10
Tiny Automaton
20
Rolling Force
25
Segmented Centipede
100
Articulated Clockwork Golem
150
Singing Blademaster
300
Small Armored Sentinel
400
Mechanical Jaguar
800
Mechanical Wolf
1000
Basher Totem
2000
Automated Digger
2500
Repair Drone
4000
Ironclad Ape
6000
Steel Python
8000
Iron-plated Behemoth
10000
Not only did the Iron-plated Behemoth cost 10,000 Mana – which was almost the maximum she could hold in the first place – but the only Monster Seed she could produce and use to create it was the Tiny Dragon Glass Flake.
Monster Seed Origination
Name:
Raw Material Cost:
Mana Cost:
Min. Mana:
Max. Mana:
Tiny Dragon Glass Flake
20000
7000
5000
10000
Large Steel Orb
32000
3200
5000
16000
In all, she would have to provide 20,000 Raw Materials and 17,000 Mana to produce the construct; to top it off, with the Behemoth name, she was a little worried that it wouldn’t even fit in her Home room. At Core Size 18, she predicted that she would have a large enough Raw Material maximum to produce a Large Steel Orb – which would cost half as much Mana; she technically still had one of the Large Steel Orbs from unlocking the use of it in the first place, but she decided against producing her newest construct until she had both made room for it and used her slowly accumulating Mana on something more productive.
There is just so much I want to do, and never enough Mana to do it.
With that thought, she mentally sighed and got to work.
Chapter 2
As much as she wanted to start crafting again – especially with the new materials that Kelerim had acquired from the nearby Orc village – she decided to put her Mana absorption plan into place. To that effect, Sandra started to produce Small Animated Shears one after another, using up many of the extra Tiny and Small Copper Orbs she had stacked up around her Core. As soon as they were created, she sent them down the hallway and into the Vertical Air-trap Transportation System (VATS) to get to the top of her dungeon rather quickly. As soon as they got to the entrance, she sent them outside into the bright sunlight and had them shoot straight up into the wide-open air.
At first, the ambient Mana she had been receiving from her constructs inside her dungeon had capped out at around 10 per minute, which would allow her to create a single Small Animated Shears and the accompanying Tiny Copper Orb (when she ran out of her stockpile). The 14 Mechanical Wolves and Jaguars (7 of each) that were roaming around outside weren’t affected by the ambient Mana cap that her dungeon seemed to have, so they were providing even more. Although the Mana wasn’t as concentrated outside of her dungeon – and from what Winxa had told her a few weeks before, would continue to thin out the further she went from her entrance – there was much more to explore. In the beginning, she calculated that she was receiving a little less than a single Mana every minute from her outdoor constructs.
While that didn’t seem like that much, she also had to consider that her Wolves and Jaguars also moved slowly and cautiously through the wasteland above; again, that was to make sure they were safe and unspotted (hopefully) by anything else roaming around up there. When they crept around instead of running full out, they could accumulate less of the ambient Mana that was available and just sitting there waiting for them to gather it up.
After the first dozen Shears floated through the air at about 200 feet, however, she could feel even more start to funnel into her. She was able to spread them out into 20-foot-long cubes, where they would slowly – but continuously – move in their designated space and soak up all the Mana in the air. They were angled so that their points were facing towards the Orcish village of Grongbak, presenting as little profile as possible to avoid detection.
Using the vision that they afforded her with a figurative “bird’s-eye view”, she was easily able to see the village on the horizon but couldn’t make out many details. All she knew, though, was that the village – in addition to about 600 feet beyond from what she could “feel”, due to her recent Core Size upgrade – was now thoroughly within her Area of Influence. She couldn’t actually see that far yet with her Shears because she didn’t dare get too close to people, so she was basing the distance on what she could envision underground.
Although that somewhat limited the space to the northwest where she could expand her ever-widening net of Shears in the air, she still had literal miles of air to fill up with her constructs in other directions. In fact, since she could see a bit farther away now, she could see that she wasn’t quite in the middle of the wasteland – as she had first supposed. Instead, it appeared that her dungeon and her Core were located somewhat closer to the Orcish lands than the other three lands – owned by the other races – that were reportedly out there somewhere.
To the north, south, east, and west, she could see the unmistakable sight of trees in the distance, though they were still a bit too far for her Area of Influence to reach yet. The northern and western forests were the closest, however, which was how Sandra knew she was closer to the Orcish lands than the others. She couldn’t quite see anything to the southwest, but she saw a small break in the tree line where she supposed the Elvish lands were located – at least according to what Winxa had told her. It was hard to make out, but she thought she saw similar breaks to the northeast and southeast, where the Dwarves and Gnomes lived, respectively.
She recounted what she saw to her Dungeon Fairy friend, who looked sadder and sadder at the descriptions Sandra supplied to her.
Winxa seemed lost in her memories for a moment, before she volunteered some information. “From what you describe, it sounds like nearly 100 square miles of land was destroyed and turned into these wastelands. I’ve only really had second-hand knowledge of what was going on up there from others, so I wasn’t completely sure how much had actually been devastated.
“Those forests you see used to extend and meet in the middle of this area, almost like a crossroads. It was here that Wester had his dungeon, and at the end of his existence, his Area of Influence had extended for hundreds of miles in every direction. Most of the wreckage of the land was concentrated here, though, where his actual Core was located; it’s almost like the combined armies of Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, and Gnomes were determined to eliminate every trace of his dungeon, so they probably overdid it a little here. I can’t blame them, however, as he was quite…dangerous and ruthless.” Winxa seemed to shiver at the mention of her former Core.
Well, let’s hope I don’t make the same sort of mistakes and ruin the land even more, Sandra sent her thoughts towards the melancholy Fairy.
“From what I’ve seen of your actions so far, I wholeheartedly believe that’s the last thing that you want – and I’ll do whatever I can to help you stay away from that outcome.”
Thanks, Winxa – I appreciate your confidence in me.
Sandra really did appreciate the confidence Winxa showed towards her. She wanted to be different than the other Dungeon Cores out there; sometimes it was hard, though, not to think about how much Mana she could acquire from the deaths of living beings. Fortunately, she wasn’t comfortable with the thought of murder and killing, so whenever thoughts of taking a shortcut to expansion entered her mind, they were almost instantly snuffed out.
After over 100 Small Animated Shears were sent aboveground and into the air above her dungeon, Sandra noticed a significant uptick in how m
uch Mana was being funneled to her. She was still getting approximately 10 Mana per minute from the constructs inside her dungeon, but the amount she was receiving from outside was already just over 3 Mana per minute.
And that had only been a little less than an hour’s work.
Encouraged by the increase, Sandra continued to create more of her small flying constructs over the next 24 hours, until she was to the point where she was starting to make 2 of them a minute…and then 3…and then 5… By the time she was done, the sky was blanketed with Shears over much of her Area of Influence – barring the area around the Orc Village, of course. The ambient Mana absorption increase was exponential as time went on; a steady stream of Shears flowed out of her dungeon in a seemingly never-ending parade of metallic objects. As she neared the 6-hour mark, she was able to produce 19 or 20 constructs a minute to send out to join the others in the sky.
All told, she had just over 9,000 of her Small Animated Shears covering 180,000 square feet of airspace. From the ground, they appeared very small and hard to spot, though if you knew what you were looking for you could see them; regardless, unless someone was specifically looking for them, they were practically invisible, being only 3 inches long.
She could’ve kept going, but she had already had to split her concentration during the whole process and dug out a massive room connecting to her boiling vats (previously used for tanning) room in order to supply enough Raw Materials for the Tiny Copper Orbs the Shears needed; she placed it there because she had a plan to use it for something when she was finished with her current project. The cost to excavate the room and acquire the RM was fairly low, but if she hadn’t had to use some of the incoming Mana to do that, she thought she could’ve had another three or four hundred of her small constructs.
Again, she theoretically could’ve kept going, but the whole process was very repetitive, monotonous, and extremely boring. And yet, when she finally stopped, took a mental step back, and calculated what she was bringing in every minute, she could see that the entire day spent on her project had been completely worth it.
Previous Mana Intake
Core Absorption: 10 Mana/hour
Dungeon Absorption: 10 Mana/min
Aboveground Absorption: >1/min
Daily Intake: ~15,000
Current Mana Intake
Core Absorption: 10 Mana/hour
Dungeon Absorption: 10 Mana/min
Aboveground Absorption: 260/min
Daily Intake: ~390,000
Before she started her Shears-blanket project, Sandra had been accumulating just under 15,000 Mana a day – which wasn’t a small amount, but not nearly enough to satisfy her need for it; especially when she considered her new construct, which would take more than a full day to supply enough Mana for it – not to mention the Raw Materials needed for its Monster Seed. Now, however, with just a day’s worth of work – boring, monotonous work, of course – she was acquiring 270 Mana per minute, or a little under 400,000 a day!
Sandra had noticed that the farther she placed her Shears from her dungeon, the less her constructs had started to return. They were still plenty effective, but they had diminishing returns as her blanket extended over the wasteland. She was almost tempted to do another round of creating thousands more Small Animated Shears, but she decided that she needed a break from the monotony of it – and her intake had increased by 2,600%...so, not a bad day’s work.
“I’ve…never even heard of something like what you’ve done here before,” Winxa remarked, after Sandra finally told her the results of what she had done. The Dungeon Core didn’t really have the opportunity to split her attention enough to carry a conversation while she had been working on her project, so it was the first Winxa had gotten any information from Sandra. “The closest I can think of was when a Natural-element Core created a swarm of toxic small mobile mushrooms that covered about a half-mile of ground before they were sent against a nearby village. Almost every other Dungeon Core thinks more in terms of ‘bigger is better’, so they rarely use their smallest Dungeon Monsters after they unlock access to larger ones,” the Dungeon Fairy explained.
It doesn’t sound like they employ much strategic thinking in their actions, do they?
“Very rarely. In fact, the last time any of them really used their Dungeon Monsters with any type of strategy like the way you have…well…you can see the result up there for yourself.”
Don’t worry, Winxa – I’m not planning on trying to take over the world; I’m trying to save it.
“I hope so…Creator help us if you’re not.”
Chapter 3
Now that she had a workable amount of Mana coming in at a fairly rapid pace, Sandra could finally concentrate on other matters. There were three things she needed to do: upgrade her Core Size, improve her defenses, and – of course – get back to crafting. Somehow, she needed to figure out how to both divide her concentration and her available Mana in order to do all three; which was imperative that she do, because it would further the progress of her purpose – to save the world…or at least the people in this corner of the world.
The first one was easy enough to do; currently, upgrading her Core to Size 18 was going to require 10 stages, each consisting of 10,014 Mana, for a total of just over 100,000 Mana. Theoretically, her dungeon and her “Airborne Mana Absorption Net of Shears” (or AMANS for short) could supply that amount in about 6 hours, but she was reluctant to go back into that helpless space again so soon after her last Core Upgrade. It needed to be done, however, so she still needed to apply some of her incoming Mana to complete the stages, but she was planning on putting it off for at least a couple of days – preferably more – before she completed the entire process.
The second action she needed to complete was to improve her defenses; they were woefully inadequate to properly defend herself from any other incursions. Before she did that, however, she needed some pertinent information from her resident Dungeon Fairy.
Winxa? I want to expand my dungeon some more to improve my defenses, but I’m not sure how to go about that. And, added to that, I don’t want my various workshops to be destroyed if more people try to come in and harm me.
“Oh, that’s easy. You can just branch off from one of your established rooms and add some more passageways. For instance, you can seal off the tunnel leading from the eleventh room down from the surface to Kelerim’s old forge, as long as you still have access to your Core – or Home – Room down here. Dungeon Cores do it all the time; expanding a dungeon to make more rooms is a common practice to make it harder to reach their Cores. You just have to make sure that there is always a route throughout the entire dungeon, otherwise you won’t be able to fill in a tunnel – which would essentially block you off from everything.”
Seems simple enough. As long as she had some sort of access to her Home room, she could do whatever she wanted. Looking at her underground dungeon with a bit of a faraway view, she saw what she remembered: a downward spiral of rooms leading from the entrance to her Core far down below, with her extensive VATS column filling up the previously empty middle of the spiral. But now that her Area of Influence had greatly expanded, as well as the influx of Mana from her AMANS above, she could add much more around her central spiral.
The first eight rooms that had proven at least moderately successful against the Orcs she left alone for the moment; she was planning on upgrading the traps inside of them since she had a greater maximum Mana, which would increase their deadliness even more. As much as she hated the thought that what she was doing was to kill, she knew it was unfortunately necessary for her own survival – and what she was hoping was the survival of the other races…as confusing as that thought was.
Therefore, Sandra started on the 9th, 10th, and 11th rooms, which were essentially empty and had acted as a kind of buffer between the trapped rooms and her workshops. For these rooms – and a few more that she was planning on digging out and filling with traps and Dungeon Monsters – she adapted her new te
chnique of multi-element traps that she had discovered after Kelerim had arrived in her dungeon. Since the first eight rooms had a single-element trap – Nether, Holy, Water, Fire, Nature, Air, Spirit, and Earth (in order from the entrance on down) – she thought it was only fitting that she would have some dual-element traps to slow down any invaders. In the future, when she was able to successfully adapt three elements into a single trap, Sandra planned on expanding even further, but that was going to have to wait for now.
In the ninth room down from the entrance, she expanded the previously 30-foot by 30-foot room with 10-foot ceilings outward from the downward dungeon spiral by a hundred feet. She then used the Raw Materials from excavating the now 30X130X10-foot space by creating curved walls inside the room; these walls led from the entrance to the room into small little 3-foot-wide hallways that led every which way, with dead ends, various twists and turns, and eventually led to the exit to the tenth room.
The walls themselves were made from a core of pure shiny Steel that she was able to manipulate enough with her Mana to produce a mirror-like surface. This was for two purposes; one, the Steel would add a lot of stability since she sunk it deep into the floor, as well as the strength to withstand repeated blows if someone tried to break it down to avoid the little maze she had made. Second, the metal would be hot to the touch from the intense heat that Sandra was planning on pumping into the entire room.
Because she now had much more maximum Mana than the traps she had set previously – just over 10,000 – her traps were much deadlier. With a combination of Air and Fire, Sandra set up a room-sized trap that would heat up the ambient temperature in the room to nearly 250 degrees – hot enough to set some cloth on fire, but not nearly enough to ignite wood. Given that powerful heat, anyone entering the room for more than a few moments would start to 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.
The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) Page 2