Silvermane cropped at the grass with infuriating serenity, as though we were on a pleasant afternoon ride rather than twenty miles west of Branfield, parked squarely on a stretch of road that every sensible person avoided. The old quarry road lay ahead of me in a shallow curve, half-choked by scrub and loose stone, the treeline pressing close on either side. It was the sort of place where sound died quickly and sightlines ended abruptly. Exactly the sort of place bandits were supposed to like.

  Yet, two hours later, I was still alone.

  If I were Nosadiva, I’d have taken the bait by now. Or at least sent someone to see why a lone rider in expensive-looking armor was loitering on a road everyone knew to be unsafe. The fact that no one had so much as tested the perimeter was beginning to bother me.

  “Perfect!” Anabeth exclaimed from the rise behind me. “You’ve got the positioning exactly right, even down to that shrub there, see it? The one that looks like it’s dying but never quite does. You even captured its lifelessness!”

  That was just because my handwriting was hideous, Anabeth.

  I glanced where she was pointing. I had, in fact, been using that shrub as a reference point. I hadn’t told her that.

  I’d even had the time to finish my long-overdue task and recharged the AP in my Huskweave using a nearby baobab tree. This was the extent of how much time we’d wasted here.

  “—so,” Anabeth said lightly, for what had to be the fifth time today, “since the bandits are clearly committed to not showing up, perhaps we could, in my humble and entirely unbiased opinion, pay a short visit to a nearby dungeon?”

  I closed my eyes.

  She leaned into my field of vision anyway. “It’s very close. Barely a detour. And,” she added, almost sing-song, “it probably contains more of that lovely quartz you keep pretending not to care about.”

  I opened my eyes and looked down at the map.

  She’d already marked the quarry road that forked south, skirting a low ridge of fractured stone—and there, just beyond it, was a skull-shaped dungeon entrance.

  Anabeth, watching me far too closely, produced a small shard of skull-shaped quartz from her pocket and set it in my palm.

  Of course she’d happen to persuade me five times to enter a Grave-Class dungeon. I would be in no shape to enter a High Tier II dungeon, but theoretically, the common creatures wouldn’t be facing anything that much stronger than the oxen. But the oxen hadn’t tried to crawl back inside me.

  I skimmed the notes.

  Maybe I wouldn’t need to fight any boss at all. If I treated the place like an excavation instead of a battlefield, I could farm fragments, test the dungeon’s response patterns, and withdraw long before the Shepherd noticed anything was missing. I’d need to bring the fragments to a Fragment Crafter, of course, but it’d probably be better than fighting something named The Ossuary Shepherd.

  I closed my fingers around the quartz shard until its edges bit into my palm. “You will tell me what you gain from a Grave-Class dungeon.”

  “Well,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back with suspicious composure, “this is, in fact, the most ethical way to obtain skeleton fragments, my lord. Pre-sanctioned dungeon remains, naturally recycled by aetheric processes. Raising constructs otherwise would be dreadfully inefficient.”

  An opening! Maybe I could find a reason to not have to traverse into a Grave-class dungeon.

  “Wretched witch!” I bellowed. “How dare you, in my presence, raise a non-metal construct while claiming loyalty to the Ferrum Lord?”

  Her reaction was immediate and—annoyingly—sincere.

  “Oh! No, no, no—my lord, absolutely not. Did I say skeletal constructs?” She waved her hands as if batting the idea out of the air. “I would never raise skeletal constructs on your watch. I cannot raise skeletal constructs, for I don’t have the affinity.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “My primary affinity is Stone,” she continued briskly. “And my secondary is Metal. Bone is… adjacent, at best. Adjacent enough to react to stone summoning ceremonies! As does slimes, but I do not know why slimes react to stone dusts in ceremonies. None of the tomes have said anything about slimes, so I only found out about their conductiveness through trial-and-error. Regardless of material, I can only raise constructs that answer to lithic or metallic binding principles. Skeletons merely happen to possess”—she hesitated, choosing her words carefully—“excellent conduit geometry.”

  That was… comforting. She would not raise the dead. She would not whisper to bones at night. She would not kill me in my sleep and repurpose my skeleton.

  “Very well,” I said.

  I regretted everything.

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  The skull-shaped entrance was not a carving in any artistic sense. One side of the ‘jaw’ had slumped lower than the other. The eye sockets were tunnels. The darkness inside wasn’t uniform; it had layers, like sediment, each deeper shade swallowing the last. Looking too long made my eyes ache, as though depth itself was a lie down there.

  No birds nested nearby. No insects buzzed. Silvermane refused to move any closer. Even the wind seemed to veer aside, sliding around the entrance rather than into it.

  Anabeth peered up at the sagging skull-face with open academic interest. “Shall we go in?”

  I dismounted, told Silvermane to not wander and not eat anything, then followed Anabeth inside.

  The daylight behind us diminished almost immediately, swallowed by the curvature of the skull’s jaw. Immediately, I saw a loose assembly of bones sliding a few inches along the floor. There weren’t just a few of them. They were everywhere, hanging against the wall, spine bowed, limbs trailing downward like roots. None of them walked. None of them crawled. They simply occupied space.

  Anabeth whispered, “I think they are Interment Drifters, Ser. See how the marrow channels are still aligned? Very tidy interment. You can walk past them safely if you don’t want engagement.”

  I stared at the creature until Ceralis gave me the information I required.

  “They are Sumpwardens, not Drifters,” I corrected her while knowing nothing about this creature.

  “Ah!” Anabeth immediately dipped her head. “My apologies, my lord. I have not yet had the privilege of entering a Grave-Class dungeon in person. Please forgive my ignorance.”

  I just knew it would be the stupidest thing imaginable for me to engage with this creature. My attacks were so sloppy I’d just accumulate debuffs, or alternatively, I’d just waste my entire AP reservoir for a 2% chance of dropping a Skull Fragment.

  “Ah. These creatures are normally not worth your time, my lord,” she leaned in. “But the bone slivers are said to be excellent conduits for Durand reinforcement.”

  Not this again.

  “They’re just… sitting there,” she said, almost apologetically. “Waiting to be taken.”

  Why did this note randomly pop up without prompting?

  Heeding Ceralis’ advice, I checked the potential EXP rewards.

  I’d level up from simply slaying two of these.

  Then I checked the potential reward for Level 8.

  My first passive.

  And by the Saint’s pancreas, it would be a good one.

  Ceralis hadn’t prompted me to check these by accident. Something about the timing, the way the notice surfaced without warning, told me this was not a suggestion so much as a nudge. Something told me Saint Merin really wanted me to test my skill against this gravebound accretion of bone and sediment.

  I unsheathed my sword and sighed. “Step aside, Lady Anabeth. The Ferrum Lord has arrived.”