Mazo set a cup of tea in front of Hans. “You can’t milk this ‘oh I died be nice to me’ thing forever,” she joked, “so don’t get used to this.”

  Hans smiled as Mazo poured a cup for Chisel, Honronk, and then herself. They sat at a small table in the mimic room, each of the Mages taking a break from their research to relax with the Guild Master.

  “So your trip went well then?” Hans asked Chisel and Honronk.

  Honronk shrugged.

  “We didn’t have any particularly bad encounters,” Chisel said, answering for the both of them as she often did. “Some folks crossed the street when they saw us coming. One tavern wouldn’t serve us, but mostly people stared at us like we were from another plane.”

  “Tusk sightings are probably rare these days, considering.”

  Chisel nodded. “I’m glad we took your advice and traveled by wagon. It was nice to see more of the kingdom again, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it if we drew a lot of attention to ourselves.”

  “You can take the griffons next time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The statues are still active,” Honronk said. “Osare and Raven’s Hollow were just like Gomi’s.”

  “By active you mean…”

  “Telling the minds of tusks to go to Gomi.”

  Hans sighed. “That’s about what we figured, right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Chisel answered.

  “Honronk and Dunfoo have been working on a solution,” Mazo added, looking to Honronk for him to pick up and finish the story.

  He didn’t.

  Chisel stepped in instead. “We can turn them off, but we can’t turn off the tusk brainwashing without also turning off the Repel Possession ward. If the orcs spun their Blood magic up again, our people would be vulnerable.”

  “Yes, but-” Hans began.

  “We took what you said about drawing attention to heart,” Chisel assured him. “We can disable the statues with cave crawlers so that no one would ever know we were involved. Only a serious Mage or Enchanter would notice that anything was different. That doesn’t solve orcs using Blood magic, but it frees our people to travel the kingdom at least.”

  “Because you’d come at it from underground.”

  “Correct.”

  “Smart.”

  Chisel grinned.

  “It was her idea,” Mazo said. “If a few Gomi humans did the traveling, they could go into a town, snip the statue, and move on. Wouldn’t be a damn reason for anyone to suspect tusks were involved.”

  “That’s a lot of travel,” Hans observed. “Worth the effort, though. What are you going to do to replace the good part of the wards?”

  “We do not know,” Honronk answered. “We do know that we can’t leave them as they are. Tusks deserve freedom.”

  Hans wholeheartedly agreed with that but was a touch surprised to hear Honronk change course on that issue. Last Hans heard, Honronk was against doing anything without a full replacement plan.

  Chisel reached under the table to put a hand on Honronk’s thigh. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “I have no doubts that you will,” Hans said.

  That addressed one of Hans’ quests. He was not the arbiter of what happened with the Blood wards around the kingdom, and he was grateful for that.

  Quest Complete: Consider revealing the existence of the Blood wards to the public.

  Mazo cleared her throat. “I know you’re still reacclimating to being alive, and I’m trying to be patient, but when will you let me study you?”

  “My thought was never.”

  “That’s obviously not an option. You’re too interesting, and if I don’t stake my claim, then one of the Hoseki fat cats will cut the line.”

  “The folks from the University?”

  Mazo nodded.

  “Are they causing trouble already?”

  “No, not really. Galad put them off in light of the fae issue. They’ve mostly been setting up and talking to townsfolk.”

  “Setting up?” Hans asked.

  “They’re in the last big building on the Association campus. It’s still pretty rough, but they seemed pleased to get permanent accommodations. I suspect most of them will be here for a few years, at least.”

  “I suppose we anticipated that.”

  “We did. However, we did not anticipate a regrown Guild Master. None of them are gifted Mages, but anyone who understands mana can tell you’ve got wild mana all over you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  Hans looked around the table. Chisel and Honronk both nodded that Mazo was correct.

  “How can you tell it’s wild mana and not regular mana?”

  Mazo sipped her tea and set down her cup before answering. “Most mana is like a steady glow. Someone like the Merchant is like a sun, while our Apprentice Mages are like copper pieces enchanted with Summon Light. We don’t exactly see mana the way eyes see the world, but when its presence is big enough, it’s hard to ignore.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “And mine is wild mana.”

  “Correct. Wild mana is more like a flame. It’s always changing and morphing. Like a campfire. Yes, the fire is in one place, but the fire itself never stops moving.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can’t answer that without studying you,” Mazo said.

  “Jokes aside,” Hans said seriously, “am I a danger to anyone?”

  “I don’t believe so. Wild doesn’t mean unstable.”

  Hans thought. “What does studying me look like?”

  “I’d like to see what kind of mana readings we get from you, but other than that, I’m thinking we start simple with a blood draw and basic observations about your health and energy levels.”

  Being poked and prodded was not something Hans wanted for himself, but he couldn’t deny the merit of Mazo’s curiosity. Furthermore, the halfling studying him might lead to a better understanding of what he had become.

  Hans’ next stop was Buru’s pond. In the time he had been away, the Druid had worked steadily to prepare the Leebel lake for fish. When Hans last saw it, the holding pond was relatively small. That was still the case now, but the process of seeding the larger lake area with the building blocks of a healthy ecosystem had begun. That little pond wouldn’t be a lone oasis for freshwater life much longer.

  Buru, Uncle Ed, and Roland employed a number of tricks to accelerate that process as much as they could.

  One of their innovations was to raise a bronzewood to a sapling on land and then transplant it. They packed a burlap sack with dirt, planted the acorn inside of it, let it grow to a few feet tall, and then rowed it out into the water. They weighted the bottom of the sack with a chunk of rubble borrowed from the unending supply in Leebel’s Rest.

  That same rubble was also the tether point for a Summon Light torch that sank to the bottom of the lake with the sapling.

  Dunfoo’s artificial sun was a godsend, but the lake’s position at the opposite side of the city, as far from the farmlands as was possible in this part of the dungeon, meant that much of it was permanently in shadow. The plants in a lake needed sunlight as much as any other plant, so sinking Summon Light torches was like a return to Luther’s early farming efforts in New Gomi where a little light was far better than no light.

  The hope was that the sapling would grow around the Summon Light torch the way trees on old farms absorbed fence posts. If they got lucky, most of the enchantment would stay exposed, permanently anchoring a source of sunlight in the lake. If they didn’t get lucky, setting up Summon Light buoys was next, but that would require an incredible amount of mooring line.

  The buoyancy of a buoy kept it on the surface of the water, but it still needed an anchor to keep it from floating away. According to one of the scholars who recently arrived in Gomi, the real-world version of that same lake was believed to be roughly two hundred feet deep at its lowest point. Dropping several dozen anchors to that depth was borderline unrealistic, which was saying a lot for a town grown by a dungeon and that had a tunnel over a mile long to connect it to the surface.

  Whether or not the torch gambit worked would likely be revealed over the coming weeks as the bronzewood saplings grew to full size. Based on their experiments closer to shore, bronzewoods grew perfectly fine underwater, so their survival wasn’t a concern. The hardiness of the plants and organisms being introduced to the water wasn’t as certain.

  A fresh innovation helped with that uncertainty, however, and accelerated the project: Buru’s Druid magic. His talent for transferring the qualities of mud had grown to become the ability to produce mud. Similar to how a Mage created fire, water, or food, this mud did not change dirt nearby. It created new dirt, right from his hands, and he could replicate specific types of mud if he knew them well enough.

  The limiting factor was his mana pool. He could produce three or four cubic feet of healthy lake mud a day if he pushed, further seeding the blossoming ecosystem. Fostering the plants and small organisms that lived within mud the natural way was still a part of the plan, but Buru’s new skill would make the process much more swift.

  As soon as Hans and Mazo crested the small rise leading to the pond, Becky and Becki spotted them. Somehow, the dwarf beat her warthog familiar to the Guild Master, wrapping him in a hug with enthusiasm that bordered on violence. Becki rubbed her head against his knee while her master held him still.

  Becky had given Hans a similar hug immediately after the fae trial concluded, and she had repeated the ritual each time she saw him since. He hugged her back.

  “Good to see you, Becky.” Hans looked down. “You too, Becki.”

  Buru, Yotuli, and Petal were nearer to the pond’s edge. The Cleric seemed to be helping with planting bronzewoods for the ongoing transplantation effort.

  When Hans last saw the pond, it was little more than a dirty puddle. Now, aside from the bronzewood sprouting from its middle, Hans would have thought it was a natural body of water. The thriving duckweed and the little bit of algae floating on the surface were convincing.

  “Can you believe this?” Becky said, walking with Hans and Mazo the rest of the way to the pond. “Mazo’s been sniffing around so much I’m worried she’s going to try and poach my boy Buru.”

  “I’d never.”

  “I’ve got eyes on you,” Becky reminded Mazo. “He’s a born Druid, and that talent of his is clearly made for the class.”

  Hans looked at Mazo, confused.

  Mazo raised her hands in surrender. “I made one comment that Buru would have made a great Mage, and I meant it as a compliment.”

  Not wanting to get sucked further into whatever this situation was, Hans said, “This looks great, Buru.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hans. Mr. Ed and Mr. Roland have helped a great deal.”

  “Taking up an interest in Druidry?” Hans asked Yotuli.

  The Cleric smiled. “In a way. I’ve noticed that the people who see themselves as bastards and wanderers are closer to the land than others. Galad and Luther are very in tune with their soil. Becky and Buru listen closely to the forest. Even the Merchant tends a mountain range.”

  “Interesting. What do you suppose that means?”

  “I don’t know if it's more meaningful than a passing observation, but Buru made me notice it. He said he found refuge in nature because tusks were locked out of anywhere else. If anything, seeing our connection with the land as symbolic of something greater is a nice thought.”

  Buru elbowed Yotuli. “Show Mr. Hans.”

  “A new prayer came to me,” Yotuli said before turning to Buru and asking, “May I?”

  The tusk Druid nodded.

  “We are the weeds between the cracks, never welcome but always growing.”

  Ivy sprouted from the ground and wrapped Buru’s legs in a fashion similar to the Druid spell that summoned roots from the ground.

  “That just came to you?” Hans asked.

  Yotuli shrugged and nodded.

  “Show him the other one,” Mazo requested. “She pulled this out when we went in to clear out the armorbacks after, you know.”

  Instead of directing her next prayer at Buru, she turned around to direct the spell away from the pond and the people surrounding it. “May the flames that burn our homes be the same that burn our enemies.”

  And then Yotuli shot fire from her palms, orange plumes that spread into a cone some two dozen yards long and a dozen yards wide at its widest.

  “I was pretty upset when you died,” Yotuli said, meekly. “Miss Mazo suggested I seek inspiration in that if I could. That prayer didn’t come from deep thoughts about nature and connections or anything like that. It came to me when I thought about how much I wanted to burn down the jungle and every armorback in it.”

  “Got pretty close to doing it too,” Mazo added.

  “Must feel good to know you prepared your students so well,” Becky said, clapping Hans on the back. “They were all ready to get out there and do you proud.”

  “They don’t have to do that. I was already proud of them.”

  “Is the new Hans always going to be that cheesy?” Mazo asked.

  “Probably.”

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  Monitor for independently grown sections of dungeon.

  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.

  Relocate the titan bones to the dungeon entrance.

  Plan for a possible encounter with Wargod.