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

spot where the final battle between the races and Wester was held all those years ago, the landscape has probably drastically changed.  From what I remember hearing of it – since I wasn’t there with him at that point anymore – the war wasn’t exactly delicate on the surrounding land.

“That being said, whenever a dungeon breaks through to the surface, they usually have already made sure that they are fully defended in case they pop up in the middle of a group of hostile figures.  This includes having a good supply of Dungeon Monsters at the ready, and traps set up and prepared for almost anything.  Typically, dungeons start off with weak Dungeon Monsters and traps first, and then increase their strength as they progress further – but it’s entirely up to the Core doing the defense.  You already know about those Bearlings, but there could be something different – either more or less powerful for you to worry about.

“Also, keep in mind that you won’t be able to absorb anything up there that isn’t connected to your dungeon.  You might be able to see and funnel ambient Mana through your constructs, but you can’t affect much more than that.  And lastly, once the entrance to the surface is created, the standard tunnels and rooms cannot be changed to be made smaller – only larger,” Winxa told Sandra when the Dungeon Core announced her intention to break through to the surface.  The Dungeon Fairy seemed to want to say more than that, but she was likely constrained by whatever force prevented her from giving advice.

Sandra got what she was trying to say, though; she needed to make sure she was properly defended in case those Bearlings decided to attack right away when she arrived on the scene.  As things currently stood, all she had was the small little pit trap near her Home, and a single wall-slamming trap in the narrow tunnel just before the last room.

That last room was inside a jutting earthen and stone hill that she assumed rose above the normal ground level, as it was just as high as the hill that the Bearlings were currently sleeping comfortably in.  As her Area of Influence expanded, she could see more of the jutting hills piercing upwards all over, and the “normal” ground level was a series of small bumps and valleys – like it was a torn-up planting field that the earth decided to rise up from underneath and destroy.

As it would only take at most an hour to dig a good-sized tunnel through the side of the small mountain, Sandra left that step until the very last.  Instead, she did something that she had been putting off, as she wasn’t really fond of crafting traps that would kill something.  Though, when she really thought about it, she was kind of doing the same thing when she crafted weapons; considering trap construction in that different light, she realized that they were almost one and the same.

The issue was that it would be her doing the killing, even if it was in the form of a trap.  With weapons, they were made for other people to use, but her traps seemed more…personal.  Sandra briefly thought about the whole Territory Ant massacre she had been forced to commit; although she didn’t like bugs and the Ants had attacked her without (at least what she considered) provocation, the whole situation left a bad taste in her figurative mouth.  To deliberately plan for the killing of beasts – or worse yet, someone of a sentient race – was something she was having a hard time with.

Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it – she had the Bearlings constantly making themselves aware at the edge of her attention.  They weren’t making any threatening moves, or even acknowledged her existence, but Winxa had mentioned that they might not stay that way once she broke through to the surface.  As much as she didn’t want to kill them if they attacked her dungeon, she would be prepared to defend herself when it came to that.

Therefore, with that mindset that she was purely doing it “just in case”, she started to place traps throughout the last rooms in her dungeon closest to the surface.  Instead of following the same plan that other dungeons seemed to take – with having weaker Monsters and traps at first – Sandra went the opposite direction and put most of her strongest constructs and traps first.  It didn’t make any sense to her why it would be done the other way; she thought that having the best stuff first would be better for eliminating the problem quicker.

She also used every extra scrap of Mana she had to create more constructs, though she limited it to ones that weren’t very expensive because the traps that she wanted weren’t cheap.  All in all, she spent five full days constantly low on Mana from her expenditures, as it was used on nothing but defense.  It pained her to put crafting on hold for that long, but she knew it was for a good cause: her continued safe existence.

Sandra also dug into her “treasure hoard” of orbs piled up around her Core for their contained Mana, as well as converting many of the dirt piles her Automated Digger had created in its excavations.  She thought it was worth it to use nearly 150 of her smaller Orbs for the project, otherwise she expected that it would’ve taken another day or two to finish – which was a day or two longer than she wanted to be away from her crafting and ultimately delaying her first glimpse of the outside.

She leaned on all her knowledge of the elements to make her traps, though she had to admit that she wasn’t great in the practical use category.  Her expertise lent itself to using elemental energy on enchantments, and not how Heroes