Now that the town knew about the dungeon, Hans, Becky, and Roland were no longer the only guards in rotation. A squonk attack was still a serious danger, though. If orcs had been crushed by the hopelessness aura, tusks were likely vulnerable as well, though it would be convenient if they had the natural resistance that dwarves seemed to have. As long as the squonks were around, the entire group posted at the dungeon could come under attack and never know.

To keep from sacrificing a cabin full of innocent folk, a guard using Olza’s earwax kept watch partway into the dungeon at all times. If they spotted enemies of any kind, they tugged on a long rope borrowed from Hans’ old perimeter alarm, alerting the others with the rattle of cans. If they were right about the range of the hopelessness aura, the warning would reach the guards topside first. Then they could wax up and join the fight.

Accounting for squonks turned the simplest tasks into hours of precautions and workarounds. They were harmless otherwise. Any member of the kids’ class could kill one if the hopelessness aura wasn’t a factor, making all of the caution feel silly and overblown–even if it wasn’t.

And Hans hadn’t been able to return to the dungeon. He hadn’t even seen the completed, furnished cabin. Every day for the last few weeks was packed with lessons, meetings, and planning sessions. At night, he prepared for the next day, sometimes falling asleep at his desk.

Having a rare free hour, Hans added sections on class-specific training to his manuscript, The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers. Preparing Gomi’s newest adventurers made him think more deeply about his approach to teaching. The Apprentices had barely begun, so it was far too early to draw conclusions, but he felt optimistic about the evolution of his methods.

“Boss? Hey, boss.” Becky snapped her stubby dwarf fingers in front of Hans’ face.

He startled. “Hi, sorry. Got lost in my thoughts.”

“What do you want me to teach my Apprentice? I’ve never trained an Apprentice.”

“I don’t know what Druids need to know, but I can help you decide what to teach.”

Becky pulled a seat up next to Hans’ desk to listen. He suggested she consider two questions:

1. What had the most utility?

2. What connected to the highest number of related skills?

For example, Hans taught parrying early because knowledge of proper parrying technique could help students more readily grasp shield work. Learning to parry with a sword also helped them to learn mobility, how to identify an opponent’s intention, and how to work with the energy of an attack instead of against.

At the same time, an adventurer would parry thousands of attacks over the course of their career. The same was true of the shield. Furthermore, the consequences of being bad at a skill like parrying were severe. All of those factors made parrying a high-utility skill.

The dwarf tugged on her beard and stared at Hans with one bushy eyebrow raised. “Shit, Hans. I don’t need a thesis.”

Hans sighed. “Teach them the stuff that’s most likely to keep them alive.”

“Could have skipped to that at the start.” Becky leaned over his desk, stealing a look at his draft pages and open notebooks. “Ever consider you think too hard about this stuff?” she asked as she picked up a notebook and looked at it more closely.

“You’re not the first to ask me that.”

Becky frowned. “Who told you about the hallway?”

He didn’t know what she meant.

“You have a drawing of it here.” She flipped the notebook toward Hans. “One of the dungeon hallways changed. It got lumpy exactly like this.” She pointed to a drawing of a footwork training aid Hans had designed but not yet tested.

An extension of his dungeon corridor training ideas, Hans had realized that the weakness of traditional footwork training was that it assumed a perfectly flat surface. For the majority of jobs, adventurers had to navigate rocks or ruts or roots, but those challenges weren't part of practice.

His solution: Build a series of ramps, like small rolling hills, from the dirt in the training yard. The constant changes in height and slope would help students learn to adapt more intuitively to their terrain. In theory. He hadn’t gotten to test it. Yet Becky saw it in the dungeon, or something like it, at least.

“When you say ‘exactly,’” Hans began, “What does that mean to you?”

Becky blinked. “What else would exactly mean?”

“A dungeon hallway looks exactly like my drawing?”

“That’s what I said.”

New Quest: Investigate the altered dungeon corridor.

Now his desire to return to the dungeon was even greater.

A gust of cold spread across the guild hall and then cutoff as soon as Kane closed the door. He and Quentin stomped the snow from their boots and greeted Hans and Becky. Seeing Chisel and Honronk learning magery had further stoked Kane’s interest in the topic. The tusk was in the guild hall for hours each day, reading and practicing. Kane would have Create Water down any day now. Hans wondered how long he could delay him from trying spells on his own.

Quentin continued his study of monsters–anatomy, habits, tactical considerations. He seemed to take after Hans in that respect, devouring page after page with an impressive level of retention. The Guild Master thought highly of his own recall, and Quentin’s was better.

Hans remembered one of his active quests.

Active Quest: REVENGE!

He was still sore about Kane and Quentin convincing him that Tandis was romantically interested. In all likelihood, the boys had done what boys did as a matter of tradition: misunderstand women. That left Hans no less embarrassed, however.

Taking revenge on children was difficult to do with maturity, he realized. Every time he thought of a prank or a scare, he would decide his idea was too cruel and abandon it. Seeing them study so diligently almost made him trash the quest entirely. Almost. He wasn’t ready to give up yet.

One of his other ideas, a non-revenge idea, was a good one.

“Quentin, Kane,” Hans began, “You know about the nightmares the kids are having?”

Kane nodded. “Gunny is starting to have them.”

“Really? When?”

“Few days ago. He’s acting tough, but he’s scared.”

I missed it. I should have asked more questions about the nightmares weeks ago.

“You don’t have to deal with that alone, you know,” Hans said. “If you need help, let me or Uncle Ed know, okay?”

Kane said he would.

“Giving you two the squonk riddle paid off. This problem isn’t as straightforward as fighting a specific monster, but maybe you’ll see something here too. Any ideas of what’s causing it or why it’s happening, I don’t care how weird, let me know.”

The boys accepted the challenge.

“I forgot,” Kane said. “Galad said to ask you to see him when you could.”

“When did he ask that?”

“Before I came here.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Becky laughed. “When else would it have been, Hans?”

“You’re all mean people.”

***

Hans stood with Galad in one of the Tribe barns. This building stored kegs and barrels that would be sold to the merchant caravans in the spring. A special order for Mazo was buried in there somewhere as well. The last visit he made to this barn, early in his arrival to Gomi, it was mostly empty. Now he couldn’t count how many barrels were between him and the back wall. When he thought about it, Hans realized he had never seen so much beer before. It was beautiful.

“Say this dungeon grows to be like the others,” Galad began, “How much loot will we have to move?”

“That’s a messy answer.”

“Walk me through it.”

Hans tried to mentally organize what he knew about dungeons and their treasures. Enchanted weapons and armor may be extremely rare, but other types of valuables might not be. An unusual ingredient could grow in a dungeon, or one of the monsters could have a useful horn or organ to harvest. The gear worn by a dungeon’s higher level monsters might not be magic but could be made from a valuable material or adorned with gold and gems. Some adventurers went as far as to loot furniture, as odd as it sounded.

The Reavers’ Rest dungeon grew a throne in its boss room. If it wasn’t destroyed in the battle–and it often was–a collector would pay good money to own that throne. The wood was intricately carved with beasts and words no one could identify or translate. The seat and back had ornate cushions made from an unknown fur and were stuffed with goose down.

Some believed the fur belonged to a now extinct animal, forgotten to time but not by the dungeon. If the rumors were true, only five thrones were recovered successfully, and now that the Reavers’ Rest dungeon was destroyed, they were even more valuable.

Galad rubbed his chin. “How many dungeon items are small enough to fit in a barrel?”

“Well, most of them, I’d say… Oh!”

The tusk grinned. “I don’t like the idea of trusting a merchant to move wares on our behalf. Puts them too close to the source. Maybe we consider running our own wagons. I’m thinking we smuggle everything out with beer shipments and unload it a town or two away from Gomi. We’d get a better price for the beer, and we wouldn’t have to worry about a merchant getting curious.”

Galad’s plan was simple but elegant.

“I’ve been thinking about this problem too,” Hans said. “I started at the other end, though. We shouldn’t try to sell individual items. It’s time consuming and puts curious buyers near to our people. With the right dealer, we sell an entire haul in one transaction and let them do the legwork to move it. That works well with your wagon idea.”

Galad nodded, smiling at the momentum of their planning. “A dealer having new inventory wouldn’t seem unusual. A single tusk selling barrels of dungeon items would. We’d take a hit selling in bulk, but you’re right. Moving it quickly protects us more.”

Finding a trustworthy partner would be difficult. They both knew that and were unsure how they would find such a person. Another puzzle to solve. Regardless of that partner’s trustworthiness, the Tribe would be wise to disguise their own identities to obfuscate the origins of the loot. No partner should be able to connect the goods with Gomi in any way.

Quest Update: Find a partner to move dungeon loot efficiently.

“Does the guild teach smuggling?” Galad asked with a chuckle.

“We will soon.”

***

Hans’ quest system betrayed him. Quests were meant to be motivating and rewarding, a clear measure of progress reaped from effort. Looking at his quest list now, nearly all of them were long-term projects. If they weren’t, they were goals he couldn’t pursue until the snow melted.

Like this one:

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

He wasn’t going to stumbleupon a first-rate magery instructor in the forest one day. The only real option he had was to order every magery book he could afford and wait for the pass to clear so they could be delivered. In the very long-term, Gomi would need to sponsor one or two people to attend a proper university or academy to learn the way most mages do, in a classroom surrounded by experts. They could then bring that knowledge back to Gomi.

I wonder if that will be Kane someday. If the kingdom becomes safe for tusks again, that is.

“Hans, do you have a minute?” Tandis asked. While the Apprentices worked on their individual projects, she worked up supply lists and thought through potential scenarios they might face.

“What’s up?”

“Should we be preserving squonk parts to sell in the spring?”

The Guild Master sat up straighter. “That’s a good question. Should we?”

“They’re rare monsters. Maybe someone would want to study them?”

“Plan it out. See what you think.”

Hans didn’t know the first thing about quartermastery, so he and Tandis learned together. While the Guild Master’s adventuring knowledge helped Tandis decide what to stock, he wasn’t much use when she started estimating monthly nutrition or water needs. He was of no use at all when the topic was any more complex than that. She had the advantage of having managed businesses before, so while she taught Hans what she knew, he encouraged her to thought-experiment her way through these early stages, anticipating that any answer Tandis reached would be more informed than his.

Two hours into those thought experiments, Hans knew he was holding her back and told her to continue without having to drag him along.

“We shouldn’t sell squonks,” she said after a time, drawing a line through the entry in her notes. “They’re too rare. That could make people curious.”

“I agree with that logic.”

Quentin leaned over to join the conversation. “Can I help?”

Right then, it occurred to Hans that he hadn’t given Kane and Quentin as much support as he would have liked. All the kids, really. Training the Apprentices had consumed so much of his focus. He made a mental note to think on what responsibilities he could entrust to Quentin. But there was so much to do for the Apprentices.

His head spun.

“Pretty stuffy in here, Hans.” Becky appeared at his desk. Behind her, the Apprentices whispered softly. They had never seen the dwarf Druid in person before.

Oh, she’s here for Buru. That’s today. Right.

“Everyone,” Hans said, standing, “I’m pleased to introduce you to Becky, Bronze-ranked adventurer.”

The Apprentices greeted her.

The dwarf sized up the Apprentices. “You should know, I’ve never done this before. But no one loves these forests more than me.”

Becky made eye contact with each of the adventurers.

“Hans, I’m ready to pick my Apprentice.”

“Becky, no–”

“Let me focus,” Becky barked.

The Guild Master had lost control. He sat, defeated, while Becky circled the Apprentices, squinting at each one. Hans was sure he heard Terry whisper to the others something about staying still and not making direct eye contact. Becky sniffed Honronk. He flinched.

“I wish I could say this was difficult,” Becky said. She stopped in front of Buru. “The forest calls for you.”

Neither the tusk nor the dwarf uttered a word after that. Buru inclined his head and followed Becky out of the guild hall. Silence remained a long while after the door slammed shut, the people left in the room glancing between each other.

“Kane, Quentin,” Hans said, “She’ll be back in a week to take you two next. Give you a taste of what Druid life is like.”

“Next week?” Quentin asked.

“Yep. I asked her to give you the deep experience.”

Hans explained that they would first complete the ceremonial mud baptism and then they would shake hands with a bull moose, assuming they convinced the moose of their worthiness with a powerful strut. To avoid confusion, Hans clarified that Kane and Quentin would do the strutting. Then they’d learn to howl at the moon.

Kane and Quentin both swallowed.

Quest Complete: REVENGE!

“I’m joking.”

The boys finally breathed.

The Apprentice class concluded with no additional dramatics. When Hans lifted his eyes from his notes again, the sun was down and the room was empty. The hearth burned low, in danger of dying completely. He couldn’t remember Tandis or the boys leaving. Slowly, he became aware of a throbbing in his temple, like a wrench tightening a bolt behind his eye.

“What time is it?”

The walls didn’t answer.

With a grunt, he rose from his desk and fought through stiff hips to climb the stairs. He considered sitting on the couch in front of the fire to see how much more he could get done. Thinking better of it, he fell face first into his bed.

***

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.

Find a partner to move dungeon loot efficiently.

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.

Investigate the altered dungeon corridor.