The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2)

by Jonathan Brooks

  That was, in fact, essentially what was being created – a large cylinder made of Spirit elemental energy that would preserve anything inside. The runes were all connected to one another as there was no break in between them – and Violet expertly continued to create them around the entire outside of the Field, before eventually connecting it to where she began. By the time she was done – about 15 minutes later – the entire column of Spirit energy was filled with three simple repeated runes that were flawlessly executed. Gnomes really are naturals at enchantments; if she was just an Apprentice, I can’t even imagine what a Master could do. While Sandra knew many, many enchantments, she’d never actually made one before and she didn’t think she’d have that same sort of expertise as Violet showed.

  The cylinder of glowing elemental energy flashed brightly once when the Gnome was complete, before collapsing down to the floor in activation of the Stasis Field. Now, around the entire RRP, the circle that was drawn earlier was filled in with the same runes that Violet had just crafted around the outside, as if it had been squashed flat and was now covering the stone floor inside the circle. It glowed the steady grey color of a Spirit enchantment, and Sandra had no doubt that it would work perfectly.

  Violet sagged a little bit when the enchantment activated and blew out a big breath. “That took a little more out of me than I thought; I’ve never created one that large before – they are usually made to encompass something the size of a small crate, which uses much less energy to create. I might be able to do another two, but that’ll probably be it for today.”

  * Nice job and perfect execution! Rest a little bit and don’t worry about doing any more for now, I want to make sure it’s working. Ok, the rest of you, I want you to craft whatever enchantments – permanent or temporary – that you know works best with Steel and place them somewhere on the Rune Repository Pillar. *

  Sandra further explained the nature of the arms and the flat sections, and Jortor immediately stepped up to the RRP. He extended his finger against one of the thinner arms sticking out and started quickly tracing Nether elemental energy around it in a fairly simple rune. The rune almost appeared to be shaped like a shield with a tapered oval on the face of the shield; it wasn’t overly complex, but Sandra thought it would take her at least 15 seconds to craft it accurately. Jortor, however, was able to make it in just over a second, showing how natural the entire enchanting process was to not just him but Gnomes in general.

  The rune looked vaguely familiar to Sandra, and after a moment she realized that Jortor was the one she had seen use his Nether energy to create a shield of darkness that blinded a crocodile when it was struck. Most runes weren’t exactly that literal when it came to their form, but this one appeared to be a fairly accurate representation of what it did.

  Jortor stepped back and looked at his enchantment, and the others stepped up to see what was happening as well. It was slightly difficult to see it within the black-colored Nether energy that characterized the element, but there was a slight directional flow in the glowing rune pattern, which followed the same path the Gnome had taken to create the enchantment. Looking at it for a few moments, Sandra was easily able to see where his finger started, where it went next, and all the way up to where it was finished.

  “How does it do that? Better yet, how did you know it would do that? I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Violet asked in wonder as she too stared at the glowing rune.

  * It was kind of a lucky guess, actually. I hypothesized that the Stasis Field would capture the exact form of the enchantment before it sunk down into the material, activating it at the same time; however, I guess – and hoped – that it would capture the directional energy flow as it was created. It turns out that I was right, thankfully. *

  Sandra knew that it wasn’t just the way an enchantment rune looked like that mattered if it would work or not; it was how it was created that mattered almost as much. That was the main reason there were very few simple runes that were recorded in books with detailed instructions; anything more complex had to be seen being constructed to know the proper way to craft it.

  Temporary enchantments didn’t last very long, sometimes as much as a couple of minutes, so everyone was excited to see that the enchantment Jortor had made was still as strong and intact even ten minutes later. As soon as they saw that, everyone except Violet crafted their own temporary enchantments on the Steel RRP, only stepping back when they were done.

  Colors from every element except for the grey of Spirit encompassed the runes covering about a third of the RRP; black, yellow, green, red, blue, white, and brown represented Nether, Air, Natural, Fire, Water, Holy, and Earth, respectively. All in all, it appeared as though each of the Gnomes had been able to add two temporary enchantments that were best used on Steel; it wasn’t as though they couldn’t use other runes on the material, but they wouldn’t be as effective. For her repository to make sense, Sandra thought it was best to separate the enchantments based on material, instead of by use or even by element. She figured if she had the opportunity in the future, she would be able to make some sort of chart to cross-reference them all, but there wasn’t nearly enough in the room to need something like that…yet.

  After conferring together, they all decided that Oak wood and – strangely enough – Copper were the two materials they had enchantments best for, so Violet created another two Stasis Fields on those two RRPs. When she was all done, she sat down on the floor looking exhausted, while the others went to work placing enchantments – some permanent, even – onto the cylinders wherever they could.

  During that whole process inside the Enchantment Repository, Sandra had her mind split up and work on another project. It was simple at first, as she was only clearing away rock and dirt; which, when she really looked at how fast she could clear it away now compared to when she first became a Dungeon Core, she realized that it was nearly 20 times as fast…

  “Yes, your Core Size does affect how fast you can clear out and create a new room; I had thought you would’ve realized that by now,” Winxa told her with a smile, taking any sting away from her words as she listened in on Sandra’s internal conversation.

  That’s beneficial, at least. By the time the Gnomes had finished enchanting all that they could – crafting just under 50 enchanting runes that were suspended in stasis, Sandra was done clearing her new room. She looked over the RRPs and saw that most of the permanent enchantments she already knew; on the flipside, however, almost all of the temporary enchantment runes were new to her. Overall, it was a great start to her Enchantment Repository.

  Now it was time to repay the help they provided with something only Sandra could provide: a way home.

  Chapter 29

  A trip back to the Gnome homeland wasn’t an easy affair, however. While Sandra could easily create supplies for them to take back, transportation – as she had told Violet earlier – was an entirely different affair. Making wagons were easy enough; with her Mundane Object Creation skill, she could easily produce the components necessary to put them together. The skill didn’t lend itself to just creating an entire wagon out of nothing as it technically had “moving parts”, but the simple components were easy enough to create out of wood using Mana. All they had to do was put it together.

  She created a 4-inch-thick, 5-foot-wide, and 8-foot-long wooden sheet of stout Oak wood to be used as the baseboard for the wagon, and then created 2-foot-wide planks that would attach to the side of it so that it would look like a large open-topped box. Four inch-thick solid Steel wheels and two Steel axles rounded out the major components, of what was needed; they were a bit on the heavy side, but it was balanced out for the need to have something that could travel over the extremely rough terrain of the wastelands before even getting to the Gnome village and beyond.

  There were other, smaller components that were needed, of course; long and short Steel braces for underneath the carriage, Steel pins to keep the wheels on the axles, Steel bolsters and clips, and other mi
nor – yet important – parts. She had spent an entire day watching a wheelwright and a carpenter making a wagon one day, though she planned on cheating quite a bit in the process compared to what they had to go through. First off, she didn’t plan on attempting to weld anything, nor was she planning on having her constructs hammering hundreds of nails into it.

  She didn’t have time for that.

  Sandra had built her new room directly across from the hidden VATS access door in the tunnel after the second room. All she did was cut out another tunnel going outwards from her normal defensive rooms and then created a large 200X200X30-foot room that contained a small forge – just in case – and a large area where she could start accumulating supplies to place in the wagons once they were done. The first of which was just beginning to get assembled when the Gnomes had taken a ride up the VATS from down below and walked into Sandra’s new Assembly and Staging room.

  She had created it so near the surface for one reason, and one reason alone: she couldn’t fit a wagon through her normal dungeon tunnels. Winxa mentioned that most of the other Cores, when they got access to Dungeon Monsters such as the Ancient Saurians, they built another, larger tunnel leading from their Core Room to their first room near the surface, and then they just made their entrance tunnel larger. They would then seal it off with a stone wall when they didn’t need it by using a bit of Mana, so that they wouldn’t leave direct access to their Core. It apparently worked and didn’t violate any rules, because there was still a route to get to their Core through the regular defensive dungeon rooms.

  That wasn’t something that Sandra wanted to even contemplate, however. If, for some reason, an invader somehow got inside when that large tunnel was open, there would be very little stopping anyone from reaching her Dungeon Core. And – unless you filled up the entire tunnel with stone – an invader powerful enough could potentially break down the stone wall and gain access that way. Neither of those seemed like a great idea, so she chose to abandon any hope of moving her Behemoths out from far down below and instead opted to make it easier to reach the surface from the new room. Instead of going through the main entrance, however, she created an exit that actually emerged inside the Bearlings’ old lair, though it was mostly hidden behind a hard-to-see turn in the stone wall surface.

  Even if someone found it, all they would bypass in her dungeon were the first two rooms. If that happened, though, she would move all of her constructs from those two rooms and fill up the third, making it much harder for anyone to advance down from there. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best solution she could think of.

  When the Gnomes walked in after doing their best to fill up Sandra’s RRPs with enchantments, they found four Ironclad Apes holding different components together while she applied some of her Core abilities to fuse them together with an application of Mana and Raw Materials. No hammers, no nails, and no welds were needed; in essence, it was cheating the crafting a little bit, but she was now on a time constraint.

  Because she wanted to be done before the other Core finished its upgrade. It was more than possible that as soon as it finished upgrading its Core Size it would send all of its Dungeon Monsters out again, making travel next to impossible. It might take all night, but Sandra was hoping to have everything built and ready to go by morning. The Enchanting might take a little longer, but hopefully not too long.

  “What are they doing? And how are they doing that?” Violet asked, as soon as she saw the pieces joining together without any obvious methods.

  * They’re building a very nice, sturdy wagon to transport you and many of the supplies I told you I’d create for you. You can see what I mean over there in the corner. *

  Indeed, the rapid influx of Mana from her AMANS made it possible for Sandra to turn most of the Raw Materials she had absorbed from the creation of the newest room into supplies for the Gnomes to take back with them. There were bars of Copper, Iron, Steel, Silver, and Gold – all useful for different applications – stacked up in neat piles up against the wall, with Steel being the most numerous of the groupings. Planks of pristine Redwood and Yew wood were stacked up in large piles, a few thin plates of Dragon Glass, and even some Skeins of Cotton Thread that she had just decided to spend some of those incoming resources to unlock were there. When she looked it up, she found that it didn’t cost that much to unlock them all.

  Monster Seed Origination

  Name:

  Raw Material Cost:

  Mana Cost:

  Min. Mana:

  Max. Mana:

  Tiny Cotton Thread Bobbin

  15

  10

  10

  20

  Locked Seeds:

  Unlock Requirements:

  Mana Cost to Unlock:

  Min. Mana:

  Max. Mana:

  Small Cotton Thread Spindle

  2 Tiny Cotton Thread Bobbins

  20

  10

  40

  Average Cotton Thread Spool

  4 Small Cotton Thread Spindles

  80

  10

  160

  Large Cotton Thread Skein

  2 Average Cotton Thread Spools

  160

  10

  320

  The Linen Thread she could create was even less expensive in terms of resources, so she unlocked those as well and included those with the growing pile of supplies being held inside the room. She first tried to use her ability to create the material, but it ended up in a large pile instead of an organized Bobbin, Spindle, Spool, or Skein like the Monster Seeds, so she ended up making the Seeds and using a few nearby constructs to transport them above. They were relatively inexpensive even for the largest size, so it was no hardship on her resource wallet.

  * As for how they’re putting them together, I’m using one of my abilities to sort of weld together the pieces, so that we don’t have to waste time with the construction. Don’t worry about them, though; I need to know what I have to provide so that we can make one of these “Haulers” you told me about. This wagon isn’t going to pull itself, after all. *

  “Right, yes, we can do that,” Violet said, after watching with fascination how easily Sandra’s Apes were moving the thick wooden bed of the wagon around, as well as the thick steel braces and wheels. Sandra didn’t really have the best grease for allowing the wheels to turn without too much friction, but she figured that the thick oily grease from all the Bearling meat she had cooked earlier would have to do for now.

  Now that she had access to wood, Sandra hoped that she could make paper for the Gnomes to help create a blueprint of sorts to draw what was needed. Alas, it was apparently an object that needed to be created first, as it didn’t appear when she thought about making it via her Mundane Object Creation; she figured it was the same as not being able to make cloth now that she had Thread – both were essentially next-stage products and needed to be created first. Therefore, instead of paper, she provided them with a various sizes of pure Maple wood boards, which had a very even blondish color to it, making it easy to see marks left by the small coal pencils she also provided to the Gnomes.

  None of them were artists – or even particularly good at drawing – but when there were eight of them trying to draw the same things, Sandra got a fairly good idea of what it was going to look like. In the end, it was fairly simple in design, but she thought it was going to be difficult to execute.

  In its simplest form, a Hauler was a box attached to two rotating spiked metal bands on either side of it. The somehow-flexible bands – which also had holes in them periodically -- were affixed to smaller gears that stuck into the holes and propelled the machine forward. There was a platform for a Gnome to stand on cut into the backside of the box, with two vertical rotating “steering wheels” – or at least that’s what the Gnomes called them. When the operator on top of the box wanted to move the Hauler forward, they would rotate both wheels forward at the same time; if they wanted to turn left or right, they had to rota
te just a single wheel; if they wanted to back up, they rotated both wheels backwards.

  The way the enchantment worked was through what Violet called an “input feedback system”, which was completely new to Sandra – and she was eager to learn what it was all about. If she understood the theory behind it, two Spirit-based enchantments would be paired together in a uni-directional matter, where what you did to one object happened to the other – but not the other way around. Therefore, as you turned one steering wheel, it would rotate the paired gear connected to the band, which would then rotate the band forward – and thus the machine. It only worked one way, however, so that anything happening to the gear below wouldn’t transfer back to the steering wheel.

  Frankly, Sandra thought it was genius.

  “In its very basic form, the input feedback system is what allows our other combat-oriented creations – like the War Machines you saw before – to work, though those are done on a massively complex scale. It would be like trying to compare a shoddy iron dagger that a novice blacksmith attempted to make, to a masterwork mithril short sword that a master at their craft could present. While I’m not exactly a ‘novice’, I’m nowhere near being able to create that kind of complexity yet. At best, I can help maintain and repair what’s already there, but designing and putting together something like that boggles my mind,” Violet explained.

  * But you think you can put the enchantments on a Hauler together? *

  The little Gnome hesitated only for a moment before replying. “Yes, I believe so. I know the basic principles behind it, and I was able to put together a simple feedback system on a model back at the ELA.”