The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (best ebook for manga .TXT) 📕

The room was fairly small – only about 30 feet wide and long, and 10 feet tall – and there was a 4-foot-wide walkway running down the length of it in a straight shot to the exit tunnel.  On either side of the walkway, however, Sandra created two shallow pits – only about 5 feet deep – that each contained 500 Segmented Centipedes constantly moving around in a writhing mass of potential death.  If something were to fall inside while still in the throes of whatever illusionary fear they were suffering from, they would be instantly swarmed over and covered head to toe in Centipedes.  It wasn’t a pleasant way to go, but Sandra wasn’t planning on it being an enjoyable experience – she was only doing it to protect herself.  And better yet, she was able to tie the double-element trap to a single one of the Segmented constructs in the pits, meaning that it would probably take the destruction of almost all of them to deactivate the trap.

In the sixteenth room, Sandra went from illusionary fear to one of the real fears she held herself when she was still Human: drowning.  She had never learned how to swim, and her deformed hands made that difficult in the first place, so she had tended to stay away from any bodies of water larger than a shallow bathtub.  By utilizing Air and Water in a trap, she was able to make a nightmarish – at least for herself, and hopefully others – underwater maze that forced whoever entered to hold their breath for a minimum of 10 minutes on their way to the exit.

At the entrance, anyone entering would take two steps inside and activate the trigger. Thin walls of clear hardened Air would snap into place in the 50X50X20-foot room, creating narrow hallways that would meander throughout the room in different directions – including straight upwards and downwards.  There were three initial entrance choices for whatever dared to attempt her labyrinth, though it was hard to tell because the “walls” of Air were invisible.  All three entrances actually led towards the end, though only one of them was shorter; even if they chose the shorter one, as soon as they crossed into any of the entrances, the hallways made from invisible air would start to rapidly fill with clear water.

Whatever tried to navigate through the filled hallways would have trouble finding the walls and the way through as everything was clear; occasionally, they would need to wait for the portion of the maze they were on to fill with water to float them upwards, though of course they wouldn’t necessarily know that there was a gap they could go through.  It was likely that they would think it was a dead end and turn around, not knowing that they would have to go upwards.

Within a minute, the entire labyrinth of solid Air walls would fill with water, and then it would be a race to the end – if they could find it.  And even if they could navigate their way through and hold their breath, Sandra didn’t make it easy on them; a dozen Ironclad Apes were scattered throughout the maze-like labyrinth.  They were easy to see through the clear Air and Water, but it was almost impossible to determine when they would actually be encountered.  Since they didn’t breathe, Sandra didn’t have to worry about them running out of air as the labyrinth filled up with water.  If anything survived 30 minutes within the air and water-filled maze, the trap would run out of Mana and collapse, leaving them free to get to the exit – and contend with whatever Apes were still left.

And that finally brought her to the final, massive room she had constructed to house her Iron-plated Behemoths.  Nine of them were currently inside the 200X200X25-foot room, and Sandra needed something to make up for their relatively slow movement speed.  While they could spin around quickly and smash apart their opponents with their flails, they couldn’t walk very fast; it was entirely possible that someone or something could literally run right by them without even engaging them.  Sandra thought about Echo and the way she could increase her speed by using Air elemental energy – she’d probably run circles around my Behemoths.

To counter that, she created walls of thick stone inside the room, separating it into three distinct areas; the first was a fairly small circular space and contained a single Behemoth that was stationed in the middle.  When it spun around, its flail-tails would be able to reach every edge, closing off any avenue of escape if someone just tried to avoid her construct in the first place.

Given that whoever made it that far had to have some expert survival skills, even Sandra didn’t think that was quite enough to stop them, however.  Therefore, she abandoned the dual-trap theme for the last room and used pure Air – and a whole lot of it.  The trap she created would thicken the air until it was so dense that it was almost – but not quite – solid.  Her Behemoth even had a little trouble getting its rotation up to speed, but once it had momentum, it would cut through the air like a knife through thick porridge.  Even if someone like Echo used her Air elemental energy to thin the air out enough to move at more than a walk, they would have to expend a lot of energy to make it happen.

And then they would have to go to the next space, which was essentially three long hallways that were just wide enough to hold an Iron-plated Behemoth.  The same trap would thicken the air there as well, which was why her constructs were located at the end of each of the hallways;