The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) Jonathan Brooks (books that read to you txt) 📖

It wasn’t a guaranteed way to defeat her traps and make their way to her dungeon, because she had planned the last few rooms to counter this kind of tactic, but she was hoping that it would take them a whole lot longer than this to figure it out.  By sending in smaller, weaker groups to activate the traps in the rooms, Sandra would effectively only end up killing the Monsters of no consequence as the stronger Monsters made their way through unscathed.  Again, she had known that would happen and a few of the stronger ones would still get caught as they had no real knowledge of how much time it took for each trap to reactivate – which meant that it could be ready to go as soon as a weak group passed through – but most of the time they would be able to get through without too much trouble.

At least for the first dozen rooms, they wouldn’t; after that, the defenses were a bit less dependent on the resetting of traps and more on Sandra’s constructs and her own Dungeon Monsters.  She would stop them just as effectively as she had before, but it would hopefully be easier since the stronger ones attacking her would be spaced out.  Ultimately, it wasn’t a problem at the moment, because the defenses were already planned and set up to account for nearly any eventuality.

The shard in control of her Core wasn’t having any of that, though.  As soon as the plan from the other Dungeon Cores was seen, there was an immediate ramp up of construct production, and even the Elemental Orbs that were being produced were put on hold entirely.  With over 5,000 Mana every minute flowing into her Core due to her constructs gathering it up above, it didn’t take long to complete the army of Wyrms and Shears for an assault on the Slime-Classification dungeon.

I must destroy this one before they have a chance to break through all of my defenses! 

While Sandra’s conscience didn’t think that was likely to happen, she wondered if the shard knew something that was so obvious it wasn’t worth even thinking about.

It’s time to kill that Core!

She tried to stop it from happening, but she was helpless against the focused rage of the Core shard. Now that it was so close to succeeding in getting a portion of the revenge it wanted, the cracks that had been there just a little bit ago had closed up, giving her no chance to intervene.

All she could do was watch.

The Expanded Mobile Fortification led the way, shooting down the tunnel at frightening speed, obliterating any and all of the Slimes in its way, even the larger ones that it basically passed through with only the slightest resistance.  Hundreds of Slimes were destroyed in less than a minute, as the Wyrms and Shears followed along behind the cubic construct – though the Fortification wasn’t unscathed from the process.  Almost every side of the large Steel cube was pitted from acid, the front worst of all, though it moved fast enough that the acid blew off before it could eat too much of the construct’s metal.

The Slime Core attempted to react, but all it managed to do was gather up a veritable wall of different types of Slimes near the entrance of its dungeon in an attempt to stop the cube…but the construct wasn’t going to be stopped.  There was a momentary delay as the Fortification rammed into the wall and it flexed as if it were some kind of rubber-like material – and then the cube broke through in an explosion of slimy jelly and destroyed nuclei.  The Wyrms arrived a few moments later and destroyed the remainder of the smaller Slimes around the entrance, clearing the way for the nearly 2,000 Animated Iron Shears that had been created.

Inside of the Slime-Classification dungeon, there was already a massive fight erupting.  The reason the shard hadn’t been successful in its previous attacks was due to the impressive defenses just through this entrance, and right now was no exemption.  The room the Fortification found itself in was massive, at least 800 feet on each side, though only about 150 feet in height.  And inside of the room was the largest and most varied collection of Slimes Sandra had ever seen, and she was instantly glad that the tunnel was too small for many of them to fit through.

First of all, there were 1,000 or more of the smaller Slimes that had constantly been filtering into the tunnel, but that was only the beginning.  There were hundreds of larger Slimes, at least 10 feet wide and tall, interspersed between the smaller ones like their older siblings watching over them; dozens of even larger ones, 30 feet in width, looking like the parents of the smaller Slimes; and then there were a handful of gigantic Slimes in their round shapes, at least 125 feet wide and tall, appearing as if they lorded over the others.

But that wasn’t all – those were just the ones that were similar in their blob-like shape.

There were Beast-like shapes of all different kinds, such as big cats and bears looking all jiggly and jelly-like, though they had tougher “skin” than the normal Slime shapes and could actually damage something with swipes of their claws; there were long, thin Slimes that were similar in shape to massive snakes, though they didn’t have more than a general shape of a mouth and no fangs; and there were strange gelatinous cubes of Slime that looked very similar to her Mobile Fortification, though large enough that they wouldn’t fit down the tunnel.  Then, as she had seen before outside, there was a Slime Dragon – but not just one!  No, there were 3 Dragons crouched or hovering in place, just waiting for an opportunity to strike.