Crammed inside Uncle Ed’s farmhouse, a small crowd stared at Honronk.

When the Apprentice Black Mage didn’t continue speaking, Uncle Ed said, “Well? What’s the idea?”

Honronk went to the door where he had left his bag. He dug through its contents and produced a wide-brimmed floppy hat, the kind worn by farmers who spent long hours working under the sun. The cloth hat was an undyed gray, and it was covered in runic script. The same runes in the same order, over and over and over. Most were scratched out and many were half-complete.

Handing the hat to Hans, Honronk said, “Nightsight. Don’t look at the fire.”

The Guild Master accepted the hat with an eyebrow raised and timidly put it on. When he felt the hat tighten around his skull, wearing it like any other hat, his vision shifted. The colors around him dulled, and the parts of the house that were in shadow now resembled a drawing on a chalkboard, white lines against black. He went to the nearest window. The world outside was in grayscale, but he could see all the way to the trees with perfect clarity.

He took off the hat, looked it over again, and passed it to Olza.

“You did this? You added a Nightsight enchantment?”

Honronk nodded.

No one else spoke as they took turns passing the hat around, each experiencing the Nightsight enchantment for themselves before handing it off again.

“You think you could do a Repel Possession enchantment?” Any other person would have explained their thought in broader detail from the start, but talking with Honronk was always a different kind of process. Hans had learned to be patient in their long hours spent at the cabin together, and that was much easier to do once he realized the tusk wasn’t being rude. That was just how Honronk interfaced with the world.

“Yes.”

Olza spoke. “The Repel Possession spell we have needs blood to power it.”

“Yes.”

“Honronk,” Hans said as gently as he could manage, “What would you enchant?”

“Tusks.”

Confused eyes darted around the room, meeting other confused eyes to confirm that no one understood what Honronk met. When Hans pressed the Apprentice to elaborate, he didn’t speak his answer. Instead, he pulled his shirt sleeve up above his left elbow to expose his bare forearm. It was the same dark-gray as the rest of his skin, but when the light caught at the right angle, Hans could see runic script, drawn in ink that was almost the same gray as the tusk’s natural skin tone.

The runes that looked like graffiti scrawled over the floppy hat were tattooed on his forearm. Over and over. The tattoo runes continued up his biceps and beneath his sleeve. Hans realized that these were practice runes, tattoos Honronk applied to himself. He pictured the tusk in front of the cabin fire, the flat of his forearm turned upward in his lap, poking ink beneath his skin with a makeshift tattoo needle. Hans would later learn that the same kind of practice tattoos covered most of Honronk’s left leg, at least the parts he could comfortably reach by himself with his right hand.

Every one of the practice tattoos was for Nightsight.

Olza, the only other person who read the book on enchanting Honronk borrowed, said that it briefly referenced enchanting living beings, but that mention wasn’t instructional. It was a warning to avoid such practices at all times. It seemed the tusk used the warning for inspiration.

“You got it to work?” she asked Honronk.

He nodded. “I’ll practice Repel Possession next.”

***

“Will it work?” Hans asked Olza. The rain on the walk back from the Tribe farmlands made conversation difficult, but now that another log was on the fire and they each had a fresh cup of tea, they could talk.

“I’m not an enchanter, but everything he explained matched my understanding, and he had the citations to back it up.”

Hans whistled. “I’m trying not to be excited, but it’s too tempting.”

“That’s a lot of pressure on Honronk,” Olza said with a hint of guilt.

“I don’t think he sees it that way. He talked about doing the enchantments the same way he talks about being hungry or making a call on a crawl.”

“Must be nice to not feel emotion.”

“He feels plenty of emotion. You don’t make those kinds of sacrifices if you don’t have strong feelings about why.”

The alchemist shook her head. “I’m terrible. That was a terrible thing for me to say.”

“I’ve had a few students like Honronk. I think they’d tell you not to feel bad. A lot of people don’t bother to try enough to feel bad, if that makes sense.”

She said she understood. “I should ask him about his tattoo ink. I might be able to give him something easier to work with.” She noted the thought in her notebook.

What could I do to help Honronk?

***

The Apprentice Black Mage gratefully accepted Hans’ offer to swap in one of the new Silvers so he could stay behind, completely focused on perfecting a Repel Possession ward. Hans guessed he would see the tusk’s other leg covered in practice tattoos when he returned.

In the meantime, Hans planned to take full advantage of the extra firepower the new adventurers provided. He still needed to be cautious with dungeon core experiments, but two well-trained Silvers expanded his margin for error. This test would be their most ambitious yet: a recreation of one of his early crawls as an Iron-ranked.

“The Regenerating Castle” wasn’t full of monsters with the Regeneration ability. Instead, the keep was built on a prominent bluff, a highly desirable location that offered critical control of a once-busy trade route. Before the kingdom united, dozens of factions across the centuries vied for control of the bluff because of its access to ore deposits. The castle was destroyed and rebuilt over and over, stacking layers of construction on top of layers of ruins.

Academics who studied the site found evidence of at least seven structures having been built on the site, the changes in construction styles and materials like the layers of stratum on a desert cliff. With so much history packed so densely, the Regenerating Castle was a popular stop for Treasure Hunters. Though the castle had been picked over hundreds of times, Treasure Hunters still found reason to believe that they would be the ones to uncover the last big score.

Undead hordes sometimes rose in places like that. The prevailing theory was that centuries of death combined with a burst of wild magic allowed skeletons and ghouls to rise. The same was known to happen on old battlefields or near mass graves. Though it didn’t occur often, single corpses could rise in remote areas, and the undead monster would wander through the wilderness until it was defeated.

When Hans and his party took the job, they knew that minor undead were in and around the castle. They didn’t know, however, that a goblin shaman was responsible and that they would find a goblin nest inside.

The experiment was a leap ahead in complexity, an attempt to recreate his best recollection of the layout and what his party fought and where. If those memories could be used to influence the core, the Apprentices could build new knowledge with relative safety. The monsters would be no less dangerous, and he wouldn’t give his students a map, but he did choose non-lethal versions of the traps he encountered for real and intended to train them on monster-specific tactics ahead of time. Ending someone’s life or career with a trap was not very educational.

Well, he thought intensely about the traps being non-lethal. He wouldn’t know if the core could be influenced to that level of specificity until he tried.

He hoped to use a version of the Regenerating Castle job to provide combat experience against undead and goblins, to prepare the Apprentices for dealing with a tight and confusing layout, to build their awareness for traps and ambushes, and to give them experience modifying tactics for mindless as well as organized monsters.

With Bel and Lee supporting Terry and Sven, clearing a version of that job should be easy enough, but they would have to do it backward since they would be at the bottom with the core when Hans made the suggestion. They also couldn’t know if the layout would be exactly what he planned.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Hans briefly prepped the party on what to expect. Terry and Sven wouldn’t be fully trained on goblin tactics, but with Hans and two Silvers in the party, they should be safe, especially since Hans knew where they attacked from his first time through the dungeon.

The party now waited at the end of the hallway where the dungeon’s roots plunged through the fissure and led to the core. Hans reread his dungeon plans with the soft purple glow and tipped his hand, a steady drip drip drip of blood falling onto the broken sphere. When the glow pulsed brightly once, he had the feeling he should stop, so he did, plugging the hole in his finger. He bandaged it up and scaled the wall to pass through the fissure and rejoin the party.

The trek back to the surface began with familiar encounters: gnolls, camahuetos, and imps. As the journey continued, Hans worried that the dungeon core hadn’t accepted any of his suggestions. Every step through the bland, uninteresting hallway lowered his hopes.

The party fought the geode gecko. Bel and Lee had never seen one in person before, so Hans let them try catching a rod in the gecko’s defensive shell, timing it so that they could lever the gecko back open. Lee moved a little too early and the rod bounced free. They ruptured the oil sac, but that was okay. Previous runs left them with quite the surplus.

Resuming their journey, they turned a corner and the dungeon changed.

The familiar cinder-gray masonry of the Gomi dungeon became mortarless white limestone bricks, each block the size of a small treasure chest. A few feet after the change, a ramshackle wooden gate blocked the way. Every board looked like it was salvaged from a different building at a different time, and the nails holding it together were haphazardly pounded, many of them angled and bent.

“We’re in business,” Sven said.

Quest Complete: Design a training dungeon concept to test on the dungeon core.

Terry ran his fingers along the limestone, astonished by where he stood and what he touched. Bel and Lee had similar reactions, but their adventurer experience restrained them from touching anything.

“Gotta say,” Lee began, “I thought you weren’t all there.”

“I get that a lot,” Hans said.

Beyond the gate was the encounter Hans predicted. Terry and Sven hesitated at first, but when Bel and Lee jumped into action, they came to their senses and did their part. With the room cleared, Hans took his time looking around.

“...It’s just like I remember.”

The memory came back to him in vivid color.

Hans and Boden the dwarf went in first. Typically, Boden preferred a spear, but he used a battle axe in the tight corners of the Regenerating Castle. This room, though, was wide open with a vaulted ceiling and multiple square pillars providing support. What this room had been used for originally and from what generation of the castle’s history, Hans couldn’t say. At that time, however, it was lit by low burning braziers and was scattered with garbage, bones, and feces.

A pack of goblins armed with spears and clubs swarmed the frontliners the moment they stepped through the door. Gret fired arrows over the frontline, favoring Boden’s side since he was shorter. Mazo did the same, but with arrows conjured from mana, wrapped in blue flames.

In a few moments, enough of the goblin swarm had fallen for the party to press forward, escaping the bottleneck of the doorway. A volley of tiny crooked arrows flew from the darkness. Hans caught most of them on his shield, and two caught in the leather of his greaves. Neither of those did serious harm, but he felt the tips scraping against his shin and his thigh. The arrows were likely poisoned or dipped in fecal matter, but addressing those likelihoods could wait.

Gret and Mazo cleared the archers using the glow of her blue projectiles to spot and target the green monsters hiding beyond torchlight.

The unmistakable clatter of hooves on stone cut through the din of battle and high-pitched goblin shrieks. The skull of a bull slammed into Hans’ shield, launching him several feet backward, and turned to attack Boden next. As Hans gathered his wits, and accepted that his forearm was broken, he heard iron clash against iron–an odd noise, given the company.

Wiggling his left arm loose of his shield, the fracture making that a challenge, he saw the bull that attacked him standing upright, swinging a double bladed axe as large as the dwarf it targeted. When Hans’ brain caught up with the eyes, he understood. All yellowed bones covered in dirt and cobwebs, a reanimated minotaur reclaimed the ferocity it had in life and came down on Boden like its axe was a sledge and the dwarf was a nail.

A trio of goblins charged at Gret and Mazo, but the Rogue already had his rapier unsheathed and the Blue Mage was mid-spell. Hans chose to aid Boden, scrambling to his feet to run at the minotaur. On the way, Boden managed a good parry, sending the monster’s axe to the side and into the floor. The blade wedged between two of the limestone bricks, and the minotaur wasted no time abandoning its weapon to use its horns.

One goblin jumped in Hans’ path. Its face crumpled from a well-placed knee a moment later, and Hans continued onward. The minotaur knocked Boden off his feet with a flick of its horns and turned for Hans. When Hans braced for the horns to come for him, the minotaur hit him with a backhand instead. It moved to gore him to finish the job, but ice formed around its hooves, locking it in place.

“Shaman!” Mazo called.

Shaman? What? Hans remembered thinking in that moment. Then he heard the incantations, sounding like the crazed babbling of a twisted child.

Three arrows flew over him in rapid succession, two of Gret’s and one of Mazo’s. All of them went wide missing the minotaur. Where he expected to hear the clatter of arrows, he instead heard the mushy thwack of arrows finding flesh. The skeletal minotaur collapsed a few seconds later, as dead as a skeleton should be.

Walking around that room again–or a recreation of that room to be more accurate–he found himself expecting Gret or Boden to come around the corner, making some variation of a dick joke about the way Hans’ broken arm hung limply. Somehow, they could turn anything into a dick joke.

“Sir?” Terry asked.

“Sorry,” Hans said. “Got lost in a memory”

“What does this one teach us?”

The Guild Master collected himself. “Room awareness and the importance of extrapolation. Seeing goblins and skeletons together should have clued us in that active necromancy was involved, something more than wild magic. That minotaur would have surprised anyone, but the shaman should have been expected.”

“Was this job, uhh. How do you usually say it?” Terry thought for a moment. “Was this job expensive?”

Hans chuckled. “Expensive enough. Boden and I both broke a few bones.”

In the corner, right where it was supposed to be, he found a stone table the shaman had used as an altar. He checked the wooden box beneath it.

“Guess we can’t get that lucky,” Hans said.

Sven asked him what he meant.

“We found a few pages torn from a necromancy grimoire in here. No pages here, though. I suppose we can’t reproduce dungeon loot.”

The Rogue agreed that would have been a nice perk. “If any of your jobs involved a dragon hoard, still worth a try.” Sven flashed a toothy grin.

After they collected the minotaur horns, they continued up through the castle. The shaman was easy to stab in the back this time around, so every skeleton they expected to face as they ran the castle in reverse was a harmless pile of bones. The goblins were pretty surprised about a party of adventurers coming at them from behind, but they were dead before they could raise any concerns about fighting fair.

Terry marveled each time the construction style of the castle changed. One layer was built from rubble, raw boulders and stone fit and mortared together. Another layer was roughcut gray stone. Hans wasn’t a geology expert, but it matched the rock he saw in the region. The next was the same kind of stone cut and placed with obvious craftsmanship, far finer than any of the layers below it. The variations would continue until they reached the exit.

Despite Terry’s fascination with the setting, he didn’t notice a tripwire ahead. Hans grabbed him, preferring to test the trap with a rock instead of an Apprentice.

The Guild Master did his best to think of alternatives to traps when he made his suggestion to the dungeon core, replacing the deadly parts with something harmless so that Apprentices knew they made a serious error but didn’t, you know, die. Thinking about not thinking about real traps made Hans think about real traps. His endless cycle of thinking and not thinking convinced him he should treat every trap as if it was deadly until testing proved otherwise. Getting killed by his own trap would be an embarrassing way to go.

They found three in total. The first tripwire triggered a spike to fall from the ceiling. Adventures coming from the other direction wouldn’t see the trap itself as it was tucked against an overhead beam. Hans’ version had a pillow on the end.

A layer of lumber covered a chasm in the hallway, a long drop to a floor below. Taking the right side–as if you were coming in rather than going out–would allow an adventure to experience that drop. The boards were rigged to crumble under a person’s weight. Hans’ version had a three inch drop.

The final trap they encountered appeared to be another gate, like the one they saw at the start of this dungeon section. Pushing the gate open without first disengaging a disguised latch would trigger a deadfall of small boulders heavy enough to shatter a skull or break a neck. Hans’ version dropped leaves.

If Honronk made as much progress as the dungeon core, Gomi was heading toward a beautiful summer.

Quest Complete: Refine a system for training dungeon awareness.

What was a staircase leading to the surface in the original castle, was the same plain corridor he had run the Apprentices down dozens of times.

“Those grimoire pages,” Terry asked as the party began unequipping their dungeon gear. “What’d you guys do with them after?”

“Turned them into the guild, of course,” Hans answered.

Terry raised an eyebrow.

“...Mazo may have copied them first.”

“Knew it.”

***

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.

Research the history and legends of the Dead End Mountains, more.

Protect Gomi.

Earn enough gold to free enough 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.

Implement a Repel Possession ward to stop the nightmares, permanently.