A sickly sweet fragrance roused Hans from his sleep. Disorientation turned to panic as he scraped at himself to peel the web from his body. Though he felt nothing but urgency, the white strands of spider silk were thick and coated in a glue that grew stronger the more he fought. Every motion, no matter how much force he used, felt like a hundred hands held him back.

  With one arm finally free, he contorted himself to pull his knife from his belt. He had to work the cords like he was sawing through a tree branch, but they broke loose one at a time. He threw himself forward only to discover his feet were still entangled. He kicked and crawled before spinning around to cut those too.

  He heard the dancey twang of lute strings echoing down the tunnel. The notes were swift but delicate, like an embroidery needle stitching an elaborate scene in seconds without a thread out of place. Though the song was beautiful, the echo of its distant approach gave it a haunting quality.

  A foreboding.

  Hans was on his feet. A knife wasn’t enough to fight out of a terathan hive, but it was what he had. He stumbled through a weak run and came to a split in the tunnel. The strumming of lute strings came from one direction, and instinct told him terathans were in the other.

  He chose terathans.

  But the lute seemed to follow him and got closer. And closer. A terathan drone lifted its human torso from its digging when Hans rounded the corner. The spider abomination had chitin machetes for arms and immediately threw itself at the human. A drone’s only purpose was to serve its queen, so they never hesitated to engage an intruder and did so with no concern for their own survival.

  One of the machetes buried itself in Hans’ collarbone, but he got his knife between the natural armor of the drone, slitting its throat before the other machete could fall.

  Hans needed both hands to pull the machete from his flesh, though his left arm had hardly any strength because of the wound. Once the drone’s arm was loose, Hans cut at the terathan’s elbow joint with his knife and then used his foot to twist the arm to break free. He stowed his knife and wielded his improvised sword.

  The lute was behind him now.

  “Hans!” Olza called from somewhere distant, as though her voice were like the Merchant’s, ringing in his mind but not in the physical world.

  No time. Had to keep moving.

  “Hans! Stop, please!”

  Olza peeked over the bed at Hans. His back was against his bedroom wall, and he held a bottle like it was a weapon.

  “Fuck,” he said. The bottle shattered on the floor. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re okay. Everything is okay.” She stood and moved toward him.

  “No, don’t do that,” Hans said. “Keep away from me.”

  “Hans.”

  “Please.” He held out both hands as he begged. “I hate my mind. How can I go weeks with nothing, and then they hit me like this?”

  “It’s… You get these when something dredges up the old stuff. I was worried seeing Vaglell would do this to you.”

  Hans grabbed a shirt and tucked it under his arm so he could pick up his boots and his sword. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, leaving the room before he dressed.

  Between the bottom of the stairs and the front door, he pulled on his clothes.

  His hands shook. Adrenaline vibrated his veins. There was no fight to be had, no danger to escape, but the part of his brain that governed his survival wouldn’t believe his own eyes or even his own thoughts. The easiest way to turn it off was with drink. He had a bottle of fool’s root at the guild hall, so that’s where he went next.

  The guild hall, like Leebel’s Rest, never really closed. Adventurers could be found there at all hours as the permanent fake daylight of the town wreaked havoc on sleep habits and traditional schedules. Thankfully, no one was there tonight. Hans was glad to not speak to anyone with the sweat of his fear still soaking through his shirt.

  Hans snatched the bottle and a bedroll. He stopped dead at the door and cursed himself. His stupid eyepatch was still at home. He had forgotten it completely. That still happened sometimes. He’d forget what he traded and not realize his eye was missing until an itch on his face bumped a fingertip against the fabric around his head.

  “Whatever.”

  Guards waved at Hans as he passed through the front gate, but no one stopped him to talk. He hoped it wasn’t because he looked like a lousy one-eyed drunk.

  The long walk to New Gomi gave Hans plenty of time to douse his stress with booze. If he timed this right, he could go to sleep as soon as he got to his hideout.

  When he finally arrived in New Gomi, he felt the swimmy delay of drunkenness yank his strings as he attempted to puppet his legs. Hans didn’t want to speak to anyone there either, so he looped around the outskirts of town. The two guards and their armorbacks at the drawbridge nodded at the Guild Master as he went by.

  A few seconds later, Hans slipped through the door to the dungeon core and locked it behind him.

  He breathed. He finally felt safe.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I crash here tonight,” Hans said to the black cube in the dungeon core room.

  Realizing he was talking to a dungeon core, a plant, essentially, Hans laughed.

  “Do you snore? I do, I’m sorry in advance.”

  With his bedroll out, Hans sat in a corner and tried to swallow as much vodka as he could.

  “At least I don’t have to worry about a regrowth if I sleep in here. Speaking of which, what the hells? You almost killed me with those lamias. Actually, you almost killed me a bunch of times. That’s really shitty, my guy.”

  Hans unclipped his Nightsight enchantment. He couldn’t remember activating it in the first place, but with it off, the dungeon core room was nothing but black, as dark and as deep as the void itself. With the swaying consciousness of inebriation, he felt as though the blackness rocked and sloshed him like a gentle cadence of waves.

  “You’d think you’d be nice to me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be trying to figure out gnoll-squonks. I’m the brains of this operation. And the blood.”

  Leaning his head against the wall helped Hans to slow the spin of the room, of the darkness.

  “Want to tell me what else you’re growing?”

  He waited for the dungeon core to reply. It did not.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “If you need to express yourself, whatever, just don’t use Devon’s memories to do it. Or Mazo’s. Definitely not Mazo’s.”

  Hans curled his knees to his chest, rested his head on his folded arms, and closed his eyes.

  “Wake me up if you need me,” he joked.

  For a moment, Hans thought he might have died. Then he felt the texture of the brick beneath him.

  Oh yeah, he came here to sleep.

  Hans clicked his Nightsight enchantment together.

  Geez. How could fake light hurt his head so much?

  What am I doing?

  This was childish. He had a bad dream, so he ran off to throw a pity party? That was not the behavior of a Guild Master or Association head, but here he was, revolted by the taste of his own mouth and swimming through a hangover.

  He rubbed his eyes, remembered he only had one, and remembered that he forgot his eyepatch at home. Hans groaned to no one in particular and stood to face the day he made for himself.

  “No…”

  The fissure was gone. Where there should have been a hole and some rope, the dungeon wall was whole and smooth.

  Oh.

  He had looked at the wrong wall. The fissure was to his left, not his right. Maybe he was still kind of drunk.

  Great start for the day.

  Hans patted the black cube protecting the dungeon core and climbed up the rope.

  On the way into New Gomi, Hans noticed that the same guards were on shift. That was either good news or very bad news.

  “Weird question,” Hans said. “How long has it been since you last saw me?”

  The guards gave each other confused looks. “Two hours or so, if I had to guess,” one of them answered.

  Ah. Good news.

  “Thank you, gentlemen.”

  The walk back to Leebel’s Rest would give Hans plenty of time to sober up. In a strange way, the grunts and huffs of the camahuetos and the throaty purr of griffions were comforting. He had come to associate their presence with home, he supposed. They were part of the Gomi ambience now. Even if another town found a way to tame griffons, their ranch wouldn’t echo through the massive chamber of a dungeon. That sound was only possible in Gomi.

  His reason for the drink in the first place floated back to the surface of his mind.

  What was Vaglell’s game here? Like he said, quite plainly, Hoseki wasn’t hurting for instructors, and Hans agreed that many of them were quite good. Hans liked to think his methods were more effective, but that didn’t change the fact that Hoseki instructors were world-class.

  And Vaglell dragged Bridun and his party all the way out here anyway.

  If Bridun was a plant to gather information, so be it. Hans could send him home having to admit the training was damn good. Let Vaglell listen to a report about that.

  “You typically run with four?” Hans asked Bridun and his party the next day in the guild hall. They sat around one of the tables while Hans took notes.

  Bridun nodded.

  The party’s Black Mage, a young woman with the stocky build of a frontliner, leaned in. Her brown hair was shaved on one side, and the longest of it didn’t extend beyond her ear. Her name was Beth.

  “Bridun and I work the back row,” she said with a raspy voice. “Jeremy is our Fighter, and Jason is his brother. He’s a Ranger. Jeremy is our full-time frontliner, and Jason floats between that and back row, depending.”

  “On?” Hans asked.

  “How quickly the Bard spells take,” she answered. “In the best cases, the enemy is killing each other and we’re cleaning up the scraps.”

  “The worst cases?”

  “A few resist the music, and we have to address them directly.”

  Hans paused in his notetaking. “I would have thought the worst case would be all of the monsters resisting instead of a few.”

  Beth grinned. “Bridun’s pretty good. We don’t have that issue.”

  Hans wrote that down and put a star next to it. In his mind, that confidence was a setup for tragedy. If the party never expected a true worst-case scenario, it was going to be ugly when they finally encountered one. That aligned with Vaglell’s assessment of the party as well. They weren’t prepared to keep their heads when a plan went sideways.

  “So a typical fight for you all is holding off the initial assault long enough for Bridun’s music to take effect. Do I have that right?”

  The heads around the table nodded, including Bridun.

  “What are your typical jobs like?” Hans asked.

  “Goblins and recently orcs,” Beth answered. “Vaglell had us do a stint on the border, and that was six months of orcs. Other than that, goblins.”

  “As in, exclusively goblins?”

  “For monsters, yeah.”

  “For monsters? I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “If we aren’t doing goblin jobs, we’re running escorts. We’ve fought our share of bandits.”

  Hans looked to Bridun. The Bard nodded that Beth was correct. By the way Vaglell posed the request, Hans had assumed Bridun was the party leader. That was common for Bards, but he had clearly misjudged. Beth was doing all of the speaking on behalf of the party, and no one showed signs of disagreeing with any of her answers.

  Beth pulled a loose strand out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “If your next question is how many, our count is at thirty-nine.”

  “Thirty-nine…?”

  “Kills.”

  Hans blinked as he processed. As a party, at least before Hans washed out of it, his count was seven. These kids were twenty years younger and had more bodies to their names than career soldiers.

  “We’re good at baiting bandits to raid a caravan, so we get hired to clean up problems before they bother civilians,” Beth explained, casually.

  “A honeypot.”

  “Correct. It’s what you’re picturing. We make ourselves look like bumpkins, and the bandits attack. They’re never ready for Bard magic. Money is pretty decent.”

  “How many do you capture?”

  “Fewer than you’d think. That type isn’t smart enough to surrender, so there isn’t really a choice.”

  Using a review of his notes as an excuse to collect his thoughts, Hans recovered his balance and slipped back into being a teacher.

  “Alright,” he said, finally. “Two days from now, I’m rotating to the dungeon entrance. We have a training room and dorms up there, and that’s where students spend most of their time. You’ll come with me and do a week of sessions. After that, we’ll start you on dungeon runs. I know you’ve got goblins figured out, but we’ll do a run of those first so I can see you in action. Then we’ll work into enemies more likely to challenge a party like yours. Lamias, durrachans, and armorbacks are top of my mind.”

  “You’ve got all of that in the dungeon?” Beth asked.

  “Indeed.” Hans looked around the table. “You know, the rest of you are allowed to talk if you want to.”

  The party chuckled uncomfortably.

  “It’s easiest if Beth takes the lead,” Jason the Ranger said.

  “Which is fair, but you’re all my students. I want you to ask questions when you have them. That goes a long way in helping me provide the best training possible.”

  Jason nodded.

  Talkative bunch.

  “This gives me enough to get started,” Hans said. “I’ll see you guys in a few hours for class.”

  “What are we covering?” Beth asked.

  “Party movement and communication. Anyone have more questions for me?”

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “Great. Looking forward to seeing you then.”

  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.”

  Manage the ongoing establishment of 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.

  Offer Diamond quests to Ewan and his party.

  Prepare Bridun and his party for Silver.