“Mr. Hans asked me to talk to ye about minyades,” Ewan said, addressing a guild hall full of adventurers. “You’ve gotta go a ways south to find them, so a lot of folks on this side of the border never fight one, but if you spend any time near or over that border, you’ll run into them sooner than later.

  “Fair to assume ye have seen a harpy by now since you’ve got plenty of them in the dungeon. In terms of appearance and size, a minyade is like a harpy but with bat features instead of bird. From there, though, dealing with minyades deviates a good bit from harpies.

  “Minyades hunt at night. Ye won’t hear them coming, and they’re more likely to hunt as a pack. Harpies are pretty selfish and will fight with each other over food, but minyades share their kills and dinnae mind working together to get a meal. Unlike harpies, minyades live underground and are good at flying through caves to hunt. Won’t see harpies doing that.

  “For ye surface-folk, the real danger of minyades is that you might not notice them breeding. They hunt at night when you cannae see them, they dinnae leave tracks, and they live underground. They’re perfectly happy picking off livestock too, so ye can imagine how a farm village might not immediately believe flying bat monsters are stealing goats at night. If you’ve had a run-in with the swiftheel in the dungeon, you’re looking at a hunting style like that.

  “Underground, they’re a lot more aggressive and territorial. Anything else that lives underground, like us good lookin’ dwarves, is both prey and competitor. Even if ye don’t go near their nest, they’ll eventually decide that the small dwarf town a few caves over has to be wiped out for the good of the brood. When they get that in their heads, they all attack together. No quiet disappearances. They’re flying through town trying to kill everything.”

  Terry raised his hand. When Ewan pointed to him, he asked, “What keeps them from spreading north? Sounds like they’re pretty good at finding food.”

  “Good question,” Ewan replied. “The book-smart types could probably explain it better, but minyades are rubbish wi cold weather, which is fine if they’ve got a food supply underground. Around these parts, ye all don’t got much in the way of caves. In our homeland, they’re everywhere, and they go deep. I’ve heard that back before dwarves our corner of the world had a lot of volcanic activity, so a lot of our caves are old lava tubes and such.”

  “We’ve got some big caves,” Terry said.

  Ewan laughed. “Ye ever meet someone that doesn’t live near mountains and has never seen them? And I mean real mountains like the Dead Ends, not tall hills.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “They think they know how big a real mountain is, but they can’t really picture something that big without seeing it. They point to some rocky hill and call it a mountain and then look at ye strange when you laugh.”

  Terry chuckled. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “Ye haven’t seen caves the way those folk haven’t seen mountains.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Ewan smiled. “While we’re talking about caves bigger than ye can fathom, that’s exactly why hunting minyades is an arse pain. Biggest nest I’ve seen was fifty-three, but a typical mature nest is in the low thirties. As soon as things are looking bad for them, they bolt, and they’re good at running and hiding. If ye try to clear a nest with a single party, most of them will get away and be back to hunting within a day or two.

  “Ye have to put bodies at every exit, and that’s tough to do in a territory they know better.”

  Hans raised his hand. “How many people do you need for a typical nest?”

  “Usually around eighteen, but that all depends on what kind of cave system you’ve got on your hands. Because you cannae just put one man in each hole, now can you? I dinnae like having less than three per if I can help it. Did that answer your question?”

  “Yes, it did. Thank you.”

  Ewan paused and rubbed his bald head as he thought. “Right. The last bit is that the bigger chapters of the Hunter’s Guild have a few tools and traps specifically for dealing with bat problems. If a crew is going out, they’re usually hauling those along. Can be a pain, but it helps ye cover a few more tunnels.”

  “Wait. Can you tell us more about that?”

  “About the tools and traps? ‘Course I can. The simplest one we call ‘needles.’ Ye have seen frises, the wooden spikes at the bottom of a palisade, right? Designed to impale a charging horse and whatnot. That’s what the needles are: a few rows of spears with a base strong enough to handle a few full-grown minyades slamming into her.

  “‘The web’ is basically a net that ye stake into a tunnel to clog it up. Quickest and easiest option out of all of them is to hang a ‘chain.’ Ye take an educated guess about their flight path and string iron right across it. Confuses the hell out of their echolocation and will trick a few of the dumber ones into flying right into it.”

  Not looking up from his hasty scribble of notes, Hans asked, “How does loaner equipment like that work? That’s not something we do in the kingdom. Maybe some weapons and armor, yeah, but that sounds like siege warfare-level.”

  The dwarf frowned. “That’s uhh… That’s a strange question. One of ours needs the equipment; they take it. Bring it back.”

  “We’re a bit more bureaucratic in the kingdom,” Hans said, eliciting laughter from several Bronze and Silver adventurers.

  “Doesn’t seem like it’s all that hard to take a note of who borrowed what.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, sure, it sounds easy. But then it gets messy. Who is responsible for maintenance? Who pays for repairs if it gets damaged? Does the chapter get a cut of the job money? How is that calculated?”

  Ewan shook his head like he might need to sit down. “There’s no reward money for hunting minyades. It’s just part of the job.”

  “Hunters work for free?” asked an adventurer Hans couldn’t see.

  “Of course they dinnae work for free. They get their salary every month.”

  The room erupted. Adventurers in the kingdom didn’t get salaries. Hans had to stand to get everyone to quiet back down.

  “Did I say something offensive?”

  Hans laughed. “No, you didn’t. Adventurers are purely freelance. There are no salaries here.”

  “That dinnae make a lot of sense to me,” Ewan admitted. “Our people get a base salary so we can send them out the moment we need them. Dinnae need to burn a bunch of time trying to convince someone to go. Ye just send them.”

  “So a minyades job would be mandatory?” Hans asked.

  “Well, aye, it would be. Monsters making a nuisance close to where our families live? A town guard doesn’t decide what criminals to arrest. They just do it, eh?”

  The room broke into shouted conversation all over again.

  Ewan looked at Hans and leaned forward to make sure he was heard over the noise. “I dinnae think standard operations would make people this lively.”

  “I don’t disagree with your method. Makes a lot of sense actually, but yeah, it’s pretty radical for our people.”

  “Humans always find a way to perplex me.”

  Hans was back in his guild apartment, not because he didn’t want to be home, but because it had become his office. Most of the time, he preferred to do all of his paperwork out in the guild hall. He liked the energy of being around other adventurers, but he also wanted to be a more visible part of daily operations. Vaglell always sequestered himself in an office and hardly ever visited the guild hall personally.

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  When Hans needed to work in private, he used the apartment up the stairs. Or, he would use it if he needed to have a prolonged private conversation, as was the case now.

  “What can I do for ye, Mr. Hans?” Ewan asked as he took a seat.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something I’m hoping to roll out across the Association. I figured it would be just as useful for Hunters, but at the very least, I wanted to make you aware of it as our guilds get closer to aligning.”

  “Alright.”

  “Are you familiar with the idea of Cursed memories?”

  “Can’t say that I am.”

  Hans set a copy of the research Theneesa helped develop on the desk between them. “You’ve been at this longer than I have. I’m not asking you to make it my business, but I’ve got stuff I want to forget. I have to imagine you do too.”

  “Aye.”

  “The idea is still pretty new, but the short of it is that the shit that haunts you is more than a bad memory. Just like calamity can bring about the undead, living through something like calamity taints the memory. Curses it. And the Curse can get worse with time.”

  Ewan slowly turned the pages of the research.

  “It’s helped me, and it’s helped Devon. We’ve got another guy in town here that does meetings with us. Theneesa is a White Mage who runs the Mikata chapter, and it’s helped her and her adventurers.”

  “Is this mandatory if we align?” Ewan asked, his eyes still moving from page to page.

  “No,” Hans replied. “But I’d ask you do me the courtesy of giving it serious thought before you decide one way or another.”

  Ewan looked up. “I imagine ye think Boden could have used this.”

  “Probably.”

  The dwarf sighed and set the papers back on the desk. “The gods weren’t kind to that lad. I wasn’t kind to the lad, for that matter.”

  “I thought you admired him.”

  “I do now, and listen, I’m not proud of who I was then. He was a hunter before he was an adventurer, but not at my chapter. I dinnae really meet him until he came back as a Diamond, but his wanting to leave years before that caused quite a row. Young hunter gets it in his head that he can make Diamond and abandons his people to do it? He was a promising lad, and we dwarves took that as a spit in the face. It’s one thing for a lost son to become an adventurer. It’s another thing entirely for a hunter to swear his fealty to a human king just to get a little stronger.”

  Hans saw Ewan continuing to chew his thoughts, so he sat quietly.

  The dwarf leaned forward to rest his face in his hands. “It must have been lonely for him out there, trying to make his own way while knowing what everyone back home thought. He might even be here now if we’d been kinder, but by the time he came back to us? It was too late. A part of him probably never believed we were proud of him, no matter what we said to try and make things right.”

  “Did you spend much time together?” Hans asked.

  “Few fancy dinners and some Hunter’s Guild gatherings.”

  “Sorry, he attended Hunter’s Guild events?”

  “His little brother went hunter. Boden dinnae miss a single chance to support that kid. He always showed up for him. Must have been uncomfortable for him to do that, but he did it.”

  “I didn’t know he went hunter.”

  Ewan nodded. “Aye. Few years before Boden moved home. He’s got the makings of a good hunter too. I dinnae think he’ll go as far as his big brother, but he’ll do well.”

  “How was Boden?”

  The weight of guilt shut the dwarf’s eyes. “Wasn’t well. We all probably drink a bit more than we oughta, but he was in a bad way. He could hide it most of the time, but Hans, his eyes were filled with sufferin’. Always. And I take it ye know the look I mean.”

  Hans nodded. He knew the look indeed, and he had seen it in more adventurers than just Boden. He’d heard some adventurers jokingly call it frontier fog, but he never liked that description. Fog obscures, but Boden’s eyes were wide so that he could see everything, always.

  At the same time, adventurers with frontier fog seemed distracted, like they were always doing two things at once. That contradiction was part of what made that look a troubling thing to see. The races in the alliance universally had facial expressions for being alert and focused as well as expressions for thinking so deeply that they seemed to have left their bodies behind.

  Those expressions were normal, everyday parts of life, but combining them was jarringly unnatural. People weren’t meant to feel those emotions simultaneously–hyper alert of their surroundings yet lost in a memory. For that to happen, something very serious had to be wrong.

  “Would it be rude to ask after his work as a Diamond?” Ewan asked. “He never told any stories from anything after Gold. Imagine he had reason.”

  Hans got up and returned with two glasses and a bottle of fool’s root.

  “That’s a good idea. Thank ye for sharing your stash.”

  “I washed out of our party because I couldn’t make Diamond,” Hans said as he poured two drinks. “So most of what I know about his life after that is secondhand.”

  “He didn’t tell ye about it?”

  Shaking his head, Hans took a sip. “He never wanted to share those things, so I didn’t push the issue. If I got the chance to see him, that is. I hadn’t seen him for over two years when he came to town and said he was moving home.”

  “I can respect the gray hair that comes with secondhand tales.”

  “He spent most of Diamond on the frontier. He put together a party of orc hunters, and that’s all they did for years. For a minute, it seemed like he’d be doing jobs in the kingdom for a while, but then a friend of ours died on a job. Disintegration trap. There and then just gone forever. Boden took it hard. We all did. So he vanished into the frontier until he reappeared and gave me half a day to see him off before he went home.”

  “Grisly stuff, I take it?”

  “You know how it is. You don’t get many chances to prevent an orc raid. You’re always coming in after they’ve done their worst. Not a lot of survivors in those cases.”

  Ewan nodded as he drank.

  “I’ve got my guilt too,” Hans admitted. “I saw the look like you did, and I let him leave. I told myself going home would help him rebuild. Get some real rest, you know? Then I find out how he died. That whole time my friend needed me, and I never knew. No, that’s wrong. I knew but didn’t step up. That’s worse.”

  “Why orcs?”

  “Did you ever hear about his first party? The one before us?”

  The dwarf shook his head.

  “He was the lone survivor of an orc attack on the frontier. A lot of adventurers see that as bad luck, so he had a hard time getting work for a bit. On his first job with us, his second party, we dumbed into the aftermath of a raid. We were trying to rescue hostages, but we were too slow. The only survivor… She was hurt and didn’t want to fight anymore. After that, Boden insisted we take the orc job if there was one on the board. Always.”

  “Boden’s Cursed memories were also your Cursed memories.”

  “Yep, and that first one… I told myself, ‘That’s the worst thing I could ever see.’ Nope. It wasn’t.”

  Ewan cocked his head. “Why’d the rest of ye go along with the orc jobs? Was that something ye wanted to do?”

  “Boden was on a mission. I wasn’t, and I don’t think Gret and Mazo were either. We had an understanding, though. If there was a job that one of us felt strongly about for whatever reason, we did it. The agreement was basically that we’re all going to have those feelings about a job at some point or another, so let’s establish now that we take them without arguing. Your reward for going along with someone else’s mission was that they couldn’t complain when you asked for the same.”

  The dwarf chuckled.

  “Every job Mazo picked like that was for a Blue Mage project. Every job Gret picked took us somewhere interesting. He liked exploring and architecture.”

  “Every job Boden picked was for orc huntin’.”

  “Yep.”

  “What was yours?”

  Hans paused, a touch stunned. He had never thought about that before. “Mystery and novelty were probably it for me. If no one was sure what monster was responsible or if it was a monster I’d never seen before, those were my favorites. Interesting places could count too, but only if the payday justified the travel in that case.”

  Ewan took a long drink. “Somehow I keep finding new reasons to admire that lad. A thirty-year career? He had more good to do. If I spent my hundred years as dedicated as he was, my homeland would be transformed. Instead, the rookie I watched pack up and leave came back. And somehow he had lapped me already. Maybe even twice.”

  The dwarf raised his glass, and Hans mirrored him.

  With his glass empty, Ewan stood and snatched the Cursed memory research off of Hans’ desk again. “That made up my mind. If it can keep people like Boden in our world longer, I’ll do it.”

  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.