The town blacksmith—a tall man built so broadly that he probably needed to twist sideways to fit through doorways—stared at us like we were crazy.

  "You realise that if you sold those crystals, the profits would be sufficient to buy a proper spirit dagger, right? With some change, even."

  "Do you have one for sale?" asked Daniel.

  The blacksmith winced. "I have enough mithril on hand to forge a dagger, but..."

  "Mithril? I thought you said these crystals would cover it?! Enough mithril for a decent dagger would be a large gold, at the least!"

  "Spirit-steel would be more cost effective, but I don't have any."

  "Can you plate a regular dagger with mithril?" asked Ryan.

  "No," answered the blacksmith, without elaborating as to why.

  I knew, though. You couldn't alloy mithril with iron or steel. Or rather, you could, but the result would lose all of mithril's magical properties. Plating would almost work, but the two materials wouldn't bond properly. The mithril simply wouldn't stick securely.

  ... And to think that back in Harvent Canton I hadn't even known what mithril was. Yay for fifth stage [Blacksmithing].

  "So, what you're saying is that if we sold these crystals—something that would first require us finding someone willing to buy them at short notice without giving a huge markdown on their value—then we'd get enough money to buy a spirit-steel dagger, if you had one to sell us, which you don't. Does that about cover it?"

  "There's no call to be so rude. You're the ones who want it done today. Normally, you'd order speciality weaponry in advance, you know? Give me time to order materials in. Or you'd visit a dedicated weapon-smith in the capital."

  "Well, yes, that's the entire point," agreed Daniel. "We know we're asking for something at too-short notice, hence why we're offering up the materials to do it with."

  The blacksmith blinked. "Fair. But as much as I admire the ingenuity, this is still a silly idea. Just mount the damn crystals at the end of a stick and bash your ghosts with it."

  I blinked. "Seriously? That would work?"

  "Depends how you define 'work'. It won't be as damaging as a crystal-plated dagger, no, but would be a lot more durable. Heck, treat it gently and you might even be able to use the crystals afterward." The blacksmith peered at me appraisingly. "Let me guess. You're the one that came up with this plan?"

  I carefully refrained from answering.

  "Just because a Skill makes you feel like you know everything, don't assume you do," he continued, apparently treating my silence as an admission. "You lot don't need my help, so if you aren't going to buy anything, then scat."

  Following his advice, we picked up a stick on the way to the dungeon and, with the aid of some twine, secured the crystals to one end.

  It was a damn stupid idea, but not any more stupid than melting them down and plating my dagger. I didn't need a bladed weapon to injure a ghost. It wasn't as if they had any flesh to cut.

  The blacksmith had a decent point. Moments before he'd pointed out the obvious, I'd been feeling proud of the Skill, but I needed to bear in mind that while the information it provided would never be wrong, as such, it could still be incomplete. It let me know that coating a dagger in crystal-stuff would let me cut ghosts, but it said nothing whatsoever about the crystals in their raw form. After all, whacking something with a crystal was nothing to do with [Blacksmithing].

  If I'd spent a few moments to think, perhaps I could have worked that out for myself. It wasn't as if it was the act of coating a dagger with the stuff that made it tangible. But I hadn't. I had [Blacksmithing] and [Dagger Expertise], and so my knowledge was skewed in that direction. When all that you had was a hammer, everything looked like a nail.

  "Hey, Robin? Why'd you stop?" called Daniel.

  I looked down, realising that my feet had stopped moving, and hurried to catch up.

  "Have any of you ever heard the phrase 'when all that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail'?" I asked.

  That was the reason I'd stopped. I couldn't remember anyone ever using the phrase, yet I'd thought it like it was natural.

  "No," answered Daniel. "If I had to guess, does it mean something like the proverb of the foolish blacksmith's daughter who took [Cooking] and never increased her Reasoning and tried to boil an ingot?"

  The others all confirmed that they, too, had never heard it before.

  I frowned as I resumed my jog. I wouldn't have thought anything of it—it wasn't as if I had much experience of having high Memory, and I could believe that this feeling was a natural consequence of the sudden increase—except that I'd had the same feeling from eager beaver. Once was weird, but twice was a pattern, and no-one I'd asked even knew what a beaver was, myself included.

  As we continued our trek, I once again recalled my encounter with the bastard prince's party. Not their deaths, this time, but something the sword-wielder had said. That the way I spoke made me sound well-educated. I'd scoffed at the time, but perhaps even back then...

  Even back then, what?

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Memory stirred once more, reminding me of what I'd actually said to trigger that reaction.

  "Do any of you know what 'casus belli' means?" I asked.

  "No, I don't know that, either," answered Daniel, and once again, the rest of the party agreed with him. "What's up?"

  "Just finding it funny how much language differs between cantons," I lied.

  "Hah. Wait till you hear the north-west accent. Can't understand a word those sand-people say."

  I didn't respond, being too busy worrying about whether I needed to worry. So I had an inexplicably extended vocabulary. Was that actually a problem? Maybe it really was the fault of Memory, and I was bringing back half-remembered things from my early childhood, before I had Stats.

  The only problem with that explanation was that I'd grown up in a tiny farming village. Our village didn't contain beavers, and didn't often get visited by outsiders. When outsiders did visit, it was by people like the inspector Matthew, and I didn't interact with them. I couldn't imagine how the topic would have come up.

  Of course, there was another possible explanation, but I was doing my best to ignore it.

  Thankfully, my deflection was aided by the dungeon coming into view, in the form of a strange haze hovering over the grasslands. As we drew closer, more details became apparent. A dry-stone wall, black metal railings poking out of it and stretching between pillars taller than I was. The air above the wall shimmered, as if in a strong heat haze, but through the railings, I could only see a dark mist. An occasional leafless tree sprouted on the inside of the wall, poking out of the mists, but I couldn't see any signs of graves or monsters.

  Also, the entire enclosed area was smaller than a single one of our village's fields. Nowhere near enough to house a dungeon.

  Dungeons were such blatant cheats.

  We circled the construction until we found a gate: a towering, double-doored thing of gothic-styled wrought iron, attached to pillars decorated with grotesque winged gargoyles.

  "Well, shall we?" asked Lee, pushing open the gates.

  "No-one guarding this one?" I asked, looking around but spotting no-one.

  "There's no settlement here," shrugged Daniel. "Not really any need for a guard."

  Wasn't there? Was I misunderstanding what it was the guards were there for? Regardless, I followed the group in.

  As expected, the view from the inside of the gates bore little resemblance to that from the outside. What had appeared as an enclosure the size of a small field from the outside stretched as far as I could see on the inside; an expanse of brown earth with gravestones poking out seemingly at random.

  Not that I could see far. There was a thin mist—less dense than it had appeared from the outside, but nonetheless present—which restricted the range of our vision, but the bigger issue was the fact that it was night. A full moon in the sky—clearly visible despite the mist—provided enough light to get by, but it was no sun.

  The night sky was quite impressive, given that it was still mid-morning, and the graveyard had no roof.

  "Eerie," opined Felicity.

  "You said it," agreed Lee.

  Ryan smirked, apparently more at home in the strange environment than the other two.

  "Okay, we all know the mission. Open five sarcophagi, swat the ghosts with our crystals-onna-stick, then slay the mummy."

  Since we were no longer using a dagger, the stick in question was held by Daniel. No-one had a weapon proficiency that dealt with whatever the heck sort of weapon it qualified as, but it wasn't that far away from a spear. It just had a very unusual head on it.

  "Why is the boss a mummy, anyway?" asked Ryan.

  "Why not?" asked Lee. "It's an undead, and a rank up from basic skeletons and zombies."

  "Yes, but that's not the point. This kingdom has no custom of mummification."

  "What's mummification?"

  "... You really need to read more. When someone dies, we bury them or burn them, right? Well, elsewhere on this planet, people sometimes do... other things."

  "Wait, mummies are real? Not just monsters? Why would people want to turn their dead into that?"

  Ryan facepalmed. "Just forget I said anything."

  "You can't just make a random comment and then not explain yourself!" complained Lee. "Why would people make mummies?"

  "Okay, that's enough, you two. This is a dungeon, not a town fair."

  "Real mummies don't walk around and attack people," I pointed out quietly. "Just like a real skeleton doesn't get up and walk around, unlike the monster version."

  "Ah, that makes more sense."

  "Oh? You're remarkably well read," said Ryan.

  "Dammit..." I muttered, realising I'd done it again. I was pretty damn sure I'd never heard of a mummy until I'd read about this dungeon back in the capital's guild library, so how had I come out with that? Was my 'condition' getting worse?

  "Something wrong?" asked Daniel.

  "Later," I deflected. "We have incoming."

  And then I vanished. Or, at least, I ducked behind a gravestone and sprinted from grave to tree, working my way behind the trio of approaching zombies while they shuffled their way toward the rest of the group, while doing my best to remain silent. Not quite a literal vanishing act, but until I convinced [Expert Stealth] to evolve, there wasn't much I could do in that department.

  Stacy stepped forward without a word, raising a fist and winding it back. Zombies weren't the brightest monsters in existence, and they didn't react, mindlessly walking forward.

  Two of them didn't make it.

  "Stab," I whispered, my daggers at the back of two of their necks, pointed slightly upward.

  The Skill activated, the fifth stage Skill piercing through skull and brain alike.

  So each one was worth a base of three hundred experience points? Not much, but they were slow, only posing a threat to anyone in large groups. Their only strength was durability. Chop off a limb, and they'd keep coming. Stab their heart, rip out their liver, fill their lungs with water, and they would barely notice. Decapitate one, and the head would still try to bite you. Killing one required causing extensive brain damage, hence why I was forced to use an active Skill despite my surprise attack from behind.

  Stacy unleashed her punch.

  Being solid steel, her gauntlets were presumably quite weighty. Despite being a simple, straight punch, her fist was moving quite quickly at the time of impact. The aim was obviously to cause significant brain damage, and she succeeded admirably.

  The head of the weak monster exploded.

  The weak monster that I was standing behind.

  "Wow. That's a surprising amount of vomit, given that we haven't eaten anything since the inn this morning," commented Ryan as I desperately tried to scrape brain matter off my face in the small gaps between the retching.

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