Chương 583: Chapter Five Hundred and Sixty-Seven - With Interest

We left the Beaver as a big pack and once we were on the ground, we started towards the edge of the field we'd landed in. Headman Eikon was standing there, leaning up on a crooked old cane with a few of the village people around him. They looked like big farmer sorts, though they seemed a bit confused on seeing us all. One of them leaned to the side to talk to the man next to him. I was pretty sure he couldn't tell that having four ears made me real good at eavesdropping.

"There's all sorts of beasts in that bunch," he said.

"Yeah," his buddy replied.

"At least some of them look human."

"Look human. Might have tails or something, like that one with the ears. Looks like fox ears, yeah? Think she'd break into my chicken roost?" I found myself pressing my lips together. Racism... or, I suppose, speciesism... was something I'd run into before, but it hadn't stopped being ugly. Then again, I wasn't sure what I could do about it? It was hardly the time to sit down with them and talk about it, and I wasn't sure how well moralizing worked with that kind of thing.

Best to put my best foot forward and hope that I could befriend my way through their meanness.

"Hello!" I said.

"We're ready to check out that dungeon of yours."

"I can see that. Are you sure? It might be dangerous," the village head said.

"We're quite certain," Amaryllis said, only a tiny bit snippy.

"We're members of the Exploration Guild. We'll document the issues with your local dungeon and do what we can to appease it."

"But we aren't paying you?" he muttered.

"I had noticed," Amaryllis replied. This time she was snippy.

"Shall we get going? At this rate we'll be arriving after sundown."

"Oh, yes, of course," the old man said.

"I hope you don't mind, but I asked Joshua here to guide you. My knees aren't what they used to be, and I'm not sure I can keep up with a bunch of youngsters making for somewhere fast."

"We can walk slower, if you want to come along," I offered.

"Or one of us could carry you!"

"Ah, no no, that's fine. But I'll accompany you through the village, at least." That was more than acceptable! The old village head spun around and we followed him through the village. It wasn't the fastest route, but that was okay. It let me take in the town a little. People were coming out and staring at us from their porches. Obviously, adventurers and explorers weren't the most common sight around here.

The old village head nodded to some, waved to others, and generally seemed quite proud of his town, which he had every right to be; it was a quaint little place.

"I wouldn't mind retiring in a place like this," I said.

"We're a ways off from retirement, Broccoli," Amaryllis said.

"Focus more on the job for the next, oh, fifty to seventy years, and then we'll see about retirement." I blinked. How long? I supposed that people with higher levels did have a few more points in their Health.

"Do higher levelled people age better?" I asked.

"Yes, obviously," Amaryllis said.

"Did you not meet Abraham? Though I wouldn't be surprised if your mind scrubbed his very existence from your memories. That would actually be a good survival instinct."

"No, I mean, yes, I know Abraham. I guess I never really spent too much time thinking about it. If we're going to retire in a long, long time, then we should start thinking about savings! Interest over such a long time would be a lot, you know?" Amaryllis was giving me a look.

"How do you even know what interest is? That's the province of financiers."

"Really?" I wondered. I supposed that interest might not have been as important, say, in my great-grandparent's time, but I was pretty sure it was common knowledge on Earth. Maybe it wasn't on Dirt, though? Amaryllis and I yapped for a while about it while crossing through Blackwatch. It really was a subject that only the nobility and those in business cared about. Personal loans were more of a flat fee kind of thing, or done between friends and family and were less about interest.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Crazy, but it was a fun tangent for a moment. We reached the end of town soon enough, and the village head nodded to us before gesturing down a winding road.

"That way leads to the coast. That's where you'll find the Black Crater."

"Is it on an island?" I asked. He blinked.

"No? Not quite. There's a bay nearby though, and the crater fills with some water when the rains are heavy enough, but it tends to empty out in the summers."" Is there an island nearby?" I asked.

"Maybe one with a fortress-shaped hole on it?"

"Hmph. Come back with the job done, and we'll talk about it," he said. That was fair, I supposed. Joshua took the lead from there. I walked a little closer and did a bit of friendly small talk, slowly making him more comfortable since he seemed a bit tense. As it turned out, he was a farmer that worked and lived not too far from Blackwatch. He had two big fields and two smaller ones. He grew onions, mostly, but some years like this one, switched to peas.

Sometimes he also did some leafy greens, mostly chard, but there was another family that did chard more around here, and it was their thing, so he only did it on some years where they were rotating out and he wanted to be light on the soil. Otherwise, he had a garden for herbs that were surprisingly profitable and he had a tiny vineyard that he had been working on for years, but they never produced anything great.

He was hoping to grow his Farming skill high enough to kind of overcome the poor quality of the soil and finally be able to grow grapes for wine. There was some real money in that, and he liked wine more than the beer made from the neighboring town's hops. I really didn't have much to add, but Caprica came to the rescue. She knew enough about gardening that even my D-rank Gardening couldn't keep up.

Mostly it was stuff she'd picked up via osmosis from being around her sister who did a lot of tending to the family gardens and greenhouses as a hobby. Joshua was quite a bit more comfortable with us by the time we made it across his farm.

"Alright, that there big rock, see the one down the road?" He pointed ahead at an unusually large boulder, sitting just to the side of the road. Beyond the boulder, a forest had been thinned out, with every other tree chopped down. Splinters of wood littered the road, so I guess it was for logging.

"I see it," I said.

"Right, well, the Black Crater's just around that to the right, then you keep on for a ways. Do... you need me to come with?"

"Did you want to stay here?" I asked. His farmhouse was a few minutes back along the road, we'd passed it already.

"Well, I've got some tending to do, you see? And, ah... well, not to put myself out there too much, but I'm a Farmer, not a Fighter. Big black knights don't do it for me, ya see?"

"That's very understandable," I said.

"Let us handle it!" With that, we parted ways. Once we reached the rock, we veered right, and it was clear that from this point on, very few people took the 'road' because it was mostly overgrown. We pushed through some low-hanging branches, then we were in the open. The Black Crater was unmistakable. There was a slight bump all the way around, then in the middle of it, a large bowl of undisturbed, blackened earth. It looked like something massive had come down here and burned everything.

The crater was at least fifty metres wide, maybe a smidge more? It was hard to tell, but it was quite big, and in its middle, the ground dipped down by at least two Broccolis in height. Since the crater was kind of slapped onto the side of a hill, it was deeper on one side than another, and that deeper end had collected a sort of pond of rainwater.

"Well, those sure are knights," Calamity said. The knights he was talking about were three figures in full plate armour, stalking the centre of the crater. They had long cloaks on, with hoods over their heads and long swords by their sides. They didn't look super friendly, but I would give them a chance!