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

except on the extreme southeastern side near the former Reptile forest, making travel that way dangerous.  It was looking more and more like Violet and Felbar were going to have to wait until the necessary deed with the Undead Dungeon Core was done before they went home.

Her Rolling Force eradication group of constructs had wiped out all of the skeletons and zombies that had ventured out of the forest over the last few days and had even taken to hunting the few Undead they found within the first few hundred feet within the trees; it was now obvious why there hadn’t been much in the way of reinforcements because of the Core’s Size upgrade, but with that changed Sandra started to see more skeletons coming out into the open.  Now that they had even farther in which to roam, they were even more spread out – which made her forces have to split up in order to keep up with them.

She added another 500 of her rolling constructs to keep up with the culling, but with nothing that could really be done about the Undead for the moment, Sandra turned her attention back to ways to accomplish the ultimate task of destroying the Core.  While she started to funnel her incoming Mana into the Ironwood Seed Transmutation option – which required 500,000 Mana in addition to the resources it needed – she started to work with Echo again on learning to manipulate energy outside of her body.

Fortunately, the breakthrough from the night before was apparently all she needed to finally make some progress.  Taking it very cautiously, she learned how to bring out just a few Holy energy units from her Shapeshifter; after a while she started to get a feel for how much energy she was bringing out, though trying to compare it to Mana was for some reason trying to compare a candle flame to a bonfire.  Elemental energy was much less…dense, she supposed…which was probably why she had yanked out so much the day before when she expected it to be a lot less.

Regardless, within a few hours she was able to take out and put back any amount of energy she wanted – though not all, as was evidenced when her Shapeshifter started to lose its form when she tried to take the entire amount out.  Fortunately, Sandra was able to shove it all back in before she lost control of it, otherwise the Holy energy might’ve caused more than some painful blinding.  After that, she stuck to very small amounts – at least until she could figure out how to manipulate it properly to do what she wanted with it.

Luckily for her, that was the easy part.  It turned out that once she had the energy pulled out from her body – which was initially very difficult – the actual manipulation was startlingly familiar to what she did with her Mana.  The major difference was that it was done from a singular perspective instead of through her normal dungeon senses, so it took particularly focused concentration to perform the simplest of tasks in comparison.  That was even considering that she wasn’t using it to create traps that had triggers and multiple moving parts, but instead were powerful manifestations of the elements.

“How did you…do that so easily?” Echo asked, astonished, after Sandra had created a bubble-like shield of Holy energy around her Shapeshifter.  Now that she finally had control over the energy, she started to manipulate it in ways that were only limited by her imagination.

* Now that I can finally use this energy, I found that it is remarkably similar to the Mana I’ve been using; my Mana is a lot more…potent…I suppose you could say, but I’ve been using it ever since I became a Dungeon Core, so it’s natural to me, I guess. *

The only thing Sandra needed help with was devising ways to use the energy effectively for attacks.  Most of her traps inside her dungeon were of a defensive nature, despite their deadliness, so going on the offensive was something else entirely.  She usually had her Dungeon Monsters for that kind of thing, and while she was starting to learn a little bit about tactics from watching many battles over the last few weeks, it didn’t really include spell-casting – especially with Holy and Air as elements.  She had a few ideas from watching the Elite Elves tear through her dungeon, but they also looked more complicated and energy-consumptive.

“Well, if that’s the case, then this will go much smoother than I anticipated,” Echo said with a relieved smile, though her astonishment was still showing on her face.  “Who would’ve thought that the easiest part of the whole process was going to turn out to be the hardest for you…” she muttered under her breath.

For the rest of the day and into the evening – with a few breaks in between sessions – Echo started to teach Sandra all of the different ways she knew of to use Holy and Air elemental energy.  It was actually very informative because her ability to manipulate the energy so easily was both a benefit and a curse, apparently.  It was like having a large lump of easily moldable clay in her hands, but she had no idea what to do with it; she might have a vague idea of what a specific type of pot looked like, but without a picture to go by or specific instructions sometimes her efforts would be a shot in the dark rather than a guaranteed success.

That was the main difference she found between using her Mana for traps or other things in her dungeon and the elemental energy she was handling with her Shapeshifter; Mana was easily quantifiable, structured, and ordered, while elemental energy was a bit more fluid and almost wild.  It was another reason she liked Enchanting so much, because while it used the same energy