“No shame in finding out this isn’t for you,” said an older man with hard deep wrinkles, a gray beard, and a body dense with decades of muscle. “If you’re still adamant, maybe one of the smaller chapters would be a better fit.”

  “No, sir, this is what I want to do,” Hans replied.

  “You’re how old?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  The man looked up and down Hans’ thin frame. He attempted to hide the judgment in his eyes but failed handily. This was the Hoseki chapter training room. This was where Diamonds and Platinums honed their craft over years of intense training and dangerous questing, and Hans knew what he looked like. The teens in the midst of shortsword training looked like men. Their faces were still soft, but they had the builds and finesse of warriors. Even the boys Hans’ age and younger looked years ahead of him.

  “I’ve been training, sir,” Hans said, trying to get in front of the next topic. “I run five miles a day, and I’ve read all the books in the library on swordfighting. Been studying monsters too.”

  “Read all the books.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve learned a lot.”

  The adventurer raised an eyebrow. “Who’s your instructor?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Who’s your instructor?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Sighing, the adventurer asked, “Who have you been training under? Taking lessons, classes, whatever.”

  “No one, sir.”

  “Son, I admire your gumption, but this isn’t the path for you. Like I said, no shame in that. Better to figure that out now than when a goblin is eating your guts while you watch. If a smaller chapter isn’t an option, maybe a staff position would be better for you? You seem smart enough to work behind the scenes and manage the books and all that.”

  “I want to be an adventurer, sir.”

  “Stop babying him,” a woman watching training from one of the benches said. She was taller than any of the men in the room and held a scowl so deep Hans wasn’t sure if she had ever smiled in her life. “He’ll figure it out.”

  At the time, Hans took her statement as a vote of confidence, that he would adapt to the training and find his way. With adult hindsight, he now knew that he was meant to discover how unfit for adventuring he was.

  The older man whistled. The boys stopped sparring and gave their instructor their attention.

  “John here wants to Apprentice,” the man said. “Rotate him in and show him how we train.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but my name-”

  “Quitting already?”

  “No, sir, I just-”

  “Get the fuck in there.”

  Hans nodded. He grabbed a wooden shield and sword off of the equipment rack and found a boy without a sparring partner. He was taller and likely thirty pounds heavier. Hans thought his partner was at least seventeen but found out afterward that his first sparring partner was actually fourteen.

  “Who wants to guess what happened next?” Hans the Guild Master asked a room full of children.

  Hans looked around the guild hall in Leebel’s Rest. What used to be Tsumi University in the original version of the city was now the headquarters for the Borderless Association of Adventurers, the new guild Hans launched a month ago at the Gomi Games. Much of the campus was still damaged from the orc war, but the main university building was coming along. The structure was not completely restored by any stretch. The open hall that used to be for studying, however, was clean and usable.

  Outside, the pounding of hammers and the shouts of workers were ever-present.

  A hand went up. Hans called on a tiny tusk girl who was maybe seven years old.

  “You won!”

  “Any other guesses?” Hans asked, smiling.

  “Kicked his ass!” another boy shouted.

  “Messed him up!”

  “Knocked him out!”

  Patting the air to encourage the room to return to quiet, Hans said, “Here’s what really happened: I got my ass kicked. I didn’t manage a single block or parry and definitely never came close to landing a hit of my own. For the next four rounds, I got thumped. By the time I got to the third, I could barely lift my sword I was so tired. The fourth round? The memory is just a blur. I couldn’t think straight enough to remember stuff because I was so exhausted.”

  The surprised faces of two dozen children stared back at Hans.

  “What, you thought I was going to win?”

  “Uh huh!”

  Hans laughed. “I wish! But no, all of the other kids in the room had been training for years. They took classes and had private tutors. They were way ahead of me, and rightfully so. Of course a kid who had never sparred got laid out. Every beginner goes through that.”

  “Master Devontes didn’t!” a young human boy yelled.

  “Actually,” Hans said, “I was there for Devontes’ first day. He didn’t have it easy and had to earn his way.” When he saw the skepticism in their faces, he laughed and added, “I’m not lying! He’ll tell you the same thing. It took a lot of hard work to get where he is.”

  “But he’s the world’s strongest adventurer!”

  “Sure, he is now. Think of it this way: Outside our walls, a bunch of people are planting seeds. Will the seed still be there when harvest time comes?”

  “No!” the class shouted back.

  “Why?”

  A small hand shot up. Hans couldn’t see the face of the child raising it, but it sounded like a very young girl. “Because it grew into a plant!”

  “That’s exactly right. Devon was a seed, and you’re seeing the plant. There was a lot in between.”

  Hans noticed Olza at the back of the room holding his eyes with hers. She nodded.

  “I think that’s a good place to stop today,” Hans said, shutting his notebook. “We’ll be having class every day this week, so you’re welcome to join us tomorrow. Miss Olza and Mr. Roland are going to make sure you all get home now, so listen to them please.”

  As the children exited the guild hall in an unorderly fashion, Terry stood next to Hans to watch them go. The Iron’s sword arm was still in a sling from his ogre encounter gone-wrong a few months back.

  “The ol’ ‘we all start as seeds’ bit, huh?”

  “I knew you were going to give me shit as soon as I said it,” Hans replied. “In my defense, that’s the best thing about teaching children.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Everything is new to them, so you can reuse your best jokes and stories all you want. I’ve seen you do it too.”

  Terry recoiled, appalled. “Absolutely not.”

  “That bit where you replace a word in a sentence with ‘sword’ and pretend not to know what the children mean when they call you on it?”

  “Hey now.”

  “You’ve got the goofiest grin when you say something like, ‘You’re sword of amazing!’”

  Holding up a hand, Terry said, “Let’s calm down. We both know that joke is top tier.”

  “Are you allowed to tell it at home?”

  Terry didn’t reply.

  “Terry?”

  “...No.”

  A short while later, after all of the children had gone, a new class began. Terry, Kane, Quentin, Izz, and Thuz were present, and they were joined by visiting Guild Masters. Theneesa from Mikata and Bertram from Kohei were among them, as were Guild Masters from three smaller towns near Mikata as well as the Guild Master of the Mikata chapter.

  Hans wrote two principles on a chalkboard.

  “The philosophy that underlies all of this has two major elements: mistakes are encouraged, and the real world isn’t a practice drill. If we want to nurture the best seeds, we need to remember that.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Terry coughed, fighting a smile.

  “Sorry, everyone. Terry loves seed metaphors and begged me to use one.”

  The room laughed. Hans returned his attention to the board.

  “We’ve all heard some version of the saying that ‘mistakes are the best teachers,’” Hans continued, “and I’ve never heard anyone dispute that for any field. The problem with training adventurers is that too many of those mistakes happen on the job. That learning experience is no good if you lose an eye from the mistake or worse, wipe your party. Our methodology aims to bring as many of those mistakes into the training room as possible, so adventurers can learn from an error without paying a grave price.”

  Everyone but Theneesa took notes in a blank book liberated from Bunri’s Tower. She knew all of this material already.

  “Once we’re in the training room, we need to tear down the idea that a mistake in practice is a failure or some kind of shortcoming. Students have to understand that mistakes are the reason we train. With so many of our Apprentices coming from orphanages, broken homes, or military service, most of them come in the door afraid to mess up. Anywhere else in their lives, a mistake was the precursor to some kind of punishment, so they develop habits like avoiding difficult scenarios, covering up their errors instead of addressing them, and making choices with extreme timidity. That’s the opposite of what an adventurer needs to be.”

  Terry raised his good hand to ask a question. “But mistakes on the job are still bad, right? How do you encourage mistakes in one place but discourage them in another? We’re always talking about how dangerous bungling something in the field can be.”

  “Fair question,” Hans replied. “We’re not downplaying the seriousness of mistakes. If a choice would have gotten an Apprentice killed, they should be aware of that, but instead of feeling bad about it, we take it apart and understand why the error occurred and look at how to prevent it in the future.”

  Nodding, Terry scribbled down more notes.

  “If adventuring is the grand opening of a play, training is the rehearsal. Everyone there knows they are practicing for the real thing, but they also know the world won’t end if they flub a line. I try to backstop fun in the training room with that reality, and most students won’t need more than a small reminder that they are mere mortals. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure does,” Terry replied without looking up. When Hans saw no more hands, he returned to his lesson.

  “Most instructors I’ve worked with buy into the mistake side of the philosophy pretty easily. The drilling part is where things start to break down because seeing a room full of your students screwing up the lesson can be, frankly, pure agony. If no one in the room is messing up, then they’re not really learning, but nearly all of us came up training in these neat little rows and formations, practicing thrusts and parries in perfect unison as the instructor calls them out.”

  Bertram, the Kohei Guild Master, chuckled and shook his head. His downward gaze suggested he replayed several training memories in his mind right then.

  Hans smiled. “Those neat little line drills are the lowest form of learning. Students need the complete lack of resistance to understand the basic mechanics of what we’re asking them to do, so those drills are useful when they’re used for teaching at that stage. The next step is to build on them to gradually introduce more and more chaos into our drills, working our way up to full-force sparring.

  “We’ll get into specific drills later, but for now, I want to emphasize what we’re aiming for. Our students will never have to do a flawless parry alone in a training room with no opponents or distractions. Our students have to choose the right parry in the middle of a battle. Their opponent might be larger or smaller than their average training partners. They might be fighting by torchlight. Instead of a flat training yard beneath them, they’re executing that parry standing on wet, rocky terrain. And on and on.

  “Succeeding in that chaos is about adaptation, not perfection. There are thousands of choices and calculations to make in a fight like that, so while technique is still important, adapting our techniques to fit the chaos is the real skill we aim to teach.”

  Quentin raised his hand. “How do we know how much chaos to bring into training?”

  “Good question. That’s a judgment call,” Hans answered. “For me, if students start to lock up because they’re overwhelmed, or I see their body language shift into anger or frustration, I reduce the chaos a bit. I’m looking to get my students to succeed some of the time so when they mess up, they realize it and work to correct the mistake. If someone is never messing up or always messing up, adjustments need to be made.”

  “How does this work in chapters that don’t have dungeons?” Kane asked.

  Bertram and Theneesa both guffawed.

  When Kane gave them both a confused look, Theneesa said, “We were talking last night about the first generation of adventurers trained in a dungeon. It’s funny to hear how different your brains are, and you’re only up to Iron.”

  “You’ve been applying these methods at your chapter,” Hans said to Theneesa. “How do you do it?”

  “Games,” she replied. “Lots and lots of games. If we’re working on something complicated like closing the distance against a ranged enemy, for example, the game is to get from point A to point B without getting hit by a bean bag. I’ll hide kids with buckets of bean bags all through a forest and tell them to pelt every adventurer they see. If you get hit by a bean bag anywhere but your shield, you lose.”

  “That must take forever to set up,” Bertram observed.

  Theneesa agreed. “Teaching this way is really, really hard. Telling your adventurers to spar for an hour is easy. Taking apart the skills you want to teach and finding ways to build chaos drills to teach those skills is hard as all hells. But it works.”

  “Master Theneesa has been writing down all of her new drills for us, so we’ll have something of a manual to work from here soon,” Hans said to the class. “When you all start inventing your own drills, I want those too.”

  Hans decided that was a good place to stop for the day. Kane and Quentin were the only ones to stay behind, but they were engrossed in their own discussion about how to turn something like a geode gecko fight into practical drills.

  With a proud grin, Hans left them to it.

  Being “outside” in Leebel’s Rest was still something of an adjustment for the Gomi Guild Master. Hundreds of feet underground in a dungeon, the city never saw true sunlight, making every hour feel like being out and about at midnight. The enchanted torches stolen from the Forgeborne Mines ensured that the city was well-lit, but the setting was always full of sharp shadows and surrounded by total darkness.

  Dunfoo’s current enchantment priorities were all focused on assisting the farming operation outside the city walls. In addition to dozens upon dozens of items enchanted with Summon Light–which simulated sunlight for the crops–he enchanted wagons and storerooms with preservation magic to help harvests stay fresh longer.

  The pudgy halfling enchanter was in the early stages of designing an artificial sun for Leebel’s Rest, a massive contraption that would move a colossal orb enchanted with Summon Light across the dungeon ceiling, matching the course of the real sun outside.

  While Hans looked forward to an upgrade like that, he also knew it was far off. Adding five-hundred-some refugees to Gomi’s population made basic necessities the priority, and that would likely stay the case for another few months, at least.

  To that end, Honronk put his enchanted tattoos to use with camahuetos. The large bull-like monsters were now hitched to plows all over Leebel’s Rest. There had been some debate about using red buffalo or hodags instead, but the camahuetos already grew in the dungeon.

  Having two enchanters around was already paying dividends.

  The center of the city that ran from the front gate to the docks on the opposite side was finally beginning to feel like a proper town instead of a warzone. For several stretches, the exteriors of every home or structure within sight were fully repaired and accented with personal touches from the new residents. Some homes had a sign with the family name engraved in it. Others had little keepsake figurines in the windows.

  There was also something of a fake flower fad that continued to gain popularity. With no good way to fill window boxes with real flowers underground, the new residents made faux flowers from fabric. At a distance, they were convincing, and their presence added pops of color and life to the sandstone city.

  When this project started, this place was a refugee camp. Now it was becoming a home.

  “Hans!” Tandis called. The tusk quartermaster extricated herself from a conversation with two elderly dwarves and crossed the street. “I meant to be at the guild hall by now. I’m sorry that I’m running behind.”

  “Nothing to apologize for,” Hans replied.

  “Two of our visiting adventurers are heading home at the end of the month, both Bronze.”

  “How many does that leave?”

  “Fourteen visitors. They’re all Irons, but more could arrive tomorrow. The intake and management side of that is a bit of a mess.”

  “Trust me,” Hans began, “I want to streamline the process for visitors too. A schedule of some kind would be really nice.”

  Tandis smiled. “I have an idea for that. In the short-term, we can take them as they come and rotate them into training sessions, but I was thinking we implement a cohort format in the spring. We announce it early to give the chapters all winter to plan who they send to us and when.”

  “I like that.”

  “I thought you might.” Tandis opened a journal and scratched an item off her list. “Do we have a timeline for the sedimander expansion yet?”

  Hans shook his head. “Still waiting on tunnel blueprints. If we don’t have those by the end of the week, the griffon expansion will be next.”

  “Perfect. That was all I had for you. You and Olza still coming over for dinner tonight?”

  “Are you still cooking?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “I might be busy actually…”

  Tandis slapped Hans in the arm.

  Laughing, Hans promised they would be there.

  A few minutes later, Hans arrived at the front gate. Instead of going through, he climbed the nearby stairs to see the view from atop the gatehouse.

  The fields between the walls of Leebell’s Rest and the border of New Gomi represented several square miles, most of which was yet untouched. Where farming had begun, the land was well-lit with enchanted torches and lined by bronzewoods. Their trunks glimmered gold as Hans watched the pinprick shadows of farmers working the soil.

  Presently, the main objective was to produce enough food for the expanded population. In time, however, the city would divvy up property using a process similar to that of the Tribe farmlands on the surface. Some of the land would go to producing hops for the brewery and ingredients for Olza’s charity potion initiative. For the rest, families would be gifted plots to grow crops of their choosing. Since that land was finite, there was still a good bit of debate over how to do that fairly, and Hans was thankful to not be a part of the process because it sounded painfully difficult to do fairly.

  Charlie, Galad, and Luther headed up that effort.

  Despite the weeks Hans had spent in the dungeon city, and the months and months of dungeon crawling time before that, Leebel's Rest still felt like an impossible fantasy. A dungeon core generated an entire city and offered every tusk in the kingdom a safe, permanent home. That same dungeon core was the basis for launching a new adventurers’ association, providing both training opportunities as well as rare materials to chapters around the kingdom, and hopefully around the allied kingdoms in time as well.

  The core lived on the other side of New Gomi and was nearly two thirds regrown now. Soon, the dungeon would be fully matured, unable to accept more suggestions. Simply thinking about that made the scar on the top of Hans’ hand itch. He had cut himself dozens of times to give the core his blood, a fact he tried not to forget.

  The dungeon core’s blessings were paid for with blood. Every suggestion required an offering. Every culling had the potential to injure or kill an adventurer. For as beautiful as this city was, its namesake was a constant reminder that two Silvers, Annalee and Annabel, gave their lives to make it a reality.

  Hans still caught glimpses of a white knight strolling down the street, celestial sword in hand. When he looked again, nothing was there except for the heartache of remembering how the two Silvers fell. How he watched, just feet away, unable to help.

  “We’re not going to waste the gift,” Hans said as if the two lady tusks were right there with him. “This city and your story will stand forever.”

  When no one replied, Hans took a deep breath and went back to his work.

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  Complete the next volume (Iron to Bronze) for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

  Address the Night Terrors.

  Investigate the possibility of the orc lich being the orc’s Wargod.

  Rebuild Leebel’s Rest.

  Monitor the changes in the dungeon core.

  Be the friend Devon needs.