The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) Jonathan Brooks (large ebook reader TXT) 📖

Apes had been and a plethora of Lengthy Segmented Millipedes to replace the Steel Pythons.  The Totems were actually a good replacement for the Apes; even if they weren’t as agile, they actually provided more attacking power in comparison.

The Lengthy Segmented Millipedes were a poor substitute for the Pythons, however.  They couldn’t move quite as fast and although they had 250 segments to them compared to the original 25 on the Centipede, they were still small and wouldn’t provide much of a threat by themselves.  Still, they seemed to be made of stronger metal and were quite formidable when in large groups, so for every Steel Python she was replacing, she created 10 to 15 Millipedes.

Sandra didn’t have time or the available Mana to change or improve any of her existing traps – with the constructs being so expensive – so she left them alone.  There also wasn’t enough time to carve out any additional rooms or set any other new defenses, so she was basically stuck with what she had at the moment.  She just hoped that they were enough to keep the Elites away from her Core; she didn’t want to kill them, but if they were aiming to destroy her, she didn’t want her defenses to hold back any of their lethality.

By the time she was done with replacing all of the absent constructs, her treasury was almost bare.  She had a handful of random metal orbs in different sizes left in there as Monster Seeds, though they were joined by big blocks of various (non-Seed) material including Dragon Glass, raw Sapphire, and Steel.  The Raw Materials she received from absorbing the hundreds of seeds filled up her capacity rapidly, and only a portion of it needed to be used to create the Monster Seeds she actually needed; as a result, she used a little bit of the Mana she received from that absorption to turn the excess RM into non-Seed blocks of different materials that required a lot of raw Materials to produce.

While she was doing all of that, she was forced to split her concentration between reinforcing her own dungeon and progressing through the reptile Core’s dungeon.  She quickly considered and then dismissed just having her constructs wait for the situation with the Elites to be resolved before she advanced any farther down the foreign dungeon; waiting would only allow the other Core to build its defenses up more with additional defenders as it accumulated Mana, while hers would stay the same.  It was entirely possible that waiting an hour or two to keep attacking could mean the difference between success and failure.

And if the Elites took a long time to get through her dungeon, then the risk that the Ancient Saurians and their smaller brethren would reach the Elven village would only increase.  Therefore, she surged ahead, doing her best to keep her constructs moving through the other dungeon while filling up her own with more Dungeon Monsters.  The process of creating constructs was fairly simple by that point, fortunately, so it was easy to make it almost automatic, which freed up the rest of her mind to tackle the harder task at hand.

The rest of the dungeon rooms her Core-hunting construct force had to fight their way through were difficult…yet easy at the same time.  She remembered Winxa saying that most Dungeon Cores weren’t as creative with their use of traps as Sandra was, and that definitely showed in the Water-element-based reptile dungeon.  The traps in the remaining rooms were just slight variations of the rooms before, though they were set up differently; more powerful water jets in different formations, icicles that shot from the wall instead of the ceiling, more water whips, and a freezing band of moisture that was more spread-out than the first.  Fortunately for Sandra, there wasn’t a repeat of the massive wall of water that had demolished many of her constructs, but the navigation through the traps – and defending Dungeon Monsters – that were there severely cut down on her constructs on their way down to the Core Room.

Entering the final room, her constructs were greeted by a massive room that was around 200 feet in length and width, and about half that tall.  There was a very large tunnel that led farther down on the opposite side of the room, and there were no other exits that Sandra could see either inside the room or from without using her Area of Influence. All in all, it looked remarkably empty of any fixtures or possible places for traps, but the room was far from empty; instead, it was half-filled with a Monster that, frankly, seemed like an impossibility.

Six massive snakes – each approximately 80 feet long and 8 to 9 feet wide – were undulating upright above her constructs, all connected together at their tails in some sort of merging of their bodies.  The merge created another body that was longer than it was wide, though it was huge; Sandra couldn’t estimate its length, however, because most of it was blocking the exit into the Core Room.  It was just barely wide enough to allow it to pass through the exit tunnel, which was how it likely got to the room in the first place – but it wasn’t going to be letting anything else through.  There wasn’t even enough of a gap around its body to slide one of her Shears through, and she couldn’t see any other way to get past the massive Monster.

How in the Creator’s name did this thing come about?

“It sounds like some sort of hydra variant, though I’ve never heard of one like this before.  It must be some sort of special Dungeon Monster granted to the Core – sort of like your Core-specific skills you have – or it could be that it upgraded its Size enough to unlock the ability to create it,” Winxa answered, after Sandra described it