Aluen Tiribi was one of countless wannabe adventurers.

  Sure, it was a rite of passage for everyone to try and get a Skill while they were still in their teens. It could decide their whole future.

  But even in industrialized nations that had all sorts of Skill-development programs, less than 5% of the population actually got one. So, most people gave up by adulthood, in favor of more stable options like college or vocational training.

  He was one of the countless youths who never gave up.

  Although he personally thought it was better than being a total NEET or settling for minimum wage jobs, society at large didn't always agree.

  Nevertheless, beginner dungeons like this one were free for anyone to enter. Some had ticket systems to limit entry, but the Lost was big enough that his whole town could move inside, so there were no limits here.

  So it had quickly become a second home for people like him.

  But even he felt a bit ridiculous hunting deer with a sword. Still, while it was possible to get gun-related Skills, he couldn't afford that much ammo. His allowance barely covered maintaining and replacing the metal swords he liked to use, forcing him to occasionally rely on wooden ones instead.

  His determination wasn't wholly unfounded.

  The current third ranked A-grade adventurer unlocked his first Skill at the age of 26. Even if he considered that a cut-off date, Aluen still had another four years to go.

  And he was getting pretty good with a sword!

  On this day, he came to the dungeon with fellow social outcasts and local losers, Kiki and Telun.

  Kiki was a girl trying very hard to learn healing magic. She bought some of the mana shards they got, and used a rechargeable artifact to heal the scrapes of her allies, hoping the magic within might eventually imprint on her.

  Attending a magic academy was a better way to learn magical Skills, but there was no guarantee with either approach, so she was saving a lot of money this way.

  Telun was like Aluen, but he preferred spears over swords. He even started making his own.

  The trio were very experienced beginners, perpetually trapped as non-adventurers because the government simply didn't permit the Skill-less to enter anything but the dozen or so beginner dungeons.

  So, although they had no superhuman capabilities, when they saw a young girl, perhaps ten or so years old, emerge from deeper within the forest covered in scratches, they were only shocked for a moment.

  "Kiki," the would-be swordsman quickly gave out orders. "Heal her up. Telun, go get a guild member here. She looks like an outsider, but I doubt she's a native, she probably just got lost."

  Though, if she really was a native to this dungeon, a dungeon in name only unless one went to the distant caves to the south, this could be their lucky day.

  "On it," was all Telun said before departing, while Kiki got out her healing tool. He had such dependable friends, it was a real shame none of them were proper adventurers yet.

  There was no way such a cute young girl with red eyes was from his world. There were albinos with red eyes, but they had white hair and pale skin, while she had tan or light brownish skin and orange-red hair.

  Her robe could just be some weird cosplay, but it was simpler to assume it was some cultural thing from whatever dungeon she hailed from. A cosplayer would generally seem more neat, whereas she had a fairly scruffy look about her.

  Still, he didn't want to get anyone's hopes up that they'd found a new outsider. They weren't trained to deal with that. It was better to leave that up to the guild who ran the dungeon.

  An official request for information would make it impossible for them to cheat him out of any reward anyway.

  That's what people online told him, anyway.

  ***

  It'd be too convenient if I could just understand the local languages of any world I reincarnate into, but although there were occasional similarities and familiarities, there usually weren't.

  As such, I had no idea what the people were saying, but as one left and the other dug through her bag, I could infer a few things.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Namely, their attention was immediately on me.

  They had a variety of hair and eye colors, giving me some fleeting hope that mine might be natural here, or at least that I might not be deemed as a demon for simply looking different. None of them matched mine, though.

  There were two guys. The one who stayed had blonde hair and green eyes, and the one who left had brown hair and dark brown eyes.

  The woman had blue eyes, along with coppery-orange hair that some worlds without proper red hair called red.

  My previous dilemma of not having enough food seemed simple in comparison to the problem I now faced.

  Eliminating them would likely only attract future attention... and it was a bad joke anyway. How could a hungry, unarmed child beat adults who carried weapons?

  Running away might encourage them to look for me, and I didn't have the resources to properly escape them.

  Going with them carried its own depth of risks. They could enslave or abuse me.

  Given their clothing seemed both cheap and made using sophisticated techniques that were beyond what I could manage, and that the girl's clothes were far cleaner than my own robes, this was most likely a technologically advanced world.

  That didn't guarantee my safety at all though. Far from it, that meant I'd likely be entered into all sorts of databases against my will. That meant they probably had a whole social system devised to deal with stray children like myself.

  And it was very unlikely they'd consider my agency, whether out of kindness or malice, in particular since I didn't speak their language.

  Still... what could I do?

  ***

  Surprisingly, I discovered another use for those crystals as the girl dropped one into a strange device. I thought it might be a weapon, and flinched as she pulled a trigger...

  ... But instead of pain, I felt its opposite.

  She aimed it at the scratches I'd earned fighting squirrels, and I felt the pain that I'd been ignoring start to quickly fade.

  I felt along where they'd been afterward, and found my skin smooth, not a scratch to be felt.

  The adults tried to communicate with me, but gave up pretty quickly once they realized it was futile. I'd expected them to try and take me somewhere, but they didn't.

  They seemed to be keeping me company for whatever the man who left went to retrieve.

  Or, perhaps, stalling.

  But I couldn't sense any ill will from them.

  It wasn't that I had superhuman senses for that sort of thing, it's just that people who'd do bad things to children rarely prioritized treating their scratches.

  Still, their tunes might change if they ever realized I wasn't a child, so I decided to avoid even the smallest debts where I could.

  Luckily, I had one of those crystals that seemed to serve as ammunition for the woman's healing device, so I simply handed it over to her.

  She tried to refuse it, but I insisted.

  When she finally gave in, and apparently only after some reassurance from the blond man, she seemed embarrassed.

  But I thought it was better than being embarrassed later over treating someone like me as a helpless kid.

  ***

  "You don't have to give me that," Kiki tried to reassure the girl as she held out a tiny mana shard.

  Upon seeing the shard, it became clear how she earned those scratches.

  "Seriously! They'll think I'm bullying you if I charge you for healing in here..."

  But it was clear the kid either really didn't understand them, or didn't care about things like that. She seemed very shy, but perhaps she was actually a really good kid?

  "Just accept it as a gift," Aluen suggested. "She's an outsider, so it could be a cultural thing."

  "Oh!" Kiki hadn't considered that.

  Perhaps she was the one being insulting toward the girl by raising such a fuss.

  Feeling awkward, the young woman nevertheless took the tiny shard.

  Mentally, she registered it not as an attempt to refund what mana she'd spend healing the child, but a pure act of good will in response to her own act of good will towards the girl.

  Although it seemed a bit silly to her.

  If there was anyone who, in her position, wouldn't have healed the girl's scratches up... was that person even a human being? She doubted it.

  Then again, perhaps such kindness was less common, or hopefully, merely less trivialized where the girl came from. She hoped it wasn't the former, although few dungeons were particularly kind or forgiving places, so...

  "Ah! It really is an outsider."

  The voice of the supervisor who presided over the dungeon interrupted the young woman's thoughts. She turned to see the supervisor led by Telun.

  "Kiki fixed up her scrapes," Aluen reported efficiently for a man who was essentially a NEET with an expensive hobby rather than an adventurer or a soldier. "She's quiet. Might be shy, but also could be a language barrier."

  "I see. Well, fortunately, I have a translation scroll with me," the supervisor said. It was technically government regulations to have one in his position, but nobody pointed that out.

  ***

  The brown haired man came back, bringing a slightly older brown haired man with him, this one having green eyes instead.

  It wasn't looking too good. They were definitely looking at me with a bit more interest than a lost child usually got.

  Fortunately, their eyes hadn't betrayed anything more than ordinary interest, so it probably wasn't anything too sinister, but I'd still prefer if they weren't interested in me at all.

  I just wanted to be left alone.

  It's not child abuse to leave me alone, since I'm not a child...

  But they couldn't understand me, even if I said so...

  Or so I thought.

  The older guy got out a rolled up parchment, and it briefly glowed before fading to dust, serving as definite proof that this world had elements one might call magic.

  Actually, the light show was just a fancy magician's trick. The real magic followed.

  "Hello, young miss," he said after kneeling down in front of me.

  I was fairly tall for the age my body was stuck at, so it meant he was looking up at me.

  But that wasn't important.

  The important part was that I understood him.

  "H-hello," I answered, finding myself stuttering.

  I could deal with starvation, dehydration, and a lack of shelter... so why were people always so much more difficult?

  It was probably for the same reason betrayal always came from those closest to you.

  "Are you lost? Did you sneak in here from outside?"

  "Um... where... where is here?"

  It was a dangerous question to ask. I was admitting to a lot of weakness by asking it.

  But the one upside to being a kid is that most adults just take for granted that children are ignorant and dumb. For an alien like me, it was like the ultimate trump card that let me explain away any lack of knowledge, no matter how basic and common sense it was.