With three feet of snow on the ground, the guild training yard was not an option. The Tribe had prepared for more refugee tusks than they received, leaving a handful of unused beds in one of the barn dormitories. In the little space they could create, only two pairs of students could drill at any time. The rest waited against the wall for their turns to rotate in.

The cramped quarters were not ideal, but Hans had taught like this dozens of times. Most small towns didn’t have indoor training facilities, so if he was guest instructing at a small chapter, canceling on account of rain wasn’t an option. They would drag the furniture out of a guild hall if they had to. Otherwise, the only Gold-rank their village might see in years would have to leave without teaching anything.

Of the eleven people who stayed behind the night before to ask about adventuring, one was Tandis who volunteered to be quartermaster. Of the ten townspeople interested in adventuring, seven came to the first training session. If he was a traveling armor salesman, he’d probably be happy with that conversion rate. When he needed at least three adventuring parties for his dungeon plan to work, seven was eleven short.

“Adventuring is about adaptation,” Hans said to the class. “A typical Apprentice curriculum is broad for that reason. Half the time when you take a hunting job, you end up facing something different from what the job says. Why? Scared people aren’t expert witnesses, and they definitely aren’t monster scholars. If you can’t figure that out on the fly, you get eaten.

“I promise you that I can teach any of you to be great adventurers, but that’s not what we are doing here. This training is specific to our challenges in Gomi. If it doesn’t hunt or grow here, we’re skipping it. If a weapon isn’t ideal for Gomi conditions, we’re skipping it. Instead of teaching you every party position, we’ll teach you one based on the class you choose, and that’s the position you’ll own for the foreseeable future.

“We’ll cover everything eventually. Just don’t go running off to fight something we haven’t trained for. If you die, you’ll be in our gear and it’ll be ruined. That gets expensive.”

The group chuckled.

“Keep that sense of humor. This job gets hard. You’ll need to laugh to get through the worst of it.”

If Hans’ curriculum was a pie, this abridged curriculum was a small slice. He could press the pace somewhat, but he couldn’t lower his standards. Sending an incompetent adventurer into a dungeon was sending them to their deaths. For Hans, the curriculum started in the same place for adults as it did for children–sword fundamentals that built into shield work.

Later that day, after he taught a kids’ class about identifying monster tracks, he taught another class to his first batch of Gomi Apprentices–emergency wound triage. Thus far, gnolls were the primary danger of the dungeon, which made bites and scratches likely. Puncture wounds and fist-sized chunks of flesh going missing were equally distressing problems for different reasons.

Optimistically, he would be escorting small groups to fight dungeon gnolls in six weeks or so.

Gods, there’s so much work to do.

***

The next day, the new adventurer class had five students. That number dipped to four on the worst day, but by the final day of the cutoff, six students committed to being adventurers. And Terry was one of them. Hans found himself rooting for the guard more and more.

Other than Terry, the other trainees were tusks–two women and three men. Tandis attended as well. Though she wouldn’t be an adventurer, she needed to understand how adventurers operated and what they needed. Hans hadn’t thought of it like that, but when Tandis explained her reasoning, he agreed, so she attended all the same classes the Apprentices did.

Instead of sword drills, they spent the day’s session discussing the roles and skills of the major classes. Hans emphasized that classes were not as rigid as many people thought. They were a way to easily understand an adventurers’ role in a party. Ultimately, an adventurer could study and practice anything they wanted, but they should be careful about what they prioritize in the long run. Specialists had a higher ceiling than generalists. Years of training and repetition added up that way.

Terry was the oldest of them. He went first and said he wanted to be a Ranger. His father had been a hunter, so he knew the forest. He was an okay swordsman, but recognized he could improve. He was about as good with a bow as well. Rangers could play a number of roles, but he assumed he’d be a frontliner given their numbers.

A female tusk with a build more akin to a human than orc also wanted to be a Ranger. Her name was Yotuli, and she preferred a style that kept her up front. Hans got the impression she wasn’t a complete novice, and he expected she would end up being more of a pure fighter in the long run. That was just a hunch though. Plenty of students had surprised him with their trajectory, so who knew?

The other female tusk was a middle ground between Galinda’s bulk and Yotuli’s in terms of musculature, but she was taller than both of them. She introduced herself as Chisel, and she had an interest in white magic. She emphasized that she still “wanted to do some killing,” which Hans could respect. A healer who wasn’t instantly helpless when a monster looked at them was a good asset.

The next face reminded Hans of Luther. He hadn’t thought of Luther in a few days, he realized. He wondered how the tusk was doing on the other side of the mountain pass. Hopefully the season slowed the war enough that everyone got a reprieve and Luther could rest easy.

At any rate, Sven was wiry for a tusk, so much so that he fit the Rogue stereotype perfectly. Even his tusks seemed extra suspicious. He could neither confirm nor deny having previous, unsanctioned Rogue experience. He did request, however, that he be exempt from any jobs involving spiders.

Honronk was an average build for a tusk, like a bodybuilder human, but his skin was a dark gray and had the sheen of onyx. Hans had never seen anything like it. The tusk spoke softly, and the only two words he spoke were “Black Mage.”

Direct. Decisive. That worked for Hans.

The last tusk to speak could have been full-blooded orc. His skin a hunter green, he dwarfed even Galad. He was barely an inch taller than the Tribe’s unofficial leader, but he was wide. Any normal person going after the tusk would need at least three other people backing them up. His name was Buru, and his first option was Ranger, but since there were already two, he asked if Druid would work.

“Where do you see yourself fitting into nature?” Hans asked.

“Carnivore,” he said simply.

“You and Becky will hit it off.”

This has the makings of a solid party.

***

Becky relieved Roland, Kane, and Quentin from watch at the Polza cabin. The construction was done–fireplace included–and rest was well-deserved. They had spent the better part of two weeks sleeping through snowstorms and doing hard labor.

Charlie and Galad worked on organizing a team to haul four mattresses from Gomi to the cabin. The same team would bring carpentry and woodworking tools–the minimum necessary because tools were heavy–to finish the cabin interior, including the furniture, the trapdoor, and the front door. Hans wanted to be involved, but his days were all back-to-back classes.

When Kane and Quentin returned, he began teaching an extra combat class in the morning just for them. They were committing to the chapter, so it was only right that the chapter commit to them in return. Gunther came to observe on occasion as well. They would have been welcome with the Apprentices if they had the space. Most days, though, the boys lingered to watch, and Hans often borrowed them for demonstrations. They were regulars in the Apprentice classes at the guild hall as well.

He loved to teach, but Hans was not having the winter he imagined. Looking at the snow out his apartment window was far more appealing than hiking in it to get to and from the Tribe each morning. Walking through a winter wonderland lost its limited novelty halfway through the first trip.

His days got longer when the Apprentices reached the point where they needed class-specific instruction. Instead of preparing one general class, he had to prepare five different lessons to account for each party member’s unique path. The mages, Chisel and Honronk, were the toughest to prep for on account of Hans’ limited spellcraft expertise. Luckily, they had a little bit of knowledge already.

Chisel grew up in an orphanage run by an old White Mage. She didn’t remember her rank, but she could hear her treating townspeople through the wall in the girls dormitory. Chisel could recite the incantations for spells like Cure Poison, Lesser Heal, and Lesser Sleep with perfect pronunciation, but she had no knowledge of spell gestures or mana manipulation.

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Honronk stole a spell from a mage shop when he was a kid and practiced it obsessively. Now he could cast Prism almost at will, generating a blinding wall of opaque rainbow light. Anyone on his side could see through it, but anyone on the opposite side–presumably an enemy–saw only dazzling colors.

Buru would break-off to train with Becky directly at some point in the future, but for now, a Druid could benefit from spellcraft training. Buru, however, didn’t have the previous experience that Chisel and Honronk did, but they all seemed supportive of each other regardless.

Magery students, more than any other class, needed the self-discipline to practice alone for long hours. Chisel and Honronk already showed that they were capable of that, but Hans still saw spellcraft as a major chapter weakness. Becoming an advanced mage in Gomi was likely impossible with their current resources.

New Quest: Address the deficiency of magery education in the Gomi chapter.

Hans taught Chisel, Honronk, and Buru how to read spell manuals. Spell gestures were intricate and counterintuitive, so the explanation for the gesture accompanying a simple spell like Create Water could span several pages. Every finger position was painstakingly represented and accompanied by a description of the movements that had the complexity of a calculus problem. Learning to read that notation made self-instruction much easier, but it was like parsing a new language.

Terry and Yotuli, the Apprentice Rangers, worked with Olza to learn herbal poultices and field remedies for infections and various illnesses. Kane and Quentin joined them. Eventually, the Rangers would train tracking and bushcraft more extensively, but for now, they were frontliners. If the party’s healer, Chisel, was injured, other members needed to be able to step in. At the same time, a frontliner sometimes got separated from the rest of the group in a battle. Watching yourself bleed out because the party healer was pinned down too far away was a sad, and potentially avoidable, way to die.

Partway into his apology that the chapter didn’t have Rogue tools–like lockpicks–Sven interrupted Hans and revealed he brought his own. Hans didn’t want to know why he had them already, so he dove into essential Rogue skills instead of asking questions. For most parties, Rogues primarily picked locks and disabled traps. Their dexterity and stealth also made them good scouts. They didn’t know what the Polza dungeon might become, but having a Rogue versed in all manner of traps was never a bad idea.

The townspeople donated spare locks to the effort, giving Sven an assortment of styles and difficulties to practice with. Hans understood the basic mechanics of lockpicking, but Sven’s skill was far beyond his own. He gave Sven a book on traps for him to study their construction and the best practices for disabling them. Every party member needed to learn to spot traps, but Sven would be the sole expert in taking them apart.

An old quest came to Hans’ mind:

Active Quest: Design a system for training dungeon awareness.

Feeling physical pain, he knew that quest wasn’t enough for Gomi’s present situation, so he added another.

New Quest: Acquire the tools and knowledge to train trap disarming safely.

By the time Hans wrapped lessons on any given day, he had trouble talking coherently. The focus he needed to be an effective teacher drained him, and the pace of the training bruised his body, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had this much fun.

***

One day, when the Apprentice class at the guild hall concluded, Hans forced himself into the cold to walk down to Olza’s shop. He had nothing against talking to Olza, but the warmth and solitude of his apartment called to him. He knew, however, that as soon as he entered that apartment, he wouldn’t leave until the next day.

“I was hoping to ask a favor,” Hans said, standing in the doorway of Olza’s small lab at the back of her shop. “Can I put your herbal poultice and remedy lessons in my book? I’d credit you, of course. I mean, I could write it myself, but I learned a couple tricks from eavesdropping on your lessons that I think adventurers should know.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Really?”

“Why are you so surprised?” Olza asked, looking up from an alchemist’s microscope.

“It feels like it’s a lot to ask.”

“It’s not.”

Hans shifted awkwardly. The favor sounded much larger to him than it did to Olza, and he found himself wanting to convince her not to help out of fairness for her. He began to form such an argument when he saw two new pots of starcup blossoms. One set of flowers had longer stems. The other had larger petals.

“More experiments?” Hans asked.

She straightened. “You’d laugh at me.”

“What? Why would I do that?”

Olza turned to the Guild Master. “I’m testing an idea I had for Mazo’s earth magic.”

“Mazo’s blood magic, you mean.”

“Earth, thank you.” She took a deep breath and reached for the pot of the long-stemmed starcups. “The starcups you saw in the kids’ classes produced a stronger reaction, right?”

Hans nodded.

“The ritual has to be repeated as the plant grows. The starcups you saw had been through four. These have been through four as well.” Olza indicated the long-stemmed starcups. “During the second ritual, I wondered if longer stems would affect a recipe. The next morning, they had grown ⅛ of an inch.”

“Is that a lot?”

“Daily growth is usually less than 1/16. So I tried it again in the fourth ritual. Same result.”

“Are you saying it listened to you somehow?”

Olza shrugged. She wasn’t ready to commit to an explanation yet, but when a similar experiment worked on the other pot of starcups–the one with larger petals–she started to suspect something along those lines. Hans asked her how much thought she had given to potential applications.

“If results are consistent, increasing potency and volume of ingredients seems like a clear benefit. That’s not as simple as it sounds though. Recipes are precise and delicate, so a more potent version of a component isn’t a quick swap, and who’s to say if growing four of something instead of one wouldn’t produce something less potent. Still promising though.”

“If this is so promising, why aren’t more alchemists doing it? I’m still hung up on that.”

“Besides the taboo?” Olza asked. “It’s exhausting. If you asked me to start a third pot and keep the other two, I couldn’t do it.”

“How far can you take that control?”

She laughed. “These are experiments two and three, so give me some time.”

Hans agreed that was fair. He got too excited sometimes. “Can I give you two potential ideas that you probably already thought of?”

She waved for him to go ahead.

“Antivenom and Lesser Healing Potions”

“I’m intrigued. Go on.”

“I think improving those two would do the most good,” Hans said, deep in thought. “Snake bites are a death sentence in small villages–”

“Because antivenom is typically specific to the snake.”

“Exactly! It’s hard to make as well. Even a small improvement would save a lot of lives.”

Olza crossed her hands behind her head. “I’m stumped on the Lesser Healing Potion.”

“This one is more of a stretch, but healing potions are too expensive for the average person. If your research can make them cheaper to produce, or if your alternative makes the current tier of Lesser Healing Potions less desirable, a drop in price would give more people access.”

“You sound like an idealist, Hans.”

The Guild Master shook his head. “Active imagination.”

When the alchemist put the starcup pots aside, she reached for a set of beakers as well as her mortar and pestle. Hans asked her if she meant to start another project at this late hour.

“More Sleep Potions. The nightmares are getting worse.”

“Is it still just the tusk kids?”

She said that it was. They came more frequently and with greater strength. At first, she thought they were the echoes of trauma, but these dreams made every child who had them want to run. The guards watching the dormitory doors for runaways were shockingly busy in recent nights.

Going over her recipes and textbooks several times, she couldn’t find a potential solution, especially one whose ingredients were available in Gomi in the midst of winter isolation. With a glint of desperation in her eyes she asked Hans if he had any new thoughts on the possible cause or potential treatments. Sadly he did not.

I haven’t been working on that problem as hard as I should.

New Quest: Draft possible explanations for the nightmares plaguing tusk children.

His quest list was getting troublingly long. It began to feel overwhelming.

***

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."

Expand the Gomi training area to include ramps for footwork drills.

Design a system for training dungeon awareness.

Research the history and legends of the Dead End Mountains, more.

Protect Gomi.

Train Gomi adventurers to keep the dungeon at bay.

Design the ultimate strategy for hunting squonks.

Pick a secret passage design for the cabin. Bonus Objective: Make it cooler than a bookshelf door.

Figure out how to launder dungeon loot.

REVENGE!

Find a way to share new knowledge without putting Gomi at risk.

Address the deficiency of magery education in the Gomi chapter.

Acquire the tools and knowledge to train trap disarming safely.

Draft possible explanations for the nightmares plaguing tusk children.