As Salicia had said, bandits don’t wear uniforms. They wore a random assortment of equipment from their cut of what they stole. If they were successful bandits, their outfits might be better, but if they were crappy, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them in rags. That meant that my girls couldn’t go out and about dressed in matching outfits of fine magical quality. We also couldn’t wear most of the gear found in the dungeons. A Bandit would usually sell off anything too valuable, as Salicia put it, so if we wanted to be bandits, we had to look cheap.

Unfortunately, I didn’t buy stuff of a cheap make. So, nothing I had in my storage would work. Even if we could use some of the stuff I bought, all of the girls had lost their storage rings and all of their equipment once again in another fire attack. Another reason I didn’t stick around the house and left so early was that I didn’t want to be there when the girls, particularly Carmine, realized just how much she lost in that last attack. She had even gone out of her way to carry more than she needed. Seeing it all go up in smoke had to be hard.

I was starting to dread storage rings, not that I’d be able to buy any more in the near future. Thankfully, I had my Storage skill and my time-stop storage ring, so I was good. I did fear it’d get destroyed, which is why I tossed it in storage before every encounter. Even if I had died, I’d only have lost what I had out to use quickly.

Still, I had the Bandit weapons and outfits we had stripped from the Bandits on our first day there. The original purpose had been to wear them to get close to the Bandits so that we could take them out by surprise. The disguise didn’t need to hold up for more than a few seconds until we got the first strike on them. However, I couldn’t use those outfits now.

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Most Bandits marked their items when they acquired them so that other Bandits couldn’t steal them and say that they were theirs. If we ended up going through all of this effort pretending to be Bandits only for a Bandit to notice our armor and accuse us of stealing, it would be a major waste.

So, I ended up buying used armor and weapons for the girls. I didn’t have an eye for stuff, and Salicia kept having to direct me to shoddier armor than I wanted to buy. Bandits depended on the idea of good quality that looks like crap. They want to protect themselves without their armor being envious of others. As a result, certain types and metals were more popular among bandits. In the end, we ended up picking out seven crappy looking pieces of armor and weapons. They are something I never would have willingly picked normally.

On top of that, because Alerith’s taxes were so bad, this stuff cost way more than it should have. I ended up spending as much for a pile of beat-up crap as I would have for shiny new furniture somewhere else. Maybe I should have gone to the capital to find these weapons? Oh well, it was done. The guy was even susceptible to Barter, the level 10 skill of Merchant which seemed to be an evolution of Haggle. I was able to take a 15% discount out of him.

“What now, boss?” Salicia asked.

“Let’s get the girls. I’d like to see the gladiator fights before we plan our next move.”