Quest Complete: Safely deliver your party to the surface.

Chisel was off for this particular rotation, so they didn’t have a Healer on hand. That wasn’t a serious problem, but it was less convenient. Bel, Lee, Sven, and Honronk abandoned their days off without hesitation, helping each of the Apprentices out of their gear and offering to do the post-adventure cleaning it sorely needed. Olza helped the Apprentices flush and dress their wounds. Some of the color returned to her face, but she was still quiet.

Hans didn’t press her to speak. In his years of adventuring, he saw that look on civilian faces dozens of times. Sudden, unexpected violence put any normal person into shock. All he could do was be supportive and give her time. Rushing these things did more harm than good.

The Apprentices experienced some of the same shock, having just fought for their lives, but they had more fatigue in their faces than fear. That was a good sign, but it didn’t guarantee that their wellbeing was undamaged. Like Olza, Hans would give the Apprentices space to process and recover before probing the topic.

“Anything else I can do?” Olza asked softly after her final bandage.

Hans shook his head. “You can have my cabin for the rest of your stay. I’ll use the old one Becky built.”

Olza nodded and exited the dormitory.

“Will she be okay?” Terry asked.

“In her own time,” Hans said. “A run like that is hardest on civilians.”

“How so?”

Lee interjected. “Think about it from her perspective,” she said. “She’s not an adventurer. She doesn’t hunt monsters or swing a sword, and she was trapped at the very bottom of a dungeon with no real control over her fate. That’s a special kind of helplessness that cuts people to their core.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Terry said. “I know I was peeing my pants, but yeah, at least I had some say in whether I lived or died.”

“Should we be gearing up for a run?” Sven asked.

“No,” Hans answered. “You’re all capable of taking down anything we left behind, but the quantity of monsters changes things a bit. Best we take a day to rest and properly prepare. We’ll rotate watch in the mines to make sure an iron elemental doesn’t find its way out. The imps aren’t likely to go very far, and the goblins are dead.”

He suggested everyone but Kane, Terry, and Quentin step out to give the wounded Apprentices a touch of privacy, as much as they could offer in a dormitory at least.

When Hans and the Apprentices were alone, he said, “Exceptional performance today, gentlemen. You adapted and kept your wits. You followed orders and made smart decisions when you didn’t have orders. I’m proud of you. All of you.”

The Apprentices nodded to express their thanks.

“A full debrief can wait, but it’s just us right now. Anything I can do for you this moment?”

Quentin raised his hand. “I get the overgrowth,” he said, “but how was there a goblin berserker if there wasn’t one before?”

Hans chuckled. “I was thinking more along the lines of are there injuries I should know about or do you need to talk, but I admire your curiosity, Quentin. The berserker: the shamans sacrificed several of their grunts for a Blood magic ritual. That’s where ‘evolved’ goblins come from. The larger the nest, the more likely you’ll find goblins like that.”

“You called ‘champion’ at one point, but it was a berserker. Why was that?”

“Incomplete information,” Hans answered. “I knew a big goblin was in the room, and the party needed to know that too. A champion was less likely than a berserker, but if I suspect one of two monsters, I’ll call the worse option. Expecting a champion and finding something smaller is a nice surprise. The other way around gets messy.”

“Anyone have anything else?”

Terry said he did. “It’s not a question. I just wanted to say that the boys got us through the gnolls. Nine of the fleabags was a nasty surprise. They would have swarmed us, but Quentin was smart enough to call for Kane to cast Push.”

“I didn’t know you were battle ready with that spell,” Hans said.

“I’ve been practicing with Lee. That was the first time I used it on a run. Quentin deserves the credit though. I froze up and wasn’t thinking about Push at all.”

“Like I said. I’m proud of all of you. Before I go, I have to give this speech: Don’t hide anything from me. If you want to tough-guy your way through talking with everyone else, I don’t recommend it, but fine. If you’re hurt or distracted or anything, you tell me. Period. Understood?”

The Apprentices nodded.

“Good. Get some rest.”

The uphill walk from the dorm to the dungeon cabin was not long or particularly steep, but Hans felt his muscles and joints stiffen from the abuse of his adventure. The pain wasn’t any worse than he expected, but it slowed him considerably, his every movement like a rusty hinge in desperate need of oil.

He knocked on the cabin door. “Olza? Do you need anything?”

She opened the door and invited him in.

“I don’t mean to be a bother,” he said.

“You’re not a bother,” Olza said. “How are the guys?”

“Superficial wounds mostly. They’ll heal up just fine. More importantly, do you need anything? We don’t have to talk about it, but I could make you some tea or anything else that might ease your mind a bit.”

Olza sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m… I guess I don’t know how I am.”

“That’s normal.”

“I’ve gone on so many runs to the core, and I’ve never been that afraid.”

“That was uncertainty,” Hans said. “Every other run you joined, we were equipped and prepared for the exact dangers we faced. No surprises, no unknowns in the shadows. Combine uncertainty with having to sit back with no real way to contribute to battle, even though your life is on the line too… That’s hard for anyone.”

Olza nodded meekly. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be sore in the morning, but I’m fine. I didn’t mean to crowd you, though. Can I get you anything before I’m on my way?”

“Wait. The core turned black when you passed out. Was it because of the suggestion you gave or has the core grown enough that resets will get more difficult?”

“My gut says it was the suggestion,” Hans answered. “That was the first time we tried a suggestion that wasn’t from a job. It was just a nice place I visited once.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah. Every other suggestion came with monsters and danger, right? Even the small ones. We can think about that later, though.”

New Quest: Test the “rules” for giving the dungeon core suggestions.

“Okay.”

Hans said he would be in the smaller cabin if she needed him.

“Hans, wait,” Olza said.

“Yes?”

Stolen novel; please report.

“I get why the Apprentices call the swamp the Poop Puddle.”

“God damn it, Olza.”

***

Getting old is bullshit.

Hans grunted and groaned as he slowly undid his armor. What would usually take him a minute or less took the better part of ten. His body demanded rest and resisted his every effort to move.

A pounding came from the door. “Hans! Sorry to bother you,” Luther said through the door. “Heard about the excitement. Thought you might want to get cleaned up.”

Hans found Luther standing outside with a bucket of water hanging from each hand. Luther wrinkled his nose.

“Not your blood I take it?” Luther asked.

“Don’t think so.”

“Hmm. Perhaps I should have brought three buckets.”

Laughing hurt, but Hans enjoyed it no less in that moment. “Two buckets is two more than I expected. Thank you.”

“You got it,” Luther said. “If you need fresh water, just leave the buckets outside the door. I’ll come by before nightfall and fill them up.”

“That’s very kind of you, but this will do.”

Luther bowed his head and excused himself.

By the time Hans finished toweling himself off, one bucket was black and the other was a disconcerting shade of brown. Three buckets might have been better after all, but the worst of the gore and grime was gone. He could live with the sticky feeling of sweat and dirt clinging to his skin for now.

As he lowered himself to his bedroll, his body warned him that it would fight its hardest to keep him from getting up again. He accepted the threat as truth and lied down anyway. On his back, looking up at the familiar thatched roof of the tiny cabin, he replayed the events from the run, studying his every decision and movement, looking for weaknesses and places to improve.

His biggest mistake was not anticipating an evolved goblin. He thought about the dungeon spawn as being static and rigid, but the monsters the core grew were no different from monsters birthed and grown organically. Goblins were still goblins. The core might have grown them, but they fought like goblins and thought like goblins. With three shamans in the room, he should have expected evolved goblins.

Otherwise…

“That was a blast.”

***

Three days later, he stood in front of the dungeon core again. Bel, Lee, Becky, Yotuli, Sven, Honronk, and Chisel waited outside the fissure, bracing for a reset. Hans suggested Olza skip this experiment, and she didn’t protest. Not so for Kane, Terry, and Quentin, though. When Hans told them they had to stay on the surface and rest, they argued for their inclusion.

Hans heard them out and told them the answer was still “no.”

If the reset went poorly again, they had the numbers and the collective experience to manage it safely.

Yet he found himself hesitating to give the next suggestion. Blacking out was unpleasant, and people he cared about were put in danger when the last suggestion went bad.

He took a centering deep breath and pictured a quaint hamlet, a small cluster of eleven well-built wooden structures. Each home was comparable in size to the Tribe cabins, if not slightly larger in some cases. Instead of logs, every board was expertly milled. Flowers, both wild and domesticated, added splashes of color all around.

The hamlet was empty. Hans’ party had been assigned to support an evacuation, so they went door to door to ensure each villager had indeed gone. His party had remarked to one another how every detail of the scene looked like a resident would come around the corner at any moment. Laundry hung on clotheslines. Buckets sat by the well. Windows were clean, and porches were swept. One home they checked even had a table set for a meal.

A group of fire elementals had come through a planar leak, setting the surrounding forest ablaze, and these homes were in danger. The fire was a ways off, but it had been observed moving in that direction, chewing through dry-season trees and grass with speed that seemed supernatural. The residents here were evacuated as a precaution.

Once Hans’ party confirmed the hamlet was empty, they had orders to check one more across the valley before hiking directly toward the forest fire. Mages with water-based spells fought the spread but needed guarding. The blaze was the perfect camouflage for fire elementals, so they would watch the line and put down any elemental that might leave the flames and go after one of the mages.

Suggesting the dungeon core recreate that hamlet–but not the fire elementals, as they were far off–would test how much danger a suggestion needed to be accepted. Visiting the town was part of a job, and though they fought fire elementals and a few trolls who had gotten flushed out by the flames, none of those battles occurred close to the hamlet.

His previous suggestion was a retreat in perfect tranquility. He wasn’t hopeful the core would agree with his logic this time, but he had to try to find out.

Hans trickled blood onto the dungeon core. The intensity of its purple glow grew, and after a similar volume of blood as the last suggestion, the core blinked, a signal Hans had come to associate with the core getting “enough” blood.

“Incoming!” he heard Becky shout from the hallway.

When he climbed the rope and slipped through the fissure, he found his adventurers and the bodies of three gnolls.

“Others?” he asked.

“No,” Honronk said. The Apprentice Black Mage had an enchanted Nightsight tattoo, enabling him to see farther in the dungeon darkness than anyone else.

With Hans in the lead, the group ventured down the corridor that at one point had half a double door and an incomplete set of stairs leading to nowhere. On this pass, they found both double doors blocking their path, complete and functioning.

And locked.

Becky stepped forward with her axe, raising it to chop through.

“Wait, wait,” Sven said. “We don’t need to resort to violence.”

The Rogue Apprentice gently lowered Becky’s axe and crouched in front of the door with his lockpicks. He pulled the doors open less than a minute later.

“The axe would have been faster,” Becky said.

“Miss Becky. This is meant to be Luther’s new home, is it not? We shouldn’t destroy a new home.”

Becky scoffed. “Luther understands me. He’d get it.”

Hans went first, finding the same staircase as before, but more of it. The bottom opened into a familiar hamlet. Though the proportions matched his memory, surrounding the town with dungeon walls and capping it with a stone ceiling made it feel smaller than the original’s scenic view of a wooded valley.

And there was no sun or stars. Just darkness.

“This is eerie,” Chisel said, looking through a window. “These were all lives, real people getting by. I know not literally in this case, but it feels that way.”

“Guards up,” Hans reminded the party. “We’ll sweep the town first. We could find anything, but fire elementals and trolls are the most likely.”

The adventurers split up and went door to door before canvassing the rest of the area for hiding places. Finding nothing of note, they sheathed their swords.

Hans saw Becky standing in the middle of town, staring up at the ceiling. “This was Luther’s idea?” she asked as Hans approached.

“Technically, Honronk had the idea first, but Luther liked it.”

“I don’t get it, boss. Why would you give up that beautiful sky for this?”

“I don't mind it,” Yotuli added, coming down the dirt road from the opposite direction. “Here I was thinking I was starting to understand why dwarves built underground but the dwarf hates it.”

“I’m my own person,” Becky said. “Just because I got cousins somewhere swinging pickaxes doesn’t mean it’s for me.”

Yotuli said that was fair. “All I mean to say is that it feels safe down here. Private, quiet.”

“If Buru was here, he’d agree with me,” Becky grumbled.

Bel called the adventurers to the town well. The Silver-ranked tusk leaned over its edge, looking down. When she raised the bucket back to the surface, clean water splashed out as the bucket rocked side to side. Hans furrowed his brow. A water source was a blessing, but he hadn’t expected the dungeon core to include a working well because it tended to resist making any resource freely available.

For example, the interiors of the homes and other buildings had basic furniture, but the core didn’t recreate food or any small treasures a fleeing population would inevitably leave. Why was a working well an exception?

Then again, the Poop Puddle–

Gods damn it.

Then again, the bayou was a lot of water, far more than a single well.

He heard Olza’s voice in his head say that good science would always produce more questions, but that was no comfort here, not when the core had recently rejected a suggestion and tripled the number of its minions as a result.

Despite Hans’ frustration with the neverending mysteries, he had learned that monster-less suggestions were possible if the suggestion was rooted in a moment where they posed a threat. That was still a working theory, however. In this case, the threat was far off, but it was serious enough that several families abandoned everything they owned to escape it.

When everyone’s curiosity was satisfied, Hans said, “Time to head to the surface.”

Quest Complete: Test the “rules” for giving the dungeon core suggestions.

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

***

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.

Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.

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