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

the Dwarf’s chest, where his shirt was open; almost immediately, the transfer of elemental energies started, and the stirrings of movement came from their unexpected visitor.

He wasn’t exactly awake yet, but she was hopeful that it wouldn’t be long.  In the meantime, she watched as Felbar in the War Machine approached the spherical object with a little hesitation; she couldn’t blame him – the destructive power of the original sphere was so great and admittedly quite scary that seeing anything of the same shape would probably make Sandra hesitate as well.  Regardless, he was next to it within a minute, after having navigated his way out of the workshop through the open top – apparently he could jump relatively small distances if he wanted to (and by “relative”, she meant half of the War Machine’s height of 20 feet) – and he cautiously attempted to move the sphere with his warhammer arm.

It moved more than it had with the Ape…all of an inch before settling back down in the packed dirt again.  Using a little more force, Felbar smacked it with the warhammer, getting it to move roughly a foot before stopping – and slightly bending the shaft of the Titanium weapon in the process.  As for the strange sphere itself, it showed not even a single mark on it even after being thwacked with enough force to shatter stone.

“Uh…this thing is really heavy; I don’t want to destroy all our hard work smacking it like this.”

* Don’t worry, I’ll be able to easily fix any of the minor damage and it shouldn’t affect the enchantments at all.  Maybe try kicking it? *

As Sandra had suggested, Felbar kicked it with the War Machine’s foot, which actually worked fairly well – though it left significant dents in the solid Titanium of the construct’s foot.  Still, it was relatively minor damage in the scheme of things, so he kept on kicking it and alternating his feet.  By the time it got up the curvature of the hollowed-out space left by the Gravitational Devastation Sphere – which was difficult, because it kept wanting to roll back down – and tipped over the edge into her workshop, the War Machine’s feet were basically unrecognizable lumps of battered metal.  Still, they were functional, and Sandra knew they could be fixed with a little effort.

The floor of her workshop – which had been heavily reinforced stone to handle even the War Machine as it stomped around – didn’t fare so well when it was hit by an extremely heavy sphere dropped essentially from the ceiling.  Not only did the stone crack, but it practically shattered and disintegrated into dust underneath the multi-colored ball; the only reason it stopped moving was that when it hit the dirt below, it settled into a hole three feet deep.  When the sphere itself was only approximately two feet across, that meant it had gone so deep that it wasn’t even visible from the surface of the workshop anymore.

The destruction of the floor wasn’t the only side-effect of the heavy ball falling down from the ceiling; the impact also shook the ground so violently that some of the ceiling that hadn’t fallen previously cracked off and fell inside the room.  In addition, the jolt finally woke up the Dwarf, with what Sandra assumed was now with a little of his elemental energy restored.

Chapter 21

Gerold struggled to wake up from the incessant nightmare that he was being sucked into a strange vortex before falling from a great height and smashing into the ground.  He wasn’t sure how many times he dreamt the whole weird and frightening sequence over and over before he started to panic in his mind; he couldn’t wake up from it no matter how much he tried, and he was beginning to think he was dead, and this was his eternal punishment.

Miraculously, one of the times when he dreamt he was smashing into the ground again…he woke up.  It was a gradual awakening, but he could definitely tell he was awake – though when he opened his eyes and looked around he immediately wished he was back in that seemingly endless nightmare cycle.  Above him was a tall ceiling made all from one piece of smooth stone, though there were a few cracks running through it; such a thing was nearly impossible to achieve even by the Master Stonemasons like his father was back at home.  For one, it required that there be a large enough stone to carve out like that in the first place; for another, there wasn’t even the slightest sign that it had been worked at all – there were no chisel marks or repair joins where potential faults in the stone may have been found.

All of which meant one thing to Gerold – he was looking at the ceiling of a dungeon; that was the only explanation he could think of after listening to his father lovingly talk about stone for most of his life, and how he had once heard that dungeons could craft with stone and dirt without having to use tools at all – which was “so unfair” and all that.  He remembered blocking out most of what he had lamented about, but the main concept behind what he was going on about was definitely something he remembered.

Moving his head to the side, his fears were only confirmed when he saw a large multi-colored blob of some unknown material sitting in the corner of the strange room he was in, though he couldn’t look at it long or his eyes went all funny.  In the other corner was something even stranger and he thought shouldn’t even exist in a dungeon – a forge.  Being Dwarven, Gerold knew instinctively what it was and the sight of it he supposed should have made him more comfortable, but it had the opposite effect.

Just as he turned his head the other