Chapter 8: Coming Out a Winner

It was coming on toward evening, and the setting sun over the far western mountains was painfully bright in his eyes. For a moment, all he could do was stand there and blink.

“Sir? Sir.”

A National Guardswoman spoke sharply when Thomas didn’t react the first time. She visibly relaxed when he turned toward her.

“Uh, what?”

“Do you need medical assistance?”

Oh. Right. The blood on his hands. “No, this isn’t… mine,” he said awkwardly.

She gave a brisk nod. “Then welcome back. Step over here, please, and we will get you checked out.”

She pointed him to a canvas-sided tent about twenty feet away. As he walked over, he glanced at the line for the dungeon’s entrance and saw it was still hours deep. If anything, the line had grown longer as people got off work.

This was a popular dungeon. Must be for the C-grade blues, Thomas thought. It certainly wasn’t for the monsters.

Though he supposed a second run would be a lot easier now that he knew the octopi’s hiding spots. With good drops… yeah, actually, he could see why there was a line.

He was quickly ushered into the tent. Inside were two folding tables, with one National Guardsman taking notes on a laptop. A woman in her forties stood ahead of Thomas. She had a sensible hiking pack and only gave him a brief look as he walked up. She wasn’t covered in blood, and he wondered how she had managed to get by the boss.

“What loot do you have to declare?” the army guy at the laptop asked her.

She murmured something Thomas couldn’t hear, obviously trying not to advertise her gains. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to keep things quiet.

“We’ll need a quick bag search to make sure,” laptop guy said. “You don’t have to sell us your loot. We’re only making a survey for this dungeon’s drop table.”

And, of course, the loot would be attached to the dungeon diver’s name. So if someone had, say, a gift for luck or loot… that would show up, Thomas noted sourly.

The woman shrugged, calm and cooperative, and unslung her backpack. From it, she provided three C-grade blue mana crystals, as well as a healing crystal.

“All right,” the laptop guy said. “Stand to the side, please.”

Two more guardsmen stepped up. One did a quick look through her bag while another ran a handheld scanner over her that looked like a modified metal detector. It beeped when it reached her waist.

“You have something else from the dungeon. What is it?” he asked.

The woman scowled and brought up what looked like a seashell, only with riotous yellows and reds.

“I got this from the boss. I don’t know what it does yet, but it doesn’t seem to be dangerous,” she said pointedly.

“That’s fine. Once again, we’re not going to take the loot from you,” the guardsman said with a sigh, as if he had repeated this many times throughout the day. “Place it on the table next to the crystals, please.”

She did and underwent another quick scan. At the end, the man grunted and stepped back. “The good news is you have no camouflaged passengers.”

“Of course I don’t,” she said. “I counted out thirty kills.”

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“You’d be surprised,” he replied darkly.

Then he ran his scanner over the loot. The scanner gave a high squeal as he moved it over the shell. The man’s eyebrows rose.

“You’re going to want to bring that to the government marketplace. I don’t know what it is, but the way this thing just went off—you’ll get a fair penny for it.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said blandly, in a way that said, “Go to Hell.”

Meanwhile, another guardsman motioned for Thomas to approach.

He decided to mirror her energy—calm, a little bored, and cooperative. He gave his name and social when asked, then began to pull out his weapons.

“I’ll show you my daggers first, just so there’s no excitement. Got these from a store in Sacramento. They didn’t come from this dungeon. And this is just a regular maul—it’s my primary weapon.” He flashed a grin at the guardsman, like he was the type of guy who enjoyed knives and bladed things, trying to cultivate an air of, yeah, sure, I totally know how to use these. “And this is my haul from the dungeon. Ignore the canteen.”

He spilled out the contents of his backpack.

“You got white air crystals from the dungeon?” the guardsman asked.

“No, I saw him trade that for his place in line,” another guardsman called back.

So they really were paying attention.

“Yep,” Thomas said, still cultivating calm, even though stress made his headache spike so much he could practically taste it. “All the blues are from the dungeon. This baby was from the boss,” he added, pointing out the larger blue crystal, “and this was my exit reward,” he said, glancing at his healing crystal.

“That’s a good haul,” the guardsman said. “Jeffers, mark that down.”