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

Not a single thing.  She was expecting it to dig down into the dirt and establish some sort of nest, but it did nothing of the sort.

Darn it!  What went wrong?

“Um, Sandra?  This is a spider, remember?”

Yes, I remember – what of it?  The Dungeon Core wasn’t sure what Winxa was trying to get at.  Using one of her available Shears to look at the Arachnid Queen standing there in the full sunlight, even more disgusting-looking with more light, it finally occurred to her.  Never mind, I think I got it.

It took another few minutes for the Queen to travel the distance to the nearest forest, close to where the Undead dungeon had caused so much havoc not so long ago.  Almost immediately, the Queen climbed up one of the trees and started to string a web from that tree to another, made from glistening Territory Ant Egg material that seemed to exude from its rear end.

While she was sure there were spiders that dug holes in the dirt, most spiders she knew of preferred to spin webs between two nearby objects; that was where she had erred.  It didn’t take more than a few minutes for a complete web to be built strand-by-strand, and then the Arachnid matriarch perched itself in the middle of the web, as if waiting for something.

That was it.  It did nothing else, which was a disappointment.  What am I missing?  The Territory Ant Queen that Sandra had fought had relentlessly created eggs one after another, but her new construct wasn’t doing anything of the sort.  Why isn’t it making eggs?

“Why would it make eggs?  Is its territory under attack?”

Such a logical question, and yet it made Sandra feel ignorant.  Simple enough to fix; all she had to do was send orders to the Titanic Territory Arachnid Queen that its territory was under attack, and—

Immediate action took place as the Queen jumped off of the web, landed on a nearby tree, and started devouring its leaves and branches.  30 seconds later, it jumped back onto the web and started to lay a gigantic pile of tiny eggs which clung to the sticky material; Sandra had to look away during the whole process because it was a little disturbing and disgusting.

When the laying of eggs was complete, the Queen jumped to the other tree and started to feast on the foliage again.  I’m assuming it needs the material to create the eggs?  That was the easiest, and likely the correct, explanation, because otherwise the construct would be making the eggs from nothing.  Well, not nothing, because she could also sense that the ambient mana around the web was thinning; she could almost see the flows of Mana being sucked into the egg pile attached to the web.

A minute after being laid, the eggs started to hatch, releasing their contents in a wave of brown sticky legs and green bodies.  What?  As soon as they all separated and landed lightly on the ground, before scurrying off in all directions, Sandra could see why they were brown and green: they were literally assembled from sticks and leaves.  With 8 thin sticks as legs and a leafy green mass of a body, they seemed to be assembled by what the Queen had consumed.  They appeared to be relatively fragile in their construction, as if a good slap would completely destroy them – but they weren’t there to fight.

With over 100 of them “born” with the first batch, they were doing exactly what Sandra had hoped: Spreading out and gathering ambient Mana to funnel back to her Core.  She could tell the difference in Mana flowing towards her almost immediately, as the stick and leaf spiders succeeded in traveling far enough away from the Queen. It seemed as though the Territory Arachnid was creating a bit of a locational void in the Mana that was used to create more spider babies.

Before she lost sight of them, Sandra tried to order one of the newly born spiders around—but it was as if it was invisible to her attention.  Uh, oh.  Luckily, she found that if she concentrated on the Queen first and then the individual stick-and-leaf spiders, she could control them that way.

“They weren’t created by you specifically, and likely do not contain any Monster Seeds,” Winxa commented.  “You could almost consider them an extension of that giant spider, so in order to direct them, you would have to direct the Queen.”

However it worked, Sandra was just glad that she could control them, even in a roundabout manner.  It wouldn’t bode well if she had just released a horde of small, organic-looking spiders on the world, especially when it already had enough problems.

Another batch of eggs hatched, and then another one, and there didn’t seem to be any stopping.  Eventually, the forest would start to suffer a bit from the hungry devouring of the Queen, but judging by the rate of attrition, it would probably take a couple of days before it became too much of a problem.

Seeing that her plan was working, and already feeling the difference in her Mana absorption, if still a tiny difference at this point, Sandra spent the Mana she had accumulated and created 4 more Queens, sending them out to different areas of the surrounding forests, where they could start their own webs and their own baby spider production.  It was at that time that Furbrea and Owchet arrived at her workshop near the top of her dungeon, so she turned her attention to equally important matters.

Before she forgot, though, she made sure to order the 5 proliferating Queens not to attack – nor to allow their offspring to attack – any people.  She didn’t want them swarming over any of the nearby villages because they were defending their territory, after all.

 

* Kelerim?  Can you meet me in the upper workshop?  We’ve got some strategizing