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

matters.  There were three things she needed to do: upgrade her Core Size, improve her defenses, and – of course – get back to crafting.  Somehow, she needed to figure out how to both divide her concentration and her available Mana in order to do all three; which was imperative that she do, because it would further the progress of her purpose – to save the world…or at least the people in this corner of the world.

The first one was easy enough to do; currently, upgrading her Core to Size 18 was going to require 10 stages, each consisting of 10,014 Mana, for a total of just over 100,000 Mana.  Theoretically, her dungeon and her “Airborne Mana Absorption Net of Shears” (or AMANS for short) could supply that amount in about 6 hours, but she was reluctant to go back into that helpless space again so soon after her last Core Upgrade.  It needed to be done, however, so she still needed to apply some of her incoming Mana to complete the stages, but she was planning on putting it off for at least a couple of days – preferably more – before she completed the entire process.

The second action she needed to complete was to improve her defenses; they were woefully inadequate to properly defend herself from any other incursions.  Before she did that, however, she needed some pertinent information from her resident Dungeon Fairy.

Winxa?  I want to expand my dungeon some more to improve my defenses, but I’m not sure how to go about that.  And, added to that, I don’t want my various workshops to be destroyed if more people try to come in and harm me.

“Oh, that’s easy.  You can just branch off from one of your established rooms and add some more passageways.  For instance, you can seal off the tunnel leading from the eleventh room down from the surface to Kelerim’s old forge, as long as you still have access to your Core – or Home – Room down here.  Dungeon Cores do it all the time; expanding a dungeon to make more rooms is a common practice to make it harder to reach their Cores.  You just have to make sure that there is always a route throughout the entire dungeon, otherwise you won’t be able to fill in a tunnel – which would essentially block you off from everything.”

Seems simple enough.  As long as she had some sort of access to her Home room, she could do whatever she wanted.  Looking at her underground dungeon with a bit of a faraway view, she saw what she remembered: a downward spiral of rooms leading from the entrance to her Core far down below, with her extensive VATS column filling up the previously empty middle of the spiral.  But now that her Area of Influence had greatly expanded, as well as the influx of Mana from her AMANS above, she could add much more around her central spiral.

The first eight rooms that had proven at least moderately successful against the Orcs she left alone for the moment; she was planning on upgrading the traps inside of them since she had a greater maximum Mana, which would increase their deadliness even more.  As much as she hated the thought that what she was doing was to kill, she knew it was unfortunately necessary for her own survival – and what she was hoping was the survival of the other races…as confusing as that thought was.

Therefore, Sandra started on the 9th, 10th, and 11th rooms, which were essentially empty and had acted as a kind of buffer between the trapped rooms and her workshops. For these rooms – and a few more that she was planning on digging out and filling with traps and Dungeon Monsters – she adapted her new technique of multi-element traps that she had discovered after Kelerim had arrived in her dungeon.  Since the first eight rooms had a single-element trap – Nether, Holy, Water, Fire, Nature, Air, Spirit, and Earth (in order from the entrance on down) – she thought it was only fitting that she would have some dual-element traps to slow down any invaders.  In the future, when she was able to successfully adapt three elements into a single trap, Sandra planned on expanding even further, but that was going to have to wait for now.

In the ninth room down from the entrance, she expanded the previously 30-foot by 30-foot room with 10-foot ceilings outward from the downward dungeon spiral by a hundred feet.  She then used the Raw Materials from excavating the now 30X130X10-foot space by creating curved walls inside the room; these walls led from the entrance to the room into small little 3-foot-wide hallways that led every which way, with dead ends, various twists and turns, and eventually led to the exit to the tenth room.

The walls themselves were made from a core of pure shiny Steel that she was able to manipulate enough with her Mana to produce a mirror-like surface.  This was for two purposes; one, the Steel would add a lot of stability since she sunk it deep into the floor, as well as the strength to withstand repeated blows if someone tried to break it down to avoid the little maze she had made.  Second, the metal would be hot to the touch from the intense heat that Sandra was planning on pumping into the entire room.

Because she now had much more maximum Mana than the traps she had set previously – just over 10,000 – her traps were much deadlier.  With a combination of Air and Fire, Sandra set up a room-sized trap that would heat up the ambient temperature in the room to nearly 250 degrees – hot enough to set some cloth on fire, but not nearly enough to ignite wood.  Given that powerful heat, anyone entering the room for more than a few moments would start to