The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (top 10 novels txt) 📗

the impending attack than anything else she had considered.  However, that didn’t mean they were useless for crafting purposes and enchanting, which was what she’d wanted when she decided to advance her Classification – but they weren’t what she needed now.

There was only one new option that – might – fulfill that role: Unstable Shapeshifter.

Chapter 38

Violet was tired of looking at stone walls and eating fruit and dried meat – as delicious as it was.  She missed the sun, missed feeling the wind blowing through her hair, and also missed the company of others; the last nine days or so had been extremely boring with just herself as company – the “constructs” that Sandra had that just stood there and ignored her didn’t really count as another person.  They were Dungeon Monsters, after all, and not really ones for conversations.

So, she spent most of her days in the Enchantment Repository, using her rather meager skills at enchanting to continue the work that Sandra had wanted help with.  She didn’t really have anything better to do, and as much as she enjoyed looking at the different crafting workstations around the dungeon, none of it interested her in the slightest.  If she really thought about it, Violet had to admit that the Repository idea of keeping every enchantment known in one place that could be used as a place of learning really appealed to her.  If something like it had existed before now, maybe her parents wouldn’t have been so caught up in running or teaching at the ELA that they might still be alive.

That didn’t help the fact that it wouldn’t and couldn’t work, however.  Already, the Stasis Fields she had enchanted that first day were starting to lose energy; within another few days, the Fields would fail and the temporary enchantments that the others had placed upon them would likely fade before she could establish another Field.  While there were ways to enforce and recharge most other enchantment runes, Stasis Fields – due to their nature of frozen entropy – couldn’t be maintained and recharged once they were established.  Even though she knew that from her learning, she did at least try to recharge it – to no more success than she expected.

She had lots of practice recharging and repairing enchantment runes – that was essentially her job back in Glimmerton, after all.  The runes on the War Machines would get damaged or start to fade after a while as the energy was used up in their use, and it had been her job to fix and recharge them.  Which was why she thought it was a shame that the Fields in the Repository couldn’t be done the same way.  Regardless, she still did what enchanting she could and established more Stasis Fields over the rest in the room, finding as she did so that she could enchant four large fields before she was wiped for the day, as opposed to the three she was initially able to do.  That meant that her capacity had increased quite a bit in even the short time she was practicing her enchantments in the dungeon, which only made sense; the more energy-intensive enchantments she did, the more energy she would be able to hold and use for even more enchantments.

It was more than tiring, though; such constant and intense enchanting was frowned upon usually, mainly because it frequently harmed the body with so much energy passing through it – unless you already had a larger capacity and your body was used to it.  Violet’s body was definitely not used to it, but the presence of Sandra’s strange “repair” monster was able to fix all of the damage she did to herself after expending so much elemental energy.  It was a fabulous training program that could revolutionize how quickly she could become stronger, though she would’ve easily traded it to have someone to talk to.

Which was the main reason she had gone looking for the reason for Sandra’s silence.  Even though the Dungeon Core wasn’t actually “present” for her to talk to, even a voice in her head would’ve been preferable to the silence that permeated the dungeon.  After a while it was starting to feel like some sort of prison that she could wander around in but never leave, and that was another reason why she had dared to go against Sandra’s instructions and venture lower than the Enchantment Repository and adjacent storage room.

Any moment she thought she might be killed by some trap that was set up to stop her, but to her relief nothing did.  She ventured lower and lower, until she came to a room that was much larger than the others nearby; in fact, in some ways it was larger than the room up above that they had used to assemble the Hauler and wagons.  A large clear spherical object she guessed was about the size of her head was suspended in the middle of the room, glowing brightly as it shone down on a myriad of different small Dungeon Monsters slowly wandering around both on the ground and in the air.

There was a large tunnel leading off somewhere to the right and a smaller tunnel leading somewhere else on the opposite side of the room, though she couldn’t see where either of them led from her vantage.  She wasn’t really interested in where they went, however, as all her attention had been on the glowing crystal-like ball in the middle of the air.

I’m assuming that’s…Sandra’s Dungeon Core?

She had heard about what they looked like from stories, but the descriptions just didn’t give the Cores justice; instead of being some sort of menacing orb of evil, Sandra’s Core looked…beautiful.  She walked forward until she was standing staring straight up at it for who knows how long before Sandra finally spoke to her.

The revelation that the other races – including the Elves, who thought of most