"Morning," I said to Oliver, two days later. I'd once again managed to return to the capital at night-time, and had to leave a sack of orc ears in my room overnight. Thankfully, they didn't smell as badly as goblins.

  Oliver sighed. "It's been... what, thirty-five hours since you took the job? The orc camp was a full day's travel away!"

  "I move quickly," I shrugged. "Light equipment, high Stats, good roads. Also, there were less than three dozen of them."

  "Less than three dozen, he says, as if thirty-odd orcs is a small number," sighed Oliver as he emptied the sack. "Thirty-three, to be precise, I see."

  "Thirty-four, actually, but I accidentally vaporised one of their heads."

  "Whatever. Let me mark the quest as complete."

  Six thousand wasn't nothing, but the real experience had been in slaying all the orcs. I'd even gained another level from it, after carefully assassinating over half of them before being spotted and adding [Lightning Shock] to the mix. [Noise] had got its first workout, but I hadn't advanced it, despite the usefulness. Until the guild master got back to me, it seemed more sensible to save my points. If there was a risk I'd be kicked into a hostile jungle in a few days' time, there were more important things to spend the points on than [Noise].

  "Cheers. And now my C-rank promotion?"

  "But you only just passed the first growth milestone... Oh well. Whatever. Gimme your hand."

  After checking that yes, I really had passed the second growth milestone, he updated my invisible System tags to reflect my new rank. My guild card updated itself to match the moment I touched it.

  After all my talk about work ethic, almost the only jobs I'd done had been what was required for promotion. I really ought to start doing more missions at some point...

  "And here's your pay," continued Oliver, dumping a considerable pile of precious metal onto the counter. "That includes your bonus for advancing rank, along with all the dungeon experience stipend you've earned to date."

  "Wow," I said, staring at the pile of coins. I'd gained a lot of experience at the Harpy's Aerie, but had it really been that much? "Seriously?"

  "Seriously. How you managed that, I have no idea, and I'd quite like to keep things that way. Now, I assume you'll be popping back into dungeons until you hit your third growth marker and can do another couple of B-rank missions? So I won't need to put up with your overachieving for the next week or so?"

  "Longer than that, unfortunately," came an answer from directly behind Oliver, causing him to flinch and spin around.

  "Guild master?"

  "Robin, grab your money, then follow me. We need to talk."

  "Uhh..." I stammered as I hurriedly filled my pack with silver. Only silver. There were far more than ten small silver, and almost as many large. No wonder the pile was so big. Had he just deliberately given me a pile instead of using bigger denominations as some sort of petty revenge?

  Not that the denominations of my pay were as important as why the guild master had just turned back up. I was hoping for good news, but his grim face and curt speech evidenced otherwise.

  "What happened?" I asked as I hurried after him. For all of his bulk, the man walked quickly.

  "Nothing. Yet. It's what's going to happen that's the problem, apparently."

  "Huh? So they told you about the worlds colliding?"

  Duke Isunbloot abruptly stopped walking, causing me to slam into his back. It was like walking into a brick wall.

  "The what?" he demanded. "No, not yet. Do not say a word more until we reach my office."

  He resumed his march, now even quicker, stamping on each stair of the staircase as if the building had personally offended him. I trailed behind, now keeping slightly more distance as I dabbed at my bleeding nose.

  Once we reached his office, he ushered me inside, slammed the door and engaged the privacy wards.

  "Now, let's start from the beginning. It seems you haven't shared everything, so let's start with worlds colliding. What does that even mean?"

  "Isn't that the thing that's going to happen? This planet is going to crash into another about five centuries from now, and there's something at that nephilim installation that might be able to prevent it. That's what the gods wanted me to do."

  "The gods can't do anything about the problem themselves?"

  "Apparently not."

  "Okay, finally things make sense."

  "They do?" I asked, really not seeing where the sense was.

  "Yes. The worlds colliding isn't important. Or at least, isn't important yet. Giving you that task is nothing but a means to an end."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "Nope, that makes even less sense. How can worlds colliding not be important?"

  "It will be, in the future, when it actually happens. Or rather, it would be, if there was still anyone left alive by that point. Which it seems that there won't be."

  I blinked. There was another existential threat? Just how many issues did this world have?

  Oh... So that was where the sense was.

  "The gods don't actually care about the tower, at least for now. It's just fuel to get me [Chosen One]. There's something else they want me to deal with later, and unlike the big planetary collision, it's not multiple centuries away."

  "Precisely. To quote the Archbishop, 'a dead tide approaches'. He seems pretty certain that if it's not dealt with, the result will be the extinction of humanity."

  "And now I've lost the sense again... Who's the Archbishop? Dead tide? We're expecting some sort of plague of undead?"

  "The Archbishop is the head of the temple here in the kingdom, but... interpreting the exact meaning of his words is a skill the System can't help with. An undead invasion seems the most likely, but whatever the exact threat, we can be certain that humanity is in great danger."

  "So, to ask the obvious, what does that have to do with me? I'm only one person, [Chosen One] or otherwise. I can't defend the entire planet from an undead invasion."

  "No, we need to ensure things don't get that far. You will play an important role, but for now, the details don't matter. When I visited the temple, the priests were quite emphatic that sending you to the nephilim tower was vital, but it was impossible to get them to explain why. I'm pretty sure they didn't know themselves. In fact, I'm not sure they cared. Instead, they were rather perturbed that, after being contacted directly by the gods, you hadn't immediately dropped everything to fulfil their mission, no questions asked."

  "... Why would anyone do that?" I complained. "With no preparation, I'd have just got myself killed."

  "Indeed. Heck, you still might."

  "So, what now? You really want me to go?"

  "Want? No. But after the Archbishop himself turned up and prophesied at me... Let's just say that I accept that you're going to have to, unless you want to spend the rest of your life watching the sky for stray thunderbolts. But that doesn't mean I'm going to throw you out unprepared."

  Saying so, the guild master slammed a gold ring onto the desk. Could the man not do anything quietly? With his Strength, it was a surprise his furniture didn't break.

  ... Actually, with my [Mana Manipulation] being somewhat better than the [Mana Sensitivity] I'd had on my first visit here, I could detect faint magic from not just the desk, but all the furniture. Some sort of subtle enchantment, stealthily added to prevent mere dabblers from picking it up.

  The ring, on the other hand, glowed brightly enough that even [Mana Sensitivity] could never have missed it. The thing was packed with more mana than I was.

  "An enchanted ring?" I asked.

  The duke sighed. "Yes. An enchanted ring. I've had many a debate with people from all walks of life about the interplay between receiving assistance and future growth. How giving people handouts they haven't earned or pulling them up through low levels can cause them to slow down or stall out later. It's not mere bluster—in one extreme case, I've seen someone get a Mark awarded at their first growth milestone that completely removed their ability to gain experience. There are all sorts of arguments, but to me, there's one that is far and away the most important: there's nothing that's going to cut off someone's future growth more effectively than them being dead."

  "And so you're giving me a ring? What does it do?"

  "I'm not giving it to you. I'm loaning it to you. For a deposit. Gimme a copper, and you can have it back when you safely return this ring."

  A copper... From the way it was shedding mana, the thing probably had a value in the mithril coin range. But if the guild master wanted to 'loan' me a powerful item in such a way that he could claim it wasn't a handout, I wasn't going to complain.

  "And what does it do?" I prompted, tossing over a copper coin.

  "Nothing much, on its own. It's just a storage item."

  Just a storage item... Wow. I'd wanted one ever since discovering they existed, and with all my money, I could perhaps get the smallest one on the market. There was no way this was the smallest one on the market, not to mention that it presumably negated the weight of its contents if it was supposed to be worn on a finger. The fact that it was a ring, rather than a bag or chest or something with a physical opening to receive items, marked it as a higher end item, too. And he called it nothing much. Damn the nobility and the high levellers.

  "Thank you very much," I said out loud, since I was hardly going to voice my internal complaints.

  The duke snorted. "Don't thank me till you get back safely. The only thing in there is a bestiary of the monsters that populate the Jungle of Braccus. I'm loaning you that ring for the same reason I'm not sending a party with you—use that compendium to look up the colossal worm. You need to travel light. Fill the ring up with potions, food, water, and equipment, then get going. Do not take a backpack or heavy armour. You still have five days on your god-given deadline, so I suggest stopping off at the Raptor Steppe on the way, since most monsters you'll encounter in the jungle will be beasts. Gain as many levels as you can before you set foot there."

  The Raptor Steppe... A D-rank dungeon that was broadly in the direction of Harvent Canton. The bonus task was simply to kill five of the roaming raptor packs before dealing with the boss. Simple enough. I couldn't foresee that posing any difficulty.

  And I could finally afford potions! Yay!

  I wasn't sure about the worms, though. What threat could a worm pose, however colossal? But if the guild master was saying it, there must be something to it.

  "Okay, this all sounds reasonable. I guess I'll head to the stores, then."

  The duke snorted again. "Reasonable? The hell part of this is reasonable? Now get going before I say something sufficiently blasphemous that someone takes offence."

  With a nod, I left the gruesomely decorated office and visited the stores to stock up. A few potions, a lot of food, a few cheap spare knives. What else would I need? There was a whole host of equipment I wanted for camping out in the wilds that hadn't been important here in the royal canton. Some skill crystals would also be advisable, because I'd seen the size of the jungle in my dream, and without some sort of Skill to navigate it, I'd just get hopelessly lost. I had to save some coin to pay my lodging fees for a couple of months in advance, too.

  ... Wait. Actually, maybe I didn't. I had a storage ring now. The guild master hadn't told me how much it could store, but it wasn't as if I owned much. Everything I had stored in my inn room would probably fit inside.

  A quick trip back, and it turned out that not only did everything fit, but, in a fit of experimentation, so did the wardrobe and the bed. Not that I intended to steal the furniture, so I put them back, climbing into the bed to read my bestiary.

  The dinosaur I'd seen being eaten by the bird was a B-rank monster called a braccus tyrant. B-rank. The birds—one of which I'd seen casually snap up a braccus tyrant as a snack—were A-rank fortress eagles. There was nothing in the jungle below D-rank. Heck, they even had treants, and given the size of the trees, I wasn't surprised to find they were A-rank too.

  The colossal worms were S-rank. Calling them 'colossal' was utterly underselling them. Even a juvenile was over a hundred metres in length, with a circular mouth ten metres in diameter. Despite their immense size, they tunnelled silently. When they attacked, the first you knew of it was when the surrounding landscape snapped closed around you, stabbing you with thousands of needle-shaped teeth. That was also, generally, the last you knew of it.

  There were tracking or perception Skills that could detect them beneath the surface, but I had no such things, and there would be more important things to spend my skill points on. My defence was my weight, or lack thereof. Living beneath the surface, the monsters 'saw' vibrations, not light. Footsteps, the patter of rain, the crashing of monsters as they fought or fed. They wouldn't be able to identify me as human, and so the blind aggression of monsters towards humans would not kick in. The monster would evaluate me only with cold logic. My low weight, combined with [Expert Stealth] to tread lightly, would combine to make me look unappetising. Essentially, my only defence against an endemic species of S-rank monsters was convincing them that I wasn't worth the effort to catch and digest.

  "... I'm going to die," I informed the ceiling, half wishing I'd never read the damn book.

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