Quest Complete: Apply a sigil-lock Magic Lock to dungeon doors.

Quest Complete: Suggest growing mandrake elementals to the dungeon core.

The sigil-locked doors worked as Hans hoped they would. As soon as he raised his forearm, presenting his unenchanted Repel Possession tattoo to the door, the handle could turn. Simple, yes, but simple was a nice change of pace. Only one of the doors was secured with a different kind of Magic Lock. The new barrier locking off access to the dungeon core required a spoken keyword known only to Hans and Bel.

He knew that the Magic Lock spell had no impact on durability and resilience, so the doors themselves still needed to be well-constructed–which they were. Otherwise, any monster thwarted by the Magic Lock could just break through instead.

Thanks to the dungeon core, four mandrake elementals now grew in the iron mines, appearing in roughly the places Hans hoped they would. The Apprentices made quick work of them. After so much practice against iron elementals and their natural armor, mandrake elementals were a simple puzzle to solve. Every hit they landed did damage, and without iron in their bodies, the mandrake elementals had less force in their blows, making them less of a threat as well.

The bayou addition, however, did not go as Hans hoped.

When he made his suggestion to the dungeon core and provided his blood offering, he thought about locating this new area down a side tunnel like he had done with the iron mines. Instead, the dungeon core put the bayou before the Bone Goblins, meaning that all future runs had to go through this new area in order to continue progressing deeper into the dungeon.

Luckily, Hans' memory of the bayou was from the dry season. When the rains came, the only way to traverse the area was by boat, covering the lone passable road and any exposed land dry enough to walk on with four feet of water. This version of the bayou had plenty of standing pools of algae-covered water and no shortage of mud and muck, but with enough patience, an adventurer could make their way around the area on foot. Their boots and pants would be covered in mud, but that was better than trying to hunt poison goliath toads hiding like hippos in deep waters.

A dungeon ceiling replaced blue sky, holding a sort of permanent dusk with no clear origin point. Otherwise, the area was just as he remembered. At the time, he was Bronze-ranked and traveling through the region. Wanting to learn more about the area and the monsters that inhabited it, Hans convinced a local adventuring party to bring him along. The job was to gather poison from the toads and to spear any sizable alligators they found along the way. They sold the poison to alchemists, and they sold alligator skins to local tanneries. Selling the meat from the alligator was an option as well, but the adventurers ended up keeping it to feed themselves and their families.

The local adventurers hated slimes as much as Hans, so they avoided them.

Hans had been surprised to learn that several adventuring parties made a living from the bayou, many of them never progressing beyond Iron or Bronze because they had no need to. The party that let Hans shadow them was all Bronze-ranked, and every member was at least twice Hans’ age. After countless hours hunting in the bayou, they collected their kills with the fanfare of someone picking apples from a tree.

They showed Hans how to look for air bubbles, a telltale sign that an alligator or a goliath toad hid beneath the surface. They tried to teach him to navigate the area without a compass, but when light was low and the foliage overhead was dense, the swamp looked the same to him no matter where he looked. Meanwhile, the old-timers could tell him how far from town they were at any point, almost to the exact pace-count.

In preparing the Apprentices to cull this new area, Hans relayed as much of that wisdom as he could remember. They discussed techniques for escaping deep muck, the kind that felt like quicksand. He encouraged Kane and Quentin to put their spear skills to use in this part of the dungeon and invited the other Apprentices to do the same.

The only lesson he didn’t teach was how to wrestle and pin an alligator. His guides insisted it was a necessary skill if someone lost an arm to a gator roll and wanted it retrieved. Stabbing the beast to death could further damage the arm, making the odds of reattaching it successfully with healing spells even lower.

“Even if you can’t get it sewn back on, that’s your arm. Ain't right to let anyone steal something that’s yours,” one of the adventurers said as they straddled the back of an alligator the size of a geode gecko.

When the Apprentices finished their first bayou adventure, killing all of the slimes and goliath toads they could find, Terry said that Hans should include a bathhouse in his design for a deep-dungeon rest area. The Apprentices never smelled great after a run, but stagnant muck was unrelenting. As long as you had a splash of the stuff on you, the stench of dirty latrine water filled your nostrils everywhere you went.

Hans said he agreed with Terry’s suggestion, wholeheartedly.

***

“Fighting ogres is like fighting faster, smarter earth elementals,” Hans said, surrounded by the Apprentices with Becky, Bel, and Lee present as well. He stood in the middle of the staging area in the iron mines, the largest flat open space they had access to this far up the mountain.

He said that the most important part of fighting any large humanoid was understanding the range of their attacks. Most adventurers were smart enough to keep as much distance between them and an ogre as they could, carefully selecting their moment to shoot in and strike, but several of those adventurers went down from attacks they believed they were safe from.

“You’re better off overestimating instead of underestimating. I picture a big circle around an enemy like that, where the edge is a few inches beyond their weapon reach. If I’m inside that circle, I’m in the most danger. That’s easy enough to do with one ogre, but ogres live and hunt in groups. You need to put a circle around every enemy, and use your peripheral vision to keep track of them. The surprise attack from their big dumb friend is the one that takes you down for good.”

A difference in monster height or weapon choice could change that range significantly, so there was no set “safe area” in fights like that, so Hans suggested his students practice judging reach on the fly. They would be estimating range in the heat of battle for the rest of their careers. The adventurers who had long careers were the ones who got good at it.

If picturing a circle didn’t help, he suggested trying methods he learned from other adventurers.

For Gret the Rogue, managing distance was all about feel. In addition to being trained to use a bow, a rapier, and a knife, Gret had been a successful boxer for many years, so he had practice making that judgment with a variety of weapons and body types.

For Boden the Spearman, his experience with the spear gave him the ultimate measuring stick. The length of his weapon was like a probe, allowing him to test a monster’s reach with the tip of a spear as a reference, keeping the dwarf well away from danger while he did.

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For Mazo the Blue Mage, who was often the person farthest from a melee attack, she didn’t think about distance to the exacting degree of a warrior. In her mind, she assigned every monster she saw a color. Red could do her harm at any second. Yellow was an enemy that didn’t pose an immediate danger but would soon. Orange threats were enemies with ranged attacks, and any enemy that could be ignored, for that moment at least, she assigned the color blue.

“The only approach that makes sense to me is the one I use,” Hans said. “I’ve tried doing it Mazo’s way, for example, and it’s just a mess. I confuse myself more than anything, but that’s because our brains are different. I suggest you experiment with different approaches. What’s best for me might be the worst for you, so when you’re sparring and hunting, put more thought into what approach is easiest for you personally and stick with it.”

In addition to teaching the same grappling curriculum that he started with the children back in Gomi, the Apprentices used the gecko rods to simulate the swinging axe or club of an ogre. Hans explained that the timing of an attack was different for an ogre than a human. An ogre’s weapons had more distance to travel, and their reach gave them access to a larger area.

The smartest ogres used wide slashes, clearing adventurers from their path as if they were threshing wheat. Angry or dumb ogres tried to squish their prey with an overhead strike, like they had a giant hammer and the adventurer was a bothersome spider. Overhead strikes in sparring matches with humans were relatively uncommon–stabbing or slashing was faster and exposed fewer vulnerabilities–so a club coming down from a twelve-foot tall opponent was awkward to handle.

Dodge too soon and the ogre corrects their aim, crushing you anyway. Dodge too late, and, well, you’d never get the chance to dodge again.

They wouldn’t cover party tactics for another few days, but when they did, it would be similar to how they fought an earth elemental. Where they smashed an elemental with a mace, they would slash with their swords to cut tendons and ligaments. Hans went on a brief tangent about how he preferred attacking the knees over the ankles because striking downward at an ankle was a great way to ruin your sword if you missed.

Any party member with a ranged attack, magic or otherwise, would avoid melee combat completely. Arrows and spells were far more useful against an ogre than they were against an iron elemental.

As they drilled, Hans walked around to offer feedback and corrections. The upper-ranked adventurers–Bel, Lee, and Becky–stuck together. Buru joined them to be Becky’s partner. Compared to the Apprentices, their drills were faster and more aggressive. When Hans saw the Apprentices try to mimic that speed, he stopped the class.

“Never faster than perfect,” Hans said. “As soon as you’re biffing your timing or are tripping over your own feet, slow the drill down. Don’t try to match anyone else’s speed. Stick to doing what’s best for your training.”

When the drills resumed, Becky asked Hans when ogres would be added to the dungeon.

“Hard to say,” he replied. “We need to cover the rest of this unit, then we need to train for flying monsters.”

Bel and Lee stopped their drill when they heard flying monsters. “I thought we were hunting ogres,” Lee said. Becky nodded to agree with what Lee said.

“You are. The best ogre job I can give you for training starts with passing through a valley patrolled by harpies. You have to get through them to hunt the ogres.”

“Harpies?” Becky asked.

“Yep.”

“I’d hoped to never see one of those angry bird women in person,” Becky said. “They give me the creeps.”

Bel agreed. “They’re even worse than you think.”

“Gee, Bel,” Becky grunted, “Your speeches are as motivating as Hans’.”

***

With the dungeon dormitory complete, Hans moved into the original cabin built over the pit, the one Roland helped him build last winter, making it a temporary home and office. The inside smelled like week’s old sweat soaked into leather armor. Though he hoped that would subside, he also knew that kind of odor had a habit of being near-permanent. Once it got into the walls and the floors, it might never leave.

But the space was private. He could get a true break from the Apprentices while they got a break from him.

Out his open window, Hans could hear the chatter and movements of adventurers, harvesters, carpenters, and laborers enjoying a cool spring evening. He even heard the distinct giggle of a child, Tandis’ daughter he assumed. When he first visited the dungeon, back when it was just an odd flower patch, the area felt remote and isolated, like it could be one of the loneliest places in the world. Now laughter and conversation were just as much a part of the setting as the crickets and frogs chirping away in the forest.

When the harvesters first talked about living at the dungeon, part of him worried that a permanent presence would detract from the beauty he saw in remote corners of nature. Instead, he found it comforting.

It was the perfect soundtrack for working on his manuscript.

***

Becky stopped Hans outside the dungeon before their next training session. “Hey, boss. Is it okay if Buru misses a few days of duty?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing like that,” Becky assured him. “The forest thinks he’s ready for his familiar, and so does he.”

“Wow. I thought you said that would be late in the summer if not the fall.”

“I sure did. Turns out Buru is a smart kid, and I’m a damn good teacher.”

Hans didn’t disagree with either assessment. Though he saw very little of her Druid lessons in person, Buru’s progress was evident in his runs. He could now trap an enemy in place with vines and summon a swarm of spirit bees to attack them. In the bayou section, which the Apprentices had dubbed “the Poop Puddle” despite Hans’ protests, Buru’s connection to nature was invaluable for navigation and combat.

If an alligator hid nearby, Buru knew. If a goliath toad attempted to use deeper water to mask an escape, he knew. He never got disoriented, he never struggled with his footing, and the density of vegetation made his ability to manipulate plants much more versatile and dangerous than it could be in a cold, stone dungeon.

“How long will he be away?” Hans asked.

“No way to tell. It takes what it takes.”

Even with his limited magery knowledge and even more limited Druid knowledge, Hans knew the familiar bonding process was a delicate one, and disrupting it was a great offense. One of his former classmates went to jail for murder over a familiar. He had been befriending a hell hound for weeks, earning its trust, when a rival mage killed the monster. So Hans’ classmate killed the mage.

The most interesting part of that story was how many mages protested the sentencing, saying that the duration or strength of the familiar bond was irrelevant. Killing another mage’s familiar was akin to killing their child, and what parent wouldn’t repeatedly cast a Paralysis spell on a murderer to hold them in place while lava slowly flowed toward them?

“Anything I can do to help or support?”

Becky shook her head. “Nope. It’s up to Buru from here.”

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Using a pen name, complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Expand the dungeon with resource-specific monsters for each of Gomi’s major trades.

Decide whether or not to pursue silent walking and snow walking.

Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.

Build a rest area in the dungeon with space for Luther to live there full-time.

Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.

Expand the dungeon using the ogre valley job as a blueprint.