"You asked me how best to leave this canton," said Sir Galahad. "From the way you attempted to hide your personal circumstances, I would guess you are a runaway from another canton. Probably Cargellen Canton, given your encounter with bandits led by Sir Leonard. No, don't confirm or deny my guesses," he added, forestalling me when I opened my mouth to protest. "I don't know why you ran, and I do not wish to know. I will stake my reputation that you are not an evil person. I will give you aid in escaping this canton, along with a letter of introduction bearing my seal that will permit you entry into the sapphire city, the capital of the royal canton. In return, I wish you to travel to that city and deliver messages to a few people."

  I fell silent as I considered the offer. It had its downsides—if I wanted to keep a low profile, then the capital of the entire kingdom didn't seem like the most sensible destination—but if a simple letter would let me enter a major settlement without the fear of guards nabbing me and sending me back to the baron, it was worth running a delivery chore to earn.

  "Before we go any further, I have to ask one thing," I said. "Why me? There must be higher level, trustworthy people you could ask to deliver a simple letter."

  "A most pertinent question. Firstly, I cannot leave myself, nor can any of my fellow knights or soldiers who are loyal to our canton and our kingdom rather than our fallen lord. Lord Harvent will attempt to exact revenge here, and I must prevent his wrath from falling upon the innocent villagers. His bootlickers, those who enjoy the unrestricted power he has granted them, and those who obey him out of fear, will attempt similar atrocities elsewhere, and my fellows are duty-bound to protect who they can. Perhaps, after today, part of the number who obey out of fear will return to our side."

  "Never," cackled Old Three-eye. "Some roots run too deep to pluck, and a fruit that has proven poison once will not be tasted a second time."

  "Second, the canton has no adventurers to call upon," continued Sir Galahad, ignoring the interruption. "There are no dungeons within this canton. We used to have parties of adventurers that hunted monsters in the forests along our borders, but they either left once the trouble started, or else were 'hired' by Lord Harvent and never heard from again. "

  "How interesting. The child is surprised," observed the crone. "Forests are friendly to him. A place to engorge, and a safe space to sleep. Not at all a place of searching eyes and hungry maws."

  "There was a goblin village, actually," I said. "And a few slimes. And bandits."

  Old Three-eye snorted.

  "Thirdly, the border is officially closed. Residents of this canton are not allowed to leave by Lord Harvent's orders, nor do the surrounding cantons want to feed refugees. The borders are porous away from roads, especially to the east, but bandits and monsters roam freely. You are not from this canton, so the restrictions, officially, don't apply to you."

  "... I'm not sure I liked the inflection on the word 'officially' there," I muttered.

  "Fourthly, few residents of a canton want to travel. Those who had the means and opportunity have largely escaped this place already. Those who are left fear moving, or else have things here that they must protect and will not abandon. Family, a home, a village. Perhaps I could convince some to act for me, but they wouldn't want to. They would rather remain. You, on the other hand, will leave this canton regardless of my interference. And, finally, you are bold and decisive. You didn't hesitate to deal with the soldier who tried to escape, despite his power being so much greater than your own. You have not allowed his death to bother you. And, as Old Three-eye so eloquently pointed out, you have already travelled far on your own, successfully and unharmed."

  "I got kidnapped twice..." I pointed out. "In the same week."

  "But you escaped."

  "With help."

  "True, but you have proven you can use any opportunity given to you."

  "Okay, so you have a reasonable reason for asking me to deliver your letter. Then I'll admit this much; I'm a serf of the Cargellen Canton. Anyone checking my identity will know that I'm an illegal runaway. Despite what you think, restrictions very much officially apply to me; I shouldn't be out of my canton in the first place. Even if I manage to cross a canton's borders, I cannot freely enter towns. Will a simple letter let me bypass inspections? You say you'll stamp it with your seal, whatever one of those is, but... no offence, but isn't Lord Harvent in control here?"

  Old Three-eyes burst into her biggest bout of cackling yet, apparently finding my question hilarious.

  "I see you have been brought up as a simple villager," said Sir Galahad, who was smiling himself. Apparently, the crone wasn't the only one to find my question amusing. I had no idea why, though. My question hadn't been odd, had it?

  "Yes, I have been brought up as a 'simple villager'," I confirmed, making sure the quotes were fully audible. "I've been brought up treating nobility as people to be avoided at all costs, and townsmen to be dealt with only when necessary."

  "Then I'm afraid you've failed, and did so before you met me, for 'knight' is a noble rank. The lowest of them, admittedly, but even Sir Leonard was, technically, nobility. Yes, my seal counts for something. Less than that of Lord Harvent, certainly, but enough to serve as a reason for entering a city. However, your lack of identity will prove a problem. You will need to pass through Greyforge on your way out of the canton. A risk, but worth it. It's not far out of the way, and the priests are loyal to their gods, not to any man. To them, and many in Greyforge, my seal counts for a great deal."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  I sighed, sensing a rather nasty eventuality in my future. "Greyforge is going to be this canton's capital, isn't it?" I asked, rather resignedly. "You want me to enter the town where this evil count lives, which will presumably be crawling with his loyal men?"

  "No, actually. His manor is there, yes, and it will be guarded. I advise against its approach. But the count himself, and the majority of his loyal men, have moved to the excavation site."

  "Okay, I suppose that makes it marginally better. I don't know how identity checking works, but if you can do something that prevents me being recognised as a serf that illegally left their canton, that's worth delivering your letters all on its own."

  "I'm glad you agree. Sleep for tonight. You may use my bed. By the morning, I'll have written out everything you require, along with a map of where you must go."

  "That would be... rather helpful..." I said. "Thanks."

  "Suspicious is he," cackled Old Three-eyes. "Too suspicious. Fleeing from ghosts that were never there. Hiding from those who mean him no harm."

  "Pardon?" I asked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "No matter. One day, you shall discover the answer on your own, but once you know the answer, the answer will no longer matter. An ironic thing, life, eh?"

  I stared at her a few seconds longer, but no more words appeared to be forthcoming. Only a toothy grin.

  "Does she have a Skill that can see the future?" I asked Sir Galahad, turning to him instead.

  "Buggered if I know," he answered. "She sure talks like it, sometimes. And then the next sentence she's complaining that the miniature dragon living in her chimney is eating her herbs."

  "She has a..."

  "No, I checked," answered Sir Galahad. "Several times."

  "Whatever," I said, dropping the subject. "In that case, can you tell me what this count of yours is up to?"

  "Very well. The problems actually started a decade ago. The amount of mithril coming from our mines has always been limited, but it has been consistent for centuries. More concentrated veins have been discovered, but no veins that come close to the sheer quantity available from the mithril mountains. But then, a decade ago, our output started to drop. Lord Harvent—who at the time was greedy but not unjust, and was willing to take advice—ordered investigations. They all reported the same thing: we were reaching the end of the mithril vein. Output would continue to drop, hitting zero within a couple of decades. That panicked our lord, since mithril is the primary, or rather the only, major source of income of this canton. We're not even close to being self-sufficient food-wise. We have no other valuable produce. Even the mountains contain little other ore, only offering up iron, which can be found all over the kingdom. If we switched to mining iron, the canton's income would have dropped massively. Almost everything would need to be spent on food to keep the canton fed. To our lord, used to fattening himself on the ample taxes that came from selling mithril, that outcome was unacceptable. He ordered the miners to delve deeply, digging pits all over the mountain in the hopes of discovering a new vein."

  "And he found a new, really dangerous vein?" I asked.

  "No. He found buried dwarven ruins."

  Sir Galahad watched me, expecting some sort of reaction. Presumably, he'd just made some sort of serious revelation, but if so, it had sailed far above my head.

  "A buried village of short people?" I asked.

  "No, dwarves as in the race," he clarified.

  I looked on in polite incomprehension. I'd only recently pondered at whether there were 'sapient, non-monstrous beings' that were not humans, but I wasn't expecting the answer to just pop out like this, by someone who seemed to think it was obvious.

  "Maybe you haven't heard of them, then, but they formed a civilisation that predates us humans by millennia. They had advanced technology. Ways of replicating Skills that didn't involve the System. Heck, I've heard some scholars argue that the dwarfs built the System."

  My look of incomprehension intensified. Built the System? But it was as much a part of the world as the earth or sky were, wasn't it? How could someone build it? Did that imply a time before the System? How did anyone get any work done?

  It seemed that the amount I knew I didn't know was rather vastly exceeded by that which I didn't know I didn't know. Nevertheless, I now had enough evidence to guess where this was going.

  "So the count wants to recover some of this 'technology', and the ruins are deadly. Then why keep sending in kids? Why not send in... well... you? You can obviously handle yourself."

  "Dwarves were physically smaller than us humans, and they built everything to match. Adults find it difficult to traverse their ruins. Furthermore, their ruins are always trapped. Such traps tend not to respond to children, whom they presumably mistake for dwarves. They also respond to high mana. A mere hundred points is enough to trigger them. And then there are the puzzles. Doors that only open if you push buttons in the correct order, or turn gears, or whatever."

  "And if you get it wrong, trap?" I guessed.

  "Correct. Combine the foreign language, time having decayed markings and symbols, and the completely different mindset of the dwarfs and... well... progress is difficult. The count has decided to resolve the problem by employing trial and error."

  "So, what you're telling me is that all the kids the count is taking aren't mining, but they're hitting buttons somewhere in a random order, and if they don't guess right, they die?"

  "There is slightly more nuance than that, but essentially, yes."

  Back in the bandit camp, I'd thought there few uses of children who were yet to unlock. Was being sent to their deaths to test puzzle solutions better or worse than what I'd naively assumed they were wanted for?

  "And you can't just mine in at the other side of the structure, or use those ridiculously powerful combat Skills of yours to smash your way through?"

  "Dwarven engineering is way beyond anything we can replicate, at least here in our little kingdom. Even some of the metals they use are unknown to us. It is possible to breach their walls, but anything powerful enough to do so would destroy whatever valuables the ruins contain."

  "Metals that even [Expert Blacksmithing] can't identify?"

  "Indeed."

  "Wow. So, if scholars are talking about dwarves, these can't be the only ruins. What should the count be doing?"

  "He should have started by reporting the existence of the ruins to the king. Then scholars would be summoned who would spend years poring over the place, and eventually skilled adventurers would be hired who would disable traps one by one, making slow but steady progress."

  "And all this would take time, and hiring experts would cost money," I guessed.

  "The mithril would be exhausted before the ruins were completely cleared, and the count would see only a small part of the profit."

  "So he's keeping the discovery secret, and you want to blow it open?"

  "Exactly."

  "Fine. I'm in."

  "You have my thanks."

  "Hehe," cackled the crone. "I told you he would be."

  "Ah, yes, the other reason I'm asking you to visit the royal capital on my behalf," sighed Sir Galahad. "Old Three-eye insisted that if I didn't, the count would eat everyone."

  "Flesh and bone. Flesh and bone," chanted Old Three-eye. "Bubbling meat and gnawing teeth, rising from the deep, fuelled by greed and hunger. Some things are not for human hands, and so the hands that hold them are not human."

  "O... kay..." I muttered, edging away from the crazy woman. That was certainly an image that would give me interesting dreams tonight.