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

crawl towards the turtles’ leg openings and chew their way inside the exposed soft flesh.  Just like the Centipede that had chewed up one of the Orcs from the inside, they were able to burrow inside and slice up the shelled monsters’ vulnerable internal organs.

Only half of the sixteen that had entered the fifth room survived to tackle the sixth room, which was also not really a problem when all of the air was removed from the room – if Sandra remembered correctly, they could survive a while without breathing because they had a very slow breathing rate.  The Articulated Clockwork Golems with double-bladed axes managed to gang up and chop off the legs of one of them, but that still meant that seven turtles were able to make it to the seventh room.

Web illusions through the use of the Spirit trap and Clockwork Spiders did absolutely nothing to faze the turtles; the Spiders couldn’t even penetrate the softer leg tissue when they managed to get close enough.

Therefore, seven of the enemy entered the last of Sandra’s original dungeon rooms, where they were greeted with stone spikes jutting out of the wall and a rotating funnel of Small Animated Shears.  Of course, whoever was controlling the turtles didn’t care to try to go around the funnel and instead drove the turtles straight through them, where only one managed to get three of the Shears – which were destroyed as a result – through its neck; it continued on for a little while, but the Shears dissipated and it bled out from the wounds shortly thereafter.  Learning from that, the rest of the shelled monsters kept their heads inside their shells and made it through with only a couple of superficial wounds to their legs.

Which brought them to Sandra’s brand-new room that hadn’t been tested…and it was over in less than a minute.  The extreme heat in the room literally cooked the turtles alive as they attempted to navigate the Steel-walled maze. Their feet sizzled against the floor and the softer, more-vulnerable flesh in their leg and neck holes were cooked like tender meat in an oven.

 She was strangely disappointed that they hadn’t gotten any further, because she wanted to see how her other rooms would fare against them – but she supposed that a positive test of one of the newest rooms was a good result.

While the turtles were still navigating through the rooms to their demise, the snakes that had come with the group had finally entered…and were squashed or pounded flat by her constructs in the first room.  The Nether vines didn’t even really have to restrain them, because they actually went for her Dungeon Monsters for some reason, though their venom and sharp fangs were no match for metallic bodies.  In fact, the snakes that came in were actually defeated before the turtles met their end, so as soon as that happened there weren’t any more of the reptilian army to worry about.

Other than the two Ancient Saurians on their way, but that was something that she wouldn’t have to worry about for a while.

She waited to see if any more were hiding nearby and waiting to enter her dungeon, but after a couple of minutes she didn’t see anything moving out there.  Echo had finally showed up at some point, however; she was covered in sweat and looked exhausted as she attempted to hide in the shade behind some rocks, but since she didn’t have her invisibility thing going on, she was more than visible to her AMANS up above.

Overall, there were some repairs to many of her constructs that needed to be completed, which her Repair Drones that she had stashed just inside the topmost VATS room immediately went to work on as soon as it was all clear.  Only one of her Small Armored Sentinels had actually been destroyed, in fact, which she immediately replaced – though she waited to send it back up until she was sure enough of the Gnomes that were brought in earlier were safe enough to trust.  She’d have to take down her flame traps in her Home in order to do that, and a single Sentinel wasn’t enough of a reason to do that quite yet.

While she was thinking of that, she checked back in with them and saw that they had already finished eating and were sitting around talking.

“…not sure what we should do.  The voice in my head said that we were free to go anytime, but can you really trust a dungeon?  Sure, there are some very strange things here, but I can’t help but think we’re being held captive here like the other races hold livestock – so that it can eat us later when it’s hungry,” one of the Gnomes was saying to the others.  She wasn’t sure of the male Gnome’s name yet because she hadn’t yet had a chance to learn them; while she had a listing of their names through her Non-threat Visitor’s List, she hadn’t been able to put a face to each of those names.

“Let’s just wait a little bit longer before we start throwing out wild theories; I have an odd feeling that this dungeon is quite a bit different from every other one,” Violet responded.  “For one, the fact that it spoke to us shows an intelligence there that is utterly unlike the others.  And two, look at this place!  This looks more like a home than a dungeon; granted, it’s made completely of stone, has monsters made of metal, and it’s a bit dreary and drab, but I’ve never heard of anything like this anywhere else.  It’s unique, and that might make all the difference.”

The others still didn’t look completely convinced.  Sandra eavesdropped on their conversation while she waited for her Mana to refill; when she was Human, she would’ve felt a little bad about it – especially since they were