"I think you skipped a few steps there," I said, turning to Oliver for either help or an explanation. He just shrugged and gave a small, apologetic shake of the head.

  "All you need to know is that we're the upcoming adventuring party. Never failed a mission, even though we're already taking on ones recommended for D-rank. And we're giving you an opportunity to join us."

  "No thanks," I replied. Bragging that they were taking jobs recommended for D-rank implied they were still E-rank. Since the criteria for advancing to D-rank was to have reached the first growth milestone and completed a few D-rank missions in a row, that in turn implied that they couldn't yet have reached the first milestone. I was right on its edge. The group were already lower level than me, and were almost certainly being carried by their equipment. Really not the sort of group I wanted to join.

  Plus, their attitude sucked. The way their faces twisted when I turned down their 'offer' was as if I'd just declared the sky to be green. They simply couldn't comprehend me rejecting them, despite the way they'd shown up and declared they'd 'let' me join without even introducing themselves first. It was like looking at an entire party of Johns. If I did join them, I was rather concerned I'd accidentally stab them all in their sleep.

  "What do you mean, no? If you're daunted by joining such a powerful group, don't worry. We already know you're worthy."

  "I have no idea who you are, and I have no idea who that guy's aunt is," I sighed. Maybe that woman who'd reacted to me on my first trip to the guild? What sort of description would she have given them? "I'm a complete newbie. Zeroth growth marker, and only learnt my first combat Skill yesterday. I have no equipment that even comes close to matching yours. Are you sure you've got the right person?"

  I leant on [Expert Stealth]. I was asking a lot of it, to 'disappear' in front of a bunch of watching eyes, but it was at the final stage of C-rank and I had a suspicion that I wasn't dealing with the brightest candles in the shed. It might be enough.

  "Brown hair, hazel eyes. Cheap clothing. Only just unlocked. Carries two daggers and a backpack. It's you."

  "My hair is chestnut, not brown, my eyes are maroon, and given your getup, I suspect you'd think any clothing is cheap. Daggers are a normal choice for anyone who's only just unlocked; they're lightweight, so can be carried without worrying about physical Stats, and they're easy to use without Skills. Not to mention that everyone's wearing a backpack. Even you four! You've basically just described every newbie in the guild."

  The party of four looked uncertain. I felt my Skill stir as it worked to convince them that my brown hair wasn't quite the shade they were looking for.

  "Why don't you ask your aunt if I'm really the person she meant?" I asked, knowing full well that they couldn't on account of being on her way to another canton.

  "Why was your aunt so insistent that we invite the kid, anyway?" asked the spear wielder, ignoring me again.

  "She said his Stats were way too high. Way beyond what should be possible for his age, and into the first growth marker range."

  "Well, that settles it, then," I shrugged. "Like I said, I'm zeroth growth marker, right, Oliver?"

  "I'm not supposed to give away private information, but since you're asking me to, then I suppose. Yes, when I registered him yesterday, he hadn't reached the first growth marker."

  The four stared a few moments longer. "Bah. At least I'll credit you for knowing your place," declared the spear wielder, eventually. "If we'd accidentally let you join and found you couldn't pull your weight after all, I'd have demanded compensation for forcing your way into our party under false pretences."

  ... There were so many things wrong with that declaration that I didn't know where to begin, but since it seemed the group had accepted that they'd got the wrong person, I didn't voice them. I just watched them tut and walk off, retaking their seats at the table as they kept an eye on the entrance, presumably watching for my arrival.

  "Sorry about them. That was a neat trick, though," said Oliver.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about," I lied. "Anyway, I'm heading upstairs."

  "Have fun."

  I'd estimated that it would take me another two days to research what dungeons and monsters were in the area. I knew there was at least one dungeon, because of the dungeon break thing, but given how serious they considered the breaks to be, I guessed it was too high level for me. Still, this was the capital, and presumably it was situated here for a reason. I was fairly confident I could find something appropriate to my level without needing to travel too far.

  My expectations were rather blown out of the water.

  The royal canton had thirty known dungeons, ranging the complete gamut of ranks.

  I also learnt why the adventurers' guildhall was built here, in a rather upmarket part of the city, when adventurers were not, by and large, refined or upmarket people. It was built on a dungeon.

  So was the palace. The actual royal palace. The place where the king lived, along with his family. The king's house was built on top of a dungeon. That was just so utterly insane that I needed to reread it half a dozen times before it sunk in. The royal palace was built on top of a dungeon.

  Not just any dungeon, either. No, it was the kingdom's only S-rank dungeon. The Deep.

  The dungeon the guildhall was built upon was not S-rank. It was, in fact, at the low end of E-rank. It was a place even F-rankers with no combat Skills were allowed into. Unlike the Fluffy Meadow, the general public wasn't allowed in, but that was because the guild used it explicitly as a training dungeon.

  The place didn't drop treasure chests, and the only monsters were slimes. The core of a slime could be sold, if intact, but since shattering the core was far and away the simplest method to kill a slime, it essentially meant there was no money to be made. It was purely an experience farm, both in the Status sense and the sense of getting used to killing monsters.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  After half a day of reading, temptation got the better of me and I headed downstairs. Slimes may be worth half the experience of horned rabbits, but if they were as plentiful down there as the guild's information suggested, I could hit the first growth milestone by the end of the day.

  The same staircase that rose from the ground floor also led down into a basement. A single guard stood next to an arch in the wall, looking completely out of place compared to the surrounding brick. It was raw stone, and yet the arch was perfectly shaped. Perhaps a stonemason could produce something like it, given a sufficiently large, flawless block to start from, but given the way the Fluffy Meadow had twisted up nature, I felt it more likely that the archway was dungeon work.

  "Heading in alone and unarmoured?" asked the guard.

  "Yes," I confirmed. "There's no problem with that, is there?"

  "No. Just don't expect the guild to bail you out if things go wrong. Please touch this to register your entry."

  "I wouldn't expect the guild to bail me out whatever I was wearing on the way in," I responded, shrugging as I touched the device.

  "Oh? E-rank already? I guess you're not completely na?ve, then. In you go."

  "Thanks, I think," I replied, stepping through the arch.

  Beyond the arch was a dungeon far more stereotypical than the Fluffy Meadow. It was almost exactly what I'd have pictured, pre-unlock, had someone asked me to draw a dungeon. A stone passage, torches burning in brackets at regular intervals.

  ... And that was more dungeon shenanigans, right there. Did the slimes come along every few hours to replace any burnt-out torches? They couldn't, anyway; a quick examination proved that they were fused to the brackets, the entire thing a single unit that couldn't be removed from the wall.

  Periodic doorways led to side rooms, heavy wooden doors already open. The rooms contained tables, chairs, along with an occasional chest of drawers, wardrobe or other random storage unit, all empty except for cobwebs and unidentifiable debris. One room held a bed, decayed fabric lying on rotten wooden slats. It was like random furniture had been plucked from a house, then left a few decades in the damp.

  All wood and stone, though. Nothing else.

  Except for slimes, of course.

  Despite the guard's opinion, I'd gone to great lengths to not be a na?ve idiot. The guild library had a wealth of information on the dungeons in the royal canton, and I'd finished reading up on this dungeon and its denizens before giving into temptation and stepping inside. Thus, the slime crawling across the ceiling and attempting to drop on my head completely failed to catch me by surprise. I simply stepped out of the way, waited for it to splat on the floor, then stomped on the core before it had a chance to raise itself back up into a blob.

  The things were everywhere. The convenient ones were on the walls, because it placed them at the perfect height for a quick stab. The ones on the ceiling were the most dangerous, but since they flattened themselves by dropping and missing, exposing their cores, they were equally quick to despatch with a simple stomp. It was the ones at floor level that were a pain. They made me wish for a spear again. With a dagger, I either needed to stoop, or else kick them up into the air like a ball and stab them as they fell, which was a rather cool trick that I could only manage with the aid of [Dagger Proficiency].

  Also annoying was that I got no stealth experience, despite my greatly improved Skill from one of the earlier occasions I'd slain a slime. Thanks to my research, I knew the reason; slimes detected vibrations, and the stone this dungeon was built from was optimal for transmitting my footsteps, however quietly I trod. The soft soil of the forest had made it far easier to surprise a slime. Perhaps that explained why the first two in the forest hadn't given stealth experience, too, if the ground there was a little harder.

  Thankfully, what I lost in stealth experience, I gained in pure volume. Every room of the dungeon held three or four of the monsters, and by the time I'd cleared the first floor, I'd taken out more than thirty of them, closing half the remaining distance to the next level.

  On the next floor, the slimes turned blue. Slightly bigger, slightly faster, slightly tougher, and worth slightly more experience. Still small enough that I could easily reach the cores with a dagger, though.

  As before, it was the ones on the floor that were the problem. With their increased speed and mass, my first attempt at flipping one into the air failed miserably, and it slammed into my face instead.

  "Ouch," I complained, rubbing my nose.

  The slime landed with a squelch, then leapt at me. I simply sidestepped.

  Thankfully, slimes weren't particularly dangerous. When you were made of soft jelly, there was only so much damage that could be done by ramming someone. They fed by engulfing and digesting their prey, but I was rather too big to engulf, and I was hardly going to let one cling to me for long enough to get any serious dissolving done, if it was capable of digesting me at all with my Constitution. I could see now why Brown Wolf had been willing to let a bunch of level one farmers play with a slime. They really were the weakest monsters around.

  We'd gone straight into the Fluffy Meadow and fought horned rabbits... If my Stats had been the same as Simon's back then, we wouldn't have stood a chance.

  The second floor of the Slime Pit was much the same as the first, beyond the colour of the slimes, and another thirty of them fell to my blades. Enough to surpass level twenty and reach the first growth milestone.

  The results, however, were not quite as expected.