I bounced on my heels, too excited to hide it. Lesson days were my favorite kind of days. Lesson days meant answers. Real answers. Not just scraps of memory from a first life that no longer matched the world I had landed in. I had been waiting for this, practically vibrating with the kind of energy I had not felt since I was a much younger version of myself several centuries ago. The air smelled like old dust and iron and sweat, and it reminded me again and again that everything here was new. Completely new. I had never trained in a place like this in my first life. I had been a wizard, self taught, hunched over books and crystals, not running drills in dirt yards or listening to instructors bark orders like sergeants preparing soldiers. This whole world felt upside down in the best way.

  Greta planted her boots in the dirt of the drill yard inside the guild's training hall. The hall stretched wide, open air but surrounded by thick walls that boxed in the sound. No desks, no chairs, just packed soil, battered wood dummies, straw mannequins with half their stuffing kicked out, and a chalkboard that looked like someone had dropped it down a cliff and decided it still worked well enough. Maybe it had survived a real battle. Maybe it had been used as a shield once. I would not have been surprised. Even the dummies had personality. One had a wooden arm tied back on with a rope. Another had a knife carved into its painted grin.

  It felt comfortable. Honest. Unpolished. It felt more real than the pristine marble seminar rooms I used to hide in while studying mana theory. Here, everything had weight. Everything had been used. Everything had a purpose.

  "Form up," Greta said. Her voice cracked across the yard like a dropped anvil. "Most of you already know this, but this part is for the newbie." She pointed directly at me. "Yes, runt, I am talking about you."

  A few older kids snickered. I didn't. I had lived too long to flinch at being called small. Greta gave me a single approving nod, sharp and quick, and that was enough to make the others stop laughing.

  She dragged a thick chunk of chalk across the board, leaving three heavy words.

  ADVENTURERS, DUNGEONS, BOSSES.

  Then she smacked the board with her palm, puffing chalk into the air.

  "What do you know about adventurer ranks?" She asked.

  A dwarven girl raised her hand. "The ranks go: Tin, Copper, Iron, Bronze, Steel, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Mithril."

  "Good. And which of those are real adventurer ranks."

  Silence. A long one. The kind where even breathing felt rude.

  Greta snapped it clean.

  "Iron is when you become a real adventurer. You have done your first mission and survived it. Bronze means you have done a few more and proved you were not a fluke. Steel is when the guild starts counting on you. Steel means you are a proven asset, someone they can send on real work without expecting you to die. You lot are Tin and Copper is what you will become when you finish this training. Iron is your first step into the real world. Bronze is early field experience. Steel is the point where the guild invests in you. Steel is also when you are allowed to take long term quests if you choose to, just like my training assignment. My quest to train all of you is a long term quest. I do it not for my own sake, but because, despite all of your horrible form, I actually like you snot nosed brats."

  Her voice softened just a fraction at the end. Not a lot. But it did soften.

  The yard eased. You could feel it. Kids straightened their backs out of pride. They looked like someone had handed them something valuable. Some of them seemed stunned. I felt something tight in my chest loosen, something old and unfamiliar. No one in my first life had ever stood in front of me and said they wanted me to become good at something for my own sake. My training had been lonely and dangerous, full of experiments and guesses and magical blasts that scorched everything around me. No instructors. No classes. No structure. No one cared if I lived long enough to master anything.

  Greta underlined the next word.

  DUNGEONS

  "Dungeons rank the same way. Tin to Mithril. City dungeons follow our rules. Frontier dungeons follow their own. Frontier dungeons are wild and untamed waiting to be classified. City dungeons have set ranks, at least until they break."

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  She paused there, letting the idea breathe.

  I had studied them in my past life, but not like this. When something went wrong back then, people screamed my name and hoped I would arrive before everything collapsed. I did not go inside dungeons. I did not run corridors or clear floors. I stood outside the mouth of the dungeon or on a cliff overlooking it and dropped enough destructive magic onto the location to erase the entire thing. That was how wizards solved problems in my age. It was brutal, effective, and efficient.

  By modern standards, I had barely been an adventurer at all. I had been a living magical disaster aimed at problems until the problems stopped existing. Whatever strength I possessed then had no name and no rank here. It did not belong in any column on Greta’s chalkboard.

  I knew the theory in the past. But the way the guild phrased it was more practical. A dungeon break happened when the mana in the core saturated enough to force it into the next tier. The shell cracked. The core inside looked like the material of its new rank. Tin like tin. Copper like copper. Bronze like bronze. And so on.

  The modern guild treated breaks like controlled disasters. They had clean procedures. Prepared teams. Reasonable plans. Dungeons still killed people. They always had and always would. But dungeons were the living heart of a kingdoms economy.

  Greta paused then leaned a little closer to the board, lowering her voice just enough to make everyone else lean in. She told us the story of the only recorded Mithril tier dungeon that had ever surfaced. Three full Mithril teams went inside. Fifteen of the strongest adventurers in the world. Only two crawled out, half dead and barely conscious, dragging themselves through the dirt after destroying the core. Everyone else vanished with the dungeon. Greta said they never lifted a weapon again. They were too traumatized to continue, too hollowed out by whatever they had seen in that place. Even speaking of it had broken them.

  They had learned the hard way that letting a dungeon grow to Mithril would destroy a kingdom rather than save it. Whatever waited beyond Mithril was not something a regular Mithril adventurer could handle, even though, in theory, it should have been possible. The guild understood then that the world did not follow theory.

  After that, the guild swore no dungeon would ever reach Diamond again. If a dungeon even started climbing that high, they closed it permanently without hesitation.

  Greta lifted two fingers.

  "Only Steel rank and above can staff a dungeon. Steel is the lowest rank trusted with guard work, so even a Tin dungeon gets Steel staff. Copper, Iron, and Bronze are not allowed to guard anything. Steel ranks guards Tin, Copper, and Iron. Silver ranks guards Bronze. Gold guards Steel. Platinum guards Silver. Diamond guards Gold. Mithril guards Platinum. And no dungeon is ever allowed to reach Diamond or higher. If it rises that far, it’s core is destroyed immediately."

  She looked at me.

  "Runt. Why do you think the guards need to be two ranks higher than the dungeon?"

  "So, they can break the core before anything gets out," I said.

  Greta grinned wide, feral, pleased. "Exactly. You stop a break by killing the core, not by praying." She tapped the last word.

  BOSSES

  "Boss monsters are always one rank above the dungeon. Gold dungeon, Platinum boss. Platinum dungeon, Diamond boss. If a Platinum dungeon breaks and becomes a Diamond rank, the boss becomes Mithril. This is why Platinum dungeons are imperial assets and not city attractions. They feed nations or destroy them." She paced, hands behind her back.

  "A Platinum team can kill a Diamond boss. A Diamond team can kill a Mithril boss. A Mithril team can kill anything that we allow to exist."

  She swept her gaze across us.

  "And since this city sits on the edge of the Sea of Trees, all of you need to listen. That dungeon is a frontier dungeon, and frontier dungeons do not care about our charts. The defenders who hold the walls and the fort at Northland keep the worst of it from spilling out, but they are not adventurers. They hold the line so people like us can push back. As adventurers, it is our job to tame frontier dungeons or destroy them if we must. Frontier dungeons are open to anyone, but city dungeons are not. Only guild members can enter city dungeons, while frontier guild halls are built inside the wilds so members can take quests, report findings, and push deeper into places no one controls. The Sea of Trees is strange. It behaves like all tiers at once. High ranked Guild wizards have confirmed it is not Diamond, at least not yet. Unlike most dungeons it seems to scale. It starts at Tin and climbs toward Platinum at its heart. If we are lucky, and if we core the heart one day, it would become a true scaling city dungeon. Those are so rare that only three nations in the world have one. If this becomes the fourth, adventurers from everywhere will flock here. A scaling dungeon means a path that can take someone all the way to Diamond rank someday if its core truly is Platinum."

  "Remember this, dungeon ranks measure the dungeon. Boss ranks measure the guardian. Adventurer ranks measure you. Do not mix them up."

  She pointed toward the training hall exit, where city life buzzed faintly beyond the walls.

  "City dungeons are safe because someone two ranks higher is sitting on the core ready to end it if starts to go out of control.”

  Then she pointed toward the distant tree line, visible through a tall window.

  "Frontier dungeons change shape. They change monsters types. Treat one like a city dungeon and you die. The frontier does not care about your badge or your curriculum."

  Greta crossed her arms.

  "Alright. Each of you will now explain the difference between adventurer ranks, dungeon ranks, and boss ranks. If even one of you mixes them up, you are running laps until sunset. And I do not care if you pass out halfway through. You will get up and keep going. That is the first lesson of the day."