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

“What—” the First-shield questioned as he sliced an arc through a half-dozen beetles coming up to his knees, a visible trail of burning embers in the wake of his slice— “are you talking about—huh?!   That’s the hunk of metal one of our patrollers found yesterday.  It took three of us to drag it in here, but we figured we could melt it down.”  Parten turned back to the battle, almost negligently slamming his shield into a Wereboar that was charging at him, knocking the powerful Werebeast back at least 15 feet, breaking its neck in the process.  “What is it doing—Gerold!  You honorless excuse for a Shieldman – how did you get out of your cell?”

“You were going to melt down my Deep Diver suit?” Gerold asked, horrified.  He was suddenly glad that an attack had threatened Stonebrink Hall, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have ever seen his suit again.

“Answer my question—”

“Parten, leave off it!  The bigger question is what that hunk of metal can do; I see that it can apparently move, so maybe it can fight?”

“Your Highness, you don’t understand—”

The King was apparently losing his temper, because he roared as he jumped into the air, landing in the middle of a veritable army of Giga-ants.  His impact produced a fiery shockwave of light that burned through at least 40 of the bugs, as well as a few Giga-beetles, frying them to a crisp.  “Enough!  Can’t you see we’re going to need all the help we can get?”

First-shield Parten was quiet for a moment, before he said something to the King that Gerold couldn’t hear.  King Mynag just shook his head, before grunting.  “I know, but if I conserve too much energy, then we’ll be overrun before we know it.  Don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to push it too far.”

Both of them, as well as the pair of Shieldmen around the two that Gerold intuitively knew were the King’s bodyguards, seemed to ignore him in his Deep Diver suit.  With the King giving him at least a modicum of permission to fight, Gerold immediately strove for the civilian side of the line, filled with Dwarves who were doing their best to engage and kill the incoming monsters, but who weren’t nearly as effective as the Shieldmen.  Even though there were nearly 3 times as many of them as compared to the number of Shieldmen in the room, they only had about a third of the line to defend – and they were defending it badly.

It wasn’t their fault, though – they were just outmatched.

“Make way!  I’m coming to help!” he yelled as loudly as he could, his Deep Diver running forward with large stomps of its metal feet, heralding his arrival.  Whether they heard his shout or the clank of his feet against the stone, the civilians turned at the sound and – with wide eyes and a few shouts of surprise – moved out of his way.  They parted around his suit in a wave, letting just enough room open up for him to pass without hitting anyone, and then sealed up the pocket they had created as soon as he was through.  In seconds, he was at the front of the line – and none too soon, it seemed.

The Werebeasts were making an obvious push against the civilians, gathering in a large group for their attack.  Their heightened intelligence had shown them that attacking the Shieldmen was next to useless, so they re-strategized and targeted the weak point in the line.  Gerold got there just in time to encounter a large wave of the Werebeasts, who were pushing their bug allies out of the way in order to strike hard and fast at the less-powerful civilians.

“Why don’t you take on someone your own size, huh?” Gerold shouted, whipping his ice-made battleaxe cross-wise at the Werebear in front of him, which tried to rear back in surprise at his sudden appearance.  The push of its brethren, however, made dodging impossible; given that he was approximately the same height as most of the Werebeasts, his powerful slice essentially cut the upright-walking bear in half, the frigid ice of the battleaxe leaving frosted fur along the wound in its wake.  It also seemed to freeze the edges of the horrendous wound, keeping all of the blood inside the Werebear; Gerold couldn’t help but think how effective that kind of thing would be against the Golems back near Nurboldar, but it didn’t really make a difference here and now.

Some sort of danger sense went off in his peripheral vision and he jerked back in the middle of his follow-through, narrowly missing having a fistful of claws tear into his protective face grate.  A quick upward slice of his icy weapon was enough to amputate the offending claw at the elbow of the Werewolf that tried to hurt him, and he instinctively kicked out with his right foot.  A crunch of bones was his reward as he heard the Werewolf’s leg being destroyed by his lower attack, and he turned slightly to his left to take a charge of a Wereboar, slamming down with a powerful overhead slice onto the head of the tusked, two-legged monster.

His attack was so effective that it surprised him how easily it passed through the flesh and bones of the charging attacker; as a result, the ice-formed battleaxe kept going until it hit the stone floor of the Tavern, shattering into a half-dozen pieces.  He knew it would reform in a few seconds, but as he turned from the split-open Wereboar, he greeted another 25 Werebeasts with nothing but the broken handle of a battleaxe.

“Uh, oh.”

They attacked almost as a unit, coordinated in a way that was totally unlike any other monsters he had encountered.  Even the Goblins weren’t adept at tactics, though they certainly did use their numbers to their advantage