I awoke to the disconcerting and painful sensation of my shattered kneecap reassembling itself, along with the faint smell of lavender, as a grin crept across my face. It was made more disconcerting by the fact that it didn't hurt nearly as much as I'd have thought it should. The agonising pain I'd felt when it had shattered was replaced with a dull throbbing as I felt small fragments of bone nudge past each other into the right places. The rest of my leg pulsed with pain in a similar manner, but it wasn't nearly as noticeable.

I opened my eyes to a lovely view of the ceiling above me. I was laid flat on my back, my injured leg raised in the air somehow. Craning my neck to look, I found my leg on Zahri's lap, as she sat crossed legged on the floor, gently prodding the area around my kneecap.

I couldn't resist. "Come here often?" I was in a weirdly good mood for just having had my leg pulverised by a giant hand.

She gave me a blank look. "No?" Damn, a lack of a cultural touchstone or just Zahri being deadpan and serious again? It would probably help if I actually knew where that line came from, apart from being a meme thing. Bars, maybe? Eh, whatever, focus.

"Well, how's it looking, doc? Are they gonna have to amputate?" I replied cheerfully.

Zahri raised an eyebrow. "No. The spell worked. How does this feel?"

I jumped as she ground a metal clad knuckle into my leg. "Painful." Came the answer through gritted teeth.

"Hmm. Be careful. It's still damaged." She placed my leg on the floor, and stood up. I propped myself up on my elbows, and had a look at where I was.

I'd been left mostly where I'd landed, aside from being straightened out on the floor. Lidda was swearing at the pit trap mechanism, Sabrina was investigating what looked like massive severed fingers, and Julie was staring at me, although the moment I made eye contact she flushed and looked away. Was that... shame? Nah, couldn't have been.

The grin was still etched onto my face, and I couldn't quite figure out why. I was giddy, but also uncomfortably restless. Was that a side effect of the healing magic? Or, no, hang on. It was the endorphins, wasn't it? I'd taken a massive blow, and had a shitload of feel-good chemicals pumped into me by my brain, but the actual injury had just been healed (mostly). So I was, what, high on adrenaline, endorphins and all of the other hormones the body flooded itself with during these kinds of situations? It felt kinda good, to be honest. I can see why adventurers put themselves into these situations, if this was the reward you got for risking your life.

Pushing myself to my feet, I put pressure on my newly fixed leg. It was the kind of uncomfortable that edged into painful, like a bad sprain, but it did hold my weight. I limped forwards to the rest of the group.

"So, what happened while I was napping?" I joked, to the obvious disapproval of Julie.

"Napping? You nearly died! Your leg is still..." She waved her hand in its direction, before directing her attention to Zahri, who had followed me over. "Why is..."

Zahri interrupted. "I'm out of spells. I'll fix it tomorrow."

I took over. "See, it'll be fine. I've had worse." At the barrage of sceptical looks (with even Lidda and Sabrina pausing what they were doing to judge me), I caved. "Well, my current state, anyway. I've not had worse than having my leg pulverised by a zombie ogre, that is kind of a high bar. Or low bar. Whatever. Still, I'm good now. Thanks for that, Zahri, I appreciate it."

Zahri just nodded back, as Julie continued to get worked up.

"Your leg was twisted and mangled! You nearly died!"

"Yeah, but I didn't." My impeccable logic didn't seem to go down well. "Look, I get that I was injured, but if I acted sad and serious about everything rather than make a joke about it, I'd have killed myself at 20." Shit, way too serious, everyone is staring at me, why the fuck did I say that, abort, roll back! Fuck, remind me not to talk when I'm hyped up on like this. Right, quick topic change, let's hope they forget that. "Yes, it sucked. But it only put me down, it didn't kill me, and I'm tough." I let the implicit 'none of you might have been able to say the same' hang in the air for a second. "It's not like I wouldn't do it again." If for no other reason than that rushing feeling of near-death invincibility I felt running away from the damn thing.

Julie had moved to staring at me with a mixture of confusion and concern, so I switched topics again. "So, what did actually happen to it? I assume you killed it?"

Looking up from the finger she was holding, Sabrina answered. "Julie moved towards you the moment you stepped up to the pit. After you burnt off some of its face, and its subsequent reprisal, she slashed at the hand holding it up," as she raised the finger up for me to look at, "causing it to fall backwards into the pit again. While it struggled to stand up, Lidda managed to reset the pivot trap, and used it again, managing to catch the head of the thing and pulverise it. It was very impressive." Given that she'd gone back to examining the finger from multiple angles, I wasn't sure if the 'it' in her last sentence was the fight or the ogre zombie, and to be honest, I wasn't interested in finding out at the moment.

Slowly walking over to the edge of the pit, I leaned over slightly and had a look. Yup, that was one dead ogre. The head was mostly paste, with little bits of bone shard and grey matter splattered across the walls of the pit. I was pretty sure I was supposed to be horrified, or whatever, but it didn't really seem like that big a deal. I guess being on the internet since I was a teenager does wonders to desensitise a man to random violence and gore. The rest of the body was littered with scorch marks and burns, the flesh still surprisingly pink for a zombie. The lack of grey was almost disappointing, in a way. The zombie at the entrance seemed more zombie-like, this one had seemed almost like it could have been alive. Well, before the head of it was squished like an insect in a vice, anyway.

I stepped backwards as the stone slab smoothly swung upwards back into place, flecks of red, white, and grey the only sign that something had happened.

"Aha!" came from behind me. "I've got it working, but I'm pretty sure that the mechanism's taken some damage, so I don't think we'll be able to use it like that again. I'm just going to slide the chuck back in and call it a day." Lidda dusted off her hands as she finished with the mechanism.

There was a moment of stillness, as no one said anything.

Zahri broke the silence. "Push on?"

Julie turned on her. "What? Mahz is injured, what if there's another one of those things?"

"Then we leave. Immediately." I'd known her less than a day, and I was already envious of Zahri's ability to deadpan things. I genuinely couldn't tell if there was supposed to be an implied 'duh' at the end of that or not.

"Like we tried to do with that one?" Julie did have a pretty good rebuttal, though. Zahri seemed to agree, if her response of "Hmm, fair." was to be believed.

"I do think we should at least search the room the ogre was in, though." The halfling said. "From the look of it, most of what the bodies in that room were wearing was rusted, but there still might be some useful stuff." I'd only been paying attention to the massive zombie, she'd been looking at the other corpses? Well played that woman.

Sabrina just nodded in assent. Probably assent, anyway. I gave my own assent, as well.

"I can still run if I need to, it'll just sting a bit." Well, a lot, probably, but still. "And I kind of want to see what was important enough to have that thing guard it."

Sighing, Julie took on a defeated tone. "Fine, we'll go back. But if there's more corridor, or rooms, then we come back tomorrow, alright? There's no need to risk ourselves needlessly, this place isn't going anywhere."

I knew that Julie was preaching the safe, sensible option, but I didn't really care about that all that much at the moment. I was honestly kind of hoping for another fight. Not a big one, we were low on healing and out of spells, but it'd help put off the adrenaline crash, and there was very much a rush that I got from gambling my life and winning that I couldn't really compare to anything I'd ever done before.

I might have skipped down the corridor with everyone else if I wasn't still limping. As is stood, I still wasn't the slowest member of the group, keeping to somewhere along the middle of the group. There was a wide path carved through the middle of the spiders lair, the ash having been shoved to one side by the relentless advance of the zombie.

The actual room that the ogre was in, when we actually reached it and had the chance to look around, was even larger than I'd thought. It was heptagonal, with no other visible exits, the other six sides of the room having what I could only describe as shelving units built into them, each one holding another corpse. The stone slabs were occupied by bodies as well. Taking the chance to actually look at one (and stab it just a little to make sure it wasn't about to sit up again and attack) showed me that they were remarkably well preserved. I wasn't sure what it was, precisely, but there was basically no decay or rot on any of them.

A clanking sound of metal against metal had me look up from the corpse I was hunched over. Sabrina had found another cadaver, and was doing something similar to me, but the other three had started going through the bodies and stripping the unrusted gear off of them. I guess they really were adventurers.

The equipment on the bodies seemed to come in two types. The first was the rusted, useless stuff, but the second had some kind of patina on them, and looked almost silvery. They were almost completely rust free, despite the obvious age, and they were all to a tee masterfully crafted.

By the time they'd finished, a large pile of armour and shields had built up. The ladies looked very pleased with the haul, especially with what seemed to be the crowning jewel of the looting session, a set of very well made looking half-plate, studded with some quite nasty looking spikes. Both Julie and Zahri seemed to be somewhat possessive of the armour, not quite arguing, but approaching the line.

Looking at the pile, a couple of questions did come to mind. I decided to voice the first of them. "So why aren't there any weapons here?"

"Armour is personal. Weapons are family." Well, thank you for that delightfully cryptic statement, Zahri. Maybe someone more eloquent could help. As Zahri went back to explaining why she should have the big shiny thing, I stared at Sabrina until she expounded on the answer to my question (which admittedly took all of a single cough to get her attention and three seconds of staring).

"The ancient Sennians, well, I suppose a number of the current Sennians as well, but it originated in ancient Sennia, believed that as armour was designed to protect you, and as it helped protect an individuals life, it belonged to that individual, and so would be buried with them in death. Weapons, however, were wielded outwards, for the good of the family, and so the weapons themselves were actually owned by the family, and would be passed down from one family member to another. As such, they tended to get used until they broke, and it was a rare weapon that was buried with its user. It only tended to happen when an individual was particularly renowned for using a specific weapon, or when the last of the family were to die."

"Good to know, thank you." That was a lot of info, and I'd probably remember none of it, but at least there was a reason. I didn't really feel bad about asking Sabrina questions, due mostly to how eager she was to answer them, so I decided to follow it up with another one. This one was slightly more thorny, though, so I took a moment to figure out how best to phrase it.

"So, isn't this grave-robbing?" Nailed it.

"Robbery is illegal, what we are doing is not. If your question is why isn't this illegal, then that's due to a recent law change under the current queen. It would have been illegal a decade ago, but in order to help encourage the expansion of the borders of the queendom, it has been made legal to take the items within 'dangerous places that may lead to public harm', such as an open crypt filled with undead. Were it still closed and locked, it would have been illegal, due to the lack of any risk to the people around it, but since it was opened, it became legal to salvage the items within."

So there was a law on the books dedicated to allowing adventurers to loot dungeons? Honestly, the longer I stayed here, the more I was starting to feel like I'd been dropped into tutorial-ville. I dunno what or who exactly was responsible for me ending up in this place, but if their goal was for me to become a fire-breathing adventurer, they picked a pretty good place.

Julie and Zahri, with Lidda occasionally verbally prodding one of them and fanning the flames of the discussion for her own amusement, had almost devolved into an argument before an agreement was made to take the half-plate back and see who it would fit better. The other person would get a similarly well made breastplate, admittedly without the spikes, so neither of them were really losing out. I decided this was a good time to make my own claim.

"Dibs on that chain shirt."

Once the equipment had been divvied up (a chain shirt and buckler to me, a separate chain shirt and buckler for Lidda (thankfully one of the sets had been small enough to fit her, although it was still a bit baggy) a pair of sizeable steel shield for the front-liners, and of course the half-plate and breastplate), the rest of the gear (a suit of chainmail, three suits of scalemail, and a couple of smaller shields) was bundled up separately for us to carry out. None of the equipment could really be worn at the moment. The leather straps were had lasted surprisingly well, in that they still existed, but probably shouldn't be trusted, and the gambesons that should have gone underneath them were completely ruined, so we ended up splitting up everything to carry between us. I noticed I'd ended up with one of the lighter bundles, but I wasn't really going to complain too hard, given that my leg still sent a jolt of pain up whenever I took a step, and it was an hour's walk back to the village.

After a quick check by Lidda to make sure that we hadn't missed anything, and that there weren't any secret compartments containing vast treasure hoards, we made our way out, stopping by the spider room so Zahri could grab the remains of the woman from the village who'd died here. Thankfully it hadn't been destroyed by the ogre when it had gone past.

The sunlight and breeze when we left the crypt was literally a breath of fresh air. I honestly had no idea how long we'd been down there for, the lack of windows in the underground crypt really helping to obfuscate the sensation of passing time.

The combination of some kind of small entrenching tool carried by Lidda helped with the digging of the grave for the body, although by necessity it was quite shallow. Taking it in turns to move earth, I took advantage of a point where both myself and Zahri weren't busy to both rehydrate from my flask and ask her a question.

"Why were they coming all of the way out here to bury people, rather than starting a new graveyard somewhere nearer?"

She grunted. "Consecrated."

"This land is consecrated?" I raised my eyebrows. If this place had been consecrated, our job would have been a lot easier.

Zahri seemed to have the same idea, as she gestured at the crypt, shrugging. "Probably not. But they didn't know."

"So, what, they gambled that this place might have been consecrated, and so came out here to bury people?"

"Pretty much."

"Sounds like a lot of effort for a maybe." I noted.

"Better than undead close to the village." She pointed out.

"Fair". I guess it was one of those things that you started doing when you lived in a murderworld full of monsters.