“Where are we going?” Lee asked, following behind Hans as they hiked through the Gomi forest, off-trail. Plenty of leaves were still on the trees, but enough had fallen that their every step came with a fresh crunch.

  “It’s a long story, but I heard that a long time ago, there was a Diamond quest in these woods. Where a forest spirit used to live.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “Did you ask Miss Becky about the location?”

  Hans nodded. “Yes. She said there was nothing worth seeing.”

  “Do you think she’s wrong?”

  “Not at all. I thought I’d go see it for myself before we were snowed in. Nice excuse for a change of pace.”

  After several minutes of quiet elapsed, Lee asked, “When do you start convincing me I’m doing the right thing by coming back?”

  Hans sighed, slightly exasperated. “I told you before I wouldn’t do that, but it sounds like you’d like me to.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I kept taking big jobs long after I should have stopped,” Hans said. “I flunked my Diamond quest three times. The third one almost killed me and sometimes feels like it’s still trying. My best friends kept progressing, and I tried to tag along for a while, which only put me and them at risk. I stacked up a few more injuries for my trouble.”

  “They didn’t heal?”

  Hans laughed. “There’s a point where injuries don’t really heal. They just shrink to smaller but permanent versions. I burned my leg real good with the orcs. It’s healed up, but I feel that stiffness in my skin any time I move now, like it healed one size too small or something.”

  Lee asked if he really had that many of those kinds of injuries.

  “I can’t breathe through the left side of my nose. I broke it once, and it didn’t heal quite straight. My right shoulder maybe has eighty percent the range of motion of the left. My left elbow is garbage, but Theneesa says the real problem is my forearm. I broke it once, and when it healed, it didn’t heal like it was supposed to.”

  The list continued.

  His ribs still hurt from the orc fight, but at this point, he couldn’t count how many times a few ribs had broken and re-healed. His lower back, where his spine connected to his pelvis, often ached and would sometimes lockup, like a small Lightning spell zapped him.

  He held up his right hand for Lee to see but didn’t turn around or stop walking. His fingers were mostly straight, but none perfectly so, and each bend in his finger was round and enlarged, like a burl growing in the middle of a tree. Most of them had been broken at least once, and the arthritis gave them odd, gnarled proportions. Lee couldn’t see it, but his pinky and ring finger sometimes went numb.

  He had never outright injured his hips, but each joint felt like a mortar and pestle, grinding stone against stone with each movement. His left knee was better than his right, but that was a low bar. If he sat too quickly onto his knees, they would pop out. Not completely, but more like a door with one broken hinge. The right torque and angle got the door back into the frame.

  Every old Gold he met had ankle problems, but he somehow didn’t. The exception was a stinging, burning sensation that ran up the outside of his ankle and into his calf. It would be fine for weeks, but then someone would grab his ankle in a grappling session and it felt like a fire elemental exploded inside of his calf.

  Even his toes were mangled. He spared her the show and tell, but the knuckles on his toes were as bulbous from bunions as his fingers were from arthritis. When he did pushups, he had to cross his right foot over his left, because the big toe on his right foot simply couldn’t bend forward that way anymore.

  Then there was the terathan poison he still felt despite it being out of his system for years. That one was harder to describe. Post-poison, his muscles felt slower, weaker, and the usual burn of hardworking muscle fibers was amplified. When he pushed himself too much, that left his whole body feeling like he pulled each individual muscle a week ago and was still recovering.

  “My head isn’t any better,” Hans said, “but that part is easier to hide. I used to think my broken down body was a problem unique to me. I’ve talked to enough Golds at this point to know that my problems are middle of the road average. Lots of the old timers have it worse. One of my instructors couldn’t thrust his sword too hard, otherwise his shoulder popped out. He had to reinvent his style completely to work around it. And that kind of thing is just normal at that age and level.”

  “Okay…” Lee said.

  “When I was younger, I had a very different idea of what the upper-ranks would be like. They all seemed so talented, so strong, like they were something more than mortal. Now that I’ve been around, I know they’re all fucked up. Physically and mentally. Every single one. No one escapes the toll.”

  “Including Master Theneesa?”

  “Especially Master Theneesa,” Hans said, still not looking back. This was easier if he didn’t have to look Lee in the eye. “Healers don’t take the same abuse as frontliners, but they still pay the toll. If someone dies, it’s usually the Healer that has to watch. She learned from me to stay busy, to always have a project or a task to occupy her focus. As long as she keeps moving, most of it won’t catch up. But it always does. I didn’t do her any favors as a teacher in that respect.”

  “How do you deal with it?”

  Hans laughed. “I don’t. That’s cost me my health, my career, and my friendships. I’ve never kept a partner for long. The friends of mine that are still around are just as bad as I am. I’m the wrong template to follow, which is why I shouldn't be the one to convince you one way or the other.”

  Lee didn’t speak for several moments. “Izz and Thuz said something similar,” she offered after a while. “They told me what they had to do in Ikari. The moment they aren’t occupied with training or a job, it’s like they’re back on those streets. Several times a day, it’s like it’s happening all over again.”

  “Those two have the strongest sense of virtue and loyalty of anyone I’ve ever met. They know, unequivocally, that they did the right thing in Ikari. Hundreds of soldiers would have fallen if they hadn’t put down the Diamond. It being right isn’t enough though. The damage is the same, so at a certain point, whether or not you continue this life isn’t about what’s right or wrong, it’s about what you can take.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Robert and Gootlab hit their limit. They’re low in the ranks, sure, but they got a lot farther than most. When good people hit that wall, they’re not afraid of getting hurt or seeing something awful. What they’re actually afraid of is facing a difficult moment, where they have to choose between the right thing or the thing that hurts less. They’re afraid they won’t be strong enough to make that decision, and they know for sure they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves after. So they quit.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Lee said that described how she felt. “I did the right thing. I know that without a doubt. Put me in that spot again, would I be able to do the right thing a second time? Losing Philip will always bother me, but if Chisel died because I hesitated?”

  “Mmhmm. I hide behind tactics and technique exactly for that reason. I don’t want to give myself the chance to screw that up, so I let Adventurer Hans do the work and then Human Hans pays the bill later.”

  “Do you regret being an adventurer?” Lee asked.

  “No. I can't picture myself doing anything else. Adventuring hasn't loved me back all that much, true, but this is who I am.’

  “So what do I do?”

  “Whatever you can live with longest.”

  Hans was reasonably certain he found one of the old Diamond quest locations, the one Becky said used to have some buildings. She said there wasn’t really anything to see, and she had been right.

  Were Hans not looking for evidence of ruins, he could have walked right by the site, believing the rock piles were natural occurrences. Since he looked more closely, he saw the barest outlines of what used to be foundations. According to the manual, this quest happened a millennia ago, which was plenty of time for the chaos of nature to overtake whatever was built here, rain and snow and time gradually spreading the rocks that used to form walls, decades of growth and death slowly burying what nature couldn’t move.

  “What was here?” Lee asked.

  “No idea. Doesn’t feel like a Diamond boon could have ever been here, though.”

  Lee agreed. She had seen countless sites like this in her travels.

  The sun beginning to dip low, Hans abandoned aimless curiosity in favor of making camp. He could continue poking at dirt in the morning before he made his way back to the dungeon for his festival shift.

  Hans didn’t wake Lee when it was her turn to take watch. Despite the fatigue in his bones, his mind wasn’t ready to rest, so he let her continue hers. As he sat in the dark, listening to the sounds of the forest and the sounds of his own meandering thoughts, a strong wind came down from the mountain, dropping dead leaves like they were snowflakes in a snow storm.

  The wind whispered in his ear. “Why do you linger in this place?”

  Not wanting to wake Lee, Hans stepped a few yards away from camp. “Lady?”

  “Why do you linger in this place?” she asked again.

  Looking around, Hans didn’t see the Lady of the Forest taking physical form from leaves or branches. “I heard something important happened here a long time ago.”

  “Important to whom?”

  “Adventurers.” When the Lady didn’t speak again, Hans asked, “Do you know what happened here?”

  “I do.”

  “I would like to hear about it.”

  The branches rustled. “Do you offer a trade?”

  This again. “My gratitude.” Hans said, gruffly.

  “She was a friend and not of our world. Her home plane is not known by your scholars. It collapsed well before your kind came to be. By chance, she escaped to our world, finding herself in this very forest. We learned we had much in common, so she made her home here.”

  “Was she the Diamond quest?”

  “Her name was Oezys, and she was a shepherd in her world. What remained of her flock lived with her here, in what was once a beautiful clearing filled with starcups. Traveling to our world cursed her. Evil was drawn to her, drawn to take what she had, as if it were some bestial instinct etched into their bones. For that reason, many of her days were filled with violence. Each death brought her more sadness, but her duty was to live. If she did not, her people would be forgotten for good.

  “After many years of this life, more years than man can understand, humans arrived, following that same bestial instinct.”

  “Adventurers? I know this sounds naive, but adventurers don’t kill friendly, intelligent life.”

  “If someone entered your home, armed with spears and swords, would your hand not reach for a weapon of your own? Is Oezys to blame for protecting her flock?”

  He didn’t need to answer. The Lady knew he was always reaching for his sword.

  The adventurers listed in the manual described Oezys as a “Forest Spirit” when really they had no idea what they fought that day.

  “She fell, as did most of her flock. Only two escaped.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hans said, sincerely.

  “Chaos comes for us all. I have missed her very much.”

  “I mean no disrespect in asking this,” Hans said, “were you part of the battle?”

  “You are aware that I could not intervene.”

  “You’ve intervened for us.”

  The forest was still for so long that Hans thought the Lady had departed. “Memories of friendships with those like Oezys have softened my heart. Thank you for sharing this memory with me.”

  Hans felt a thin vine wrap around his ankle and then his vision flashed, night suddenly becoming day and a rush of cold washed over him like a waterfall of mountain melt.

  He saw a humanoid figure with unnaturally long arms and legs, like her torso was an afterthought. She moved on the tips of her toes like a ballerina, and she wore a short white toga trabea, vivid purple and saffron woven into the edges of the fabric with golden embroidery over top. Her flesh and hair was like seeing a color Hans didn’t recognize, inspiring an oddly disorienting and troubling sensation in his mind. Like it was wrong to see the color.

  The best he could describe it, her body and hair were the color of a still lake under a summer sun, somehow reflecting the world around it while also being dark and empty. He found her to be deeply beautiful, but in a haunting way. When he looked at her, it felt like observing a funeral pyre blazing against the silhouettes of trees, the sky above a heavy red, the sun completely out of sight.

  The darkness of night returned, and Hans felt dead leaves under his boots. His face felt wet. He’d been crying.

  The next morning, Hans and Lee explored what remained of Oezys’ home. They saw nothing notable, and Lee took the time to search for sources of mana, like enchantments or curses. She found none. The magic that caught the attention of the Takarabune was gone.

  “Who were you talking to last night?” Lee asked.

  “How much did you hear?”

  “All of it.”

  For an instant, Hans felt panic at having betrayed the Lady’s secret. From his first introduction to her, it was clear that the dryad desired for her existence to be unknown to the larger world. Then again, she was smart. If Lee heard them talking, perhaps the Lady had wanted her to.

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “A friend. I can’t say anymore than that, I’m afraid.”

  “Did no more of her kind escape their home plane?”

  Hans didn’t know. Their knowledge on this subject was perfectly equal. Until now, he wasn’t aware that a plane could collapse, and if he was being honest, he couldn’t get his head around what that meant exactly or how that might work.

  “She must have felt so alone.”

  “She had her flock,” Hans said. “Maybe they were enough to keep her going?”

  “But they died anyway.”

  “Like all things do, really. If she hadn’t brought them, they would have died with her home plane. Because of her, they got a lot more time, quite a lot by the sounds of it. That’s something.”

  Lee nodded. That was something indeed.

  Quest Complete: Visit the ruins at one of Gomi’s former Diamond quest locations before the snow begins.

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

  Mend the rift with Devon.

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

  Explore the idea of training “dungeon lifeguards” to accompany adventurers in training.

  Await the arrival of a safe for the Gomi chapter.

  Complete construction of the Takarabune (still need diamond, scarlet steel, celestial steel, and mimic blood).

  Fix the two broken drawbridges.

  Use a cold weather job to preserve the dungeon’s food for longer.