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

When the attacking Beasts would jump down into the water, nothing would happen.  It was only when they passed the trigger halfway through the room that the actual trap would activate.  Utilizing the Water-element portion of the trap, she would make the entire pool of water freeze, catching whatever was wading through it in its grip.  Strong enough Beasts, such as those monkey-bear creatures or a Crocatile, could break out within seconds and progress as if nothing happened; others would be trapped for longer, as they wouldn’t be strong enough to get themselves free.

That was all perfectly fine, because freezing them in place was only a temporary measure, and the ice would melt back to water in 5 seconds anyway.  It was while they were frozen in place that two different things would happen.  One, 3 Sonic Blademasters would emerge from behind outcroppings, revving up their rotations in anticipation of attack. Two, the Air-based portion of the trap would activate for all of 2 seconds – more than enough to do some serious damage.

A giant, 14-foot-long pole of hardened Air 6 inches wide would invisibly materialize in the middle of the room, positioned horizontally a foot above the frozen pool.  On one side of the pole, a coating of ice would flash freeze, creating a massive blade that stretched almost the entire width of the room; she had gotten the idea from the battleaxe she had created for Gerold’s Deep Diver suit.

All of that took exactly a second to form; the next second, the now ice-blade-coated pole of air would rotate around the room faster than the eye could see, slicing through everything in its path.  The carnage it would create was impressive, as the ice was extremely durable and the strength of the Air pole underneath was powered with so much Mana that nothing much would keep it from rotating.  In all, it took nearly 5,000 Mana to create that trap, which was a lot considering that it only lasted a total of 5 seconds, but its effectiveness relied on its simple design.

There were ways to beat it, of course; if a Beast was able to lie down as they froze and were under 3 feet, then they would pass through unscathed; if they went to the corners of the room, there was a small space where the rotating blade wouldn’t pass through, as it created a circular pattern as it rotated; two Monsters could theoretically work together, with one on top of the other, where one would survive and the other wouldn’t; or a half-dozen other ways that she could vaguely think of, plus those she hadn’t even thought of.  The point of the trap wasn’t to kill everything that walked inside, but to slow the tide of attackers down.

If they were more intelligent than they were insane, the Cores would begin to become cautious of what they sent into the room, knowing that whatever walked through would likely die.  So, they might only send in a single Beast cautiously, to see if the trap was active; if it was, then only a single Monster might die.  If not, then they could send in larger groups; the catching point was that with only 5,000 Mana invested into the trap, it only took between 20 and 30 minutes for it to reset itself, depending on how thick the ambient Mana was in the room.  Therefore, a single Monster might make it through, but as soon as a larger group went, the trap could activate as it was reset.

Of course, that wasn’t the only room that Sandra made, nor was it the only trap.  Using variations of Water and Air, which she thought would be particularly effective against the Fire-based Beasts, she created 15 additional rooms and traps throughout the 4-mile-long tunnel leading to her dungeon.  Some rooms had constructs, some didn’t; others had only constructs that were to act as a defense, but could retreat into an adjacent room she constructed in case they were being overrun.  All of the traps she created were deadly, but were usually only single use, like the first.

The point of her defenses wasn’t to make a kill-them-all-instantly trap or series of traps, but to last long enough to win the war of attrition.  Traps, as long as the catalyst she used to tie them to a room wasn’t destroyed, were automatically replenished; the Beasts that would be attacking could constantly be reinforced by the Beast-Classification Core, but it would cost Mana, again and again and again.  No matter what, even if Sandra were forced to replace a trap here and there, or her defending constructs were annihilated, she would still come out ahead.

The Beast tunnel, as she was thinking of it now, took just over an hour and a half to complete; most of that time was spent waiting for more Mana to flow into her Core from her constructs up in the wider world, which was slowly but inevitably increasing every hour as her Titanic Territory Arachnid Queens continued to make little leaf-and-stick spiderlings.

She spent the next 4 hours working on the other 3 tunnels, applying what she had learned from the defenses in the Beast tunnel on the others.  Against the Golems, she applied traps based in a combination Nether and Fire – to seal any wounds inflicted on them, so they couldn’t regenerate.  She had witnessed firsthand what the Undead dungeon, especially the Liches that it employed among its Dungeon Monsters, had done to her constructs using their Nether-based spells. In short, they had practically disintegrated as their metal forms were eaten away, so that was what she wanted to employ against the tougher Iron and Steel Golems.

The Goblin tunnel employed mainly Natural-based traps, including poison clouds, strangling vines, and thorny pit traps.  The Powered Arachnids were also going to help out, hiding in a whole bunch of different forest-like environments she created specifically for this tunnel, including the