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

essentially a smallish roiling ball of super-hot flames approximately the size of one of the Elves’ fists.  She found that she could launch it only about 20 feet before it dissipated, and once it hit something it would flare up for a moment a little larger and then disperse.

Of the other elements, she had some ideas of how to use them – but couldn’t find the proper method of their creation.  After she accidentally killed one of her Shapeshifters by creating a nasty Nether void of some kind that consumed almost two-thirds of its body within a matter of seconds, she gave up until she had some better instruction.

After Echo was done teaching – and learning – she went back to the village with another shipment that Sandra had managed to squeeze in when she had the time and Mana.  When she came back the same day, the Dungeon Core was surprised; however, a couple of hours spent in the hot pool down below was evidence enough why she returned so eagerly.  That, and she was interested in learning about Enchanting – and Sandra eagerly tried to teach her what she could.

It was actually good timing because she was also finishing up her Enchantment Repository Room.  After a lot of practice making the Energy Orb and even Energy Cube enchantments, Sandra had learned how to finally incorporate the Limiter rune into it; she had also practiced making the Preservation Barriers/Stasis Fields that Violet was so good at, so that she could enchant brand-new Pillars herself – as well as replace the ones that were starting to run out of elemental energy with ones that incorporated the new Cube.

She, of course, experimented with much smaller enchantments first, but once Violet looked at them and approved of them – and Sandra felt somewhat proud of that – she finished off the rest of the Repository.  Once she had completed Pillars for most of her materials – at least the ones that really mattered – she spent some time transferring as much of the knowledge she could remember of Enchanting onto them.  It was at that point that Echo started to be curious about the process, and Sandra took the time to teach her.

The teaching of which was just about as successful as Sandra’s first day learning how to cast spells.  Enchanting was an extremely foreign concept to the Elf, but the Dungeon Core could see that there would eventually be some progress – though it would probably take a while; Sandra thought that Echo might eventually be able to create them (because the Elves did create some enchantments, though not nearly as many or as well as the Gnomes) but doubted she’d have the same instinctual feel of them that the smaller race seemed to have.

Eventually, with all the training and development of skills, the production of enchantments and upgrades to the materials on the War Machine, and the completion of the Enchantment Repository Room, they were ready to finish the final step: the complex and energy-consumptive linking enchantment.

Fortunately, Sandra had prepared for that.

Chapter 18

“Is she okay?” Echo asked Sandra as Violet collapsed to the stone floor.  Felbar rushed over to the girl and placed her on her back instead of being in a tangled heap; Sandra knew she was fine because none of the Repair Drones nearby had even twitched when she fell.  As for the Dungeon Core herself, she thought that if she had a body she’d be on the floor, too.

* Yes, she’ll be fine; she’s just exhausted after that intensely powerful and intricate enchantment.  My Shifters took over what they could but controlling so many of them at once was much more…difficult…than I had anticipated. *

“Difficult” was a major understatement.  For something as intricate as Enchanting, Sandra had needed to personally control each one to create the lines of linking rune sequences that led to each of the existing enchantments, as well as contributing what she could to the actual control modules – which wasn’t a lot because a few sections of the sequences were a little more intricate than she could easily do.  Then, once she did a section with one Shifter, she would have to mentally instruct it to hold it in place while she went on to another.  The mental strain of doing that wasn’t quite as intense as when she divided her concentration in the dungeon to complete multiple tasks – but it was amplified by the sheer number of Shifters she had doing it.

Who would’ve thought that controlling 20 Unstable Shapeshifters at the same time would be hard?

Sandra had done it, however, and so had Violet – though it had apparently taken all of her elemental energy to do that, even with a dozen mixed Spirit and Natural Energy Orbs hanging around her neck.  Like she had told Echo, she needed some rest and she’d be fine; Sandra, on the other hand, was already starting to recover from the strain and she looked at the enchantment on the War Machine to see if it had taken properly – and was pleased at the result.

Her Shapeshifters had done a great job of maintaining each section they were responsible for, and they all amazingly meshed together without any hiccups; Sandra had to mentally congratulate herself for a job well done with so many “hands in the pot”, but she acknowledged that it was almost like one – since they were all Violet’s form doing the enchanting.  Nevertheless, it was done, and she didn’t see anything different from the one on the model—

What the—?  That’s not possible…

Sandra’s attention was pulled away from the workshop and her dungeon as she felt a change somewhere else.  She briefly thought that one of the Cores around the Orcs, Elves, or even the Dwarves had expanded its Area of Influence, but she just as quickly identified the culprit: the Undead Dungeon Core.  Its