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

suffer greatly from the oven-like environment.  The trigger point for the trap was only a few steps into the room, which would last for a little over 5 minutes before the Mana ran out and had to recharge for a lengthy period of time.

Learning from the previous incursions, she also placed a second trigger on the threshold to the room that would deactivate the trap if every person who had crossed it exited the room.  That way, they couldn’t just activate it and run out, waiting for it to expend all its Mana before entering again; well, they could just do it multiple times in a row and slowly deplete the Mana inside of the trap, but she was hoping that no one would know enough about how it worked to realize that.

There was one other way someone could deactivate the trap, however.  Inside the small corridors of the maze, there was a Steel Python located in the room towards the exit, which was the catalyst for the trap.  Every room that had more than one element in its trap needed a catalyst to maintain its presence within the room; in this case, it was the Python, and destroying it would deactivate the trap.  Through some experimentation, she found that she could retie the trap – with a comparatively small application of Mana – to another Python if the original was lost, so replacing it in the future didn’t mean she would lose the trap for good.  Of course, getting to the Python was going to be difficult, as one would need to traverse the entire maze in order to get there.

In the tenth room – if anyone managed to get that far – she flipped some things around.  Previously, when she applied the Spirit element to a trap, she had caused those affected by it to imagine they were trapped inside a large spider’s web and attacked by multitudes of spiders, which also had the benefit of ramping up their Fear quite a bit.  When she combined Spirit with Holy in this next room, however, she went in the opposite direction.

Dozens of large, densely packed, and bright floating lights would hover throughout the room – which she didn’t change from its previous 30X30X10 size – when the trigger was activated by someone crossing the threshold.  The trap would last for a little more than 20 minutes, which was plenty of time for the 30 Singing Blademasters she had placed along the rear of the room – because those who touched one of the bright floating lights likely wouldn’t even know they were there.

The lights weren’t harmful by themselves, however – just the opposite; if someone allowed a portion of their skin to come in contact with the floating light, they would experience the greatest euphoria they could ever imagine as long as they stayed touching her Bliss Globes.  Or, that’s what she decided to call them, because pure bliss was what she was hoping people would “suffer” from.  When they were incapacitated and in their joyful, introspective world, her Singing Blademasters would attack when they weren’t prepared for them.  Simple, and yet – hopefully – effective.

She had tried to make the entire room one whole euphoric experience, but the effects would only last for about 20 seconds; as soon as it was activated, the timer started, so that if only one person walked in and was caught by it, the others outside in the tunnel leading inside would be completely unaffected – not the ideal situation.

In the eleventh room, Sandra combined the Natural and Earth elements to design something that she thought was going to be extraordinarily lethal.  First, she expanded the room to be about the same size as the ninth room with the maze, but instead of walls – she built pits.  A narrow, 2-foot-wide, zig-zagging walkway wound through the room, with a deep, 30-foot pit filled with extremely sharp jagged rocks tipped with Dragon Glass (for extra penetration).  The walkways actually came fairly close to each other as they crossed through the room, but to avoid the chance that anyone could just hop over the pit to another walkway, there were Natural-element-created vines hanging down from the ceiling.  Normally, this would probably look like a way to swing across, but the vines were connected to a very lightly wedged piece of heavy stone created by her Earth element; if the vines were pulled on even slightly, the stone would plummet down from the ceiling and impact anyone nearby.

Sandra even placed a few vines in the middle of the walkways, which were difficult – but not impossible – to pass by.  To make it harder, she placed over 100 Rolling Forces along the walkway and created small ramps that pointed at anyone walking towards the exit.  Her constructs could pick up speed and either run into someone’s foot or propel themselves through the air via the ramps, where they would – hopefully – hit them when they were least expecting it.  The traps were tied to the very last Rolling Force in the room, which acted as the catalyst, and if it were destroyed, the vines and the falling rocks would disappear; if anyone managed to survive more than 15 minutes the trap would disappear as well, but she didn’t think anyone would last that long.

The next room down was technically Kelerim’s old Forge and workshop, but she branched off and made the real exit to the walkways on the wall adjacent to the tunnel leading there.  She couldn’t seal it off yet because then there wouldn’t be access to her Core and her Home room, but she was planning on that to happen in the future when she was done.

Sandra started to hollow out the thirteenth room down, when she took a mental step back and evaluated where she was at.  She now had three more fairly deadly rooms to add to her defense, and though