The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) by Jonathan Brooks (best english books to read TXT) 📗

completely abandoned all rational thought and gone feral and insane like the other Cores.  When she looked at each of the Dwarves (both the Shieldmen and those villagers living in her actual dungeon), the Rangers moving in and out of their own village and throughout the forests to either side, and the Orcish mercenaries helping to cull the plague of Dungeon Monsters roaming around, they each were the light in an otherwise-dark world.  She thought that it was the Bond they shared that caused them to be highlighted to her vision, and it was like a lifeline to the tiny bits of sanity she could hold onto.

When she looked at the Elven and Orcish villagers, who hadn’t Bonded with her Core, she didn’t see the same “light” coming from them.  That didn’t mean they were the enemy, however, so she would leave them alone; if they stepped foot in her wasteland without being invited, though, they would join the corpses of the many interlopers already being converted to Raw Materials.  She was more than halfway done dragging the corpses of the Orcs into her dungeon so they could be absorbed, though it wasn’t just for the Raw Materials she gained from the process that she did it.  Despite her rage and fury at the dungeons nearby, leaving bloated corpses to rot in the sun was not something she could stand for.

Besides, even though their swords were of horrid quality and only made of Iron, Sandra could absorb them for a much greater quantity of Raw Materials than their corpses provided alone.  Thinking of how shoddily made the weapons were led the red haze coating her vision to lighten up a little, though; as she thought of how they should’ve been crafted, reviewing the steps required to ensure the temper of the metal wasn’t such that it would snap so readily, her mind started to clear.  Those periods of lucidity were all too brief, unfortunately, because they usually only lasted a few moments before the anger came back full-force.

Aside from those infrequent breaks in her rage, all of Sandra’s concentration was on the task at hand: getting her revenge on the Cores that deigned to assault her dungeon.  They would pay for forcing her hand against the massive Orcish Warband that had invaded the wasteland; she was convinced that if she hadn’t been fighting a war on multiple fronts, she could have handled the whole situation with them with much less bloodshed – and Perceine wouldn’t have died unnecessarily.  Don’t get her wrong, she was glad they were dead now, but that didn’t mean that they had needed to die.

She hadn’t forgotten her desire to save as many people as possible, after all; and right now, that meant eliminating the threat to both her dungeon and those people – the other Cores.  By destroying them, she would keep everyone safe, so that was where she was focusing her concentration.  An annoying voice at the back of her mind kept trying to warn her that doing so would be an extremely bad idea, but she kept ignoring it; the message it was relaying didn’t line up with her own objectives, so it wasn’t that important to her.

The problem with her objectives, it turned out, was that fighting a war on 4 fronts was becoming horrendously difficult.  Actually, “fighting” a war was something Sandra was more than capable of; “winning” that war was the hard part.  When she was on defense, it was much easier to think and strategize what she wanted to do, mainly because she intimately knew the area she was defending.  When it came to assaulting the other dungeons, that ease went right out the window – and she was basically at a stalemate.

It didn’t take long for her to take complete control of the tunnels the other Cores had dug to reach her Home room.  All it required was opening up the access to them by removing her own Steel-plated walls, reaching her awareness into the tunnels, and taking control of them.  Since all of the other Cores had shut off direct access to them near their own dungeons, they were ripe for the taking; Sandra now had over 15 total miles of tunnels leading off in 4 different directions, all culminating right next to one of the dungeons that had dared to attack her.

At the same time, she opened the massive Aerie Roc tunnel leading out from her Home room that she had sealed off during the attack, using it as a means to ferry in and absorb the field of Orc corpses and Monster Seeds that had been dropped during the titanic battle.  Using her own army of Hyper Automatons and Articulated Golems, they were slowly clearing the field and providing Raw Materials at the same time.  As for Mana, even after 24 hours, there was still a sizable “cloud” of the precious resource hanging around the site of the carnage, released from the dead Orcs, though she could tell that it was slowly dissipating.

She needed the Mana to keep creating Dungeon Monsters and constructs to send against the other Cores to supplement what she already possessed, but there was a problem with that.  Every time one of her Monsters absorbed and funneled the Mana to her Core, an equal amount was funneled to the other Cores.  As they received Mana, they would create their own Dungeon Monsters to help defend their dungeons or to send out aboveground to start collecting even more.

Sandra had managed to break through the obstacles in her way – which were blocking off access to their dungeons via the extremely long tunnels – multiple times; using some Steel-plated Behemoths and Steelclad Ape Warriors equipped with Titanium Warhammers, her constructs were able to crush the stone and even the Iron-plate walls that had been hastily placed to cover up access to their dungeons.  Every time she broke through, however, there was a massive army