The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (literature books to read TXT) 📕

“Those sound like Bearlings – nasty pieces of work there.  They might not care about you now, but as soon as you break through to the surface, they’re close enough to your dungeon that they might be a problem.  While they aren’t as territorial as your little ant problem from before, it’s my understanding that they don’t care for neighbors.”

After an hour of continuing her normal operations of crafting and expanding, Sandra had to agree with Winxa, as the Bearlings were still in the same place without any outward reaction.  Without having to worry about them, Sandra went back to her business at hand: expanding her Monster Seed repertoire.  Again, she wasn’t exactly sure what to do with the Elemental Orbs other than use them as an actual Seed – which she briefly tried with success – but the fact that she didn’t have to supply any RM to create them was a big deal.  If there were ever a time when she didn’t have access to anything to absorb, being able to make a Dungeon Monster from pure Mana was sure to be invaluable.

As she waited for her Mana to refill as it was funneled from her constructs, Sandra finally had time to think about the lack of variety in her resources.  Sure, she had plenty of metal for making weapons, but she didn’t have wood, clay, sand, herbs, hides, or any other materials she would need to craft other items.  It appeared as if she was going to need to visit the surface soon in order to find some other material sources somewhere.

She just wasn’t looking forward to having to defend against those Bearlings…

Chapter 21

Kelerim Hafanorc pounded on the red-hot metal bar, wincing slightly as his hammer strike missed his target – again – and the very tip of the sword he was forging broke and flew off.  A *clink* sounded as the super-heated iron rebounded off the crude stone construction of his forge, falling to the dirt below.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time he had made a mistake like that over the last year, which was why he didn’t have anything flammable anywhere near his workstation.

He set his hammer down and placed the half-finished sword on the anvil so that it wouldn’t fall on the floor as well, then he used his tongs to pick up the quickly cooling metal shard up and put it in a small stone box he had nearby for his scraps.  Kelerim didn’t care if it was still hot – it wouldn’t hurt anything in there, and it wasn’t like he could use it again.

Oh, he had tried to fix or reattach some of the mistakes he had made over the last few months but was met with very limited success.  If it was a minor error on his part, reheating the metal and hammering it out was more than possible; for things like the piece of sword that had broken off, there wasn’t any way to put it back on without melting down the metal and creating it all anew.  At least, he didn’t know of a way – but it wasn’t like he had much training in the first place.

I guess they’ll just have to live with a shorter sword.  He had already spent more than an hour hammering and shaping his current project, which made him hesitate to start over.  He still had over a dozen of the iron weapons to make before the warband was back tomorrow night, and he was likely only going to finish them all if he managed to cut his sleep down to a couple of hours as it was.

Those stupid brutes probably won’t even notice, anyway.  That wasn’t fair of him, he knew; they were raised to look down on the weak and unaccomplished, and for a half-blood like him, it was doubly worse.  Half Orc and half Dwarf, he was relegated to the bottom of Orcish society, and given jobs like his current one that no self-respecting Orc Warrior would ever stoop so low as to do.

It was only fair, he supposed.  Kelerim was a mixture of the two races; stuck height-wise halfway between the 7-foot Orcish people and the 4-foot Dwarvenfolk, he wasn’t really accepted with open arms in either society with his 5-and-a-half-foot frame.  The Dwarves didn’t trust foreigners to the point of chasing them off, and the Orcs didn’t respect his “small” size; fortunately, the Orcs could marginally overlook his birth and make use of him to do menial jobs like blacksmithing.

He finished up with the sword he was working on – amazingly with no more major mistakes – and he placed it in the water-filled quenching tub to cool it down that much quicker.  Clouds of steam rose into the air for nearly a minute before it stopped, the metal cool enough for him to physically pick up and place on the rack next to the ones he had made earlier.

I need a break, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow.  It was extremely hot even in the open-sided smithy, and he needed to sit down before he passed out.  Before he did anything else, though, he made sure to place all of his tools back on the workbench nearby. He arranged them exactly where he needed them and would be able to instantly see if anything was missing – the Orcish children in the small border village would often mess with him by hiding or moving the tools he needed.

Scooping out some water with a small iron ladle – that he made himself – from the quenching tub near the forge, Kelerim drank deeply, grimacing a little from the highly metallic taste.  When he was done drinking his fill, he put the ladle back and dunked his whole head inside the tub.  The water was refreshing as it helped him to scrub