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

the nearest Gnome town is likely safe – as it’s a few days of quick travel away – it’s going to start to threaten the Dwarves to the northeast of here.  Not that I care overly much about them, but when I was assigned to our village I was put in charge of culling the monsters around there – and this feels like an extreme failure on our part.”

“Yes, just like those reptiles attacked your village, the undead monsters from the dungeon will be attacking the Dwarves within the next month or two, if what Sandra said is correct,” Violet added.

Now that got Echo’s attention; just like Felbar had said, she didn’t particularly care about the Dwarves – other than the fact that she didn’t want anyone to necessarily die from monster attacks like the Gnomes had – but the mention of the Nether dungeon was something else entirely.  As it wasn’t just any sort of a Nether dungeon, but an undead dungeon to boot, she felt her natural instincts flare up and all she could think about was destroying it.  It was the same reason she had been so adamant about getting help to destroy Sandra’s dungeon, because she thought they were undead monsters at first.

The Elven people had an instinctive hatred of the undead, and many Elites had been lost over the years when they dropped everything else to destroy their particular dungeons when they were found.  Echo couldn’t explain what it was that drove her or her people to do such a thing, mainly because it was so ingrained in her psyche that it was almost normal and natural to think that way.  She wasn’t aware that there was an undead dungeon so close to her village; she was pretty sure that if she or the others were aware of it, they would’ve sent a team to try to destroy it as soon as they could – even if they trespassed on Gnome lands.

“We have to destroy it – undead dungeons are abominations that need to be eliminated as soon as possible,” Echo automatically said, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them – not that she would stop them even if she had a choice.  It was something she believed in with every fiber of her being.

Violet and Felbar stared at her with strange looks on their faces.  “That was apparently what Sandra was trying to do—” Felbar started to say, before the Dungeon Core herself cut him off with the first non-translation message Echo had heard since she walked in.

* That wasn’t necessarily what I was trying to do; I was only trying to cull the Dungeon Monsters outside of the dungeon enough to delay its expansion.  I hadn’t quite yet decided on whether or not to destroy the Core, but that seems like a moot point right now.  I messed up and made it worse, and I’m not even sure that I could destroy the Core even if I wanted to. *

Sandra went on to describe what had happened to her own force of monsters she had sent there to destroy the undead, and how they had been thoroughly eradicated.

“We never saw some of those other undead she claims to have seen; I only remember killing thousands of skeletons and zombies in my time there culling them in my War Machine.  As for those Specters – the mist-like undead she was talking about – all it took to kill them was a quick temporary Fire-based enchantment on one of my weapons and they were destroyed quite easily,” Felbar added when the dungeon was finished talking.

* Wait a minute, you put an enchantment on your weapons?  Why? *

Sandra seemed completely confused by that, but it was so natural and obvious to Echo that she answered for the Gnomes.  “It’s because the undead are vulnerable to certain elemental attacks.  Holy-based attacks work the best, of course, but Fire works quite well in a pinch; others like Natural, Air, Earth, and Water are nearly useless against something that is already technically dead, but they can be used in various ways to at least inflict damage.  However, for undead monsters such as that Specter Felbar was talking about, they are resistant to most physical forms of attack, though the touch of iron can ‘hurt’ them if they are in constant contact with it.

“Then there are others that are resistant to anything other than Holy-based attacks, which was one of the main reasons I was hoping to become an Elite with my ability to manipulate Holy elemental energy.  Destroying Nether dungeons – and especially undead-based ones – is something I desperately want to be able to do one day,” Echo explained.

The Gnomes nodded along with her explanation and Violet added, “I thought everyone knew that, which was why I hadn’t thought to tell you.”

Sandra was silent for a while, leaving Echo and the others staring uncomfortably at each other.  While she didn’t necessarily dislike the other races, the distrust between the Elves and the others was deeply ingrained and taught at a young age; she put a lot of that aside after she was saved from death by the dungeon and the subsequent interaction between them all, but whispers of it were still there.  Therefore, she still wasn’t entirely used to being around the small people, and it was obvious that they felt at least a little of the same.

* Yes, well, I don’t have much knowledge about the undead from my previous life.  I mainly concentrated on crafting; while there were some enchantments that pertained to killing the undead, I never had time to study the actual Dungeon Monsters themselves.  I didn’t realize that some of them could only be hurt by elemental attacks, and I was unprepared with how ineffective my constructs would be against them.

 

* I can only blame myself for not asking about it; Winxa