Once they had developed a method for killing a crocodile the rest of the work was, as a math instructor might say, simply a matter of reducing things to a previously solved problem. Solomon found that thrown rocks worked as well as bullets for attacking the monsters' attention, which let him save some of his precious powder as they whittled down the mob.

There were some ups and downs and broken bones along the way, but the outcome was never really in doubt. After pausing to sleep for the night, they managed to finish off the last croc just before noon the next day. Solomon viewed the dungeon's cheerful congratulations for their accomplishment with a sense of relief.

He was particularly relieved by the fact that the exit portal had appeared in the park where they had been doing their fighting instead of the middle of the sewage-filled lake. Either the system was adapting to circumstances or it had anticipated any dungeon-clearing team taking the fight to a relatively favorable location. Either way, Solomon was happy.

The cash windfall from bonus for being the first group to clear the floor was more than enough for everybody to return the money that Solomon had loaned them. For his part, Solomon ended up with enough cash on hand that he was able to buy up the entire beast core haul for slightly more than they would have gotten from the dungeon store.

They got a few coins each for the raccoon claws, but the crocodiles turned out to have been little walking gold mines. His disassembly had left leather hide behind from each of them, and each hide fetched a pretty penny from the store. All in all, Solomon felt things had gone pretty well as he walked out of the dungeon.

He looked around. Surprisingly, everybody else seemed rather glum. A far cry from the good cheer they had shown on entering the dungeon.

He nudged Julie in the side. "Penny for your thoughts?"

She shook her head. "We only cleared the first floor, and it was already that tough."

"It wasn't so bad," Solomon said. "Nobody died. Nobody even lost an arm."

She gave him a flat look.

"I'm just saying," Solomon said, "it was better than my first day in the system."

Technically he had lost the hand before he'd ventured into a dungeon, but Solomon thought it was fair to lump the whole experience together. It had been his first taste of the life and death confrontations that the system was so happy to deliver, just as this dungeon had been the first taste for many of his companions.

"Part of me was hoping we'd be able to keep going and clear the whole thing," Julie admitted.

"Nothing wrong with aiming high, but you have to be realistic," Solomon said, shaking his head. "I don't know how those football guys did it."

The change from a single person dungeon to a twenty person dungeon was bad enough. Solomon could only imagine the kind of hell that a hundred man dungeon would have put them through. He couldn't believe that the team had not only cleared it but also been eager enough for more to continue on to the outpost and then the arena.

It was too bad that the prize for braving the dungeon as a team was to go up against a buzzsaw in the form of the alien invaders. The visiting team had been preparing for war their whole lives. It was ridiculous to expect human rookies to put up a fair fight after less than a day.

"I want to see a whole dungeon some day," Julie said.

Solomon nodded, glad that she'd been able to put that dream on hold for now. He wanted nothing to do with the lower levels of the twenty man dungeon. Today's efforts had put some money in his pocket and protected the neighborhood from a dungeon break for a little while. That was a good day's work in his book.

He wanted people to follow him out into the wilderness to safety. That didn't mean that he wanted them to be chased out of town by rampaging dungeon monsters.

Solomon had to hold up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun as he reached street level. After enduring the gloom of the dungeons, the sunshine brought a smile to his face.

Solomon and Tiffany lived in the opposite direction from the rest of the group. Before they split up, he used the occasion to give one last sales pitch recruiting people to his new territory. Honestly, he thought the choice was pretty straightforward: get the heck out of town, or else you're going to go up against people who consider the fight they all just went through to be nothing more than an easy warmup.

He didn't get anybody firmly agreeing to join up right away, but he saw a lot more people considering the idea seriously than he had when he'd tried going door to door. He decided to give them time to think it over and waved goodbye, heading back home with Tiffany by his side.

They walked in silence for a block and a half. That wasn't too unusual for Solomon, but he'd rarely seen his sister so subdued.

"How'd you do on the skills, anyway?" Solomon asked, trying to break her out of her funk.

"What?" she asked, startled, before her eyes started to move as though she was reading something invisible. "Oh, yeah, I got Blunt Weapon Mastery up to level four. Ten points must not seem like much to you."

"Hey, it's a good start," Solomon said. "Once we get you a rifle you can start piling up points from a distance."

The system seemed to grade on something of a curve. Bringing a relatively modern rifle into a grading system built around bows and arrows wasn't exactly a fair fight, but Solomon wasn't exactly interested in fairness, so it worked out. With a little effort, she should easily be able to get up to rank five or six in Marksmanship.

"That'll be nice," Tiffany said. "I don't know if I'm up for another dungeon trip, though."

"There's no shortage of things to fight outside," Solomon said. "You didn't like it?"

She paused in thought for a moment before she replied.

"It's just, I've cleared dungeons in games, you know?" she said. "I get the strategy. But it's different when you have to smash something in the head for real."

"I hear you," Solomon said. "I'm still getting used to it myself, to be honest."

"I know we have to fight," she said. "And we have to get stronger if we want to keep those bastards from leaving the campus and coming after us. I just need to figure out how I'm going to do it, is all."

Solomon nodded in understanding and they kept walking in a companionable silence. Whatever had happened on campus, his sister had come out of it wanting to hit something in the face with a heavy object. If that was what she wanted, then he would support her every thwack of the way. If she decided that she wanted to do something else, though, that was fine too.

It might sound like a bunch of new age self help talk, but the system really was all about self discovery. It seemed ready to reward people for developing any skill imaginable, as long as it had to do with killing things. It also seemed to have a little leeway in its interpretations of what contributing to a kill meant, exactly. Giving Hank some points for gunsmithing was hopefully just the start.

The most important part of their new settlement would be to establish peace and security, but making things comfortable to live was a close second. Solomon had always enjoyed camping in the woods for a weekend. He wouldn't mind living in a campsite for a week or two. That didn't mean he wanted to spend the rest of his life sleeping in a tent and planning out latrines for sanitation.

The system had creature comforts for sale, but he didn't expect to have many coins to spare once he was done spending enough to buy security for a whole territory. He wanted to make sure to have people on hand who knew how to build things, not just how to kill things.