Chapter 66 - Target Practice

Tom's decision to abandon the stones of the first floor was fully rational. While there was no limit to how many stones he wanted to bring home, there was a hard limit to how far they could go with just their firearms alone. As such, there was a pressing need for both Tom and Claudia to get stronger, something that could only be done with the help of said stones.

But there was a major problem occurring whenever stones came into play. While the fact that neither Tom nor Claudia knew exactly how to make them give up its energy for the sake of improving their bodies was a major problem, it wasn't something that would prompt Tom to such a rash decision.

It was all about time.

First off, they were scheduled to meet up with Cleo's avatar as soon as possible. Given how they was only a chance that they would both appear on the same channel of the dungeon when reaching upper floors, there was a hard limit of roughly eleven more hours before Cleo would go forth and climb to an even higher floor.

Without any means of communicating with Tom's childhood friend, that was the only possible way for them to organize their meeting.

"Reach the floor fifty within ten hours. Wait there for two more hours and then proceed to the next floor. Rinse and repeat all the way until you reach the fifty-fifth floor. If we won't manage to meet with each other all the way there, abandon the mission and proceed on your own," Tom ordered way back before the entire situation started to play out.

And now, with roughly an hour of their precious time wasted on satisfying their carnal pleasures, Tom had no other choice but to pick up the pace.

"Well, let's go, then?" Claudia said, grasping Tom's hand and intermingling her fingers with his. As she tightened her grasp, she pulled Tom forward, right towards the gate.

"Wait!" Tom shouted right as the girl was about to press forward. "Hug me first. We don't want to get split up at the gate," Tom warned, pulling the girl into a bear-like embrace before lifting her up a bit and taking the step forward.

His vision flickered for a measly second before the open space of the boss' room was replaced by the same, tight corridors of the next floor.

"We made it," Tom muttered with a huge dose of relief. Exploring the dungeon the way they did was riddled with all sorts of traps and problems that, for the most part, they weren't even aware of. That's why just the fact that he could still feel the soft flesh and skin of the girl in his arms proved that at the very least, crossing the barrier between floors while hugged wouldn't split them up.

"Yeah, we did," Claudia nodded her head impassively before suddenly shrugging. "I know that you like hugging me, but I think you should let me go," she said as her head moved to the side.

'Is she still shy?' Tom thought before letting her go and looking in the direction she cast her glace to. 'Or not,' he thought silently, with all his joy caused by the moment vanishing in an instant.

Claudia wasn't too embarrassed by the hug to stay like that for a little longer. She just found this kind of position way too uncomfortable to fight the approaching monsters at.

And so they were, the lowest staple of monsters appearing at the bottom tier of every single world created by a human mind. While bunched together with slimes, kobolds, and several other species within the lowest rank of monsters that one could encounter, they were surprisingly a tough nut to crack for the newbie players of the Dungeons Online.

Not because they posed much threat to their avatars or Tom and Claudia personally in their current situation. It was all because of just how immersive Dungeons Online were. And as it stood, encountering the goblins was often the first time when the majority of the players would proceed to kill something that they could consider a living being.

And even if everyone believed those goblins to be a mere characters within the game, it didn't change the fact that each of the players had to push a blade into the goblin's flesh and watch it bleed out.

"Leave them to me," Tom said, pulling up his rifle. The shape of its back made it super easy to lock the gun on one's shoulder, improving one's accuracy by leaps and bound with that. What's more, a special set of magnetized springs hidden at the bottom of the rifle made it pretty easy to sustain the recoil of the gun.

After all, even though the rifle was shooting small pellets instead of full-fledged bullets, its shooting force was several grades greater than anything a personal firearm could ever achieve.

And then, as if it was still a game or just a shooting range, Tom took aim before switching on the safety and pulling the trigger.

His rifle was in a semi-automatic mode. Given the potential scarcity of the ammunition, Tom was as far from "spraying and praying" as he could be. Instead, he would slowly take an aim, pull the trigger and move the weapon towards the next target as soon as he noticed a small red rose flourishing atop the monster's head.

In six shots, six goblins fell to the ground without any signs of consciousness. As the weakest out of all the goblin species, they didn't even have any weapons. As such, one could consider it a waste of six pebbles to get rid of them in this way, especially given how proficient Tom was with his spear.

But once again, it was all about time. While slaying the monsters in the way Dungeon's Online made its players do would be quick and easy, it would take time. And given how many encounters there were ahead of Tom and Claudia, if they wasted time each of them, there would be no way for them to reach the fiftieth floor within their deadline.

"I don't think those would make a nice rack," Tom muttered, already disappointed with the floor. According to his experiences in the game, for the first ten floors, there would be mono-cultures of monsters on each of them. In other words, since they already spotted goblins on this floor, they would have to try their luck with another one, as even Tom wasn't courageous enough to claim he could make some clothes from the goblin's skin.

"It's okay," Claudia replied with a lovely smile. While she had the only spare t-shirt they had on herself, she didn't seem to mind the fact that it only pretended to hide anything from Tom's eyes. "Didn't we already fuck? It's not like we will be as distracted by our bodies as we would be an hour ago," she added with an amused smile, enjoying her current situation more and more.

"If you think that fucking you once will be enough to calm my lust down for tens of hours…." Tom said before shaking his head. "Well, we will cross that bridge once we get to it," he said after a moment, averting his eyes as he decided to change the topic.

"If you reach the point where you can't go on any longer, just hit me up," Claudia smiled before sending Tom a wink. "If such situation were to occur, I wouldn't really mind helping you out," she said with a smile only to strike up her shirt from below, making it flutter up, revealing her moist crotch for a split of a second.

Normally, this kind of interaction would be more than enough to get Tom going. But the fact that Claudia did it while stepping over the bloodied bodies of the goblins that Tom just took out somehow made it less arousing than normally.

"As I said," Tom shook his head, "we will think about it once we get to cross that bridge," he said once again before fixing his rifle on his shoulder and pushing forward.

The rest of the floor turned out to be as simple as the first encounter on it. Whenever a pack of monsters would appear, Tom would make short work of them as if it was a low-grade shooting range. Roughly halfway through the floor, he even pushed the gun into Claudia's arms, making her start her shooting training.

After all, while there was barely any threat to their health on the second floor, the situation wouldn't stay the same once they would reach the floor tenth and below.

And even this estimate was nothing but Tom's guess derived from his experiences as Dungeon's Online player.

"We found it," Claudia shouted in joy when she finally saw the narrow corridor widen up to what could only be a boss room. And once the two of them took the corner, this guess was only confirmed.

In the middle of the room, a massive goblin stood. It was roughly twice as high as Tom and as wide as Tom was high. To a degree, the boss monster looked like a slime that couldn't make itself any less round but attempted to take the form of another monster to look more dangerous than it was in reality.

"Can you take it down on your own?" Tom asked, raising his eyebrow as he threw the question at the girl.

"Do you even need to ask?" she countered, pulling on the glove in her left hand before raising the barrel of the rifle at the monster. "Let's see how well it will fare against this boy!"