Quentin missed class the next three days, which was to be expected. His family had been through a lot. Taking time to be with his dad was the right thing for him to do.

When Roland began talking normally again, Quentin would leave his father’s side for class and return right after. The hunter could eat and drink on his own, but he was still weak. None of the damage appeared to be permanent, so he mostly needed time for his body to finish mending itself.

His mind was a different matter. Roland seemed to be stuck in slow-motion, like every interaction took conscious effort. He smiled sometimes, but he would often lose focus and drift into silence. Hans had visited, and the hunter stopped talking halfway through a sentence to stare at the corner of the room.

I should have thought to call for a healer when we sent Luther out.

Healers–White Mages who specialized in treating wounds–were common in any sizable village, but psionic damage was more complex than a broken bone. The closest city that might have a Healer of the right caliber was six towns away. Hans’ personal savings likely wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost. Roland and Quentin almost certainly didn’t have the money either.

“It’s early yet,” Olza said when Hans vented his frustration to her. “The real Roland is in there. Give it time.” He knew she was right.

When Hans finished griping, he explained the kind of concoction he wanted to make. “Sudden pain can break a psionic hold, so maybe we could make a potion that causes a sharp pain in predictable intervals?”

“What ingredients are you thinking?”

“Some kind of poison, I assume.”

Olza looked at Hans in disbelief. “Your idea is to poison yourself.”

“Just a little.”

The alchemist vetoed using any kinds of poison. In addition to the risk, repeat uses could build a tolerance, making the potion less effective over time. Olza promised to think on it and shooed Hans out of her shop so he could get to his kids’ class for the day.

With their new training gear, the children could begin to incorporate shield work into their training, a skill that Hans believed to be essential for every adventurer, regardless of the class they choose.

“A shield is one of your most versatile tools,” he began, addressing a gaggle of children sitting in the dirt of the training yard. “They are good for blocking, but how do we feel about blocking?”

“Blocking is bad!” the children yelled back.

“That’s right. Just because you have a shield doesn’t mean you should try to block every hit. Not only might you fight something too big for the shield, blocking against another person is tiring. If Miss Becky swung an axe at me, it’s going to hurt even if it hits my shield.”

Hans explained that his biggest argument for training shields is that ranged attacks were always a challenge for an adventurer. Dodging an arrow wasn’t practical for most adventurers, but they could get a shield in its path with a little bit of awareness.

“Swinging a giant war hammer looks cool, but it leaves you exposed. Learn to play it safe before you start taking those kinds of risks.”

Passing out the bucklers first, he taught the children how to cinch their own shields with one hand because help wouldn’t always be available. He showed them where on their forearm to position the midpoint of the buckler and then talked about how footwork was important with shields as well.

They started with the buckler not just because it was lighter than the larger targes. He wanted them to learn with small shields first so they could develop good positional habits. Whenever it was possible, it was ideal for the shield to take a blow at its center, spreading the force across the shield, into the shield arm, and eventually down into the rear foot of their stance. The farther from center a strike was, the more likely it was to glance off and hit you anyway.

Furthermore, glancing blows were more difficult to anticipate and predict. Proper shield positioning was essential to controlling a fight and staying safe.

The buckler forced them to be accurate. They couldn’t cheese a block with a larger surface area. The larger shields had their place, Hans explained, but bucklers were good for tight dungeons and good for training. A targes would be in their hands eventually, but not today.

Once the children had their stances mostly correct, they began a drill where one partner slowly executed the strikes they knew while their partner would block with their shield or parry with their sword.

“Take your time and pay attention to how it feels to block with one or another. When does it feel better to use the buckler? When does it feel better to use the sword?”

The children quickly picked up that a strike coming at your buckler side was awkward if parried with a sword. And vice versa. Carrying both a sword and shield divided them in half. Before, they only had to pay attention to moving their sword. With the shield in play, they had to see their opponent’s attack, decide which parts of their body to move, and then get themselves there before they got cut up.

The first few shield classes were always the hardest. There was always a lot of crying.

And so it was in Gomi. Gunther, Harry, Harriet, Chance, and Loddie all broke into tears at least once when a wooden sword banged an elbow or bounced off bare knuckles. The children didn’t know it, but that experience was a sort of training in its own right, but Hans never said that out loud. Ever. Parents, it turns out, weren’t keen on pain being a learning tool.

Real pain, like that of an injury or wound, was not the intent, nor was deliberately causing harm. However, the children needed to learn to work through bumps and bruises. Those were inevitable in training, and it would only get more challenging as they went on.

Hans didn’t consider pain a relevant part of training until he took lessons from a Rogue early in his adventuring career. He wanted to learn knife-fighting, knife-on-knife as well as unarmed-vs-knife.

The Rogue opened the lesson by saying, “The first lesson of knife fighting is accepting that you are going to get cut. Always, so start thinking now about fighting through it so you can win before you bleed out.”

When they sparred, Hans felt how true that first lesson was. His fantasy of becoming untouchable in a knife fight dissolved beneath hundreds of cuts. Not real cuts, fortunately. They used wooden training knives, but Hans knew what every mistake meant. He would have been cut to ribbons if the knives were real.

He heard the Rogue’s voice anytime someone complained about getting banged up by wooden swords. His words on the matter were gentler than the Rogue’s, but the intent was the same.

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Hans ended the class by teaching the students how to redirect an attack with their shield instead of absorbing the impact, likening it to the parrying techniques they had been practicing with their swords. Their coordination needed practice, but they understood what they needed to do and why. That was the important part right now.

When class wrapped up, he noticed Kane lingering at the back of the training yard, looking at the sticks laid down to frame out the dungeon corridor Hans intended to build. Hans asked him if he had any questions, but the teen tusk said no, thanked Hans for the class, and left.

***

The next morning, Hans awoke to the sound of shovels breaking ground. Out his apartment window, he saw a dozen tusk-touched men and women in the training yard. Several had shovels, and the others pulled posts and boards from the back of a wagon, carrying them toward the tusks with shovels to stack a pile of materials.

Hans stared for a long minute, his recently woken brain staggering and stumbling to make sense of what he saw.

Then one of the tusks set a post into the ground, and he understood.

They’re building a dungeon corridor.

When the tusks saw Hans approaching, Galad waved. “Glad you’re here. How tall you want this?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Kane convinced us.” Galad pointed a thumb to the tusk teen, who looked small for the first time. Hans wasn’t used to seeing Kane surrounded by full grown tusk-touched adults.

“Quentin helped,” Kane answered.

“I… Wow.” Hans’ brain broke again. “You don’t have to do this.”

Galad walked to Kane and put a hand on his shoulder. “Kane here thinks he’ll be able to take me in 5 years. He needs all the help he can get.”

Kane smiled and looked at his feet.

“Seriously, Guild Master. How tall?”

The original design called for eight-foot tall walls. He wanted the barriers high enough that weapons wouldn’t pop out over the top edge and injure someone by accident. Kids were unpredictable and made rash choices. With enough enthusiasm, those wooden swords became missiles.

Looking around, or up rather, at the tusks working around him, Hans had a thought. “Any chance you guys would give it a try?”

“I’m a little old for the kids class,” Galad said. “Don’t think I’ll be dungeon crawling anytime soon.”

“I was thinking of adding an adult class a few days a week.”

Galad raised an eyebrow.

“You won’t be fighting in a dungeon. That’s fair. But you’ve never been in a fight indoors? Will you always be in a wide open space? Some parts of the barn looked like they got pretty tight.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Invitation is open to everyone,” Hans said loud enough for the whole yard to hear him. Then he turned his attention back to Galad. “If the Tribe is going to use this we should probably make it ten feet.”

Galad laughed and got back to work.

***

Quest Complete: Design and build simulated dungeon corridors for training.

The tusks worked with such smooth unity. Every set of hands was moving the project forward at every moment. They worked so efficiently that the faux dungeon walls were complete before noon. Eight posts in total, and then several lengths of milled timber nailed to those.

The tusks who hadn’t met Hans introduced themselves and thanked him for being good to their little brothers and little sisters before they left. Soon, the training yard was empty again, leaving Hans to gaze upon the majesty of a new training aid.

It’s so beautiful.

Quentin came up beside him. Hans realized he had been standing there for some time, but Hans’ mind was too wrapped up in the possibilities the two wooden walls created.

He wrapped an arm around Quentin’s shoulders. “Thank you for this.”

“It was Kane’s idea.”

“Yeah well, he said the same thing. Whoever is responsible, I hope all of them know I am grateful.”

The boy blushed.

“Can you grab us two swords? We need to try it out.”

With Quentin’s help, Hans thought about what dungeon-specific skills he should teach and what drills he could design for them. Soon, he was recreating various combat scenarios with Quentin, starting to feel out what it was like to train in the corridor.

Some of the skills were obvious:

-Combat with limited arm mobility on either side

-Fighting from back against wall

-Fighting an opponent with their back against the wall

-Escape being pinned against the wall

-Get back to standing when downed

-Defending when downed

With where the kids were in the curriculum, he’d be lucky to cover all of that in the next six months. Only yesterday they held a shield for the first time. Right now, using it at all was challenging enough without restricting the space.

But his mind kept thinking. If those were the basics, then more advanced skills would include:

-Closing on a ranged opponent

-Reacting to a pincer attack

-Fighting out of a corner

-Weapon-specific tactics (spears, halberds, flails, axes)

-Fighting alongside allies

Already Hans wished that the corridor was longer. More than two pairs would find it difficult to train in here at once, but if he didn’t restrain himself, his next corridor extension might include a few trap pits. Because that only made sense if they were recreating a dungeon environment, but the serious part of him knew that pits were a step too far, even for him.

He would have to think on these skills a bit more to decide how best to teach them. Gunther entering the training yard, whistling off key, reminded Hans he had a class to teach. He had plenty of time to–

“Gunther… why is your pocket full of worms?”

***

After the squonk encounter, even a kids’ class felt peaceful. The next several days of lessons blurred together. They were still training with bucklers and had started incorporating follow up attacks as well. The youngest children did their best, but they were still very much children. A lot of what they were learning wouldn’t show its value until they were in their teens.

Like Kane and Quentin. Those two drilled together constantly, despite their height difference and weight difference. Kane was almost the size of an adult human, and he still had several years of growth ahead.

A rain rolled in and lingered for a few days, reminding Hans that he needed to plan for winter. All of their training space was outdoors. What would they do when the temperature dropped? The space in the guild hall definitely wouldn’t work, and he couldn’t think of any larger buildings in Gomi.

New Quest: Design a winter curriculum.

Attendance would probably dip when the snows came, he thought, but he could still be useful and available. In his experience, mountain dwellers were more accepting of snow than the citizens living in more temperate climates. What Hoseki considered a winter emergency was just another day in Gomi. The town wouldn’t be perpetually buried, he hoped, and there would certainly be a good bit of downtime for the kids.

Thinking of Gomi in the winter revealed a mistake in his planning. He had considered what he would need to be comfortable and fed, but he recently returned from a deep wilderness rescue job. He needed to be prepared to do the same in the winter.

“Sorry Quentin, I can’t go find your dad. I don’t have the right shoes,” he imagined himself saying. He could never deny a request like that. It’d be less shameful to head out there and freeze to death.

New Quest: Acquire winter adventuring gear.

The list filled quickly, from snowshoes to ice picks, from thick gloves to a new cloak. In many ways, it would be like buying a whole new set of adventuring gear. Nearly every item needed a thicker more resilient version for the winter months. Boots. Pants. Shirts. Even his sheath needed the right care to keep his sword from freezing in place.

A few things he might be able to commission with a local craftsman. Gomi’s blacksmith could probably handle forging a pair of ice picks and a batch of pitons. He might be able to find a seamstress as well. He kept working through his list, identifying what he could source locally and what would need ordered.

Gods, this is going to be expensive.

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Pick up the guild provisions from the caravan after next.

Identify the unknown purple flower from Olza.

Keep the guild hall clean.

Prepare a booklist for Mayor Charlie.

Grow the Gomi chapter without attracting outside attention.

Prepare for winter, and don’t forget the beer.

Design drills to practice specific dungeon corridor skills.

Brainstorm ideas for safe approaches to training on uneven terrain.

Look for other sources pertaining to squonks.

Investigate the presence of orcs near Gomi.

Design a winter curriculum.

Acquire winter adventuring gear.