Although we’d known Mayor Luke was Marquess Arvale’s son, he defied all our expectations. He wasn’t haughty and didn’t bat an eye when we used coarser language around him. Honestly, he felt out of place in this rough-and-tumble wilderness. He was just a calm, kind boy. How had this kid ended up like this?
He was already more mature than Hazena, our youngest party member, though that could’ve been a result of his noble upbringing and early education.
“There’s a dungeon near this village?!” I exclaimed after Luke told us the news.
“Yep. It was discovered just recently.”
“The Forsaken Zones and a dungeon?! This place is an adventurer’s paradise!”
We’d come chasing rumors about the Forsaken Zones, but this was an even bigger find. It was shocking enough that the dungeon entrance was inside the village itself, but then we learned that the entire thing sat within the settlement limits. After he showed it to us, he was kind enough to give us a tour of the rest of the town.
As we walked, we started seeing some unexpected sights.
“Is that an elf?” I asked.
“Yes, we have some elves living here with us,” Luke said.
“You’re kidding! I thought elves cut off all contact with humans and disappeared to some secret settlement!” I replied, but there was an elf right there, chatting with a human as if it’d been the most natural thing in the world. She’d blended in so well that I’d first assumed she was just an especially beautiful human.
“There are dwarves living here too. They mostly stay underground, so you probably won’t see too much of them.”
“Dwarves too?!”
“Underground”? Wait, what’s that supposed to mean? Does this village have some sort of subterranean hold?
Then there was how ridiculously clean both the village and its residents were. I’d seen my share of towns as an adventurer, but nothing had ever come close to this. Usually, trash and human waste littered the streets. Here, however, every house had a private bath and toilet, and they even had public bathhouses.
Finding a town where everyone had a roof over their head was rare, so we were shocked to learn that not a single villager in Luke’s town was homeless.
“Most of our residents are refugees, but I’ve made sure everyone has a place to stay.”
He said that like it’s no big deal...
Eventually, we arrived at a strange set of buildings.
“These inns are specifically for adventurers.”
“Inns just for adventurers?!”
A single building was so big that I couldn’t fathom how many people it could accommodate. We usually stayed at cramped, privately run inns. This thing was on a completely different level. And every room had its own bath and toilet.
“Wow, this is amazing! Honestly, I kinda wanna live here,” Hazena said, her eyes sparkling.
Usually, the inns near dungeons or Forsaken Zones were pretty run-down. People couldn’t sensibly invest in good infrastructure when monsters could show up any given day to wreck the place, after all. Only the well-managed dungeons under direct noble control received proper lodging, and those were few and far between in our kingdom.
Yet according to Luke, adventurers stayed here for free.
How the hell is that sustainable?
The dungeon entrance was in the courtyard in the middle of the four inns—or, more accurately, the inns surrounded the entrance like the walls of a fortress. I thought that’d mean monsters could come pouring out at any second and attack the village, but Luke insisted it wasn’t an issue.
“You’ve got one surprise after the other for us...”
But the biggest shock came when he told us we could receive Blessings here for a single gold coin.
We didn’t quite believe him, so we followed him to a building that looked like a church.
A drop-dead gorgeous woman waited inside.
“I’m Myria, the priest,” she said.
This beauty’s a priest?! Hang on a second... If she’s a priest, why’s she wearing a maid’s outfit?!