core’s Area of Influence only reached about a half-mile into the barren wasteland she called home.

But that won’t last long.

While the Undead Dungeon Core had lost quite a few Dungeon Monsters before and during the battle, it was nothing compared to the constructs that Sandra had lost.  Not just in terms of the Mana used in their actual creation, but more importantly the Monster Seeds they had left behind.  While contracts normally prevented Cores from attacking each other’s Dungeon Monsters for the sake of looting their Seeds, that didn’t apply to Sandra and her unique situation; therefore, all of the Monster Seeds dropped by her constructs were now in the possession of the Undead Core.

After doing some quick estimations of how much those Seeds would be worth if the Dungeon Core decided to absorb them all for their Mana and Raw Materials, she figured that it might be enough