Greenskins knew, how to march. Four hours in lockstep, with a marching band playing all the way. The three leaders obviously pulled every stop and mobilized every last Goblin, Hobgoblin, and Orc who could play some instrument (and an Ogre drummer) to learn the new music and escort the couriers. It was quite overboard: three couriers, four adventurers, a scorpionlizard, and fifteen musicians, Wolfgang not included.

The band wasn't exactly good, but Prof realized, with the accompanying music it was easier to march, and they were faster too. It was like listening to the radio while driving, even the songs were partly the same. Prof was shocked to hear Thunderstruck in Greenskinnian. During their short break at noon, he asked Wolfgang, how the whole walking faster was possible while listening to music – while driving it was understandable, you just flowed with the rhythm until you got a speeding ticket. But walking?

“It's magic. More precisely, [Magic: Music]. This is why we do everything with music accompanying – it makes everything faster, easier, and better. MYTHRILL is important because of this, it has more power than Granite and Clay." That was understandable, for once. Wolfgang obviously put a few Skill Points into [Speech: Bergian] and was now able to say a whole sentence without glaring grammatical mistakes. Speaking of which…

“Say, Wolfgang, why does everyone I've met here speak Bergian? I would assume, the Bergian Kingdoms are too far away, behind the Valley and the Elves to warrant learning the language."

“Ah, you probably don’t know. The Eastern Bergians, the kingdoms, that is, we have almost no contact with. However, there are two Bergian Duchies just North of Ostwaldland. Zwergeberg and Waldeberg. Sometimes, we fight together, sometimes we fight each other, contact is thick to learn each other’s tongue.”

“Bergians in the West? Never heard about it. What are they doing here?”

“The usual things. Tilling lands, raising cattle, brewing beer, multiplying.”

“Funny. I meant, why are they here in the West?”

“I don't really know, never saw a point in raising [History: West Bergian]. Probably colonizing empty lands. Or political refugees. I think they were already here when the Valley was formed."

At night, they made a stop not far from a village at a lonely farm. Albeit Greenskins knew how to march, they were utterly incapable of making pleasing architecture. Every last building Prof saw on the way, was a masterful piece of typical pillbox-with-columns. The owners even tended to paint the ugly buildings in eye-searing colors – mostly different shades of green. Some wore camouflage patterns, others had whole landscapes and work scenes painted on them. Allegedly, one could have an idea about the owner's business by just looking at the decorations.

That night, they were lodged in the bunker-patterned barn. When they entered the yard, a couple of hogs were angrily… growling at them. It couldn't have been squeaking, that sound is just too cute to convey the menacing sound, the hogs produced. As for the size, tusks, and basic attitude, even the most vicious boar, high on steroids, speed and savagery back on Earth would just look like a squeaker compared to them, and would just shut up and piss off.

“What’s with all those pigs? I remember seeing them in every village so far. Where are the dogs?”

“DOGS?!?! Why would anyone keep a degenerated wolf at home? They are good for nothing. A well-trained hog on the other hand? The very best home defense you could imagine! We aren't even talking about famous warhog-breeds! Half a ton of concentrated muscle, tusks, and savagery, and that is even without armor or a Goblin raider on the back! All those Human knights? Bah! They are just food in a shell for our Hograiders!"

Well, someone was extremely proud of their hogs! Prof was interested, in how a village fete would look like in Greenskin lands. Of course, they wouldn't just tie up their village bard, but what would they eat instead of roasted boar? Roasted dogs?

It took them three days to reach the capital. Prof noticed, that each day there was a fluctuation among the musicians, some came, some left, and from the original bunch, only the Ogre drummer was still with them, when they reached their destination. Probably spreading MYTHRILL and training on the go.

The capital itself was a huge surprise to Prof. He got used to unpaved roads – even the Elves, with all their superior attitude, did not pave the roads, even in "large" cities like Deadbranch – and spread-out cities. Not that he visited many cities, towns, and villages since coming to Arkadia. Smallgrovewell was a tiny village in the ass-end of nowhere, Willowflower was much more like a trading post for outlying farms, and he was forbidden to enter any other Elven settlement. Deadbranch was the closest he got to a proper city, but with how Elves did things, that city was closer to any suburbia on good old Earth, than a real medieval city.

If he expected a proper, real medieval city from Saugarten, Ostwaldland’s capital, he got sorely disappointed.

The city consisted, of course, of traditional Greenskin buildings, built four to six stories high, with wide main boulevards and just slightly less wide side streets. Every last road and street was paved with the same cast material, the houses were made out of. Prof suspected, it being some kind of concrete, sufficiently different from the concrete he knew very well to not exactly warrant the name concrete.

The whole city gave the vibe of a mix between a modern Earth city and a fortress museum.

He noticed two very strange things almost immediately: first, literally everything was accompanied by music. Shopping, working, and even normal walking. There was a musician on every other corner, playing walking music.

Secondly, how spotlessly clean everything was. Not only there was no strategically placed piles of rubble, or rebar sticking out, but there was no dirt or garbage around at all! That kind of cleanliness wasn’t even expected from a hospital, not to speak of a modern city, and here was a whole medieval city without overflowing garbage bins (there was one fairly close together) or randomly thrown away junk. They haven't spent much time in the villages and towns on the way to the capital, but Prof was fairly certain, he hadn't seen much garbage there either.

Saugarten was on a whole different level – he could have eaten from the sidewalk!

Actually, you could eat from the sidewalk everywhere, but you would consume other, completely free and unhealthy stuff too. Don’t eat from the sidewalk or the floor, even if it looks clean.

It was like a whole species was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, pointed exclusively at cleaning. Other details, like wares in stores, stalls, and the outsides of houses weren't affected, only the roads.

“How do you like Saugarten?" Wolfgang asked, seeing Prof's confusion "Nice and clean! It is all thanks to our resident Redcap, master Strassenfeger. He is the best and most effective street sweeper in all the Greenskin lands! Every year, the other capitals try to poach him, but every time he refuses. He says he became a Redcap in Saugarten, he will not betray the city by cleaning another. True dedication!"

“Wait, are you saying, he became a Redcap because he is good at sweeping streets?"

“Not just good, he is the best. It is rumored, his [Cleaning] and [Sweeping] Skills are way above 500%! Unprecedented! There is a very long waiting list to be his apprentice. It is said, he tolerates only one mistake. The second time you overlook a pile of hog manure or dust in a corner, you are out. It is understandable. If you don't have dedication, you are wasted in learning from a Redcap."

“There is a Skill [Sweeping]? That’s news to me.”

“Ehmmm… I think it is some high-Level specialization of [Cleaning]."

Prof was starting to think, Arkadia was indeed strange. He knew well enough from reading that accursed Rulebook, that there was a Skill for literally everything, but still thought, the System had its limits. He realized (again), that limits the System did not have. There was no trying, either you did, or you didn't. If you didn't have a Skill, you failed even in the most mundane things. Or, more precisely, if you had the need for a skill to accomplish something, it was guaranteed, there was a Skill to help you fail legitimately. If there was a Skill to find loot more efficiently, party harder, play sports better, or recognize stuff, who said there couldn't be a Skill to be good at sweeping streets? No one should be surprised to see such a Skill!

Prof was.

They were deposited in an inn not far from the city center, allegedly the best one in the city. Wolfgang had an apartment on his own, but that was too small for the whole party, and the inn was the best alternative he could think of. It even had a separate room for Prof and another for Mini, Bianca, and Sharpclaw had to share a third. Wolfgang promised them to meet up in the morning and help them to sell their loot. He warned them, there would be most likely a large official reception soon, and they would need to meet with the country's three leaders before that. It wasn't every day, a new Redcap emerged, bringing back long-lost secrets of the whole species. Plus two pieces of jewelry of significant cultural significance. Or prominent prominence.

The very first thing the party did after cleaning up – the inn even had indoor plumbing! Not even the Elves had such! – was to finally have a meal that was not porridge or dried goods. Not surprisingly, there was no pork on the menu. Actually, there wasn’t even a real menu, only two kinds of soup, cooked beef with vegetables and some kind of fried fish with fried tubers. It still was actual food! Actual, and good food. The cook even used spices!

The only slightly problematic thing was, that the waiter only marginally knew Bergian, and Prof's proficiency with Greenskinnian didn't yet include detailed knowledge of food-related vocabulary. He was more or less certain, the beef actually came from cows and not from other four-legged creatures, and for the fish, he just drew a blank. He wasn't proficient in fish-related things back on Earth, on Arkadia he would need [Zoology] just to notice the difference between pilchard and catfish.

He didn’t care that much. He wanted to finally eat real food, and he did just that. He even tolerated Mini feeding him fish-and-tubers, and even reciprocated by feeding her a few bits of bloody raw beef she ordered.

Mostly, because he finally got drunk after having to ration his limited amount of booze for a long time. The Greenskins at castle Seeblickstein only gave him one beer a day – he found out, that was the amount every soldier got for free. The inn had beer, a nice selection of wines, and hard booze. He elected to sample the wine – that he had no experience with that on Arkadia yet. A wine that was made of grapes, the Blood Wine they found back in Willowflower probably never saw grapes. Forestdeep sounded like a country that was too cold to raise them.