“Oh, I’m sorry. It’s late. This could wait until morning,” Lee said.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep anyhow,” Hans assured her, and he wasn’t lying. “Blood magic? Why did she think that?”

Lee explained Theneesa had studied the issue from the first day rumors began to spread about tusks defecting to the orcs. Then when she heard one of her former students defected, she threw all of herself and her resources into investigating why. With a team of four Gold and five Diamond mages, Theneesa spent every free hour working to find an explanation. She even had books shipped in from Hoseki as well as a few rarer grimoires sourced from other towns.

“Bel is the mage,” Lee said. “She could tell you the technical stuff. Blood magic was Master Theneesa’s top theory, linked to tusk blood somehow. That’s as much as I know there.”

“I trust Theneesa,” Hans said. The Diamond-rank White Mage was far more qualified to study magic than Hans would ever be, and she handpicked the mages who helped her. If Hans had hired people himself to study the problem, he couldn’t have done better. Not anywhere and definitely not in Gomi.

Also, if he was honest with himself, he may have never thought Blood magic was to blame. That school wasn’t in textbooks, and the effects and power of it were described in vague terms when mages did discuss it. The taboo around that kind of magic created a massive blindspot for the orcs to exploit.

“Did she have a solution?” Hans asked.

The tusk shook her head. “Not when we left. She was talking about using wards, but they weren’t sustainable for some reason. Wish I could explain it. I’m just a dumb Spellsword.”

“Don’t hear about those very often. Spellswords I mean.”

“Almost everyone in the Mikata chapter can cast at least one spell with a weapon in their hands. Master Theneesa insists on it.”

Hans had many more questions, but Lee had only just arrived. “Thank you for all this. We don’t get news here during the winter.”

With the barest minimum of snow melted, the outside world leaked into Gomi right away. Soon, Hans suspected, the dam would burst.

***

Bel could walk on her own by the morning, thanks to the magic of Healing potions. Her wounds were still mending, winces of pain often interrupting her sentences, but she was strong enough to hobble out of the guild hall and up onto a wagon. Lee followed the whole way, ready to catch her friend if she stumbled. Hans hadn’t seen a wagon all winter, and to his eye, the weather still wasn’t right for it, but Galad was willing to push his mules if it meant getting Bel to the barns with less pain.

Olza understood the implications of Blood magic better than Hans, but her education was just as absent on specifics as his. She said there were wards against Blood magic in her book on enchantments, but she couldn’t remember how much material was there, and she couldn’t look because Honronk had borrowed it.

The Apprentice Black Mage was due back that day or the next, and his books only left his hands when he was in the dungeon. They could look it up then.

When Honronk arrived late that following afternoon, Hans relayed what Lee had shared, bringing him up to speed. As soon as Hans mentioned wards against Blood magic, Honronk said to look at page 231. Olza flipped to it as quickly as she could without tearing pages. Her face dropped almost as fast.

“If correctly constructed,” she began, “the ward will protect the caster from any and all blood influence as long as the rune is directly connected to the caster’s own blood, typically through a cut on the hand, the rune pressed into the wound.”

“Is that the only ward against blood magic?” Hans asked.

“The only one we have.”

Every solution is just three more problems in a cloak.

Honronk asked, “I almost had Charm.”

“I’m sorry, Honronk,” Hans said. “It’s a good spell. It’s not wasted effort.”

The tusk nodded. “What spell does the ward use?”

Olza looked back down at the book. “A variation of Repel Possession. The enchantment script is the same except for a modification that ‘enables blood to power the runes. Refer to–’ Yeah. That’s all it says about the spell.”

“Good news,” Honronk said.

Hans raised an eyebrow.

“Repel Possession is in our books.” Before Hans could comment, Honronk continued, “Charm can wait.”

The Guild Master knew Honronk wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise, even if dropping a spell that close to learning it was inefficient. Hans got the sense that the Apprentice Black Magic would offer his own neck if that meant helping the tusk kids. The children were sleeping for now, but they would build a tolerance to Sleep potions eventually, and the nightmares would return. Standing in Honronk’s way would do no good for anyone.

When Charlie entered the guild hall, the cold gust behind him a little softer than it was a month ago, Honronk bowed slightly to Hans and Olza and then to Charlie before seeing himself out. To Hans, the Apprentice Black Mage was always thinking, and it was focused thought, like he had a puzzle right there in his hands. That was probably why the tusk barely spoke. He didn’t have the energy to.

“Wanted to tell you two that Luther was awake today,” Charlie said to the Guild Master and the alchemist. “He didn’t say anything, but he nodded when Galinda asked him a question. She says he even smiled a little bit.”

“What happened?”

The Mayor frowned. “He was beat pretty good. Doesn’t look like he’s eaten a long while, and that’s not like Luther. That boy would eat the whole bakery if I let him.”

“A prisoner,” Hans said.

“Appears so,” Charlie said. “I was sitting in a comfy chair drinking tea while he was locked in a horse stall, dying a little bit each day he didn’t get to eat.” He put a hand on a table to steady himself as tears welled in his eyes. “I’m tired. I’m so so tired.”

When Hans and Olza moved toward him to help, he waved them away.

“I just needed to say it out loud. It’s the only thing in this world I can’t tell the love of my life. She’s tired too, but she can’t admit it either. Won’t admit it.” Charlie slowly inhaled, pressing the air back out through his nose on the exhale. “No matter how much good we do here, it just gets worse out there.”

Silence hung. Hans had seen his share of difficult emotions. If Charlie wanted more from his friends, he would ask. He said he needed them to listen, so Hans didn’t speak. Nor did Olza.

“Right. Thought you’d want to know about Luther. I’ll be seeing you.” Charlie turned and left hurriedly. Tandis stepped through the door as the Mayor held it open.

“Is he okay?” Tandis asked when the door shut.

“He’s been doing this for a while,” Olza said, “and that’s the first time I’ve seen him crack, even a little. I don’t think I would have held it together for very long if I were him.”

Tandis understood. “Galad’s pretty worked up.”

“I’ve never seen that either.”

“What can we do?” Hans asked.

“I wanted to let you know he’s packing the blood and horns into beer barrels,” Tandis explained. “He’s putting a human team together to take it to Osare as soon as the pass is remotely usable. He asked me to work up a product volume estimate so he can move the wagons as frequently as we can.”

She opened her notebook and passed it to Hans.

“I don’t see how we can manage more than one delivery a month,” she continued. “Between bringing it down from the cabin and having enough stock to turn a profit on the trip with wholesale prices… I thought you should check my math.”

The page in front of him was packed with numbers and figures and calculations. Hans lost his way almost immediately. Handing the notebook back, he said, “This is beyond me. You know more than I do about this stuff, so if you say a month is the best cadence, then that’s the best cadence.”

“Okay,” she answered, reviewing her notes with a troubled look on her face. “I wasn’t before, but now that the plan is actually happening, I’m terrified. I could fail and a lot of people will suffer for my mistake.”

“Adventurers go through something similar. The first real job, where they’re unsupervised and the stakes are serious, messes with a person’s mind. I heard it called a ‘medusa moment’ one time and that’s stuck with me. The thing that makes you scared… it’s not going away, but you can learn to manage it even if you freeze up at first. And you’re one member of a party, so let the pressure of the job spread across everyone to make it a little easier.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Tandis nodded.

“Tandis,” Olza began, “what’s Galad doing that worries you?”

She thought. “I haven’t been here long, but he’s always been optimistic and welcoming and encouraging. My daughter adores him–everyone does, really. And today, well, today was the first time I ever saw him want to hurt someone.”

***

“We need coin to buy supplies and to build Gomi’s wall,” Galad said to the group gathered in the guild hall. “I was somewhat skeptical of Hans’ plan to expand the cabin, but now I’m convinced we should hire an outside crew to build the wall while our people go up the mountain to work.”

“Rushing wagons through the pass is too risky,” Charlie argued. “We’re all angry, but we can’t risk our people like that.”

“You don’t understand. Someone is going to come looking for the tusks who took their prisoner,” Galad replied. “The snow isn’t even gone, and we’re already a town of interest. We need to be ready to protect our people as soon as possible.”

Galad shared that Uncle Ed and three town guards volunteered to drive the wagon. One of the new tusk families would take over Ed’s farm as if it were their own so that he could do his new job: Being the human face of Gomi’s laundering efforts. Hearing about Luther worked up Uncle Ed pretty good too, and he wanted to do something about it.

“We need to be cautious,” Charlie urged. “We’re starting to sound like the military type. Galad, you’re right that someone will come looking sooner than we’d all like, but we have to be calm. Whoever they send needs to return to Osare unharmed and uninterested.”

Galinda growled to express her frustration.

“That’s not what any of us wants. Me included,” Charlie continued, squeezing his wife’s hand. “So we need to start cooling this off today. One person’s anger could be enough to end Gomi.”

The room sat in silence.

“I know the adventurer Bel and Lee apprenticed under,” Hans said. “I have no doubts that they are skilled and well-trained. If we fold them into the cabin rotations, we’d have enough people to risk pushing for more growth. That could up the profits quite a bit, depending on what we pick.”

“You remember what nobles are like, right?” Galad asked Charlie when he saw the Mayor shaking his head as Hans spoke. “With enough gold, you can spit in the face of a royal guard and then go on with your day.”

“What kind of spitting are you fixing to do?”

“I don’t think any of us has an answer for that right now, but with the kind of gold we’d get from a bigger operation, we would have many more options for protecting Gomi. Gods, we could buy Osare outright.”

“We have friends in Osare,” Charlie reminded Galad. “If we start to think of neighboring towns as enemies to be battled or conquered, we’re definitely on the military track, and that’s dangerous. Kings don’t take kindly to that sort of thing.”

“We need resources to have options. Gold is the best resource of them all.”

Charlie nodded. “I see there’s no changing your mind. I’ll support sending a wagon as soon as we can if you promise me it’s for gold only. If it’s for revenge, I’ll block the road myself.”

“Agreed,” Galad said.

The meeting adjourned as stars overwhelmed the fading sunset. Soon, only Hans and Olza remained.

“I’m going to go grab my last bottle of fool’s root,” Olza said.

Hans rubbed his neck. “That’s a good idea.”

Quest Update: Earn enough gold to free Gomi workers to build the new campus. Bonus Objective: Pick a secret passage cooler than a bookshelf door.

The Bonus Objective for that quest was like a splinter lost in a finger. He couldn’t see a fix, so it poked him just a little bit hundreds of times a day.

***

Olza reclined in her usual spot on Hans’ couch in front of the fire. She set her book on her lap, and asked, “Can I ask you an odd question? Do you ever feel nostalgia for a hard time in your life?”

Hans said he wasn’t sure he understood.

“Here’s an example: When I was studying for my alchemist exams, I was broke and shared an apartment with four other students. Some days I skipped meals because I couldn’t afford them. I hardly slept because I was studying all the time. And I was stressed nonstop, worried about my grades and my projects or whatever test was coming up next. Sometimes, though, I miss my tiny little room and eating rice and beans three times a day. That’s crazy, right?”

“I don’t think it’s crazy,” Hans said. “I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. Best explanation I can think of is that simple problems are a strange kind of luxury. Getting good marks and paying rent seem trivial next to… well, you know what I mean.”

“You also know the ending. You didn’t then.”

“Interesting,” Hans said. “Yeah, I can see how knowing you survive is different from how it felt the first time through.”

“Like a battle in an adventuring story,” Olza said.

“Wow. That’s exactly it.”

Olza asked Hans if he would go through being an Apprentice again if he had the chance to do it over.

“In a heartbeat,” he answered. “Being a beginner at something is the best feeling in the world.”

The alchemist wasn’t sure she agreed with that. She remembered being a beginner at anything as being difficult and unpleasant.

“Yes, and then you learn new things and improve. Those first few years of studying… It's like you learn a fascinating new concept or technique every day. You progress so much, so it feels like every little bit of work you put in leads to a reward. Seeing yourself improve like that is pretty magical.”

“You want to learn everything over again?” Olza asked in disbelief.

Hans nodded. “That’s probably weird, but that’s how nostalgia around adventuring feels for me. Improvements for me now are so small, just minute shifts in a swing or in footwork, something only I notice that makes me, at best, 0.1 percent better.”

“Do you think we’ll look back at this winter with that kind nostalgia?”

Hans paused. “I don’t know, but I hope so. That means it ends up working out, right?”

Olza agreed. That seemed more plausible with two new adventurers in town. They hadn’t discussed it, but Hans suspected that Bel and Lee were Silvers. Teaching and training for many years had given him that sense. When adventurers visited a chapter, they rarely volunteered their rank right away, which meant that the new guy in your class that day could be Iron-ranked or could be Gold-ranked. If you didn’t learn to quickly assess someone’s skill level, two equally horrible outcomes were possible.

If the adventurer ended up being Iron-ranked but you fought them like they were Gold, well, you were an asshole who beat on someone far below your skill level.

If you fought the Gold-ranked adventurer like they were an Iron, you wouldn’t be prepared for a serious match, which was like giving your opponent a free swing, or several.

Hans had experienced both of those scenarios and enjoyed neither.

And Lee mentioned that Bel was a mage. If Bel was indeed Silver-ranked, the arrival of the tusk adventurers could have big implications for Gomi’s future.

Quest Update: Talk to Bel about the deficiency of magery education in the Gomi chapter.

If Bel and Lee could get to Gomi, Hans realized, another kind of problem could be on its way to Gomi: Olza’s jealous ex, the Diamond-ranked adventurer.

“I know you don’t want to, but we should talk about him before the snow melts all the way,” Hans said as gently as he could.

“What is there to say?”

The topic, not surprisingly, upset Olza. She wasn’t an adventurer, and treating her like one was unfair. He couldn’t be direct and plainspoken about all of the ways a visit from an ex could go wrong. In many ways, that would actually be cruel. Instead, Hans approached the conversation as his wanting to respect her wishes in how the situation was handled, if it arose in the first place. That was true, and he hoped it would make it easier for her to talk about her fears and concerns.

Olza eventually said that she didn’t want to have to talk to him, but she also didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she hid from him. She wanted to see him stomped into the dirt, but she also didn’t want to face the fallout that would inevitably follow. If he could somehow come to town, decide he no longer wanted to pursue Olza for whatever reason, and then leave, never to return, that would be her ideal outcome, whether or not she was responsible for making that happen. Because it would be done. For good.

“What class is he?”

“Geomancer.”

Geomancer was a Black Mage specialization focusing on earth and water magic. High-level Geomancers were highly valued in military applications because they could build walls and dig trenches far faster than a crew of diggers. The nature of their combat ability also made them desirable, as earth and water were always available in some form, and such magic was not easy to directly counter.

A Magic Resistance potion could weaken or nullify the mana-powered flames of a fireball, but a Geomancer worked with plain old dirt and rocks. A Magic Resistance potion wasn’t helpful for protecting you from a mudslide or from a shower of sharp stones. Those weren’t mana-powered entities. They were simply natural parts of the environment.

“You don’t owe him any of your attention,” Hans said. “If he shows, lock the shop. The rest of us will get him out of town.”

“I don’t want to be a coward.”

“I’ve heard that a lot in my career. Telling an Apprentice with dreams of becoming a hero that there is no shame in avoiding battle is counter to what they want to be, or at least that’s what they think. Adventuring isn’t a sport, and life isn’t either.”

Hans continued, saying that while you might owe a competitor in a festival duel courtesy and respect, no such thing was owed to an enemy. Ever. If a person or a creature was labeled an “enemy,” they had already disqualified themselves from deserving honorable behavior of any kind. Getting bested in a festival duel sent you to the losers’ bracket. Getting bested in a real fight sent you to the grave.

So, forget everything else, and win.

“I still feel like this is my problem, not anyone else’s,” Olza said.

“When I was sick, I told you that you didn’t need to stay around to take care of me. You told me to shut up because friends take care of each other.”

“That was diff–”

“Olza, respectfully, shut up. Friends take care of each other.”

***

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.

Earn enough gold to free Gomi workers to build the new campus. 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.

Talk to Bel about the deficiency of magery education in the Gomi chapter.

Devise a test to see if blood magic is causing nightmares in tusk children.

Design a training dungeon concept to test on the dungeon core.