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

easily able to.  More Undead were slowly coming out from where she sensed the dungeon was, though, and the new ones she was seeing were tending to be just a little too much for her constructs out in the field to easily handle – or reach.  Specters were suddenly the popular way to go for the Core, mimicking the way her Shears stayed above the ground and consistently moved around; they were obviously much more expensive than skeletal rats so she didn’t see hordes of them, but it was probably only a matter of time before the sky above the trees was filled with mist-like Monsters.

Other than that, she saw the more-powerful zombie beasts, a few random Ogre Skeletons, and scattered sightings of the ghouls she had seen before.  Her Rolling Forces proved to be able to kill one of the latter, but it required all 100 of the ones she had in groups to sacrifice themselves in their bombardment to do enough damage to them.  The first skirmish she had between her constructs and the ghouls proved that they could be injured, but it took a lot more hits before they went down, and the Undead itself was quite adept at quickly slicing through the pieces of her Forces with its sharp claws.  After that, she knew it would be better to leave them alone and hunt safer targets.

However, she estimated that by the time the next day dawned that there wouldn’t be many more that she could eliminate.  To top it off, there was still approximately 3 square miles of the other Core’s AOI that she couldn’t even reach, as it was now too far past the dungeon itself to access.  If the Undead Core was smart – and Sandra had seen enough evidence so far to assume that it was – then that area she couldn’t reach right now was likely packed with monsters.

Even if they were only those rats, it was enough space to let the Undead Core accumulate massive amounts of Mana – and there was nothing she could do about it.  By the amount of “new” Undead (she assumed they were newly created, instead of just being sent out from the defenders already stationed in the dungeon) she saw, Sandra thought this was indeed the case.

She was still filtering through all of that information as she looked around the entire Area as night set in.  Her Visitors were already asleep – or feigning sleep, in the case of Echo – so Sandra had some time on her hands to figure out what she wanted to do.  She already knew that she wanted to enchant some Titanium warhammers that her Steelclad Ape Warriors would be carrying into the fight against the Undead, but she wasn’t sure where to go from there.  Since that was really the only construct that could reliably wield a weapon, the Dungeon Core was at a loss for what to do to enhance her existing Monsters.

Of course, she had her Unstable Shapeshifters, which could wield their elemental energy and cast spells like the ones that had been so effective against those robe-wielding Undead.  After consulting with Echo who seemed to know quite a bit about them despite never actually seeing them before, she discovered that they were called Liches.  Apparently, they were the most despised of the Undead – as far as the Elves were concerned – because they were originally purported to be the reanimated remains of Elves that had turned towards using “necromantic”-type spells as their focus.  Whether that was true or not, Echo was almost spitting with obvious hatred and barely restrained violence when she mentioned them earlier.

Nevertheless, the ability to cast spells from a distance – and relatively powerful ones, at that – was a great addition to her forces.  She was already adding quite a few of them to her eventual army that would eventually be sent to the area around the dungeon, as well as inside when the time came, but there were a few downsides to using them.  The first one was the most obvious one – their time limit; they could only hold their shape for an hour before they had to revert to their normal form, which had proven not to really have any offensive capabilities when it was a multi-colored blob.  Other than possibly suffocation if it were allowed to envelop an enemy, but that really wouldn’t do much to Undead Monsters that didn’t have to breathe in the first place.

Second, giving them some sort of armor to protect them or weapons to attack with if they ran out of elemental energy was technically possible, but there was no real easy way to bring them along; she’d have to assign some sort of transporters for the sole purpose of carrying their gear, because the Shifters themselves couldn’t carry more than something small in their blob-like appendages they could extend – and poorly at that.  Not only that, but she had also found that if the Shifter was wearing something in, say, Echo’s form, if the “shift” time ran out before it could remove the clothing it was practically shredded as the Unstable Monster ballooned up into its “normal” shape.  Sandra wasn’t sure if something a little more durable than just cloth would act the same as well, or if it would hurt the Shifter as it suddenly became too large for its protection.

The third thing – and it was the most worrisome of the entire situation – was that she wasn’t sure if she could even have her Shapeshifters cast spells while in the other dungeon.  During the battle outside her dungeon entrance, it was proven that they could take orders and cast spells that Sandra knew how to easily create without her having to directly control each and every one – which would’ve been virtually impossible in that type of situation, regardless of how much practice she’d had at it lately –