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

Spreading out so that the maximum number of them could attack him at once, they leapt, charged, or roared out in a coordinated assault that would leave him battered and torn apart if he were in his normal Shieldmen armor.  Fortunately for him, he was in his Deep Diver suit.

Just before they struck, he activated the Nether portion of his defenses.  A cushion of darkness surrounded his entire form, blocking out the light from the torches in the room as well.  The blackness was so complete that he couldn’t see anything, and even sounds were muted nearly to inaudibility.  Gerold couldn’t see or hear – but he could certainly feel.

The attacks all came within a second of each other, battering his suit in a seemingly relentless barrage of…well, it was hard to tell, actually.  Instead of the powerful hits he was expecting, it felt like he was getting hit by a bunch of children wielding thin, wooden sticks.  Some of them felt like thicker sticks, which he assumed might be the Wereboars charging into him, but other than making him shift a little to the side, there really wasn’t any damage.

After a few seconds of that, the battering of his suit stopped.  Gerold assumed they had backed off, confused by the aura of darkness surrounding him, as well as being unable to physically harm him.  While he couldn’t see if his battleaxe had reformed from ice, he figured it had been long enough; he dropped his Nether-based cloak of protection and was immediately greeted by 2 dozen Werebeasts in a wide circle around his position.  He wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he was convinced that they had extremely confused expressions on their beastly faces.

Gerold didn’t hesitate.  He swung his battleaxe at the nearest of them, going for another chop that would hopefully separate both halves of the Werebear’s body he targeted.  At the moment before he connected with the confused and surprised monster’s fur, he was suddenly worried that his weapon hadn’t been repaired, as he hadn’t even checked before he struck; he would feel extremely foolish hitting the Werebeast with just an axe handle.

Fortunately, his trust in the way Sandra had created his weapons was proven to be correct, and he barely felt any resistance at all as his icy battleaxe clove through the Werebear.  He continued his attack as he spun around with his attack, throwing himself towards the next in line as he rotated, slicing off the leg of a Were-tiger; with another rotation, he aimed upwards, passing his axe through a Werewolf’s chest cavity and bisected its neck in the process.

Those were the only free shots he was going to get, however, as the Werebeasts had recovered from their shock and were back on the attack.  Luckily for Gerold, he wasn’t the only one that had taken advantage of their confusion.

A wave of axes descended on the Werebeasts, chopping off limbs here and there, crippling them until they could be finished off.  A half-dozen of them managed to use their speed to avoid the counter-attacks by the civilians and pounced on Gerold, but the Deep Diver suit lived up to his hope for it and withstood the majority of attacks on its shape.  Bites and scratches left tiny dents here and there, as well as cosmetic damage, but he was able to use the “strength” afforded by the suit to beat them away, if he didn’t connect with his ice-formed weapon right away.

Within 20 seconds, all of the Werebeasts were dead – but that was only the beginning.  Gerold stomped back into the line with the civilians, who were looking thoroughly relieved at his timely intervention; he looked at the break in the Tavern wall about 40 feet ahead, and there still seemed as though there would be no end in sight to the monsters streaming through.

As he was bracing himself for another wave of attackers, there was a strange tickle on his back.

“Gerry!”

The familiar voice seemed to come from right behind him, but before he could turn he felt something slam into his unprotected back, causing him to overreact and fall forward, shattering his ice axe as he tried to catch himself.

Chapter 27

“Get up, Gerry!  It was just a blasted spider, but I got it for you!”

Gerold got his suit to its knees just as a wave of Giga-ants arrived.  His weapon hadn’t reformed quite yet, so he slammed his arms down on the multitude of bug monsters, squishing them with the metal of the suit itself.  After splattering into goopy messes, the Giga-ants seemed to think better of attacking him directly, and they parted around either side of him in order to get to the civilians on either side of him.  Worried that they would somehow manage to sneak around and get into his suit from behind, he quickly got to his feet and risked a quick glance behind him as he stomped down on two of the Giga-ants that had gotten too close.

It was Master Blacksmith Jespin, wielding a master-crafted battleaxe and shield that he had likely made himself at some point in his career.

As he turned back to the line, seeing that another batch of Werebeasts was coming in behind the smaller Bugs, he shouted loud enough for the Blacksmith to hear him.  “Thanks for the save—but we have to get out of here!”

“We can’t leave now!  Well, I could, but they can’t survive without your help, Gerry.”

Gerold swiped at a Werewolf that approached him first, but it dodged his attack with superior speed, followed up by a Werepanther that jumped back just in time to avoid any damage, putting his suit slightly off-balance.  Either they were somehow faster now than they were previously, or he had been such an unknown before that they hadn’t known how to react until now.  Regardless of