The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (e book reading free txt) 📕

to try out some enchantments that she hadn’t had a chance to use quite yet.  If they worked, then it might be something she could add to future armor she made for the Orcs.

First, for a third of the Goblins in the first room, she added a Light Shield enchantment similar to the one that was being used by Felbar’s War Machine against the Undead, which would activate when something other than the Goblin touched the chest armor.  She didn’t hook up any Energy Orbs for additional power, so the enchantment was limited to how much Holy energy (via an Echo clone) she pumped into the rune sequence.

Her experiment there was to see how effective reactive enchantments were on armor, so that she didn’t have to have things activated manually.  Most of her other enchantments she had created had to be specifically activated to take effect, but if she could figure out how to get them to trigger automatically – sort of how her dungeon traps worked when invaders crossed over their triggers – then that could change everything.

With this in mind, she also created an enchantment on another third of the Goblins that sucked in water from the air and then froze it rapidly, covering the entire armor in a sheet of hard, protective ice.  The enchantment, if she remembered correctly, was meant to keep food and drinks cool once it was activated and not necessarily to freeze water into ice, but with its reactive state she wanted to see if her idea would work the way she wanted it to. For the most part, each enchantment she created was a one-shot deal and couldn’t be reactivated, though with the addition of Energy Orbs in the future that could change.

The last third of the Goblins she enchanted with a Nether-based enchantment that was usually applied to weapons, so she was interested to see if it could be used in a defensive way.  Basically, as soon as something touched the armor, a blast of necrotic energy would shoot out and cover anything nearby – except for the Goblin itself.  It was usually applied to a bladed weapon’s edges, so that when it sliced into a Monster, the necrotic energy would work to weaken the enemy from the inside, making it much easier to kill.  This, she was hoping, would be a lot more dramatic.

Once they were all protected with their new enchanted chest armor, Sandra looted her storage and display room, where she had nearly enough short swords that she had previously crafted for all of her Goblins in the first room to have one; there were a dozen that she had to create for them, which was easy enough to do once she knew how many she needed.  While they weren’t warriors of any sort like Winxa had mentioned, it was better than going into a fight unarmored.

For the trap in the first room, she took a cue from the Reptile-Classification dungeon she had invaded previously and used water as her main source of attack.  A powerful waterfall of freezing cold liquid would descend from near the ceiling, slamming into whatever walked inside.  That wasn’t necessarily meant to hurt them, however, but to provide a false sense of security; after the first waterfall, a second one fell down to the floor after 5 feet of empty space, which was filled with sharp slivers of ice 3 inches long that would attempt to impale anything passing through.

To create those waterfalls, and to have them last for approximately 15 minutes, required nearly her entire maximum Mana to achieve, so there wasn’t much else she could add to the trap.  If anything came through the two waterfalls unscathed, they were going to be met by 100 Goblin Foremen with enchanted armor and short swords.  Truth be told, she didn’t think they were likely be overly effective, but that wasn’t necessarily the point of their presence.

In the second room, she again created some more Goblin Foremen, but only 30 this time.  The main component of the room was something completely different from the first, but it was again an experiment – this time with Energy Orbs and the enchantment placed on the explosive bolts she created for the Elves and their new composite bows.  She had already seen what happened when she placed the Fireburst enchantment on the tip of a warhammer and turned up the Limiter rune too high; the resulting explosion nearly destroyed her Steelclad Ape Warrior wielding the weapon, and bent the metal of the warhammer at the same time.

She had applied that to the bolts from a suggestion by Echo, though she used Tiny Energy Orbs to make it small enough to fly; regardless of the size, they still did a heck of a lot of damage.  But what if she increased the size of the Orb?  She had only used an Average-sized pairing of Energy Orbs for the warhammer; not only that, but the Limiter rune had been adjusted so that not all of the energy would be released all at once, even if she had made a mistake.  If she took the Limiter rune completely out of the sequence, however….

Her experimenting ultimately left her with a Copper ball wrapped around a Large Energy Orb.  She chose Copper because it tended to work better with Fire-based enchantments, and she enchanted the outside of it with the Fireburst enchantment – which was easy enough.  The problem was that she needed it to be activated by touching the Energy Orb in the center, which – on the explosive bolts – was normally done by a strong impact, driving the Spirit and Fire Energy Orbs together, creating the explosion.  Here, though, the enchantment wasn’t yet connected to the Fire Orb inside – so she needed a way to connect them.

It ended up being a simple solution of using her Mana to make holes in the Copper ball and then