"So, uh, random question, but does the name 'Charles Klendy; mean anything to you?" I asked Oliver as I placed three job notices on his desk.

  "The leader of the Golden Avengers? One of King Klendy's many bastards?"

  "King...?" I started, before realising exactly what he'd said. Our royal family's name was Robeld. I'd never heard the name Klendy before. So he was a foreign prince? I'd killed a foreign prince? Illegitimate, which might explain why he hadn't bragged about it, but of royal blood nonetheless. Yeah, I was screwed.

  "Yes, king," confirmed Oliver, taking my truncated mutter as a question. "Why do you think we put up with that idiot? The brats he hangs around with aren't much better, either, spongers that they are. I'd love to run them out of the guild, but while he's theoretically exiled from his homeland, that doesn't mean we can touch him without causing an international incident. Thankfully, they haven't come back after yesterday's bit of fun. Probably got scared and ran for their lives before the canton got locked down. Good riddance, I'd say. Why're you asking, anyway?"

  "They never introduced themselves," I answered. "I overheard someone talking about him and put two and two together. Just wanted to check my assumption was correct."

  "Fair enough. Now you're unfortunate enough to know. Anyway, are these really the jobs you want?"

  "D-rank by the end of the week, remember?"

  Oliver peered at the trio of notices I'd picked. A goblin village had been spotted in a forest about a day's travel from the capital, and one mission was to clear it. The other pair were for wolf and treant materials, and the same forest happened to contain sizeable populations of both. It also contained an E-rank dungeon, the Fungal Garden. The travel time was more than I'd have liked, but the opportunity to kill four birds with one stone made it worthwhile.

  "The treant job requires you to bring back the heartwood of a dozen of the monsters," pointed out Oliver. "How do you intend to carry it all?"

  "Handcart."

  "Handcart?!"

  Oliver peered at me for long enough to deem me serious, then facepalmed.

  "You know the end of the week is in four days, right?" he complained. "The forest is a hundred miles away. You want to go there, complete these three quests, then come back, pulling a cart, and still expect to be promoted by the end of the week?"

  "Yes," I answered. I'd already rented the handcart, and was ready to go as soon as Oliver did whatever he needed to do to mark that I'd taken the jobs. Apparently, it was possible to get bags or chests or even pockets that were bigger on the inside than the outside, but such things were far out of my price range.

  Something else I'd learnt from my recent education was that above gold coins were large gold, then mithril, then large mithril, and finally orichalcum. Even the worst performing storage item was priced at large gold coins, so even my bandit loot wouldn't have paid for one.

  Maybe Charles—whose name I would never prefix with 'prince'—had a storage item on him, and I'd left it for slimes to consume. If so, I'd prefer never to find out. Obviously someone knew what I'd done, even if they gave the odd impression of being on my side, which raised the annoying possibility that I could have got away with looting the corpses.

  Oliver shrugged. "Good luck, then. And if you make it... Well, maybe your next trick will be to single-handedly clear the Deep and solve our dungeon break problem."

  That comment made me pause. "Solve the dungeon break problem?" I asked.

  In all the reading I'd done, I hadn't come across any mention of dungeon breaks. It seemed an odd omission, given how big a problem breaks apparently were.

  "Well, yeah. Dungeon breaks only happen if a dungeon goes ten years without being cleared. Clear the Deep, and you'll stop the next break."

  ... No wonder that hadn't been in anything I'd read. I'd prioritised the most relevant stuff, reading about the E and D-rank dungeons that I'd be visiting imminently. Such low-ranked dungeons were hardly going to go a decade without being cleared.

  Unlike the Deep, apparently.

  That had a couple of additional implications. Firstly the obvious, that no-one had cleared it in the past seven years. Or, rather, given that the dungeon break had been described as 'regular', multiple decades. Secondly, the dungeon break was not, as I'd assumed, caused by monsters exiting lots of dungeons all at once. It was caused by one.

  One that was in the middle of the capital, under the palace.

  That seemed ill-advised. Wouldn't the monsters trash the city on the way out? What did they do? Evacuate everyone and rebuild everything once a decade?

  Missions registered, I left the guild, grabbed my cheap little cart and set off for the forest.

  A day of jogging gave plentiful time to think. Firstly, about clearing the Deep. Three years from now, I'd have grown as much as a regular person would in sixty, plus whatever multiplicative bonuses fell out, and hence would be among the most powerful people in the kingdom. However, I knew there were other people around with Marks that granted extra skill points or bonus experience, so the chances of being actually the most powerful rather than among the most powerful seemed slim. And even if I did become the highest level person in the kingdom, it wouldn't automatically follow that I could clear the Deep. Not only did I not know how far away other attempts had come from clearing it, but also other people presumably attempted it as a party. How much higher level would I need to be to accomplish solo what others had failed as a group?

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

  The second thing I thought about was how bloody boring it was jogging over mile after mile of unchanging landscape. Not to mention how strenuous it was doing so while pulling a cart. Well, I did have thoughts about balancing out my Stats...

  And then there was the third thing; who had left me that note, and why?

  My best guess was that the answer followed on from the first point. The way the letter had referenced the dungeon stipend strongly suggested that the author knew my Mark gave a massive experience boost. Sir Quix had, slightly less strongly, indicated that he also knew. He was a royal knight. That led to my theory that the letter-sender was related. Someone in the palace had found out about me, and deemed that the best chance the kingdom had to survive was for me to gain levels as quickly as possible. Not only was there a monetary reward offered, but also an implicit threat. I'd killed a prince of a foreign kingdom, and, at some point, would face retribution that I would need to be very high level to survive.

  If the letter sender was completely unrelated to Sir Quix, then... well... I had no idea who else it could possibly be.

  In the end, the details didn't matter, because the response was the same. Gain levels as quickly as possible. Seize 'freedom' by the simple process of growing so powerful that no-one would dare touch me.

  And with that violent thought in my mind, I arrived at the dungeon. I'd chosen to clear it before fulfilling my monster-hunting quests mostly so that I could stash the empty cart up a tree. No way was I dragging it with me through the dungeon—especially later, when it would be full of monster bits—nor did I want to leave it unattended outside in case the dungeon had other visitors, or a goblin came across it.

  ... Was stashing a cart up a tree a weird thing to do? I wasn't sure. It certainly wasn't a thought I'd have ever considered prior to unlocking, but with my physical Stats it was easy. The hardest part was finding a suitable tree. Thankfully, the growth around the dungeon entrance was impressive, the trees tall and gnarly, even if the leaves were sparse and the trunks contained an impressive amount of bracket fungus.

  Given that the journey had taken most of the day, I followed the cart up the tree and spent the night there myself.

  The dungeon entrance itself didn't even try to conform to conventional geometry. A pair of dead trees stood like foreboding gateposts, their branches intertwining in a mouldy arch, mycelium spanning between twigs like cobwebs. Through the arch, I could see a strange mirror of the forest. Giant mushrooms replaced the trees. Smaller mushrooms took the place of undergrowth, and the floor was covered by a mat of mycelium so thick that the dirt beneath was invisible. Some of the mushrooms—the smaller ones, thankfully, rather than the tree-sized ones—shifted slightly, as if in a strong wind. Caps lifted up, showing the gills, which were angled and bunched up in a way that gave a worrying impression of eyes.

  If I hadn't read up on the place beforehand and knew it was E-rank, I wouldn't have dared step in. Thankfully, I knew exactly what I'd face in there, which was why, instead of rushing in, I paused at the entrance to take a cloth from my pack and tie it securely over my face.

  As soon as I set foot upon the dungeon's fungal mat, the moving mushrooms shuddered all at once, shaking their caps and expelling clouds of yellow spores. I just grinned beneath my mask. It would filter out the worst of it, and my Constitution would handle the rest for long enough for me to deal with the cause.

  Normally, stabbing a large plant wouldn't achieve much, and you'd expect an axe, or maybe some fire. This dungeon was rather too dank and moist for things to burn well, though, and even if they did, the mat of fungus covered the entire dungeon floor. If it caught alight and burnt quickly, the resulting inferno would not just take out the monsters, but also the non-monstrous trees, me, and the entire landscape.

  ... Although if it did burn like that, couldn't I just toss something in from the outside? Would doing so grant experience for every single monster in the dungeon? Or was this like the Fluffy Meadow, where the monsters didn't exist until you went looking for them?

  In any case, the point was that the spore-releasing mushrooms were monsters, and thus didn't quite conform to regular biology. They had weak spots.

  Holding my breath—probably unnecessary, but I intended to risk nothing—I charged the first, ploughing into the dense cloud of spores that surrounded it, ducking under its cap and stabbing my daggers into two of its 'eyes'. The monster quivered in response, before falling still, its cap sagging slightly and the yellow mist it was releasing ceasing.

  The upper end of the experience scale for an E-rank monster, but if someone didn't come prepared with a mask, and didn't have the Constitution to simply tank the toxins, the spores would have completely paralysed them in seconds.

  Paralysed, but not actually hurt. Thus, they'd remain fully conscious as they fell to the ground, left aware but unable to resist as the mycelium mat grew and infested their clothing, their skin and then their flesh, consuming their soft tissue as fuel for the production of a new mushroom monster.

  There was a damn good reason I was holding my breath. The thought of experiencing that fate made me shudder, however strongly logic insisted I was protected.

  An interesting discussion could be had on how the System ranked monsters. Despite being E-rank, these things would decimate a party of low-level adventurers that approached them unaware. On the other hand, forewarned and appropriately equipped, they posed no danger at all. They couldn't even run away. The System thus seemed to have decided they were worth only five hundred experience despite the danger they posed.

  Not that it mattered, in the end. Experience was experience, and so I cleared up the rest of the monsters in the first clearing, looking around for the pathway towards the boss as yellow motes of light rose up from the mat, swirling and coalescing into a treasure chest. I was aiming to take the most direct route, rather than visiting every clearing in the dungeon. After all, my aim was to beat the dungeon before the morning ended.