The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) Jonathan Brooks (me reader TXT) 📖

just done what Human Blacksmiths who worked with Titanium did, which was use enchanted clothing that would absorb the heat of anything over a certain temperature it came into contact with.  She even thought she knew how to make the simple enchantment sequence and with a little practice could probably duplicate it…but that just wasn’t quite as fulfilling as creating something new like she just did.  It could be that she was too used to not having access to enchantments for her crafting purposes to rely on them or because she wasn’t quite confident in her Enchanting abilities yet; regardless of the reason, she was much happier finding a more mundane way of achieving the same result – and it gave her some ideas for future uses of some of her materials.

Doing all of that took most of the day and partially into the night, but now that she could work Titanium without worrying about her Ape’s hands and arms melting, Sandra bent her efforts to practicing with the new metal.  She had only seen small amounts of Titanium worked while she was learning all she could about Blacksmithing, mainly because it was a rare material; despite not seeing it being handled very often, she had learned that it was relatively easy to work with.

She found that it was similar to working Steel in some ways, while the heating properties of it was more like Iron, but it was also more malleable than either of them when it was soft from the heat.  She almost felt like she could shape it with her own hands…so she did – or at least with her Ape’s hands.  With the extreme strength of the Steelclad Ape, she was able to pinch, bend, and even fold the metal. Now this is something you can’t do with enchanted clothing like the Human Blacksmiths use; the enchantment on those would cool the metal so quickly with only a touch that they would be useless in something like what she was doing.

When the metal was hot enough – nearly to its melting point – it almost acted like clay, where she could literally shape it into anything she wanted; however, the size and stiffness in her new gloves prevented her from doing anything that required detail, and anything more than basic shapes was hard to accomplish.  Still, the heat-proof gloves did allow one thing she wasn’t expecting when she created them – she didn’t have to rely as much on the Dragon Glass-coated tools to handle the metal.  Her Ape could actually physically hold it now, and she didn’t have to worry about it slipping out of its grip.

Sandra spent the next few hours crafting weapons from Titanium, starting with some smaller knives and working her way up to a longsword; what she really wanted to do was to make a warhammer for her Steelclad Ape Warriors to use, because she could already tell that the new metal was definitely stronger and weighed slightly less – meaning they could swing them faster and harder.  They wouldn’t have as much weight behind them, but she didn’t think that would matter too much; most of the damage they inflicted on their targets was due to the strength of the Apes themselves wielding the weapons.

She wasn’t able to test that quite yet, however, because the day was just starting – and there was a lot of work to be done.

Chapter 15

The first day of “learning” how to manipulate elemental energy didn’t quite go as well as Sandra had hoped it would. She used the term loosely because it was just so foreign to her that it was hard to comprehend what she was supposed to be doing, so not much “learning” was done.  It wasn’t that Echo was a bad teacher or anything, but she apparently assumed that Sandra had a knowledge of some basic concepts that she actually didn’t – like how to hold energy outside of her Shapeshifter’s body when it wasn’t being used in an enchantment.

Normally, all she had to do to use the elemental energy inside of her shapeshifting Dungeon Monster was to pull it out and immediately feed it into the enchantment she was creating; she never pulled more or less than she wanted – even if it was a mistake to use so much in an enchantment – because it was practically natural to her at that point.  She likened it to what she did when she created almost anything inside her dungeon: Dungeon Monsters, Monster Seeds, and even traps automatically pulled out what was needed to create them, and she didn’t have to measure it out.

In fact, the only experience she had in handling raw Mana like that was when she was creating her Elemental Orbs and Cubes.  Thinking that would be a good place to start…she immediately found that it wasn’t anything similar to what needed to be done.  There were a multitude of reasons, from a different way she needed to pull it out from her body to how she needed to concentrate on it to keep control of it rather than letting it dissipate, but the end result was that she was unable to do much of anything that first day.

To be fair, though, she was making progress.

At the end of the first day of alternating between her Unstable Shapeshifters because of their tendency to only keep their form for an hour at a time, Echo was nearly pulling her hair out trying to understand why Sandra couldn’t do something so simple.  Then, just minutes before the Dungeon Core could tell the Elf was about to give up for the day, she was finally able to look deep inside her Shapeshifter and yank out a large chunk of just over 500 Holy energy.  Ecstatic and self-congratulatory, Sandra almost immediately lost control of it; floating untethered to anything, the bright white blob of energy floating in front