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

eardrums would burst.  She couldn’t even hold her hands up to her ears to save them any further abuse because her hands were still tied tightly together with rope, but thankfully the screaming stopped after about 10 seconds.  Echo watched as the Royal couple seemed to deflate and collapse upon their seats of authority, followed by every single Royal Guard.  Each of the ones guarding the prisoners flopped to the floor unconscious, and the one nearest her nearly knocked her down in the process.

What just happened?

“Good thinking, Echo.  Hold on, I’ll get you untied.”  The next moment, Winter was at her back side and she felt an intense cold radiating over her bare skin, followed soon after by her restraints suddenly letting her go.

“Thanks.”

“Ha!  I told them it was a good idea to bring you along!  I guess I was right, again,” the normally surly Elite said with a giant smile, and she didn’t have any idea what was going on.

“Don’t listen to him, Echo; he enjoys messing with people’s perception of him whenever he can,” Churven said from behind her, and she jumped at his sudden presence – she didn’t even hear him approach.  She whipped around, seeing that the Elder was there as well, cautiously stepping over the unconscious Guards on the floor nearby.

Herrlot interrupted the conversation.  “There’s no time for this.  You need to get going.”

“Get…going?  But what is—?”

“They’ll be fine when they wake up, though they’ll be extremely confused and likely missing some chunks of their memory,” Churven said quickly, nodding at the Guards covering the floor.  “The King and Queen, however, won’t be so lucky unless you get them to this dungeon of yours.”

Ah.  That’s right.

“Oh, and good thinking on removing his head, because decapitation is the only way to effectively sever the tie between the caster and the victims of the mind manipulation spell.”

Echo paused in the middle of ordering the Roc to land.  “Wait…so I could’ve messed that up?  You could’ve told me.”

The Elder had the presence of mind to look a little embarrassed.  “Well, we couldn’t really trust you with everything.  We were convinced we had someone feeding information to the Chamberlain, but we weren’t sure who it was.  Based on how adamant you were that we had actually taken you from safety, we weren’t exactly convinced that you hadn’t been compromised.  You understand, don’t you?”

She did, but that still didn’t make it right.  “Fine.  Whatever.  Let’s just get them loaded up and we can go.”

“I…I’m not going with you, Echo.  Someone needs to organize everything here now that the King and Queen have been incapacitated.”

That sounded a lot like she was taking over the governance of the Elven people.  Almost as if they had just successfully completed a coup….

The Elder held her hands up, as if to stop Echo from thinking the worst.  “Now, I know what that sounds like, but it’s only until you come back with them.  I was telling the truth when I said I don’t want to be in charge; running a small village was the most responsibility I would ever want.”

Echo just shook her head, not completely believing her, but having no other choice at the moment but to follow through on her commitments.  Either way, if Herrlot was in charge, then at least there would be someone that knew about the danger and was willing to start passing out Energy Orbs.

The Roc landed moments later and Echo got plenty of help gently strapping the Royal family into the harnesses, and she took her place in her own position.  With one last look at The Rebels – who had succeeded in their rebellion all because of a much-less powerful Ranger…and a gigantic bird monster from a dungeon in the wasteland, of course – she turned away and instructed the Roc to make its way up and out of the Royal Bowery.

As she flew off to the northeast, towards Sandra’s dungeon, she couldn’t help thinking that the way things turned out had been the Elder’s plan from the start. Too many coincidences, I’d say.  Regardless, Echo looked at the setting sun, hoping she would arrive before it became too dark; it was just her luck having to try to set down in the middle of a desolate wasteland, carrying the most precious cargo of the Elven people.

Chapter 26

Gerold hesitated before he joined in with the chaotic battle ahead of him.  Not because he was afraid, but because he wasn’t sure where he might be best used to shore up the failing defenses of the Shieldmen and civilian fighters ahead of him.  Doing a quick estimate, he determined that there were at most 40 Shieldmen and 100 civilians wielding battleaxes and wearing non-Shieldmen armor that appeared to have seen better days.  Almost everyone in their strongholds knew how to fight and defend themselves, but they were much less effective at it than the more specialized Shieldmen, of course.

Sadly, as he glanced around, there were at least 200 civilians – residents of Stonebrink Hall that he recognized – lying in jumbled heaps, pushed to the side of the Whiskeyflow Tavern floor to make room for the rest of the defenders.  Noticing a few others that he recognized for a different reason, he realized that they weren’t all civilians; some faces belonged to at least a half-dozen Shieldmen he knew, and since he couldn’t see all of them, there were no doubt more.

“This…this is bad.  Maybe I should’ve just left instead,” he said out loud.  No one seemed to hear him, fortunately, because there were too many screams and the sounds of a fierce battle overwhelming the senses.

As for what they were fighting against, Gerold immediately recognized two types of dungeon monsters that were known to come from dungeons relatively nearby.  To see them working together, utilizing the same tunnel leading into the Tavern, was a