Active Quest: Relocate the titan bones to the dungeon entrance.

  A couple of days had passed since Kane, Quentin, and Gunther left town. That made the guild hall even quieter. Hans kept busy to keep his mind from worrying too much about them.

  Presently, he and Devon were about to catch a minecart to the surface to move the titan bones. The guards at the bottom of the tunnel were interested in becoming griffon riders, so the Paladin stopped to talk with them for a minute.

  The final minecart build wasn’t exactly what Hans expected. When he visited Boden’s homeland, every minecart he saw was suitable for a person or two at best, which was not viable for Gomi. Moving people up and down the tunnel two at a time wouldn’t reduce the burden of the journey much at all, if any.

  Instead, the dwarves built two tracks, leaving more than a wagon’s length of space between them. Each track had its own cart, but instead of forcing the tracks to bear the weight of cargo, they mostly functioned as guides. The platforms built on top of them extended out beyond the tracks, allowing larger wheels at the edges to aid in carrying much of the weight. Furthermore, the carts were built such that they were truly level for the entirety of the journey, which required the base to have a wedge shape.

  Hans didn’t entirely grasp the engineering of it all, but the lake-powered windlass was used to lift heavy loads going up or to slow heavy loads going down.

  This would be Hans’ first time riding the carts, and he found that he was oddly nervous about the proposition. The last time he felt like that, he was a kid in line at a fair, and some great big carnival man swung a barrel tied to a tree. The ride was being in the barrel for the spinning and swinging.

  A set of carts came down the tunnel while Hans waited. From where Hans stood, he couldn’t see who was on them, but the voices caught his attention. They spoke with an accent that clipped their vowels and rolled their R’s. He recognized it from his one trip to Boden’s hometown.

  “Didn’t expect to see so many lost sons in a wee tusk town,” one of the louder voices said. “Aye, I can see why you’d settle here too. Feels like home already.”

  Hans rounded the corner to see six dwarves with bulky packs strapped to their shoulders and bursting rucksacks piled in between the seats of the cart. They had the hardened look of seasoned adventurers. The tells for dwarves were usually tanned faces and beards that were well-kempt but rough and damaged from their lifestyle. Merchant or aristocratic dwarves would never subject themselves to that much sun, even if they primarily worked on the surface.

  The sun didn’t hurt dwarves, but their skin aged far more easily than the other races. A couple hundred years of leathery skin was not appealing to the average dwarf. A little bit of mindfulness on particularly sunny days went a long way and was usually sufficient to avoid that. Adventurers, however, didn’t have a choice.

  Or farmers or laborers, but Hans ruled those possibilities out pretty quickly when he saw their weapons. He figured them for a batch of Fighters with a Rogue, a Black Mage, and a White Mage for support.

  Three of the dwarves had the builds of Fighters–wide, pronounced shoulders and thick, broad backs. They each carried a double-bladed battleax and a shortsword. The dwarf with the slight build was likely the party Rogue. The Black Mage, meanwhile, was smartly dressed in wool traveling attire. He wasn’t as muscular as his Fighter allies, but he was clearly in shape.

  Hans was sure he was the Black Mage because though most of his appearance was normal, he wore a ring with a silver skull. Something about Black Mages made them think shit like that was cool.

  The White Mage had a large medallion that vaguely resembled the head of a battle axe if only the blades were visible. That made Hans pause. Perhaps this dwarf was actually a Cleric? With that class being more rare, they were the de facto mouthpiece for their god of choice and went to great lengths to look the part. Hans wasn’t familiar with the symbol, which wasn’t surprising because he knew nothing about dwarvish gods.

  Seeing it surprised him, however. He didn’t recall Boden’s homeland being particularly religious, and now that he associated the symbol with a Cleric, he noticed its presence on the other dwarves in some small form or another, like a necklace, or a pin, or a beard ornament.

  One of the Fighters stepped out of the cart first. He was the only dwarf in the group to have gone grey. His beard was long, but his hair was cut short enough that two distinct scars running parallel to each other across his scalp were plainly visible. One had the smooth scar tissue of a blade swiftly separating skin, while the other looked more like a claw of some kind had done the damage. It was rough and jagged.

  Hans knew scars well enough to be certain of his guess. Olza thought that particular gift was a touch odd, but swapping stories with adventurers meant he got a good look at all sorts of scars and heard what caused them, so Hans got pretty good at deducing their source. Most adventurers developed that skill, really.

  Hans approached the gray dwarf with a hand extended.

  “Welcome, friend,” Hans said. “You’ve got the look of an adventurer.”

  “You’ve got an impressive collection yourself.” The dwarf meant Hans’ collection of scars.

  “I’m Hans. I run the chapter down here, and this is Devon.”

  The Paladin joined Hans in offering the dwarf a handshake.

  “The name’s Ewan,” the dwarf replied in turn. “This is an impressive trick. How’d they tell you we were coming down?”

  “There’s no trick. We happened to be on our way up, is all.”

  The dwarf laughed. “And here I was hoping you came tae welcome me. Oh well. It is still good fortune. We’d like to speak with you if you’d give us your time.”

  “We can talk on the way across the lake. Come. I’ll go with you.”

  “I don’t want tae keep you from your business wi the clouds.”

  Hans knew that expression because Boden had to explain it to him the first time he heard it. Hans surmised from the start that it was a way to say “on the surface,” but he liked learning more about this kind of lore. Local sayings were layered with nods to their culture and community.

  Boden had told him, “A fish doesn’t think of itself as being underwater. You think of it that way because you don’t live in the water. To you, the surface is normal, but for dwarves, we were raised by people who visited your surface as often as you touch your clouds. In their minds, they are equally remote.”

  “It’s no problem,” Hans replied to the visiting dwarf.

  “Yeah,” Devon added. “We were just helping a big guy move. He isn’t in a hurry.”

  “I appreciate the kindness.”

  Once all of the adventurers had boarded the ferry with their luggage, the old dwarf picked the conversation back up.

  “I believe the best tunnels are straight,” he began, “so I’m going to tell ye why we came to your wee town. You can tell us to turn right back around if that’s what suits ye.”

  “I can respect that.”

  “I head up our people’s version of the Adventurers’ Guild. We think of ourselves as hunters instead of adventurers, but we do all the same work. Like your Guild, the Hunter’s Guild has chapters in every dwarven city and settlement. We’d like our organization to join your Association.”

  Hans had to blink a few times. “Wow. As in, every chapter?”

  “Aye, but the hitch is that we want Diamond quests too. Starting with us.”

  New Quest: Learn more about the visiting party of dwarves.

  Making Diamond quests available to all of the allied nations was a major motivation in founding the Borderless Association of Adventurers, so Ewan and his party did exactly what Hans hoped adventurers in other kingdoms would do.

  But now that they were here, Hans was resistant to the idea of handing out Diamond quests to strangers. He didn’t know anything about these dwarves, and he’d have even less visibility into the dwarves they would in turn recommend for promotions. Boons were too valuable and too powerful to be handed out with little to no vetting.

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

  How should all of this work? Hans wasn’t sure.

  New Quest: Finalize a process for distributing Diamond quests.

  He told Ewan that this was a bigger partnership than what they anticipated. They expected growth to be small and sporadic as the odd chapter here or there joined the Association. Absorbing an entire guild wasn’t a possibility they considered.

  So Hans proposed that he get the dwarves set up with a place to stay and they reconvene over some food. They had two apartments in the guild hall, and the others were welcome to a bed in the dorms. The alternative option was to stay at the inn. No, he didn’t know the name of it and didn’t know if it had a name yet at all. He could show them the way, though.

  The dwarves opted for the inn. They wanted to do as much relaxing inside of a dungeon as they could. The journey was long, and Gomi was too strange to be a quick visit.

  That was a positive sign, Hans believed. Ewan claimed to have hunted for over one hundred years, and his willingness to trade coin for comfort supported that claim. Upper-ranked adventurers made decent money, and after so many years of camping and crawling, they gladly paid for a soft bed wherever one could be had.

  Ewan carried himself like a Gold. Hans had gotten less of a sense for the others, but he doubted the head Guild Master of the dwarven kingdom would bring anyone but his best to a meeting like this. They were six dwarves representing thousands. No one serious would send hacks to do that.

  A tusk mother and her teenage daughter ran most of the day-to-day operations of Galad’s inn. Until now, that involved nothing but waiting for their first customers. Those customers actually appearing had both women moving nervously and second-guessing their every decision.

  For the mother, that meant hesitating on the check-in process Galad wanted her to use. For the daughter, that meant flubbing a beer pour in front of five dwarves. They still had bags over their shoulders, but the moment they spotted a tap, they went right for it.

  They ribbed the daughter a bit for wasting a mug of beer, but it seemed good-hearted to Hans. Then the Rogue hopped up to lean over the counter, a movement he couldn’t complete without letting his feet dangle in the air as his stomach rested on the bar. He gently coached the young woman on how to do a proper pour. When she succeeded, the dwarves cheered and pounded the bar for her. She blushed and got four more mugs.

  The dwarves cheered after every pour.

  “Oy,” Ewan said to get the attention of his party. He tossed a key to each one. “We’re up the stairs. Don’t be late for breakfast tomorrow.”

  Ewan turned to Hans with a smile.

  “Looking forward to our talk, Guild Master. I’ll see ye in the morning.”

  Hans was reasonably certain that he and Devon arrived at the tunnel entrance in the morning. Was the day further along than they realized, or were the dwarves giving themselves twenty-four hours to recharge? Both explanations were plausible to Hans.

  “They seem legitimate,” Devon said as he and Hans walked down the street. “Ewan’s probably got some stories.”

  “If you have ideas for how we decide if they’re the kind of people we want to work with, I would listen. I’m not sure how to verify anything they say that isn’t sending a letter and waiting two years for a reply.”

  “You can use my Sense Truth. It’s okay if you ask.”

  “I hadn’t considered that as an option, to be honest with you,” Hans insisted. “Wouldn’t that be kind of awkward?”

  “The ability will work whether I want it to or not, so all we’re really talking about is if you want me to tell you what it says.”

  “If you’re okay with it, I welcome it, but I’d rather this not be an interrogation. How about you let me have the conversation and then give me the answer after?”

  “Sure,” Devon said. “But why that way?”

  “I want to form my own opinion first. You can tell me if my read is wrong.”

  “Before we get tae business, I have a promise to keep,” Ewan said as he sat at a guild hall table with Hans, Devon, and Mazo. He set a thin metal case on the table, its dimensions akin to a book with an exaggerated length, perhaps twenty inches or more by Hans’ estimation. The material had the white gleam of silver and was etched with dwarven filigree.

  Where the inclination to use meaningless but aesthetically appealing lines to bring more beauty to everyday things was universal across cultures, the dwarven version of filigree was not the elaborate swoops and braids common to the surface races. Dwarves preferred geometric designs with hard lines and sharp corners, but it was no less beautiful.

  “I was asked tae give this to ye.” Ewan slid the case to Hans.

  Curiously, Hans accepted it, undid the latch, and lifted the lid.

  “Holy shit.”

  Devon and Mazo looked down at the contents with wide eyes as well.

  “Where… How did you get this?”

  A spetum spearhead rested on a navy blue bed of velvet. Traditionally, spearheads used a variation of a leaf shape, as if a spear was nothing more than a very large arrow, but career spearmen, especially the sort who chose adventuring over the military, often chose a spearhead with more utility.

  A flared base right beneath the blade, not so different in shape from a hilt, was the most common addition. When the spearhead found its mark, the base kept the weapon from penetrating too deeply. A thrust that burst out an enemy’s back and traveled another three feet was dramatic in a story, but it was a disaster in real combat.

  A spear buried that far was no good against the other enemies trying to kill you. Without the base, a warrior had to be more restrained with the power of their thrusts to keep from accidentally disarming themselves. With a proper base, a warrior could use their full strength, waiting for the sensation of the guard thudding against flesh to know when to withdraw.

  Boden called that “the drum.” When a spearhead went into an enemy and the base caught and bounced against their ribs, he said it felt like striking a beat on a large drum because of how the vibrations moved through his weapon and into his hands.

  The spetum design expanded on that idea and took inspiration from polearms. This spearhead had an exaggerated base that bent into a thin crescent moon to bring more versatility to the weapon. Many commonfolk mistook the weapon for a trident at first glance, but the crescent base didn’t extend nearly as far as the main spear tip.

  Simply making the base larger made it easier for a spearman to entangle weapons, but curving it made it even more versatile. Boden was the master of making an orc believe they had blocked a spear thrust with their sword, only for the dwarf to twist, trapping the blade between the flare of the base and the spearhead itself.

  If the orc didn’t lose the weapon completely, the panic that they might be disarmed cleared the lane for putting the spear into their face or chest.

  Over the years, Boden commissioned dozens of spearheads, each an iterative improvement on the last. By the time the dwarf made Gold, he had a weapon that fit him and his style perfectly. When he hit Diamond, he commissioned the spearhead that now sat on the guild hall table in front of Hans.

  The spear tip itself was twenty inches long with a narrow profile to make it more effective at punching through tough skin or armor. The crescent of the base curved so that both points faced the same direction as the spear tip. The outside of that base was sharpened like a scimitar, and the inner curve was serrated.

  The serration was Boden’s final adjustment before he called his spearhead project complete.

  A sharp edge on the outside of the base gave Boden more options for attacking laterally. The blows lacked the power of a proper swing or thrust because he tended to move from a near-full extension to a sideways swipe, but that didn’t make the movement less useful. Boden used it for a parry or for a sneaky slice. It also gave him the option to use the retraction of his spear as a strike, slashing an enemy as he pulled his weapon in to ready another thrust.

  Hans had seen several orcs die to that trick. An orc standing next to an ally who just blocked a spear rarely anticipated that spear suddenly moving sideways into its throat. Chopping up a carotid or a windpipe didn’t need all that much force to do the job, so the lack of power wasn’t a concern for Boden. He simply hated wasting an opportunity to put down a monster.

  The serrated interior gave Boden another type of edge to fight with, but not one that undermined the original function of the base. When both sides of the crescent were sharpened like swords, they broke right through the drum instead of stopping for it. Serrating the inner edge gave Boden another option for ripping and tearing without the worry of overextending a thrust through an enemy.

  The speartip on the table was well-cared for but had scratches that wouldn’t buff out, and years of resharpening every edge made it look unreasonably thin. But it was undoubtedly Boden’s. Hans ran a finger over the metal. All of this wear had come after the party moved on without him. He could only imagine how many battles it took to wear the edge this far from its original shape.

  How could one piece of metal seem to embody a lifetime of combat experience and adventures?

  “When Master Boden declared allegiance tae your king, none of us reacted kindly,” Ewan said. “One of our sons turning his back on his people? Couldn’t imagine it, and I daresay he lost many a friend with that choice. Now that I’m sitting here today, his decision looks a lot more like a sacrifice. If he hadn’t dug his own way through life, he wouldn’t have met ye and yours. And no offense to the rest of your party, but ye might not have lived as long as ye have without him.”

  “I’m very aware of that last part,” Hans said, chuckling softly as Devon and Mazo did the same.

  “Dordun, Boden’s wee brother, asked me to give this to you. It was the least I could do tae honor the memory of a warrior who opened this door for his people.”

  “Thank you. I consider this an incredible honor. I’ll treasure it the way I treasure his memory.”

  Ewan nodded his approval as Hans gently closed and latched the case. “Shall we move on tae business?”

  “Yes,” Hans replied. “Let’s talk about Diamond quests.”

  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.”

  Establish a Hoseki-grade library in Gomi.

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

  Decide how to manage breeding requests for monsters like mimics and shadow scorpions.

  Relocate the titan bones to the dungeon entrance.

  Learn more about the visiting party of dwarves.

  Finalize a process for distributing Diamond quests.