The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) by Jonathan Brooks (e ink epub reader .txt) 📕

As soon as she started moving forward, a transparent shield of swirling air appeared around her, and she looked back and shouted, “Thanks!” at the King, who winked at her again.  Flying slowly through the room, she rotated firing to her left and her right, filling the Archers and Mages with regular bolts that ended them swiftly; they, naturally, fired back, but both arrows and fireballs were deflected by the shield of swirling air around Echo.  Ice formed around her legs and feet, as well as the legs and feet of Starlight 3, but that didn’t really hinder her in the slightest since they weren’t stuck to the ground, being so high up.

It took less than a minute to clear out the Goblins in the room, and the others had been following along at a distance, allowing her to clear the way for them.  Looking at her quiver when she was done, however, she realized she was already running low on bolts, but she hoped that she wouldn’t be needed as thoroughly in the next few rooms as she was in this one.  If she was…well, she still had nearly all of her explosive bolts, if it came down to it.

Luckily, she wasn’t needed through the next few rooms other than as backup, as the others demolished and destroyed everything in their path.  All of the traps were nullified, so they didn’t need to worry about those, but there were a lot of Goblins of all different kinds.  They began seeing Goblin Commanders, which were bigger than any she’d seen before, but they fell just as quickly as the others when they were tag-teamed by the two Shieldmen or Gerold and the Princess, who systematically sliced them apart, piece by piece.

And then came the Goblin Necromancers that Sandra had mentioned.  Just seeing their black robes made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, as she remembered the undead she had faced in another dungeon not that long ago. Echo couldn’t see the spell they cast over the other Goblins they were facing, but she could tell that both her King and Queen could.  “They all are going to arise as undead!  Take their heads from their shoulders!” the Elven King shouted.

Echo went hunting for the Necromancer, but it seemed to have disappeared.  When she flew dangerously close to the back line of this room’s worth of Goblins, she saw that it had retreated behind a pillar, out of view from anyone else in the room – anyone but her, of course.  She took aim and let a bolt fly – only for a grey shield to appear to around the Goblin, deflecting the bolt so it flew into the wall.  What?!  Fine, try one of these on for size.

An explosive bolt followed her first one, but it too was deflected – though it was more the explosion that was redirected than the bolt itself.  Fortunately, it was close enough to a few Goblin Archers that the explosion sent them flying.  When Echo looked back at the Necromancer, though, it hadn’t been harmed in the slightest.

With the projectiles sent by her bow not working, she tried another tactic.  While she wasn’t anywhere in the same sort of spellcasting league as the Elven King and Queen, that didn’t mean she couldn’t cast a few offensive spells. They weren’t nearly as reliable as her trusty weapon, however, so she only fell back on them when she had no choice.  With some deft manipulation of her Holy energy, she formed a long, thin rod of light with a sharp point to it in the front, and then threw it at the grey-shielded Goblin.  Her Lightstrike spell shot nearly as fast as one of her physical bolts through the intervening distance, striking against the barrier…and then dissipated harmlessly upon impact.

“I can’t kill it!  That Necromancer is shielded and I can’t break through!” Echo shouted as she directed Starlight 3 back to the other side of the room, dodging a few arrows shot in her direction as she did so by a handful of Goblin Archers.  Taking her frustration in not being able to harm the Necromancer out on the ones trying to shoot her, she shot another explosive-tipped bolt at the floor in between the Archers, and their relatively fragile bodies blew apart.

“We’ll deal with it after these are dead – or re-dead, whatever the case is.”  Her Queen continued to fight even as she spoke, weaving fatal spells throughout the room that killed Goblins by the dozens.  Without line-of-sight, however, neither she nor the King could affect the Necromancer; a big enough explosion might reach it if it was set off near the pillar it was hiding behind, but Echo thought that wouldn’t really work.

The battle in the room was winding down within a few minutes, as those Goblins that were killed and not decapitated sprang back into action within a few seconds, meaning they had to be killed again.  To those Mages or Archers that Echo had shot or exploded with her bow, many of them came back as undead, as it was difficult to remove a head with a projectile – unless it was demolished as a result of her explosive bolts, of course.

When the last undead Goblin fell, the Necromancer finally made its move to flee, heading for the exit to the next room.  The Elven King brought forth a thin stone wall that blocked the majority of the tunnel, though, and the Necromancer was trapped.  Spell after spell from the Royal couple were thrown at it for nearly a minute, but when they stopped, the Goblin was still standing; the powerful shield seemed able to block just about anything long-ranged.

Nearly faster than she could follow, Palzerk zoomed across the distance, his sword held horizontally to the side as