Drills and dungeon runs. Gnolls, camahuetos, and imps. Again, and again, and again. Hans put wax in his ears for the first three laps to be sure the squonk problem was truly resolved. From there, they continued combat drills when the dungeon needed time to regrow, and then put their new techniques to practice on the next dungeon run.
Hans had never had students with so much field experience. The speed with which the Apprentices learned to fight the dungeon monsters quickly made encounters simple mechanical repetition. To keep them learning, he had the Apprentices try different roles in the party, giving everyone a glimpse into what their allies experience in a battle. Even the mages took up a sword and shield to experience the frontline, though they didn’t stay long.
Eleven days after Becky and Olza returned to Gomi, a sparrow rapped its beak against the cabin door. Buru answered, listened, and thanked the bird.
“Sparrow says ‘Potion worked,’” Buru announced.
The cabin sat silent when Buru finished speaking.
Quest Update: Continue researching non-localized spells capable of causing nightmares in tusk children.
“What do we do now?” Tandis asked, breaking the silence.
“Identify the spell,” Hans said, his mind racing but finding no destination.
“How do we do that?” Chisel asked.
Hans sighed. “We go Dispel by Dispel until something works. Process of elimination, but without a high-level mage or a stocked library… That will be hard with the spells we have.”
“Because we have so few?” Honronk asked.
Hans nodded.
“Shorter list,” Honronk said, continuing a moment later when the rest of the group looked at him with confusion. “Short is easy.”
The Guild Master was surprised that Honronk played the optimist and that he agreed with him. Depending on the spell, Hans may be able to get by with reagents as a big crutch, but that was likely too optimistic. They had to have the ingredients first. Next they would have to be willing to accept that most or all would be “burned” when Hans bumbled the incantation and failed the spell. That was a costly endeavor in light of the broad spectrum of spells they would need to test.
With the unofficial group meeting concluded, Hans lingered in the cabin to make himself available for questions on their ongoing studies. When he was first planning how training would work in the cabin, he believed he could use the downtime between dungeon runs to cover textbook material, but he abandoned that idea two days in. Combat drills, guard duty, and crawls in perpetuity was already too much to ask of the Apprentices. Everyone but Honronk had started to take semi-regular solo walks when weather permitted, their only real opportunity to have solitude.
Honronk read and studied endlessly. He wasn’t cold or particularly anti-social. That was just how he spent his free time. Hans had to force him to rest his hands, expressing genuine concern for the potential damage over practicing spell gestures might cause.
Several hours after the sparrow, Honronk asked Hans, “Should we be practicing the runic script?” The Apprentice Black Mage referred to the strange lettering included with every spell entry.
“Well, I’ve never seen it taught to non-enchanters. A few of the dangerous ones are good to know for traps, but it’s basically a different language with its own set of rules. I tried to pick it up on my own but surrendered.”
The dark gray tusk nodded by the firelight. “Is it useful?”
Hans said that it was but for more specific purposes. If a mage wanted to create a spell scroll–essentially a “pre-cast” spell–or wanted to work with enchantments, whether it was for items or places, they needed to learn to read and write with runic script and be competent users of the spell they intended to imbue into that script.
A few mages made a comfortable living by repeating the same enchantment for a low-level, but still useful, spell. One might specialize in Nightsight helmets and another might specialize in imbuing staves with Light, and then produce nothing but that item for the rest of their careers. Though mages always denied it, they had been accused of fixing the market on several occasions, all the mages allegedly agreeing to keep prices high and inventory low. Under that system, enchanting three or four items a year was quite lucrative, giving the mage the capital and the free time to pursue personal projects.
The tusk looked down at his notebook and back up at Hans. “But is it useful?”
Sighing, Hans replied, “If that’s what you want to do, it’s incredibly useful. I’ve never seen an adventurer double-up on their studies like that, though. The material is dense, and it’s just as challenging as your first specialization, and your first specialization requires all of your energy and focus to begin with.”
“I see.”
“There should be a few pages on it in the Beginner Spellcraft book if you want to check it out.”
Sven caught Hans’ attention and asked, “What should I be doing now? I’ve read this four times.” He indicated the manual on traps Hans had given him.
“Could I borrow that next, actually?” Terry asked.
The Rogue tossed it to the Ranger. “What for?”
“I’m walking first. I’d like to pitch-in on looking for trips. Selfishly.”
“Good news,” Hans said. “We’re working on that tomorrow.”
***
At the start of the next crawl, Hans made two announcements.
From now on, Hans would add “traps” to the dungeon, but he asked the Apprentices to temper their expectations. He added details throughout the dungeon that would be out of place, a simulation of hidden trap triggers, but he had limited materials to work with. The training was for Sven, primarily, but everyone was instructed to participate even if they weren’t answering out loud.
Quest Update: Refine a system for training dungeon awareness.
For the second, he said that they would begin transitioning to three-person teams for dungeon crawls. He knew that the non-stop schedule was burning them out, and getting them comfortable with that structure was the only solution he could see. The Apprentices didn’t have any alternatives to offer, but they didn’t seem concerned about the change. They were close to that already. Though they had six in their party, in any given fight at least three of them did little more than watch.
They knew that was true, but the extra support was there if they needed it. That absence would be felt, but rest would be felt too when they could halve their party size.
Sweet, sweet rest.
The first version of Hans’ trap training program was crude and embarrassingly simplistic, but it was a start. He used a nail stuck to the wall with some clay to represent a trip-wire. He broke one of the bricks he pulled out of the pit and used a thin flat piece to represent a pressure plate. With some chalk, he drew a faint outline to represent a trapdoor. And he used crushed cinders to represent murder holes in the walls.
The whole exercise reminded the Guild Master of the paintings the Gomi children left hanging around the guild hall and how many of them were better than what he managed to execute in the dungeon. Hopefully the effort would help, even if it was just a little.
Sven spotted the pressure plate easily. A rock in an empty corridor was difficult to disguise. He spotted the nail easily as well. The trapdoor outline elicited some giggles from the Apprentices, and Sven argued that the cinder spots looked nothing like murder holes. After that, Buru offered to help Hans hide the traps. He felt he could use the task to practice his natural camouflage techniques.
Fortunately, the shift to a three-person party went smoothly. Terry, Sven, and Honronk formed one party while Yotuli, Buru, and Chisel formed the other. Balancing skill sets after the obvious choice to split the Rangers was simple enough.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Both of the parties stumbled early on, but that was when the other party members were still present to offer backup. By the time they split, every encounter was a success. Hans insisted, every crawl, that they be on their guard. The dungeon core had grown new monsters itself in the past, and they had no way of predicting if or when that could happen again.
Any crawl could be the one that served up a nasty surprise.
But maintaining that sense of caution was difficult, even for Hans. They started stacking camahueto horns outside of the cabin, and they ran out of containers for imp blood days ago. Every time they added a new pair of horns to the stack, Hans’ concern over their plans to launder dungeon loot grew. No matter where they sold them, it was a suspiciously large quantity. Any valuable reagent in that quantity would be unusual, actually.
On some days, he felt certain that their plan to keep the dungeon a secret would work and that progress was promising. On other days, like when he stood in the snow pondering the small mountain of horns, their plan was an obvious sham that could never keep the Adventurers’ Guild and the kingdom at large from taking over.
By the time the first resupply arrived, the three-person parties finished their crawls efficiently and safely. The size of the dungeon meant almost a day of hiking each time, but no one had been injured or made a tactical error. At worst, Hans figured, he’d be the fourth party member if one was needed.
Getting the Apprentices rest was important enough that he considered running the dungeon alone. The Apprentices would forget what they were saying halfway through sentences. They would go without blinking too long. They would take a little bit more time each day to climb out of their bedrolls. The Apprentices put on a good face, but Hans could see them fraying.
The Apprentices drew lots, and Terry, Sven, and Honronk won. No one begrudged them for going home first. Tandis offered to stay to organize the new supplies, but Hans forced her to return to Gomi. She needed rest as much as any of them, and he saw no reason to keep her from her daughter for an extra two weeks.
Once the adventurers and the restock team departed, the one-room cabin felt downright palatial. Hans kept to the smaller shelter to give the Apprentices time away from their instructor. As much as he would have liked every session to run according to plan, friction was inevitable, especially with how much time they spent with one another. In truth, they annoyed Hans sometimes as well.
He learned long ago that conflict within parties was unavoidable. Instead of ignoring the friction or stewing in it, he taught adventurers to give each party member space, to resolve any active problem, and to let the small stuff slide. Instructors needed to do that with their students as well, space being especially important in that particular dynamic.
An instructor Hans met once told him, “Don’t be friends with your students.” Too many parts of training adventurers required you to do what was best for them and not what made them–or you–happy.
Hans always found that advice to be callous, but the longer he taught, the more he understood why an instructor could feel that way. Devon had refused his advice, and their relationship died in the same moment. An endless chain of friends moving on to better things or coming to despise you would make anyone bitter and jaded. Students always left. Always.
He tried to find a middle ground that was genuine and approachable with a professional amount of distance. That was best for him and for his students.
It was also lonely.
***
After drills one day, Yotuli stopped Hans at the ladder out of the pit.
“Can we talk? No optimism. No cushion.”
He said okay.
“Will we fix the nightmares? Truly?” she asked, her eyes flat and her back rigid, like she braced for the worst.
“We have a lot of spells to test, and no mages at a level to cast them. That’s… Not easy to solve.”
“That many spells cause nightmares in children?”
Of the spells Hans knew, academically at least, he identified the following as potential culprits: Fear, Charm, Confusion, Taunt, a couple Suggestion spells, a few dozen Illusion spells, and a variation of Astral Projection he read about one time. He knew that Olza tried Cure Curse potions on the children, but he didn’t know enough about curses to say if that meant all curses forever or if they had edge cases and technicalities to address.
“Is there anything I could do?” Yotuli asked.
“You mean beside cull the dungeon for eight weeks straight?”
“We have our own time to use if we want.”
Yotuli was welcome to read any of the books in the cabin, but Hans warned her that the likelihood of finding an answer was low. Not because she didn’t know magery but because their research runway was so limited. If anything, she said, it would give her something to do, even if it ultimately went nowhere. He could empathize.
If Quentin could figure out the squonks, maybe Yotuli would break the case of the nightmares wide open, so might as well try.
***
“Why would anyone want to be a wizard?” Yotuli asked in the cabin to no one in particular.
Chisel expressed that she had been asking herself the same question since she volunteered to be the party’s White Mage.
After a laugh, Hans asked, “Which part got you?”
“Besides the few thousand pages to read and memorize? Half the entry for each spell is cautions and warnings. Lesser Sleep: ‘Miscasting on one’s self or a human or halfing can result in a temporary or permanent coma for the target of the spell.’ Illusory Scene: ‘Visual hallucinations may become persistent.’”
“The risks of bending the universe to your will.”
Yotuli turned to Buru. “Is Druid magic like this?”
Buru shrugged. “If you are good to nature, she will lend you her strength.”
“How do you do that?”
“Hard to explain,” Buru answered and didn’t continue.
Yotuli physically recoiled at a new discovery. “I’m changing my question. Why would anyone learn summoning? ‘Pacts with any being from the infernal plane are discouraged, and under no circumstances should one summon any demon or devil varieties of Bronze-ranked or higher as they are known to exploit open wounds for possession and attack quickly.’ Eesh.”
Hans nodded. “Intelligent evil is a strange enemy. They’ll humble you with twisted creativity.”
“Will our dungeon have monsters like that?”
“I have no idea. We don’t know enough about dungeons.”
Yotuli closed the tome. “Is it weird that I’m sad we might never fight something of that level? I mean, that sounds terrifying, but I’m curious too.”
“You’re talking like a true adventurer.”
Chisel asked why Yotuli believed they might never have that chance.
“We won’t ever adventure outside of Gomi,” Yotuli answered. “Our rank will be unknown, and no chapter will let us through the door after the war.”
“That’s not so bad,” Buru said. “I like it here.”
“We do too,” Chisel responded.
Yotuli agreed with Chisel. “It’s not about not liking Gomi. It’s hard to feel yourself getting better but know you can’t take it anywhere.”
Reluctantly, Hans said that Yotuli’s fear could become reality. He believed adventurers, perhaps more than anyone, needed practical and objective information, not a sanded-down version that was more palatable but less accurate. Despite that belief, adventurers were still people, and bad news was no less painful just because being direct was smarter tactically.
Could was not the same as would. That was important because the war could end in a way that also opened the kingdom up to tusks again. If that sounded too fanciful, Hans could also devise a way to register them under a different chapter, giving them a real rank and access to jobs outside of Gomi. That was definitely a “could” because of the complexity and variables involved, not to mention it would require a significant amount of crime on top of all the other crime he already had planned.
Somehow, Hans’ dream of being a Guild Master had morphed into an elaborate web of illegal activities that continued to expand each day. Laundering, smuggling, fraud, tax evasion, forgery, treason–The Gomi chapter had made a hard pivot in operating procedure because of the dungeon core.
Furthermore, his current Apprentices were accessories to each of those crimes, if not equally as guilty as Hans due to the nature of their roles in the dungeon scheme. No one was innocent by this point, and everyone knew what they risked by participating, but was it worthwhile to press their hand and expose everyone in Gomi to even more risk just to take outside jobs? Hans verbalized those thoughts to the adventurers.
“I wouldn’t want my adventure to hurt anyone here,” Yotuli said. “But I’m also fine doing the crime instead of being the accessory to it.”
Chisel and Buru agreed without hesitation.
“Let’s get everyone to Iron before we start making other plans,” Hans said.
***
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.
Refine 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.
Rethink the approach to the dungeon cabin. Bonus Objective: Pick a secret passage 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.
Continue researching non-localized spells capable of causing nightmares in tusk children.
Test structural suggestions for the next dungeon core experiment.