Hans sat at his desk in the guild hall, running through checklists for the Gomi Games, making sure he had all of the appropriate weapons, runes, trophies, and first aid supplies accounted for. It was too late to order more, he realized, but he wanted to be certain of his supply counts.

  Tandis approached Hans’ desk and said, “Terry reported that the far-dorocha doesn’t have purple eyes anymore.”

  “In the Bronzewood Grove you mean?”

  Tandis nodded.

  “That’s probably the most news we could expect from the fae on the matter.”

  “Executed?”

  “I’d assume so.”

  “Yeah, not surprising, considering. We’ve got maybe seventeen hours until the box goblin comes, by the way,” Tandis added, looking over her shoulder to settle the debate between the visitors.

  The Guild Master looked up. “What did you just say?”

  “What?” Tandis looked at Hans, confused.

  “Just now.”

  “I said we’ve got seventeen hours until the box goblin comes.”

  “‘Until the box goblin comes,’” Hans repeated.

  “Yeah. That’s what folks are calling the reset. I guess it rubbed off on me.”

  Hans sighed.

  “You hate it, don’t you?”

  He shrugged. “One of the kids stopped me mid-class yesterday to ask if we were ever taking a field trip to the ‘Rock Cocks’ since we already saw the chickens in New Gomi. At this point, I’m almost thankful that the regrowth slang is that benign.”

  “Don’t admit that around Terry,” Tandis cautioned.

  “You’re right. He’ll start an initiative to replace ‘when the box goblin comes’ with ‘Rock Cock O’Clock’ or some shit because the chickens come back with the reset too.”

  Tandis guffawed so hard she snorted. Then she smiled at Hans.

  The Guild Master glared back. “Don’t you dare.”

  “I’m just saying, that’s a pretty good one, Hans.”

  “In some chapters, the staff is loyal to the Guild Master, you know.”

  “I’ve always admired how progressive we are.”

  Hans sighed.

  “I want to keep torturing you,” Tandis said, “but you have a class coming up.”

  “Crap. Thank you.” Hans stood to grab his training gear.

  “I’m told that the original Tsumi, way back before the alliance, started right here,” Hans said, standing on a street of Leebel’s Rest several blocks from the guild hall. A class of adventurers–many of them visiting for the Games–was with him. “There was a fort here, and then a small castle, but at some point it got torn down and replaced with a merchant warehouse. As you can see, there isn’t much of the warehouse left.”

  The ruins behind Hans were charred and covered in soot. A few of the first-floor exterior walls were made of stone, so some of them survived, but fire had consumed everything else.

  “This is the first time we’re trying this drill, but if it goes the way I hope, this will give your party a taste of dungeon crawling while the rest of the class watches and critiques. The basement on the other side of these walls is all stone, so it's mostly intact, and it's exposed to the air. One party will attempt to clear the basement as quickly as they can, and anyone not on the run will be up on the city walls with me and Terry, looking down on the action. The view isn’t perfect, but you can see most of it.

  “There are ten enemies inside. They are summons, and they are armed with training swords. A hit will still hurt but won’t kill you unless you really screw up. As soon as they’re cleared, we’ll reset for the next party, and before you get ideas about cheating, their location will change each time. You might get an advantage seeing the layout before the run, but you won’t know where the summons are.”

  A Bronze party of four–two Fighters, a Black Mage, and a White Mage–were up first. They were in town for the Gomi Games but had joined every training session they could since they arrived.

  The party waited at the front door of the burned-out warehouse while the rest of the class used a guard tower to access the nearby wall. Looking down from the parapets was a bit like looking down into a rat maze.

  “For those observing, I’m encouraging speed for this drill to simulate the pressure of actual danger. I’d want you to be much more careful on a real crawl, but we’re ramping up the urgency here so that we can cycle all of you through and this not take three days.”

  The class laughed.

  “Try to learn as much as you can by critiquing how others do their runs, both positives and negatives.”

  Hans loosed a shrill whistle to signal the start of the drill. As the first party breached the door and descended the stairs into the exposed basement, he leaned forward and rested his hand on a root that only barely broke the surface of the stone parapet. The root was placed intentionally to be all but invisible. Had Hans not known where it was, he would have had trouble finding it.

  Through his contact with the dungeon root, Hans watched the party progress from the perspective of dungeon walls, ceilings, and floors. The view from on top of the wall was pretty good, but nothing could compare to watching his students as though he were in the room with them.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The summons occupying the basement were wooden soldiers grown from bronzewood acorns, the same monsters the far-dorocha used in his fights but with their weapons swapped. Hans commanded them to patrol set areas and to attack on sight. He didn’t tell anyone else this–not even Terry–but he could issue them new orders telepathically as if communicating with a familiar. With his close-up view of the action, halting the attack of a summon was trivial, so if anyone was really in danger, the exercise would end.

  The first party through the drill needed about thirty minutes to fully clear the basement, and that was with Hans shouting periodically for them to hurry up. A few of the later encounters, where they entered a room with two or three of the wooden soldiers, challenged the adventurers as intended. They made mistakes that would have gotten them seriously injured at best and killed at worst–had this been a real run with real monsters.

  The most dire mistake was not watching their flank when they cleared a room with two enemies. The noise of that battle attracted a nearby soldier, and he came up behind the party’s backline and whacked the Black Mage.

  While the next party set up for their run, Hans slipped into the guard tower, activated his shadow scorpion Camouflage, and hopped out the window instead of walking the way down. He ran through the basement, tossing acorns as he went, not stopping to watch the wooden soldiers burst to life when the seeds hit the ground.

  Hans wanted these drills to move swiftly, and he figured this was his best option for hiding his abilities. No one had seen him jump. No one could see him moving about the ruins. All they saw were wooden soldiers reappearing as if grown by the dungeon itself.

  Just before Hans exited the top floor of the guard tower on his return to his place along the parapet, he dropped the illusion.

  Hans whistled to signal the start of the next run and set his hand back on the dungeon root.

  “This really isn’t fair,” Terry said, speaking softly as to not be overheard by the students.

  “What isn’t?”

  “I’ve been giving this instructor thing a go, and basically I try to do what you do and teach how you teach. I can’t do this shit.”

  Chuckling, Hans replied, “Sorry about that.”

  Next, he waved the first party over. As Hans and the rest of the adventurers watched the second run play out below, he gave the first party detailed feedback about how they could have prevented the back attack that surprised them. He had seen every detail of it from every angle, after all.

  “I know I have to get used to a new normal,” Olza said to Hans, watching the ferry from their rooftop deck, “but would you be okay with not using the core while we talked?”

  Hans sat in his chair, the one with a dungeon root wrapped around the armrest. Any time he was up here, he set his hand on the woody material and watched the dungeon.

  “I can do both,” he replied. “I can watch and talk.”

  “Maybe. You don’t seem totally here, though.”

  “But I am.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s very clear that you’re splitting your focus.”

  Taking his hand off of the root, Hans said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that’s how it came off.”

  “It’s okay. This is an adjustment for both of us, and I know how you are with always wanting to work.”

  “Yeah. It’s hard not to watch with the option right there.”

  “How is training going?”

  Hans wobbled his head. “Straight swords, I take four out of five matches with Dev. When abilities are in play, I haven’t won a single round. Came close two or three times, but he always edges it out.”

  “That’s normal, right?”

  “Definitely. He’s practiced enough with those abilities to have a Platinum skill level. I’m maybe Bronze with the new stuff, and that’s being generous.”

  “Is that frustrating?”

  “A little bit,” Hans admitted. “It’s frustrating in the sense that it’s a challenge I haven’t been able to solve, but I’m not upset about it. I need to get the reps in, is all. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about training, though.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I’ve hesitated to talk about it,” Hans began slowly. “I need to ask, though. Are you doing alright with all of this? I’ve put you through a lot.”

  “Vaglell and his stooges put me through a lot,” Olza retorted. “You didn’t do this.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Olza thought. “I felt like I owed it to you to be a part of the funeral rites, to get you ready for the pyre. Now, if my mind isn’t completely occupied, that image of you… of what was left of you, comes right back to the surface.”

  Hans held his reply, giving Olza time to work through what she wanted to say.

  “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, it was just pieces of you. I’ve never seen a person in that state, let alone someone I loved.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “Before you came back, it was just sad. I missed you. I felt so bad for what you experienced before you passed. I felt the loss of you and the loss of our future together. It destroyed me, but it was sorrow. Deep and dark, sure, but sorrow only.

  “Then I learned that it wasn’t some tragic adventuring accident. Someone deliberately did that to you. Someone put you through that pain. They went to great lengths to take our future away from us.”

  Olza paused to swallow. She looked Hans in the eyes.

  “I hate them, Hans. Vaglell, Bridun, whoever else supports them. I hate them all. It’s like the anger Bert talked about, like I’m not really in control of it.”

  “I understand.”

  “I know you do,” Olza continued, “and that makes me angrier. You’ve told me about some of the bad stuff, and I’m sure you held back the worst details for my sake. For how horrible I pictured all of those stories being, though, actually holding your body in my hands was completely different. Now it’s hard to imagine not feeling this way. How could I ever forget that? Even if you didn’t return, how could that be something I just move on from?”

  She took a deep breath. Her jaw, cheeks, and brow tensed like she held back tears.

  “These last few years, I’ve pushed for peace because it was the right thing. Violence wasn’t a solution. It could never be the way forward. I told you that, and I told that to pretty much every person in Gomi, new and old, in some way or another. Seeing you like that opened some kind of door in my mind, and all that changed in an instant. It feels… I don’t know… primal? Like the anger is as natural as my heart beating.”

  “That’s difficult to come to terms with, but I’m here now,” Hans assured her. “I’ll do anything I can to help. If you think the memory is Cursed, we can start on that too.”

  “I still believe violence is wrong. I still believe that hurting other people is not the path to peace. As soon as I was the one getting stomped on, though, I wanted to fight. Anyone. Anything. I’ve been angry, but this was something different.”

  Olza took both of Hans’ hands in hers. She looked at his fingers as she gently rubbed hers over his knuckles, as if confirming they were in fact really there.

  “My mind believes it’s wrong, but my heart wants to see them all ripped to pieces. That’s the only thing that feels like justice now, and that scares me.”

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  Complete the next volume (Bronze to Silver) for “The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers.”

  Continue the momentum of establishing a Hoseki-grade library in Gomi.

  Learn to help your advanced students as much as you help beginners.

  Consider revealing the existence of the Blood wards to the public.

  Master your Diamond boon.

  Get Dunfoo the materials he needs for a Holy enchantment.

  Learn more about the limits of the dungeon roots.

  Confirm the results of your dungeon growth experiment.