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

doors so that it could turn to the side and enter through that way.  Then, when it got to the air traps that sent it upwards, the sheer heat from it caused it to rise much faster than normal, where it ended up crashing against the ceiling above the trap.  Fortunately it didn’t seem hurt by it, but the stone ceiling required a little repair from the impact.

It was a good thing that it hadn’t been hurt, because there was no way to heal it with her Repair Drones – they couldn’t get close enough.  The heat emanating from the Phoenix was so great, in fact, that it almost caused the Gnomes’ supply wagon to catch fire as it made its way through the workshop and out to the sky above.  Once it soared through the open air, Sandra wasn’t sure exactly what it could do other than burn brightly; its special ability gave a hint of what the Phoenix was known for, but without testing it she wasn’t sure how effective it could be.

Rising Phoenix

 

Current Elemental Energy:

Holy – 7500 energy

Fire – 7500 energy

 

Special Ability:

Born from the Ashes: 3700 Holy and 3700 Fire

She didn’t want to risk killing it herself just to test the ability – especially after the effort she went through just to get it out of her dungeon – so she sent it against the Undead that she had a hard time eliminating: the Specters.  As the flaming bird screeched through the sky on its way over the forest, she watched it go with some of her other constructs out there; she had to admit that even if it turned out not to be very effective, it was impressive to look at, nonetheless.

Fortunately, it was just the thing she needed to combat the mist-like Undead that were busy accumulating ambient Mana above the trees.  The Rising Phoenix didn’t attack so much as just pass through the insubstantial forms of the Specters, destroying them utterly in seconds.  Sandra thought that they didn’t even do any damage to her Monster, but after a few Undead were destroyed, she noticed a significant drop in the intensity of flames that were running all over the Phoenix.  After destroying just over 20 Specters, the flames were extinguished completely and the bird fell from the sky, crashing through the trees below and scorching leaves as it passed by.

Some nearby Rolling Forces finally located it after a minute; she normally would’ve kept watching through the Phoenix’s senses, but as soon as it fell she lost all contact with it.  When they finally “rolled” up on the crash site, she saw what appeared to be a tiny, baby Phoenix bird waddling around the ashes of its former self.  The firebird appeared completely helpless and didn’t even have any flames around it, though the ashes that would flare up a little as it hopped around showed that it still generated a bit of heat.

It was only after 10 minutes of watching the bird hop around looking lost that something finally happened.  The Phoenix began to grow at a rapid pace, getting larger and larger…before it stopped when it was only about half the size of the original Phoenix.  It immediately lifted off the ground and burst through the trees; as soon as it hit the open air, flames burst out over its body and wings, though they were noticeably not as bright as before.  Interesting.

More experimentation showed that it was able to destroy another 10 of the Specters before falling again.  This time, however, she was too late getting to the crash site; her nearby rolling constructs made it to the location just in time to see a zombie bear smash flat the poor baby firebird under its paw, though it appeared to scorch said paw in the process.  So, obviously, soon after the “resurrection” the Phoenix was extremely vulnerable, which meant she had to plan better where it crashed after its flames were extinguished, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to come back if it was caught by some other Undead.

It wasn’t a perfect trade-off, but Sandra still thought that even if the Phoenix was destroyed before it could resurrect even once she came out ahead.  Therefore, she decided to create another one to start hunting more Specters.  Since she’d seen that the flames of the newly reborn Phoenix were dimmer than before, she tried focusing on her new Monster to see if she could duplicate that intentionally.  After getting nowhere issuing orders to the Phoenix, she finally found that if she directly controlled the Monster, she could dampen the flames considerably for a short time – at least while it was on the ground.  Learning how to fly and do it at the same time proved to be beyond her at the moment.

Each of the Dungeon Monsters she had acquired proved to be just what she needed, so she kept the rest of her remaining AP for the future.  The last thing she did that night was to start to plan out where she was going to place all of the Dwarves that could potentially be there later in the day, as well as where to put all of the new crops she was going to need to plant.  She dismissed the idea of just adding on to her current growing room for the simple reason of Mana availability; the current growing room took quite a lot of her Maximum Mana to set the trap up with Natural and Holy elements – for the actual growing portion and “sunlight” – and making it much larger would probably be impossible until she increased her Core Size.

Therefore, she started the slow process of creating another growing room down below near the long line of rooms she had made before; she was thinking that all of the rooms she had excavated to acquire more AP and for their Raw Materials would