Solomon's Crucible 57. The Rest Stop (2) (Patreon)

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Solomon looked down at the poor bastard who had barely survived a stint as a mutated cat's play toy. He seemed completely oblivious to what was going on around him. Solomon stepped forward and nudged him with his toe.

"Hey, buddy," he said, before the man's whole body convulsed as he started wriggling away from Solomon. He'd made it a few feet when he finally looked up and seemed to understand what he was seeing.

"Who- what-" he began, eyes darting back and forth.

"It's dead," Solomon said. He'd be paranoid too if he'd been chewed up by that thing.

"Really?" the man asked. "Who are you?"

"It's a long story," Solomon said, "let's go inside."

The man scooted back another couple feet. "I'm not going back in there!"

Solomon winced. He couldn't blame the man for not wanting to return to the place where most of his blood had been left behind. He was curious what his HP situation looked like. If not for the system's healing, there's no way the man would have survived. Of course, if not for the system, he never would have been attacked in the first place.

"That's fine," Solomon said, "we can just use an empty room."

The man nodded, though he still looked skittish. He declined Solomon's offer of assistance and scrambled to his feet on his own. Once he was standing, Solomon was able to make out the blood-soaked nametag that identified him as "Monty, happy to assist you!"

Monty was happy enough to lead them where they needed to go. First they stopped by a storage room, which thankfully was secured by a physical lock to which Monty had the key. Monty grabbed a change of clothes and tossed it on top of a folded up cot. At his direction, they wheeled everything over to room 14. After a bit of dithering Kanmi kicked the door open, snapping off the card reader.

The room was vacant and featured a pair of twin beds. Kanmi pulled a few of the system lights from his inventory so that they could make their way around. Once the cot was set up, Monty borrowed one of the lights and excused himself to shower and change.

In a rare show of mercy, running water still functioned in the face of the system. Judging from the yelp that they heard shortly after the water started running, the hot water heater had not been spared.

Solomon sat down on his bed. Part of him wanted to go to sleep right away, but after a day on the road he could really use that shower. He also suspected Monty was going to need a little reassurance before he'd be able to sleep.

Kanmi settled on the bed across from him. "That kind of thing is how they get you."

"What do you mean?" Solomon asked.

"Didn't you wonder?" Kanmi asked. "How a five man team was going to take over a whole town?"

"I thought the system gave it to them," Solomon said. He'd been too busy fighting for his life to worry over the niceties of the system's operation. He'd won control of his little piece of nowhere and thought that had been the end of it.

"System ownership lets you control who can use the store and the dungeon," Kanmi said. "It's a big stick, but it's not enough to keep a thousand people in line."

"So what," Solomon asked, his mind going to the worst case scenario, "they use some kind of mind control or something?"

Kanmi shook his head. "Nothing so fancy. Think about it, a town where everybody's had a close encounter like that poor bastard."

Solomon cocked his head. "Glide didn't seem so bad."

"Not yet," Kanmi said. "It's not getting any easier."

"All right, all right," Solomon said. "So everybody's gonna be traumatized."

"Then a bunch of experts swoop in," Kanmi said. "They don't give you the hard sell at first. Just put in an honest day's work and you get paid enough to eat with a little left over, and nothing has a run at eating your face."

Solomon didn't like to think that it would be that easy. Safety was a powerful lure, though. How many people would really turn down that kind of offer and rise up in rebellion? Especially after their most capable team had been taken down in the arena.

"The deal keeps getting worse, bit by bit," Kanmi continued. "Eventually you find out you're on the front lines marching out to take over land from what used to be your friends and neighbors."

"Why are you so pissed off about it?" Solomon asked. He was angry at the prospect of his friends, family, and countrymen all being enslaved by aliens. He didn't quite understand why Kanmi, an alien himself, would have the same sort of reaction.

"The jackasses that can afford to set up a racket like that wouldn't treat a guy like me any better," Kanmi said. "They'd bring me over a few years in, when the system starts letting them bring in more ringers. They'd have me busting my ass and putting my life on the line while they kept the profits."

Solomon raised an eyebrow. He wasn't quite sure that Kanmi was being completely forthcoming. His anger seemed a bit too personal to be based solely on getting a raw deal.

"Anyway, whatever you can do to throw a wrench in things, I'm all for it," Kanmi said. He paused for a moment, composing himself. "Provided I make some money along the way, of course."

Solomon smiled. He was all in favor of both of those things. 

He was starting to hope that Kanmi really did want to help him for his own reasons, not just because of the system's mandate after he'd lost the duel. Two people might not seem like much more than one when it came to fighting off an invasion on a planetary scale, but from a certain point of view it was twice as much power being brought to bear.

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