The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (e book reading free txt) 📕

Echo was instantly flustered, and she couldn’t even respond.  Luckily, Sandra was prepared.

* Tell her for one year only, with the option to re-enlist when their period of mercenary work is done.  Also, please stress that any that become mercenaries will be treated fairly and be given many of the same supplies that the Warbands will receive, so they won’t be used as fodder against Dungeon Monsters. *

In reality, the mercenaries would probably have better equipment and supplies than what she was going to be trading away, because she wanted to prevent their deaths as much as possible – as well as making them a formidable force.

Furbrea seemed pleased by that, and quickly woke everyone in the village up.  All 15 of them.  Apparently, news that the village was being abandoned had spread quickly, and only those that didn’t have any other prospects were still hanging around.

Negotiations – which she helped both Kelerim and Echo navigate with her own Mercantile expertise – were quickly underway when the situation was explained, though it didn’t really take that long or was overly complicated.  Basically, Sandra would transport weapons, armor, and any other supplies like Energy Orbs to the village, along with foodstuffs and common supplies that they would normally obtain from the larger cities – and Furbrea and the others would spread the word and organize things in the village for the new Orcish mercenaries. In addition, they would spread a rumor that the nearby dungeons were going to start to be a lot more difficult to cull and contain, because of the destruction of a total of four dungeons near the wastelands.

To stop the Warbands from just taking all of the equipment and supplies, Sandra was going to provide some protection in the form of constructs; they could be passed off as Gnome-made creations, as Orcish legends hinted that the Gnomes were quite adept at creating things like them.  A few appearances by “Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves” – that were actually Unstable Shapeshifters – stopping by in the future to see how things were going would only further reinforce the idea that all the races were starting to work together, and that they needed the help of Orcish mercenaries to fight against the push of the dungeons.  Sandra had a little hope that seeing all of that would eventually lead to the Orcs to want to join the others in full defense of all the lands, but she also wasn’t relying on that; based on what she had learned about them from her own eyes, experiences from Kelerim, and basic knowledge of Orcish society from Echo and Gerold, she was beginning to think something like that would never occur.  Stranger things had happened, of course, so it was still in the realm of possibility.

When that was all done, Kelerim and Echo left Grongbak and rushed back to Sandra’s dungeon – where they both promptly fell asleep once they got to their beds.  The Dungeon Core kept an eye on the Orcish village, slightly worried that it had all been a ruse on the part of the villagers, but no one rushed out that night to warn any possible passing Warbands; so far, so good.  Time would tell if everything worked out the way she was hoping, but things were looking up.

Now with night in full swing and everybody asleep, Sandra finally had time to get some stuff done.

Chapter 13

While Sandra had been collecting Echo and Kelerim, and then later overseeing their journey to Grongbak, the majority of her focus for her dungeon had been in converting most of the incoming Mana she was receiving into more Shears and Tarantulas for her external Absorption Nets.  By the time midnight rolled around, she finally got a chance to evaluate where she was at on both the quantity of constructs for each Net and how much Mana she was gaining every hour and day.  She had to do some calculations in her mind based on how much she was gaining over a minute and subtract what she was gaining from her dungeon, and was pleasantly surprised at how she was progressing.

# of Shears in the AMANS and scattered locations: 13,758

# of Tarantulas in the GMANT: 4,352

Approximate Mana absorption from AMANS and GMANT per hour: 18,110

Approximate Mana absorption from AMANS and GMANT per day: 434,640

The calculations were fairly easy once she started to look into it.  Because the Shears were so high up above the ground, they didn’t absorb as much Mana; the Tarantulas didn’t have as much vertical movement as the Shears and moved slower over the ground, and accumulated the same amount despite being closer to her Dungeon Core.  In the end, they averaged out to about 1 Mana per hour per construct – which didn’t sound like a lot, but it added up.  Right now, with the additional constructs and Dungeon Monsters she had wandering around, as well as what she was gaining from the dungeon and her Core themselves, she was nearing a half-million Mana every day.  Even that wasn’t quite enough.

She was still devoting a small amount of Mana every minute to creating and sending out more of her Net constructs, which would continue to increase her absorption, but unless she devoted every spare unit of Mana she had coming in, it would continue to increase slowly.  There was entirely too much she wanted to spend her Mana on right now to devote all of it to that pursuit, such as creating another Aerie Roc for Echo and the Elven Elder to use on their journey to their capital, which meant finding Mana somewhere else.

Winxa?  I’ve been thinking about sources of Mana for the last day, and I keep coming back to one in particular.  Obviously, the easiest and most efficient way is absorption from the environment – and I’m working on