I had questions, starting with 'how the heck did he recognise the clothes' all the way up to 'does calling him 'Sir' imply he's going to get pissed at me telling him he's dead'. As was rapidly becoming my custom, I decided to stick to technical truths.

  "These clothes came from the leader of a band of bandits, who kidnapped me to sell to the count," I answered. "They also kidnapped a bunch of other kids, all from other cantons. Eventually, he apparently kidnapped someone he shouldn't have touched, because someone armoured very much like you turned up and conducted a bit of a slaughter. I stole some necessities and escaped in the chaos."

  "I see," answered the knight. "A pity. When he deserted his post, I'd dared to hope the man had grown a spine. However, I see he had merely decided to serve this land's traitorous lord in more clandestine ways."

  "Uh... Not that I'm complaining, but are you really going to believe me just like that?"

  "There were no lies in your words. You may not have shared the whole truth, but it was the fate of Sir Leonard that interests me, not your origins. I see no reason to pry out your secrets."

  "Thanks then, I guess. You probably have important things to be getting on with, but would you mind advising me on which way to go to safely get the heck out of here? And I'm also rather curious about what the heck the count is plotting."

  "Oh? 'Plotting' is an interesting word choice. Perhaps it might be worthwhile sharing some information with you, but first, I'm afraid I must deal with..."

  The knight paused as a faint boom echoed from the direction of the forest. From the way the distant air shimmered, I had a strong suspicion that it had actually been quite a loud boom, but we were simply hearing it from a long way away.

  "Never mind," he continued. "It seems they have been taken care of. Now, with his dwindling manpower, it will be several days before the count is able to mount a response to what happened here. Why don't you step into the village of Greystone and rest while I aid with some clean-up. There are, regretfully, a number of dead that must be respectfully laid to rest."

  Unlike the knight—who I noted had not given me a name—I had to walk around the smouldering pit. I could probably jump it, given how far my Stats had grown, but given that it was still smoking and glowing a rather ominous red in places, I wasn't going to risk it. By the time I'd reached the other side, the knight was already busy moving corpses, respectfully shifting the dead villagers into neat rows. Meanwhile, the villagers were busy looting the dead soldiers, before disrespectfully tossing their corpses into the smouldering pit, where they quickly started to char.

  I had to hand it to the villagers. As far as plans went, theirs was outright suicidal, but it had worked. From the conversation, it was obvious that the knight and Captain Tyler had fought before, but the knight hadn't been able to prevent him escaping. The villagers had therefore turned themselves into bait. They'd trapped the captain and his men in a situation where they couldn't flee. Over a dozen of them had paid for it with their lives, but the village itself was safe.

  The captain had said the publicity was the point. What would this publicity do?

  "Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked the villagers, who were staring at me suspiciously. It would probably be best to make a good impression.

  "You came with them," said one. "I think it's best you stay out here, where we can see you."

  "Not by choice..." I said.

  "Don't be like that, Charlie," said another of the villagers. "He's probably as much of a victim as any of the other kids the bastard count has taken. He's just lucky enough to have been rescued."

  "Fine. Since my brother insists, do you have any useful Skills?"

  "Uh... [Adept Foraging]?"

  Charlie whistled. "Whatever food you can gather would certainly be appreciated, if you can deal with the monsters. Maybe we can send some hunters with you as guards. But... uh... maybe wait for that madwoman to come out of the forest before you go in..."

  "Madwoman?"

  "Never mind... You'll know her when you see her. Any other useful Skills?"

  "[Farming]?"

  "No farms around here, lad. The soil is pretty awful. We have to import our food. Or used to, anyway, back before our canton was blacklisted by every major merchant in the kingdom."

  "[Cooking]? [Blacksmithing]? [Fish..."

  "You're a blacksmith? Oh my goodness, that's even better than [Adept Foraging]! The bastard count rounded up all the blacksmiths months back, and without the traders, we just can't get skill crystals anymore. If you can reforge our axes and make us a hundred or so arrow tips, we might stand a chance of surviving the winter."

  "Assuming the count doesn't flatten us in revenge," said the other villager. "But what's up with all those Skills? How many do you have?"

  "Lots," I answered. "I spent some time running a dungeon that spat out a skill crystal for every five monsters you killed. I haven't put points into many of them, though."

  "Seems a waste of skill points to me, but to each their own. I'm not going to complain if you have [Blacksmithing]."

  "Yeah," agreed Charlie. "Come on. I'll show you to the forge. We have a few people who've tried their hand at it without Skills, but... you know how it is when people try to do things without Skills, quite aside from the fact that you don't get experience from it. Perhaps it would be different if they'd had a chance to learn from our old blacksmith, but the arrowheads they've been turning out are no better than a sharpened stick, and they can't put an edge on an axe worth a damn."

  Frankly, after all the running away I'd been doing, not to mention getting captured twice, I was more than happy to spend some time doing some honest, non-violent work. So much so that—given that to the best of my knowledge I was safe and no-one was trying to catch me—I splashed out a few skill points to the occasion. It wouldn't be a waste; I'd need to maintain my equipment in the future, and [Blacksmithing] would prove useful.

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  My rising mental Stats absorbed the extra knowledge from the E-ranked Skill easily enough. I decided against raising it to [Adept Blacksmithing] though; it was likely it would show up in little ways like arrows piercing a little further than they should, that it was possible people would notice. I didn't fancy explaining why I had so many skill points.

  It gave the same time to experience ratio as [Farming], which was fair enough. It wasn't much after a few days of careful slaughter, where the C-ranked [Expert Stealth] gave more experience than that for a single assassination, but it was honest, peaceful work, I was helping a village that needed the help, and no-one died in the process.

  That last point had been in short supply recently.

  As the failing light forced me to put down my tools, I looked up to find the knight watching me with interest, standing alongside... well, a madwoman seemed like a pretty good description, based purely on appearance. She wore a tattered robe that may once have been black, but was now a dirty grey. The same could be said about her hair, which, alongside its lost colour, was also long and unkempt. She was barefoot, with a hooked nose that had a wart right on the end. If someone had told me she was some sort of higher form of goblin, I'd have been tempted to believe them.

  Assuming this was the woman who'd been in the forest, she was likely responsible for blowing up six of the count's soldiers in one go, so I decided not to trust appearances, whatever she looked like. Besides, there was also her gaze... Piercing didn't even begin to describe it. Her eyes were pointed at me, but what they were actually looking at was a mystery. It certainly wasn't my face.

  "His insides are wrong," declared the woman.

  "Uh... Are they?" I asked, looking down. When I'd thought of her gaze as 'piercing', I hadn't thought it was literally piercing. "What's wrong with them?"

  "Not those insides, silly. All squishy meat and sticky blood. Old Three-eye doesn't know what they're supposed to look like, although she is pretty good at making your insides your outsides. The stuff inside your insides."

  "Uh..." I repeated, looking to the knight for help.

  He sighed, then took off his helm, nodding at me respectfully. The man beneath was older than I expected, maybe somewhere in his fifties, with a neatly trimmed beard and, for some reason, an outstretched hand tattooed on one cheek. "Thanks for helping them out," he said. "I appreciate it."

  "You're welcome, but it wasn't much."

  "A cup of water to a drowning man is not much, but to a dehydrated man in the middle of a desert, it is everything," cackled the old biddy.

  "I think some introductions are in order. Would you come with us to our quarters?"

  "I'd be happy to," I agreed.

  "Ooo, Sir Galahad is bringing a man back to his room," cackled the old woman. "Whatever would his mother think?"

  "Shut up," sighed the knight—Sir Galahad, apparently, with the old lady having pre-empted his introduction—but the resigned tone of voice suggested that he didn't expect her to stop.

  An interesting pair, for sure.

  "As that crone said, I am Sir Galahad, proud knight of Harvent," said Sir Galahad.

  "Hey, what're you calling me, young whipper-snapper? I've still got a decade or two in me yet before I reach the point of being a crone."

  "And the crone is Old Three-eye. Presumably an alias, if only because even she presumably wasn't born old, but if she remembers her real name, she's never seen fit to share it with me. Despite appearances, she is an alchemist of some renown."

  "It's just one insult after another from you, isn't it? You should watch I don't swap out your ale with a potion that makes your dick fall off."

  "My name is J... I mean, Robin," I said, deciding that the time for lying was over.

  "Robin, huh? We had a Sir Robin among the count's knights. He was one of the first to speak up when the count let his obsession get the better of him. If only the rest of us had seen the danger back then, perhaps all this could have been averted." He gestured back at the village entrance, where a couple of villagers were repairing the gate. From the way they were simply throwing wooden planks at the gate, which just happened to land in the correct place, I guessed [Expert Carpentry] was involved. "Alas, we did not, and now Sir Robin is no longer with us, may the gods bring his soul to rest."

  "That's what you get for living with your eyes closed," complained Old Three-eye, poking the knight in the breastplate with a bony finger. "Not enough people can see what's right in front of their noses."

  "I dunno what it is that you can see, but I'm fairly sure it's not in front of anyone's nose," bantered back the knight.

  "Of course. I mastered seeing what's really there a long time ago. Now I've moved on to what will be there, or what might be there. Sometimes even what will never be there, which is a whole lot harder, let me tell you."

  "So is this the point at which you tell me what 'all this' actually is?" I asked as we stepped into one of the village's huts. No fancier than any of the others, with a little more than a couple of cots, a table with two chairs, and a couple of shelves up on one wall.

  "First, why do you want to know?"

  "Because this whole damn canton makes no sense! Security is shot, only the most foolhardy of merchants dare cross the place, and the population is starving while their next generation dies in some slave mine. I really don't see what the count gets out of this arrangement in the long term."

  "So it's simple curiosity? You have no desire to fix the canton?"

  "I can't. That fight earlier made that obvious. In a straight fight, I couldn't beat one of those soldiers, and it's not even close."

  "Helping doesn't need to involve fighting, as you well know, given your evening's work."

  "I'm hardly going to blacksmith the count to death."

  "No, indeed not. You could, however, deliver a message."

  "Huh?" I asked stupidly, being caught completely by surprise. "You want me to save this canton by delivering a message?"

  Old Three-eye giggled to herself.