Solomon's Crucible 80. The New Dungeon (1) (Patreon)

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Solomon was loaded for bear as he and his sister headed to the local dungeon. He'd picked up the loaner rifle from Hank, along with five rounds of ammunition. Both the rifle and the ammo were made from a mix of ordinary and dungeon materials, so they couldn't be stored in his inventory. A small price to pay for such a useful weapon, although it did mean he was marching down the street with the rifle slung across his back by its strap.

He'd also changed back into his armored clothing. He didn't intend to be fighting in the front lines, but he could hardly expect the dungeon monsters to respect his intentions. The blood stains would also lend a certain gravitas as he coached everybody else on what to expect from the dungeon.

Tiffany was dressed more normally, though she had put her outfit together with an eye towards practicality rather than fashion. She wouldn't usually wear cargo pants, a flannel shirt, and hiking boots for a meeting with her friends, but they would be serviceable in a fight. She'd be gearing up at the dungeon store, but going into the shopping trip without any obvious weaknesses would let her be more flexible with her money.

"Are you sure you don't want a gun?" he asked. He'd made the offer before. He knew he should probably just let it lie after she'd turned him down, but he had a hard time accepting that somebody would turn down the option to bring a gun to a knife-or claw-fight.

Tiffany shook her head. "I don't want to feel like I'm burning money every time I kill something."

Solomon felt a pang of regret. He'd given his sister a crash course on dungeon economics since she usually enjoyed figuring out that kind of thing. He hadn't expected her to try to optimize her cash flow right out of the starting gate.

"I don't mind spotting you some ammunition to start out," Solomon said.

She gave him a look. "Do you really want to hear my opinion on guns?"

Solomon raised an eyebrow. He didn't remember his sister having a strong opinion one way or the other on the topic before the system arrived. She'd even accompanied him to the range a couple of times. "Yeah, I guess I do."

"Your pistols are good for one shot in each fight. They're barely accurate from outside of melee range, and they let everybody in the neighborhood know that you're there," she said. "Larger monsters will just shrug off the bullets, and even a human sized target can bounce back with system healing unless you're lucky enough to hit a vital spot."

Solomon winced. It wasn't anything he hadn't noticed, but it sounded worse when she laid everything out at once like that. For a moment he was ready to concede the point, before he reminded himself that he was the experienced one here. 

"It's been working pretty well for me so far," he said. He had the trail of dead bodies behind him to prove it.

"How many grid points did you spend just making the gun shoot better?" she asked.

"About forty," Solomon admitted. The last fifteen gave special abilities that were separate from normal things like aiming and bullet wound size. Even so, he could already see where she was going with this.

"I don't have dozens of grid points to invest right now," Tiffany said. "Once you've got more of those rifles to hand out I'll give it a try, but to be honest I think everybody's going to need to be able to fight monsters hand to hand."

Solomon nodded. Even he had done most of his killing up close and personal. He didn't like the idea of his sister letting dungeon monsters get within arms' reach before she started trying to kill them, but he knew a lot of that was pre-system thinking that he needed to adjust. In the near term, system healing made melee fighting a lot safer than it had been before. In the long run, the ability to purchase attributes from the system could leave Tiffany stronger than him physically, if she focused on it.

"All right, all right," Solomon said. "At least let me spot you some cash so you can start out with a decent set of gear."

He wasn't going to insist that his sister fight with a weapon that she didn't like, but he also wasn't about to let her head into a life or death battle wearing the armor that the system handed out for free. He'd brought a good pile of money with him that he'd originally planned to spend on transportation when he'd been hoping that he'd be in and out of Eugene in a day or two. Now that he was going to be sticking around for a few days at least, earning more dungeon coins, he could spend them on more important things like keeping his sister alive.

"If you insist," Tiffany said. She sounded a bit put out.

"What?" Solomon asked.

"Part of me feels like if you could start from nothing and make it big, I can too," she admitted.

Solomon shook his head. "You know this isn't just some video game achievement run, right?"

He thought Tiffany's competitive nature would serve her well in adjusting to the system, but there was such a thing as too much of a good thing. Fortunately, she seemed to realize as much as well.

"Yeah, yeah," she said. "If there was ever a time when pay to win was justified, it's now."

"If it makes you feel any better," Solomon said, "I'll be giving everybody a starter loan. Yours will just be a little bigger."

There was a good chance that the people who volunteered for this impromptu gathering would be the core of the fighting force clearing out the monsters around his territory. It was only natural for Solomon to invest in getting them started on the right foot. Especially when the first clear money meant he should get paid back right away.

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AN: The real reason she doesn't want a gun is because it's a more expensive way to get into stealth archery compared to a sword or a club.