“I thought you wanted to go to sleep?” Olza asked as she and Hans walked through the forest to return to Gomi.

“I still do, but now I can’t.”

“I’ve never met someone who dislikes opossums, until now I suppose.”

“Look, she’s probably listening to us right now.”

“...Petal the opossum?”

Hans took a deep breath and summarized his earlier conversation with the Lady of the Forest, ending the story saying, “It would be like Becky to get a forest spirit to tease me.”

“When she ‘read’ you with her vines, maybe she saw a memory of you killing opossums?”

“I’ve never killed an opossum!” Hans shouted in the middle of the road. “Why would I ever do that?”

“Assuming you’re being truthful…”

“Olza,” Hans said, stopping the alchemist to look her in the eye–or the best he could with the starlight leaking through a spring forest canopy. “Are you in on this? You can tell me. You had your fun.”

“Hans,” Olza said in return, mimicking the Guild Master’s seriousness, “You’re sleep deprived. It’s an opossum. You saw it. I saw it. Buru confirmed it. You’re right, the oath is strange, but I’ve met people who treat opossums like they’re rats. I’m sure you have too, so maybe the Lady was just trying to protect Petal from that?”

“Are you suggesting the Lady wants me to be some kind of opossum advocate?”

Olza laughed.

“This isn’t funny, Olza.”

The alchemist rubbed Hans’ back and gently guided him to continue walking like he was a confused, senile old man. “I know. I know,” she said softly. “Oaths are scary. You’re right. Do you trust Becky?”

“...Yes.”

“Do you trust Buru?”

“...Yes.”

“And you thought carefully about the oath and didn’t find anything nefarious.”

“That’s why this bothers me. Why would the Lady of the Forest put so much importance on an opossum? She talked as though I would immediately take issue with the familiar, like it was dangerous or something. Gods, this is too strange.”

“Do you trust yourself?” The alchemist asked.

“Absolutely not.”

Olza sighed. “The Lady has been good to Gomi. From where I stand, she has only ever helped. Becky trusts her, which is no small feat, and the safety she’s offering is more than fair for not harming an opossum.”

“I gave Devon so much shit about his oath, Olza,” Hans said after a time. “But now… Now I see how he could have been swayed.”

“Your oath is different. Nothing you told me translates to personal gain for you. I think not being selfish matters here.”

“That’s exactly what’s bothering me,” Hans said, his twitchy anxiousness giving way to the dullness of fatigue. “I know you’ve heard the stories about the great ‘Master Devontes,’ and they sound like fairy tales, a dashing young hero routing entire forces with his divine blessings and all that. But they’re true. That kid has so much ability, and he’s helped a lot of people with it… If I was willing to take an oath about an opossum to help people, would I really have turned down an oath if it meant greater power to help?”

“I think your last shift up the mountain was a tough one,” Olza said, softly. “On top of that, you’ve been upset about Gret and the Adventurers’ Guild. You’re tired. You’re stressed. The Lady of the Forest has been nothing but helpful, so maybe this is about perspective. If she was just as protective of Becki when she was a piglet, would you still be suspicious?”

“...I suppose not.”

“Let’s sleep on it. Give this topic some time to breathe and come back to it with a fresh head.”

Hans agreed, reluctantly, and walked Olza home.

Quest Complete: Decide whether or not to pursue silent walking and snow walking.

As much Hans wanted those abilities, he wasn’t willing to go through the oath process with the Lady of the Forest again. Walking the hard way would have to do.

***

The Guild Master woke with the sunrise and went downstairs to the guild hall storage in search of coffee beans. He knew he had none, but if he checked again, he thought, perhaps the gods would see fit to change that.

They didn’t.

Kane and Quentin, already studying in the guild hall common area, asked if Hans would like a cup of tea. He accepted the offer and sat at his desk while Quentin poured a cup and refilled the kettle.

“Everything okay, Mr. Hans?” Kane asked, assessing the bedraggled Guild Master, his hair and beard still skewed to one side from his pillow.

“Didn’t sleep very well. I thought I told you two to rest.”

“We are,” Quentin said, setting a cup on Hans’ desk.

“Waking up before me to study doesn’t sound like resting.”

“Do you find reading to be strenuous, Mr. Hans?” Kane asked.

“You know,” Hans said, after a sip of his tea, “in some places, they respect their Guild Master.”

The boys laughed. Hans joined them.

He asked what they were studying. Kane practiced the gestures for the spell Pull. Though Lee insisted that a Spellsword should disguise their casting at all times, Kane didn’t agree, preferring to increase his dungeon effectiveness above all else. Push had been pivotal to his success against the gnoll overgrowth, but he liked the idea of using Pull to bring a monster into his sword. Any reasonably intelligent being would see that a spell was at work, but Hans approved where Lee did not.

Quentin studied varieties of goblins, taking notes and recreating their battle in the shaman room from the top down to analyze the encounter. The margins contained a growing list of questions about positioning, goblin capabilities, and alternative battle choices. Hans noticed Quentin also had the chapter on ogres bookmarked, likely an extension of the large humanoid sessions he had observed with Becky and the Silvers.

For a moment, the boys whispered an argument to each other. The only words Hans could make out from either of them were “no, you ask him.”

“Mr. Hans,” Kane said finally, “We want to be adventurers.”

Hans stared dumbly at the Apprentice. “Okay…”

“We love Gomi and all, but we want to have adventures like you and Miss Mazo. Travel the kingdom, meet interesting people, all of that.”

Gods, it’s too early for this.

“I see. What brought this on?”

“The shaman room was scary, but… We liked the challenge. I don’t want to say it was ‘fun’ because that sounds bad, but that’s kind of how it felt.”

Hans nodded. “I’ve probably been too honest with the two of you, but I had fun too. You’re allowed to like doing what an adventurer does, you know.”

“Okay, so how about the adventure part?”

“Kane…”

“I know it can’t happen now, but this war won’t last forever. Tusks could travel just fine before, so it has to go back to that.”

One of Hans’ active quests came to mind.

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

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

And that made him remember another.

Active Quest: You’re too tired to formulate a coherent quest update about the baby opossum familiar.

Gomi was supposed to be a slow, quiet life.

“It’s like we’ve talked about before,” Hans said, “I’m all for it. If it were up to me, we’d be working on that right now. I have to put your safety first and traveling the kingdom as a tusk isn’t safe. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. This isn’t what the kingdom should be. The truth is, I don’t know if it will be safe for any Gomi adventurers to work abroad, tusk or not.”

“That’s bullshit,” Kane said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Give me another year of training with Lee, and they can try stopping me. They got Luther by surprise but they won’t get me.”

“Kane.”

“They got no right.”

“Kane!”

The tusk stopped suddenly, as if realizing just then that he had begun to rant. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hans.” Kane shut his notebook and left the guild hall.

“Should I give him space or go after him?”

“Space,” Quentin answered. “This is my fault. I complained about wanting to adventure outside Gomi. I should have realized he felt more trapped than I do.”

“This is not your fault,” Hans assured him. “One of the hard parts of being a good friend is recognizing where anger is really coming from, not just how it comes out. Kane sounds angry at us because we’re the only people willing to hear him. It’s easy to confuse being the audience for anger with being blamed for that anger.”

Quentin said he understood. “Still sucks.”

Hans agreed.

When he returned to sipping his tea, he felt the subtle throb of a brewing headache. Perhaps Olza was right about fatigue and stress warping his perspective.

Well, of course, she’s right. What choice do I have, though?

Get it together, Hans. Be productive.

Opening his notebook, he brainstormed how a baby opossum could actually be a vicious threat. His thoughts included:

-Evil Druid shapeshifter

-Vessel for a greater demon

-Unknown species that resembles an opossum

-Dire opossum (Note: do dire opossums exist?)

-Extraplanar opossum

-Fae-blessed opossum

-Warg vessel for a wizard to spy on Gomi

Reading his list back to himself made him more embarrassed for how he behaved with Olza the night before. Were some of these possible? Yes, in the sense that the techniques and variables existed for such things to actually happen. Were they at all likely? Absolutely not.

I need to apologize to Buru.

Quest Update: Apologize to Buru for your negative reaction to Petal.

Hans stood, telling Quentin he was heading to the Tribe farmlands and would be back in an hour or so, definitely in time for class.

He stepped into an overcast sky. Yotuli stopped him as he shut the guild hall door.

“Mr. Hans,” she said, “Do you have a minute?”

He said he did.

“You told us when we picked our class we would learn our roles and those roles only.” She hesitated, unsure of herself for a moment. “Hypothetically, what if we wanted to change our class?”

“Walk with me?” he asked. “What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, and I’m really grateful for all that Gomi has done for me. But–”

“Yotuli. This is a normal question, and this is just a conversation. You’re not going to upset me or anyone else.”

Ten quiet steps later, Yotuli said, “I picked Ranger when we started, and I’m not opposed to sticking to it if that’s better for Gomi. I’ve been thinking about what you said about specializing. Helping cover the kids’ class has helped me see Ranger skills are not for me. I’d like to focus my specialty in a different direction.”

“What direction appeals to you?”

“Promise not to laugh?”

“Promise.”

Yotuli seemed to reconsider continuing the conversation and then held her chin a little bit higher. “Cleric.”

“I take it you’ve read up on it?”

She said she had. “I know it’s a difficult class, but I’ve thought a lot about it. I would be able to keep using my weapon skills but add Cleric abilities, and we don’t have a Cleric, so that would be good for the party too.”

“Yotuli…”

“I can do it.”

“The Guild doesn’t do a good job of explaining the true challenges of the Cleric path,” Hans said. “I’ve had maybe thirty aspiring Clerics come through my classes. That’s in total for my career where I couldn’t begin to count the number of Rangers and Fighters. I know of three who had the conviction to actually use Cleric abilities. The rest switched classes.”

“I know it won’t be easy.”

This was how every Cleric conversation went for Hans, but he had had too few of them to practice his answers. Aspiring Clerics always believed that their faith could endure, only for their training to later reveal they did indeed doubt themselves and their beliefs. It might be the smallest sliver, buried so deep even they didn’t know it was there, but that was all it took to cut a Cleric off from their unique flavor of magic.

Teaching an adventurer to believe so deeply in their ideals was far different from Hans’ other teaching challenges.

To swing a sword, the body had to coordinate hundreds of muscles in a perfect sequence. At the same time, the brain calculated the timing, speed, trajectory, and force of the attack to aim the blow at the correct place and time. Casting a spell was like that, except will moved mana instead of muscle fibers. Despite the mystique casters indulged in, most spells were purely mechanical. What you believed was irrelevant if your technique was correct.

Broken into its component parts, combat was a synergy of thousands of calculations running and updating nonstop to keep up with the chaos of a battle. Unlike magic–for all but the rarest of prodigies–a person learned to maneuver and coordinate their bodies for the whole of their lives. By the time someone trained seriously with a sword, they had been alive for ten or twelve years practicing to move. The natural progression of that development hid the true difficulties of developing other skills.

Hans never had to teach the idea of a punch. He only ever had to teach students how to punch better. Whether through instinct or socialization, every person understood the rough mechanics of clobbering someone with their fist. Close your hand. Throw it at the target. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The same was true of swinging a sword.

Magery students at the beginning of their studies were like Fighters who had never moved their arms before. Before they could execute a punch, they had to learn to use their muscles, as if they didn’t have a childhood where they learned those skills organically. Most people never thought about how hard that would be to learn as an adult, but Hans had seen a few adventurers survive horrific injuries. The damage was so extensive that they had to relearn how to walk and feed themselves.

The process looked incredibly difficult.

Unlike magery, Cleric abilities were rooted in conviction, making the use of any Cleric blessing far easier than spells of similar strength, mechanically. Modern day Clerics built their conviction on ideals or philosophies rather than on gods and goddesses.

However, if they doubted their belief in the slightest, they could not call upon a Cleric power. Confidence in traditional casting mattered, of course, but even the least confident mage could cast a spell as long as they followed the steps correctly. Not so for a Cleric. The purity of the Cleric’s belief replaced any need for incantations or reagents or sophisticated mana manipulation.

“It’s an all or nothing class,” Hans warned. “Having pure conviction is hard enough, but Clerics have to keep it too. Fifteen years from now, if you discover a reason to doubt, all of that effort to become an effective Cleric was for nothing.”

“I understand the risks.”

“They might be bigger than you realize.”

She said she wouldn’t change her mind.

“Supposedly, being a Cleric was easier when the gods were more active in our plane,” Hans said. “Easier to believe in something when you see it at work. With pure conviction… I don’t know, Yotuli. My beliefs now are very different from when I was your age. Things I thought couldn’t possibly change.”

The tusk was twenty two years old to Hans’ thirty nine. Wait, he was forty now. He hadn’t noticed his birthday come and go.

“This belief won’t change.”

“May I ask what you’d root your faith in?”

“My gram prayed to Daojmot. Do you know it?”

Hans shook his head. He wasn’t much for spirituality.

“So my gram grew up on the frontier. Her mom’s family was one of those groups trying to stake their own claim beyond the kingdoms. I guess you don’t hear about them much anymore.”

“I remember when the frontier was where you could ‘build your own kingdom.’ I saw a lot of families chase that dream. Fill a wagon and hope for the best.”

“Yeah,” Yotuli said. “My gram’s family was one of those, so she was too, and so was my mom. They fell in with a group that had contacts at a settlement. Safety in numbers and all that. When they got there, a few of the families prayed to Daojmot. I don’t know what language that is, but on the frontier people used the word to mean ‘the spirit of bastards and wanderers.’”

“Spirit as in a being or spirit as in an idea?”

“My gram described it as the connection between a certain kind of people, so an idea I guess. When orcs attacked the settlement, there weren’t many survivors, and my mother… she died later having me, so she was killed in the attack too in a way. My gram said Daojmot spared my life and spared hers, and Daojmot gave us the power to survive, to keep wandering.”

As Yotuli explained it, her description of Daojmot sounded like a different form of hope. They both gave form to the idea that though life was difficult, something better was on the horizon if you were willing to look for it. Daojmot was that too but was specifically for the outcasts and the unwanted. It was a resilient, gritty kind of hope that only they could share.

Hans wished he could believe in something like that. Were he Yotuli, he would not consider a few survivors as a sign of some sort of blessing or grace, but he kept such thoughts to himself.

“Thank you for hearing me out,” Hans said. “I can tell your heart is set on this path, and you’ve given it the thought it deserves. So let's make you a Cleric.”

***

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.

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.

Apologize to Buru for your negative reaction to Petal.