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

the training time could be drastically reduced.  Even she could probably do it, though it would likely take a while to get to the point where she wouldn’t make it fall down with every step – not that she wanted to pilot it in the first place.

In short, the simplification of the overall enchantment rune sequence made it accessible to all.

“Alright, then – let me see what I can do.  I don’t know if this will work, but if it does – it could change everything,” Violet said, keeping her rambling thoughts about the enchantment to herself.  She could tell that Felbar noticed a change in how everything was created – how could he not – but he wasn’t entirely in the know on all the technical details; some of it was a bit advanced even from Violet’s perspective, so the differences were a slight mystery even to her.

Reaching inside of herself, Violet pulled out a trickle of Spirit and Natural energy and got to work visually designing the rune sequence.  It was a trick she had learned back home from her parents to learn the structure of an enchantment without providing it with enough power to actualize. It was a good way to practice something without worrying about it exploding or backfiring in any way, but it was also energy-consuming if you did it for too long.  Fortunately, her Spirit and Natural Energy Orbs around her neck in a thin leather-string cage was enough to offset the expenditure.

Violet looked down at them and was surprised to see that they were almost half the size as they were when she first made them; she had been using so much elemental energy lately that it made sense, though.  She could tell that the maximum amount of energy she could hold had increased as well, though it was hard to gauge by exactly how much.

If she were to guesstimate and give her capacity a number, she would say that when she arrived at Sandra’s dungeon she could hold 500 each of Spirit and Natural energy; after just a few weeks of constant enchanting, however, she had probably doubled the amount of Spirit energy she could access (to approximately 1,000 or more) and increased her Natural energy by half (to approximately 750).  The difference was because she had been using Spirit energy much more in her earlier experiments, though with the War Machine she had been primarily been using Natural elemental energy.

The hardest part of designing a brand-new enchantment sequence was that she could never be sure it would work unless she actually tried it with the required elemental energy, but the visual model she made floating in front of her allowed her to place everything just how she wanted during the design process.  Whether or not it would work was something else entirely, of course, but she was slowly learning that she could feel when it would do something as she stuck specific runes in place – good or bad, though, was up in the air.

For this linking enchantment, she designed thin sequences of simple Transfer runes with alternating Spirit and Natural elemental energy that would connected to a specific place on each existing enchantment on the model War Machine.  These sequences led back to an area behind the model on the workshop’s stone floor and a nearby waist-high stone block – as well as a sturdy leather harness with a lead fused to the block – which would act as a kind of center where commands could be given; the lines linking the arm, leg, and torso enchantments almost looked like small blood vessels that led back to a heart – or perhaps a brain would be a more appropriate analogy.

It was this area – which would be in the pilot’s enclosure on the larger War Machine, but had to be separate on the smaller model – that would act as the control center; commands given from there would be transferred to the linked enchantments, which would in turn control the movements of the construct.  In the Machines that she was used to, the entire system was all one enchantment, which helped to equalize the energy drain during use and made the operation of the construct “sip” at the overall energy infused into the rune sequences; this new system would practically “gulp” in comparison, but the Energy Cubes would easily provide that energy.

The way commands were given was a unique combination of Pressure Feedback, Convert, Activate, and Control rune sequences layered on top of each other with the two different elements.  If that wasn’t difficult enough to deal with, there were also a total of five of these command enchantments that would control different parts of the War Machine: one for each arm and leg, and a fifth that would control the torso.  The arm controls would be placed on the stone block while the legs were on the floor; the torso would be controlled by the leather harness and would mimic the movements of whoever was piloting the construct.

For the purposes of the model, the linking sequence “command center” was connected from the stone and leather materials through a series of very thin copper wires that were fused to the back of the model; the metal was remarkably flexible but it was so thin that she needed to be fairly precise with her enchantment development to ensure it infused the material.  On the larger War Machine the linking enchantment would be mostly internal, fortunately, so they didn’t have to worry about that so much – but it made the testing process a little harder…but also safer.

Violet spent over two hours working on visually building the linking sequence – while blocking out everything around her – before she was satisfied that it would…do something.  She let the non-powered enchantment fade from her view and looked around the workshop as she got accustomed to the world again; she felt like