Solomon's Crucible 14. A Stuck Landing (Patreon)

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Solomon kept his eyes locked on his target. The wind whistling through his ears sounded deafening to him, but the boar didn't look up until the last instant. It was far too late.

The pointed tip of the shield smashed into the boar's back, a few inches behind its head. The shock of it rattled up both of his arms. It was almost enough to distract him from the pain as both of his knees slammed down.

It was worth it. The shield punched clean through the boar's spine. The boar let out a half squeal, the air stolen from it with its mouth open as its legs collapsed and it fell to the ground. A gout of blood shot out from its back and hit Solomon in the face. One of his knees was buried in the filth of the other boar's corpse.

He didn't care. He had one arm strapped into the shield and the other locked in a death grip on its top edge. All of his focus was in pushing down, keeping the boar in place until the grim work of burning through its HP was complete.

The boar thrashed once, gave and oddly human cough, then died. Solomon looked at it with suspicion, pulling his pocket knife from his pocket to poke at its face, but it was well and truly dead. A moment later, confirmation came from the system.

[Congratulations on completing a successful combat encounter! Your Improvised Weapons Mastery has been raised to level 4. You have been awarded 9 Grid Points!]

Solomon dismissed the box with a weary thought and rolled off of the boars' bodies. He was still covered in blood and filth, but at least he was lying on the relatively clean forest ground.

So the healing power of HP had its limits. Solomon was glad that he had learned from inflicting a grievous wound on an enemy, rather than being on the receiving end.

Solomon glanced at the timer in the corner of his vision. With a groan, he pulled himself up to a seated position. He reached out to grab some grass and did the best he could to scrub the worst of the mess off his face. He had to save his system-purchased water for drinking. He had no idea how long he'd be stuck in the dungeon, nor whether there was any water inside to be had. If he did find a stream, though, he'd be cleaning himself off first thing.

Once he wasn't feeling completely disgusting, Solomon turned his attention to his vanquished foes. He held his hand out first over the one that had been done in by the slow bleeding from his spear.

"Disassemble."

A blue glow suffused the boar's body for a moment before the whole thing disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a pair of tusks and a beast core the size of the one Solomon had gotten from the big furball.

Solomon tucked his spoils away in his inventory and picked up his spear. The spell had cleared off any evidence that the spear had been stuck through a bleeding monster. Solomon wondered for a moment if he could adapt the spell to remove the remains of a dead monster from himself or his clothes.

That sort of experimentation would have to wait for the future. For the moment, the disassembly spell had left him flat out of MP.

Solomon stood and took a look around. He certainly wasn't going to go anywhere without claiming his spoils. He put a hand on the remaining body and tried adding it to his inventory, but the system wouldn't let him do it if he couldn't lift the body up and drop it into the inventory pane. Rather than try to wrestle the body around, he decided to wait for his MP to regenerate.

At least no other monsters had shown themselves. He'd been worried that the noise of battle might have drawn scavengers, or even predators looking for easy prey. He'd heard some ominous roars emanating from deeper in the forest that had to have come from something much larger than a boar.

In the end, though, he was in a dungeon, not a real wilderness. It wasn't completely game-like, but it seemed like the monsters would at least keep to their areas until he disturbed them. Solomon passed an uneventful but tense hour waiting for his MP to refill, broken up only by a quick snack and drink to get his energy levels back up. The water tasted so good that for a moment he wondered if the system had done something to fiddle with it, but in the end he figured it was probably his thirst that enhanced the experience.

With his rejuvenated MP, Solomon first disassembled the remaining body. The tusks and beast core went into his inventory with the others.

He then pulled the remaining magisteel and wood out of his inventory. He cut the wood into a short handle and molded the metal into an axe blade. The result was a little crude, but it made for a much better backup weapon than his knife. Taking down these monsters in the face of their naked aggression and HP based healing required a weapon that could carve out big chunks of damage. Stab wounds that would see off a wild animal just weren't going to be enough in the dungeon.

Solomon used the leftover bits of metal to add a small horizontal bar to his spear. The bar would prevent future monsters from pushing through the spear to get at him. He could have put the bar just under the spearhead, to make it easy to withdraw the spear and stab again. Considering how useful it was to have the weapon deeply embedded in a monster, though, he instead added it a couple of feet further down the shaft. He could adjust it later if it turned out to be impractical.

He enchanted the spear for increased toughness for good measure. Using the chalk from his inventory seemed to help the spell take hold, though the effect wasn't very pronounced. Something to test when he wasn't up against a deadline.

Solomon would enchant the rest of his gear as his MP came back. For now, he'd taken enough of a break. Shield and spear at the ready, he began to circle around the outskirts of the first floor forest, looking for easy prey.

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