As I made my way west, I had plenty of time for thinking, and one of my thoughts was—to put it simply—that everyone was far lower level than they should be.

  Mum had refused to tell me her level, but I had much better mental Stats now than back then, and could do the maths myself. Based on her age, the way experience gains scaled with Skill, and the way experience requirements scaled with level, she should have been approaching level sixty, if she hadn't already surpassed it. The highest level of my victims had only been forty-six, and he'd looked older than Mum. That was a sizeable difference.

  Leo had given specific orders to those over level fifty, as if they were the most elite of his forces.

  I'd thought that people in better social positions would earn more experience. I could see that a bunch of bandits that had run away from villages probably wouldn't earn much additional experience: their behaviour wouldn't match their Skills, so there would be little to no occupational experience, while there was no way they could kill large numbers of people on a daily basis. But that bandit camp had only been set up less than a year ago at the earliest, so that didn't explain why the bandits were so low level.

  Did people just... not try? While the serfs put in their mandated eight hours, the peasants slacked off? I could see the temptation; if I was to be brutally honest, we could have put half the effort into our fields back home and still got ninety percent of the production. There was simply a limit to how much difference could be made by diligently weeding and tending the fields on a daily basis.

  There were other factors to consider, too. How much experience would a guard earn if everyone was well behaved? A soldier if the roads were safe? A blacksmith if they had no orders?

  I recalled the memory of Boris having Lana make tools only to immediately melt them back down. Most notably, Boris himself hadn't been joining in. Boris would have had [Expert Blacksmithing] at its final stage, and then just stopped. Unlike farmers, he wasn't mandated to put in eight hours a day if there was no work that needed doing.

  Were farmers simply over-levelled? Or perhaps my estimations were off, and Mum wasn't as high level as I thought.

  Either way, it seemed likely that anyone who didn't either actively hunt down monsters or diligently utilise Skills for a significant fraction of their waking hours would be lucky to reach the third growth milestone, let alone the fourth. It made me wonder what sort of level the soldiers and knights I'd dealt with had been, if they spent much of their time on standby. Maybe not as high as I'd assumed, if the main source of their strength was Skills.

  Adventurers, on the other hand... With the amount of experience I'd gained from wiping out that goblin village, I imagined adventurers could get into triple digit levels. The fifth growth milestone. But adventurers weren't in the direct employ of nobility, and would the nobility really tolerate what was effectively a vigilante army in their territory if it was stronger than their own knights and soldiers? Heck, there was a guild building in the kingdom's capital. A whole building full of grizzled veterans over level one hundred, inside the defensive walls. Dad had thought the baron would feel threatened by me simply because of my Mark. I wasn't entirely convinced Dad knew what he was talking about, but the logic was sound, and having an adventurers' guild building down the street from his residence was so much worse.

  I was missing something. It was a pity I hadn't spotted the discrepancy before I parted from Sir Galahad; he'd presumably have known the answer.

  At that point, my musing was interrupted by the road curving north, springing up right in front of me on the shallow gully I was following. Thankfully, there were no travellers visible, so I back-pedalled back out of sight.

  [Expert Stealth] insisted I should travel parallel to the road while remaining out of sight of it, but doing so was doing horrible things to my travel time. As Sir Galahad had said, the terrain north of Greyforge was just as barren as to the south, but was more rugged. The peaks and gullies made it easy enough to stay out of sight of the road, but having to follow the curving gullies meant I was running twice as far as I needed to. Then there was the time spent checking on the road position, to ensure I wasn't getting lost.

  I was going to run out of food before reaching the border as it was. I couldn't afford the increased travel time.

  What were the chances of bumping into anyone hostile? It had been a couple of days since the battle of Greystone, and if the count was going to respond as Sir Galahad expected, he'd need to marshal a sufficient force. Assuming he had some method of efficient communication, his best men were probably in the south already. They'd have no reason to be on this road. I hadn't gained any experience from [Expert Stealth] for evading detection or pursuit since leaving Greyforge, which implied there hadn't been any near misses thus far.

  There was the problem that even his not-best men could screw me over, or even random villagers if they decided to take advantage of me as a lone traveller, but at least I'd stand a chance of escape. If I ran off-road, I didn't need to go far for the rugged landscape to become a maze.

  Wishing I wasn't being forced to repeatedly take risks, I popped back out onto the road and followed it as it weaved to the north-west. Thankfully, my luck held, and I met no-one. I continued running through the night, too; my Constitution was high enough for it not to bother me, and with plentiful cover around, I figured I was better off sleeping in the light. All I needed to do was move a little away from the road, and no traveller would see me.

  And then I moved a little further, so that no traveller would hear me. Something else I should have asked Sir Galahad; how loudly did I snore, really?

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The next day was much the same, which was actually a little concerning in its own right. I hadn't passed a single traveller, of any sort. The road was completely empty. There weren't even any monsters, although that was explicable enough; in this barren wasteland, there'd be nothing for them to eat.

  Nothing for me to eat, either. I ate the last of what I had in my pack before lying down to sleep. My water supplies were getting low, too, despite how many canteens I'd looted from the bandit camp. The road hadn't crossed a single river, so there had been no opportunity to refill since Greyforge.

  Thankfully, the border came into view not too long after I'd started running the next day. Or next afternoon, rather, given that I'd gone to sleep at dawn.

  Unlike the transition from Cargellen to Harvent, which I hadn't even noticed, this border was very obvious. A tall wall, gleaming white in the sunlight, spanned the horizon. The road led to a great gate, wider and taller than those of Greyforge, flanked by fortified towers, from which flags of blue flew. The flag displayed a shield, in the centre of which was depicted a golden crown.

  The construction was, rather obviously, guarded.

  I could see a few soldiers on top of the wall. Not in a quantity to raise a significant defence, not with how widely spaced they were, but enough to keep an eye on both sides. Crossing unseen outside of an official crossing point would be impossible if the wall encircled the entire royal canton.

  The main gate itself was closed, with multiple soldiers in gleaming mail watching vigilantly from above. I'd thought Captain Tyler's squad to have been well equipped, with their chain-mail and fancy tabards and armoured horses, but it was poor fare compared to these guys. Solid metal breastplates gleamed brightly enough in the sunlight that the reflected beams were blinding. There were no tabards, but blue cloaks fluttered in the wind instead, each one stamped with the same heraldry as that on the flags.

  A couple more soldiers in the same uniform guarded a small, open gate, off to the side of the main one.

  It was simultaneously good news—as promised, the border seemed to be manned solely by people from the royal canton, not the count's men—and bad—the professionalism on display made my head spin. Sir Galahad had been rather clear about not using his name to cross this border, despite the fact that it wasn't manned by the count's men, from which I suspected that talking my way through would not prove trivial.

  I needed to try, though, whatever my doubts, so I headed toward the open gate.

  "Turn around," ordered a guard as I approached, her uninterested gaze following me from within her tall helm. "Residents of the Harvent Canton are not permitted to travel at this time."

  "I'm not a resident of the Harvent Canton," I tried. As doubtful of success as I was, I had no intention of giving up that easily.

  Her gaze grew a little more interested. "State your name and business," she ordered.

  "Robin of Cargellen Canton. I'm headed to the sapphire city to register as an adventurer."

  I watched her eyes narrow, although the expression seemed more confused than suspicious. It was a little hard to tell; her ornate helm hid a lot more of her face than Captain Tyler's had done.

  "I'm sorry, but let me get this straight. You—still sixteen, by the looks of you—left your home and your canton, then crossed the entirety of Harvent Canton, to register as an adventurer? Why?"

  "Dungeons are fun," I answered with a shrug. "Also, lots of experience points."

  The guard doing the questioning glanced at her partner, who shrugged.

  "And you crossed Harvent Canton without difficulty?" she continued.

  "No. I got kidnapped by bandits. Thankfully, I was able to escape."

  My stomach, unhappy about the current state of fullness, chose that point to rumble loudly.

  "... Also, this canton seems a little short on food," I added.

  "I see. In that case, please list everyone you've killed, and why," continued the woman.

  I didn't bother with anything like 'what makes you think I've killed people'. She could very likely see [Murderer II].

  This was actually kinda bad... Thanks to Leeroy, it was no longer the case that all my kills had been members of the bandit camp.

  "I... uh... didn't exactly get their names beforehand," I answered. "I mentioned bandits? Well, I didn't escape quietly. I made a bit of a mess on the way out."

  "Please give a straight answer. Were all of your human kills earned during your escape from bandits?"

  Damn. "No," I answered. "Not just during my escape. After getting out, I hunted down some stragglers."

  "So, having escaped from bandits, you didn't run, but hunted them down?"

  "I disapprove of bandits," I shrugged. "Oh, also there was one more. A group of raiders trying to burn down a village. I didn't really want to get involved, but I ended up killing one of the raiders who ran in my direction. Aside from him, all of my other human kills were bandits from a single bandit camp."

  Mentioning that one was another risk, but I didn't want her asking again if all my kills were bandits, because I'd have been forced to answer no. Two in a row would be suspicious, and make it look like I was trying to hide that last one.

  She seemed rather suspicious regardless, which was fair. I was claiming something rather unbelievable, after all.

  "How, exactly, did you score so many bandit kills?" she asked.

  "Quietly," I answered. "I have [Expert Stealth], and the bandits I killed were all disillusioned villagers, without a single combat Skill or detection Skill between them."

  "A C-rank Skill? How old are you?"

  "Sixteen."

  "Then how?"

  "Just because I'm not officially registered doesn't mean I've never been to a dungeon."

  "Then why aren't you registered? Hell, a kid of sixteen with a C-rank Skill already, why aren't you employed directly by Baron Cargellen?"

  "Uh... I was falsely accused of a crime before I had the chance... A social superior of mine, and it was just my word against... Huh..."

  Oh.

  Ohhh.

  "Something wrong?" asked the guard.

  "Yeah. I'm a massive idiot. It's only just occurred to me that I probably didn't need to run, because there's no way his accusations would have passed any sort of lie detection. In my defence, I didn't know lie detection Skills were a thing back then."

  "Back then? What interactions have you had in Harvent Canton that taught you of their existence?"

  Drat. I was still being an idiot. I shouldn't have told her that...

  "I passed through Greyforge on my way here," I answered. "The questioning by the guard at the gate made it kinda obvious. Your questioning too, for that matter."

  The guard smirked a little beneath her helm. "And, now that you know, you don't wish to return home?"

  I considered it, but even if John's trumped-up charges wouldn't stick, I'd probably still be in trouble for running. Just as Old Three-eye had foretold, I'd fled from ghosts that were never there, but by the time I'd realised it, the knowledge made no difference.

  "Nah. I'm already here, and I'd rather not cross Harvent Canton again in a long while."

  "Hmm..." said the guard. "I guess there's all sorts of crazies out there. Please follow me."

  And with that, she set off, not through the gate but into the adjoining tower.

  Should I be worried?