Having just cleared most of the dungeon on their own, Izz and Thuz opted to head to bed, leaving Hans, Olza, and Luther talking at the mismatched tables. Maurice slept in Luther’s lap.

Olza explained her Blood magic–apologies, Earth magic–to Luther, telling him about her modified garlic. The same concerns around grow-time that worried Olza were why Luther had never tried growing garlic on the surface. He was next door to a farmer who planted garlic one year, and he hadn’t been encouraged by the results. Other than offering general farming advice, he wasn’t sure how helpful he could be.

“If I still had my farm, I’d plant a few rows of it for you, but it’s tough to grow crops in darkness.”

“Yeah,” Olza said. “Not much sunlight down here.”

“Dumb question,” Hans began, “I know that plants need sunlight to grow, but why is that the case and why doesn’t other light do the same?”

“The simplest explanation I can give you is that sunrays are a special kind of light that the plant uses as a sort of fuel to grow. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the idea.”

Hans rested his chin in his hand. “So it’s the sunrays the plants need, not the sun itself.”

“I’m not sure that distinction matters, but sure.”

“A while back, I was helping Honronk work through a tough spot in his training, he was stuck on– no, that’s not important. What is important: I recall the Summon Light spell describing its illumination as having the same benefits of sunlight. Keeps adventurers from losing their minds in the total darkness of a dungeon, and I think that's why dwarves used them too. I don’t remember the whole entry, but I am certain it said ‘sunlight’ instead of ‘light.’”

“Is that spell difficult to learn?” Luther asked.

“I mean probably,” Hans answered, “but the iron mines are loaded with torches enchanted with Summon Light. You have a few down here already.” He gestured at the enchanted torches mounted outside Luther’s home.

“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?” Olza asked.

“New idea. I swear.”

Olza and Luther spoke over top of each other, each suggesting they try an experiment right away.

Luther laughed. “Seems we are agreed, but we shouldn’t be too hopeful. The soil down here seems acceptable, but I’ve never used dungeon soil to really know.”

“I doubt anyone has,” Hans said.

“Right. It may be that nothing can grow here no matter what we do. I still want to try.”

When Luther finished a list of seeds for them to test–potato seeds or plain potatoes, carrot seeds, radish seeds, and tomato seeds to start–Hans offered his last piece of business for the night.

“In a few weeks, I’ll be back here with a book we need to hide. Think you could find a place where it would be safe?”

“Of course. How could I say no to a proper use of a dungeon?”

***

Back on the surface the next day, Hans showed Izz and Thuz two dorm beds they could claim as their own.

“You can stay in Gomi as long as you want,” Hans said. “You knew that already, but I wanted to say it outright. I am happy to pay you for the time.”

“Again Mr. Hans?” Thuz said with a sigh. “We have already shared our terms. Help us construct a plan to help our village prosper. Do that, and consider it the completion of a fair trade. If anything, it is we who are indebted to you.”

“I do have one more request,” Izz said. “We will likely be doing a great deal of teaching when we return to our home, and I feel unprepared for that responsibility. We have both taught the occasional class or lesson, but our training is in adventuring, not instruction. Might you teach us to be instructors?”

Hans said he’d be happy to do that whether they made a trade or not. He promised to get them a copy of his manuscript as soon as possible. In the meantime, they knew the Apprentice curriculum well enough to work with the current batch of students–Kane, Bel, Lee, Chisel, and Honronk. With Tandis’ new recruits, they might have a few completely new magery students as well.

If they wanted, Hans could observe and offer suggestions. The brothers said they would like that very much.

***

Terry came in from the training yard after a session with the new recruits and flopped onto one of the guild hall benches.

“Gods, Hans,” he began, “where do you get the patience for this work?”

Hans asked what he meant.

“A few of the recruits have never handled a weapon before. Ever. Of any kind. It feels like teaching my daughter how to walk, but it’s worse because they can talk to me.”

The Guild Master chuckled and thought on the question. “I’m not a patient person, and I mean that sincerely. It’s very much the truth and not some humble platitude. When I’m teaching, I think it’s less about patience and more about being practical and empathetic.”

“I’ve never been accused of being empathetic.”

“You’re better at it than you let on,” Hans said. “Beginners will always suck at doing what you’re teaching. That will never change because that’s what being a beginner is. Your real goal with the early lessons is to get them comfortable with sucking.”

“Come again?”

“A new student knows they’re awful, and they know that you know they’re awful. Most of the time they’re already embarrassed, and that just puts more pressure on them. Try to acknowledge that from the start. We were all beginners, and what they’re going through is not just challenging but also normal.”

Terry nodded, thinking.

“Is it maddening sometimes when you say ‘lift your right arm’ and they lift their left? Absolutely. If you let the student see you’re frustrated, bam, they’ll think more about how stupid they look and less about what they’re supposed to be learning.”

Hans suggested Terry adjust how he defined “success” in teaching. Pushing a student to have perfect execution in the early days wasn’t practical. The nuances were plentiful, and understanding them required a much greater context than they had yet. The only immediate objective was improvement. If someone could do ten percent of a technique correctly and they got to thirty percent after a lesson with you, that was time well spent.

The teacher needed to know that just as much as the student did.

Learning was like that at the higher ranks no matter what, further increasing the importance of a new student accepting incremental improvements.

“How incremental?”

“When I was Bronze, I started thinking I was hot shit with a sword,” Hans said. “For a while, I was one of the best swordsmen at Bronze. I won tournaments, I’d occasionally win matches against Silvers, all of that. This Diamond started making annual visits to Hoseki around that time and the guy outright murdered me. I’ve been training a long time now, and I still can’t tell you what he did to put me on my ass, but it happened instantly.

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“Before he left, he tweaked the angle of my hips in my stance. When I say tweak, I mean so slight that you wouldn’t be able to see the difference looking at me. Then he said, ‘Footwork this and footwork that, that’s all you hear. When your feet do what you say, the hips are next. Nobody trains the hips.’”

Continuing the story, Hans said that when the Diamond returned the following year, he gave Hans another tweak. This time, it was an adjustment to how Hans’ head moved when he executed an attack. The year after, he critiqued Hans’ grip. The year after that, he tweaked Hans’ shoulder positioning.

“I’d spend the entire year drilling the new habit, and right when I thought I had mastered it, he would add another miniscule change. But Terry, those tiny fixes were magic. Getting them down made me feel like a Platinum. They helped that much.”

Eventually, the majority of high-rank adventurer training was exclusively minute adjustments to techniques or spells the adventurer already knew. A Gold rarely learned a truly new technique because by that point they had seen the majority of what hand-to-hand combat had to offer. The elite adventurers weren’t using secret techniques. They used the same attacks as everyone else but at a far higher level.

“Izz and Thuz half-interrogated Honronk about his enchanting work because they knew he did something different. At their rank, the tiniest insights are like, well, diamonds. They might go over a year without discovering a single insight like that. And it might come from anywhere. Even an Apprentice.”

“...You make being advanced sound not so fun.”

“The layers are deep. Anyone can get good at anything they want, and I believe that. It’s everything beyond ‘good’ that’s really hard. So help your students enjoy being beginners. If they don’t love the training process, they will never stop struggling.”

***

Olza passed Hans a fresh cup of tea and returned to her usual spot on the couch.

“How’s it feel having Izz and Thuz around again?”

“Really great,” he said. “They’re good kids. Too hard on themselves, but they’re never not trying to help someone. Part of why Mazo keeps them around is to have two working moral compasses in their party. She’d get in a lot more trouble without them.”

“You seem kind of sad sometimes when you're with them, though,” Olza said.

Hans took a sip and thought. “I miss what it used to be. I miss it a lot. They remind me of that. There was maybe a year where life was perfect. I hit Gold, I had money, I had friends around every corner in Hoseki and in almost all the towns in the kingdom. We were demolishing high level jobs every other month, and kids like Izz, Thuz, Theneesa, and Devon were improving so fast.”

He compared that time in his life to a rare celestial event like a comet or an eclipse. Huge forces had to align in the exact right way, and the perfect moment that might have needed a hundred years to happen passed in an instant.

“This is all just old adventurer belly achin’,” Hans said. “A lot of people never get a moment like that, so I should be thankful that I did.”

“No, it’s okay. Getting older is strange.”

Hans agreed.

Olza held her tea close to her chin as she thought, as if she was about to take a sip but was interrupted by her own mind. “We’re not Charlie-level old, but how much time I’ve used and how much time I might have left is very clear to me.”

“That’s an interesting way of describing it.”

“Is it like that for you too?” Olza asked. “Gomi gives me too much time to think. I take myself in circles trying to decide how I want to spend the rest of my life. Some days, Gomi is paradise. Other days, I feel trapped, like my potential is wasted way out here.”

“Yeah. That tracks. The dungeon has helped a lot with that for me, but I get restless.”

The pair sat quietly for a while, basking in the pleasant warmth of a young summer night.

“Most adventurers don’t see old age,” Hans said after a time. “The Guild makes sure you know that, so you’ll hear a lot of adventurers talk about living life to the fullest, no regrets, and on and on. Mostly they’re looking for excuses to go on a bender or to blow their savings, but I think about it a lot.”

“In what way?”

“If I died this moment, would I feel I lived to the fullest? That I did the best I could when it mattered?”

Olza nodded. “My answer for myself would be ‘no.’”

“Why?”

“I gave Aaron too many years of my life, even after he was gone. I was out here worrying about seeing him in Gomi one morning. I don’t know. It’s embarrassing to admit that.”

“It sounds normal to me,” Hans said. “Once someone has experienced real danger like you did, they look for it around every corner for the rest of their lives, whether it makes sense to or not.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious. And screw that guy. It’s not your fault he’s an asshole.”

“You think so?”

Hans laughed. “Olza, I wanted to punch him in the face thirty seconds after meeting him.”

“Fair.”

After he refreshed their tea, Hans sat back down at his desk, continuing his study of the Takarabune manual. He had been working through the notes left by old Guild Masters, starting with the oldest entries and working toward the present. A few hours of writing turned his battered hands into gnarled stumps, so for now he read instead of transcribed.

So far, most of the notes were simple lists and records for basic stuff like what boon a Diamond earned on a certain quest and what rare item was brought back for the Guild. Other than the fact that parties–and not individuals–took quests at the start, the most noteworthy information he found was that early Diamond quests were within the kingdom’s borders, and the Guild shifted to solo quests a few decades in to increase the prestige of the rank, but Hans suspected supply was an unspoken factor.

Were those meaningful facts or novel pieces of trivia? He wasn’t sure.

Two Diamond quests had taken place in the Gomi forest. That was interesting.

For the first quest, he found the following entries:

Cassian the Ranger – 4106.372, Forest Spirit, Fear Aura

William the Archer – 4106.372, Forest Spirit, Fear Aura

Alexander the Black Mage – 4106.372, Forest Spirit, Fear Aura

Higluf the Rogue – 4106.372, Forest Spirit, Fear Aura

Quest Color: Orange/Yellow.

No wonder the Lady of the Forest is so reclusive.

For the second he found the following entries:

Tacitus the Fighter – 1235.2568, Tainted Treant, Vampire Roots

Julian the Barbarian – 1235.2568, Tainted Treant, Vampire Roots

Florus the Berserker – 1235.2568, Tainted Treant, Vampire Roots

Laelius the Druid – 1235.2568, Tainted Treant, Vampire Roots

Quest Color: Violet.

For a heartbeat, he thought he had come across information related to the dungeon, but the coordinates didn’t match. He noted the locations, intending to ask Becky if she was familiar with those two points.

New Quest: Investigate the locations of old Diamond Quests.

Later, Hans decided to look up his generation in the manual, but an entry from a Guild Master Otis caught his attention as he flipped through the pages. Otis was seven Guild Masters ago:

After reviewing my predecessors’ notes, I am certain that year over year, the number of Diamond quests is slowly decreasing. Furthermore, they are trending toward being farther and farther from Hoseki. Where our early Guild Masters had quests within the kingdom, all of my Diamonds have had to venture deeper into the frontier than anyone before them.

My tentative conclusions:

-Diamond quests are finite.

-The farther a quest is from the device, the more time and mana it requires to discern a location. Since our quests are farther away, we have fewer to offer.

-It may take centuries, but there will come a point when we need to take the device into the frontier if we want to continue locating Diamond quests.

I pity the successor who must weigh the decision of having no Diamonds against risking relocation of the device, potentially losing it to the worst of our enemies.

Two pages later, the same Guild Master wrote:

We’ve lost eleven Golds so far this year. I send them into the frontier for their quests, and they do not return. My job has become sending children to their deaths.

That was the last entry Guild Master Otis provided. The next entry was from his successor:

My friend and teacher took his life last night. He could not recover from the guilt he felt.

As of today, I am raising the standards for every rank. I hope that will spare my successor the pain that defeated Guild Master Otis.

***

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.

Confirm Roland and Uncle Ed’s decision on the Osare tournament.

Finish transcribing the manual and decide on the next course of action.

Help Izz and Thuz bring new opportunities to their home village.

Investigate the locations of old Diamond Quests.