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

An intense light temporarily blinded the beast – and the one directly behind it – and it stumbled forward as stabbing pain to its low-light-accustomed eyes made it additionally disoriented.  And then, out of nowhere, a shockingly loud whining noise assaulted its ears, the sound of a dozen different Singing Blademasters echoing and reverberating around the room until it was magnified so much that it physically damaged the sensitive ears of the Bearlings.

Blinded, deafened, and in pain from unknown sources that they couldn’t even see to fight and stop, the lead beasts roared out in retreat.  The two inside the second room turned around and started shoving their way back out the tunnel (after running into the walls a few times, of course).  The ones behind were confused, but they could also hear the sound of Sandra’s Blademasters; after seeing the remains of at least four of their number (since Sandra had absorbed two already) inside the first room, and the panicked roaring of their lead elements, the rest beat a hasty retreat as well.

The Singing Blademasters stopped their rotation when the Bearlings were halfway to their cave, a third of their number having lost their lives in her dungeon.  Silence reigned over everything and Sandra watched in numb fascination as – over the next 20 minutes – the arm of her damaged Ironclad Ape slowly rebuilt itself.

She had done it.  Against the odds – and with a bit of luck, maybe – she had been successful.

Sandra tried to repair the damage that had been done to the entrance tunnel – just in case the Bearlings decided to come back within the next few minutes – but she got a message stating that she couldn’t do it while there were invaders inside her dungeon.  She looked at the first room, verifying that the ones in there were all dead and started to get worried.  Did something else invade while I was distracted?

A frantic search around her the rooms of her dungeon showed nothing out of the ordinary; it was only when she returned to the second room that it hit her – the man she had saved.  She looked at him closer, seeing that he was still unconscious, and she wasn’t sure when he would wake up.  Or if he ever would.

Now…what the heck do I do with you?

Chapter 27

Sandra wasn’t quite sure what to do with the strange-looking man, so she ignored him for the moment while she dealt with some other issues.  The first issue – though it was a good problem to have – was that she was full of Mana again from the deaths of the Bearlings inside of her dungeon.  She felt a little bad for needing to kill them because it hadn’t been her intention to seek their deaths, but she was hoping they had learned their lesson and would leave her, the man, and her dungeon alone now.

While she had already used the Mana from the first two Bearlings who lost their lives on her Core Size stages, after that point she had been too preoccupied with the battle to pay attention to her Mana levels.  Although she was full now, she figured that she had lost all the rest of the Mana from the other four Bearlings that had died.  Oh well, it’s not like I was seeking Mana out in the first place.

“That Mana is still there, you know.  Since you can only absorb so much at once, the rest sticks around the area where the Bearlings died so that you can still grab it later with one of your Dungeon Monsters.  It will eventually disperse into the surrounding environment after a few hours or so, but you’ve got a little bit of time before that happens,” Winxa told her after hearing her thoughts again.

Thanks, I didn’t know that.  Sandra was briefly annoyed that the Dungeon Fairy hadn’t told her that before – because it meant that she didn’t have to spend it on her Core Size stages if she hadn’t wanted to – but she realized that the issue hadn’t really come up before.  The Territory Ant attack had been already ongoing when she had arrived, and the total amount of Mana the unending stream of insects had provided hadn’t been all that much in the first place – especially in comparison to the Bearlings.

Regardless, now that she knew about it, she could spend the Mana however she wanted.  She was also nearly full of Raw Materials from absorbing the bodies of the two Bearlings, so Sandra immediately recreated the fallen Basher Totems at 2,000 Mana a piece, using some Large Bronze Orbs she had lying around – a few of which she had been forced to make during the battle to ensure she didn’t fill up her Raw Material capacity.  She even made enough to add another four of the Totems to the room; they did very well against the Bearlings, and more was always better.

She also made another Ironclad Ape, which brought her total up to three; she planned to keep them all in the second room as a backup force, and she thought they would work very well as a team – along with the Singing Blademasters.  Overall, she had been pleased with how well her defenses had held against the scary beasts, though she could see some ways to improve in the future.

But that was for later – she still had quite a bit of Mana leftover even after restocking the first room with her constructs.  Since she couldn’t rebuild, expand, or otherwise change her dungeon while the man was lying unconscious in her dungeon, she used the bodies of the other Bearlings to create more Average Steel Orbs, and even had enough remaining to advance a stage in her Core Size again.  By the