When the next dungeon rotation wrapped, Tandis joined the adventurers coming down the mountain for leave. Like always, she stopped at the guild hall to provide Hans an update before taking her own time off.

  With the first flurry falling outside, she read from her notes. “The smith isn’t sure they can complete the bridge fix before winter.”

  The dungeon’s version of the gate house put a hard limit on the space they had. Worse, it made accessing many points of the gate house difficult. The ramparts, for example, butted against the ceiling. Someone small like Pogo might be able to crawl across on his belly, but that was no good for major construction. The smith needed more time to work on the problem.

  Tandis continued, “Luther sent me down with a few bags of reagents he harvested as well as his latest notes and observations. Short version is we know reagents grow faster in the dungeon. Won’t know if they are better than surface-grown until Olza tests them. Take it you’d like me to give all that to Olza?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’m sorry, Hans. I thought things would have been patched up by now.”

  Hans shrugged. “It’s okay. Please continue.”

  “I had to write this one word for word from Thuz. He said, ‘We are investigating the nature of mana flow in the elemental’s anatomy with the aim of containing the death surge. We request Resist Magic potions. Varying strengths preferred for testing.’ Do you know what all that means?”

  He did, and he hadn’t thought to try potions. That seemed promising.

  “Can I ask a question that might sound rude?” Tandis asked, lowering her journal. “Is there a reason the brothers talk like that? They always seem very… royal, very proper.”

  “If it’s rude, well, I was rude first because I asked them that same question way back. They’ve talked like that since they were kids. Most of it is because of anatomy. Speaking the common tongue isn’t easy for lizardfolk. Their lips, mouths, tongues, and throats are all very different from the other races, so Izz and Thuz speak slowly and put great care into hitting the pronunciation as exactly as they can. When they get really excited, you can’t understand a damn thing they say.”

  Tandis thanked Hans for the explanation and resumed her work. “Everything else is the usual inventory and scheduling stuff. You’ve heard it a hundred times.”

  “How’s Gunther faring?” Hans asked.

  “Pretty good. Him and Kane have been alligator hunting between harvests. They got permission from Thuz first. When a harvest is going, he helps me organize and pack everything for the wagons. He’s still Gunny, but he’s never done anything worse than get distracted.”

  When Hans thanked her for the update, Tandis lingered.

  “Anything else from Sven?” she asked.

  “Charlie said he left with the merchants.”

  “Think he’ll keep the dungeon a secret?”

  “In spite of what happened,” Hans began, “I think he will. It’s kind of scary, though, I’ll admit, but Charlie says I shouldn’t worry too much. This whole operation was built with the assumption that someone would talk about the dungeon eventually.”

  “I suppose his instability works in our favor,” Tandis mused to herself.

  Hans agreed. Sven might struggle to convince others of his credibility.

  Though he didn’t say as much to Tandis, Hans tempered his optimism with a dose of realism. There would be more Svens in the future, and the sooner Gomi had its own Diamonds, the better Hans would feel about their secret coming out.

  The snows came early enough that Galad worried for Uncle Ed. He was out on a run when the flakes began to form inches of white on the ground. Ed ultimately made it, however. Broke two wagon wheels because of the mud, but made it home all the same. A few days later, Roland returned to town and announced that the pass would likely be blocked completely in the coming days. No more runs for Uncle Ed, and no more merchant caravans. Not until spring.

  Unbeknownst to Hans, Tandis’ preparation had gone as far as to solve the winter wagon problem for the dungeon operation. Travel up and down the mountain would be limited regardless, but she worried about getting down the mountain in emergencies, and she was concerned the dungeon campus’ relatively limited storage space would be overloaded by harvests within the first two months of winter.

  Her solution: a sleigh. When she asked Galad why Gomi didn’t have sleighs already, he told her it was never necessary. No one went anywhere in the winter, and if they did, they weren’t making a wagon-sized delivery. A good pair of snowshoes was plenty sufficient.

  The existence of the dungeon, however, changed all that. With the Tribe’s help, Tandis commissioned a brand new sleigh. She looked forward to testing it.

  The dungeon culling continued on its usual schedule, but as he had planned, Hans scaled back the intensity of training, giving the adventurers more days off and longer rest periods in general. Intense training was best in small bursts. Pushing someone to their limit and beyond in every session led to burnout and injury. A slow period would do everyone good.

  That also meant putting the next expansion off for a while, which Hans was more than happy to do. The dungeon core was up to roughly a third repaired. While he had a great deal of canvas left to use, the extent of the repair was a reminder that his ability to suggest dungeon changes may not last forever.

  With that awareness, he wanted every addition from here on out to be carefully considered, even more so than before. He didn’t regret adding the Shit Shrooms because of their training value, but the resources that section yielded were barely worth the effort compared to Bunri’s golem or the lamia coven.

  For the sake of his students, and for the sake of Gomi, he needed to be as smart as possible about his dungeon choices.

  He had that thought often. Every time he did, he found himself looking up, expecting Olza to be reading a book by the fire, ready to talk. The realisation that she wasn’t stung the same each time.

  While Hans thought and read in his apartment, the Golds and the Silvers continued their teaching and training rotations at the dungeon.

  The brothers continued to test new combat and harvest tactics against the diamond elemental. They learned that dousing a severed elemental leg with Resist Magic potions reduced the severity of the discharge damage. They began to collect diamonds the size of walnuts after battles now. That still wasn’t large enough for the Takarabune, but they were the biggest damn diamonds Hans had ever seen.

  Hans also learned that the adventurers had begun exploring more of the City of Glass. So far, their most meaningful find happened right at the basecamp, the one Hans and the Apprentices used to safely observe the diamond elemental battle.

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

  When the adventurers opened the crates covered by tarps, they found a familiar box in the stack. Inside of that box was a frozen goblin.

  Terry thought it was absolutely hilarious.

  Galad handed Hans a glass of fool’s root. Instead of sitting at Galad’s table, they pulled the chairs close to the fire.

  “Ed worked it out with Doorstop on his last run,” Galad said. “He’s giving us a good rate. It’ll mean another wagon or two going along on each run, but shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “And we’ll have a few adventurers to spare by then for escorts, especially if travel is safer for tusks then.”

  “Sven seemed to travel just fine,” Galad observed.

  “True.”

  “I suspect we’ll have a fair number of folk move on in the spring.”

  Hans shared that suspicion. He expected Bel and Lee to return to Mikata when they could, and Thuz and Izz were likely to resume their travels as well.

  “Won’t be the same without them here,” Galad said, sipping his vodka. “I’ve quite liked having them around. Everyone did, I’d say.”

  The Guild Master merely nodded. He would miss their presence dearly, but that was the job. Every student moved on, eventually. “How about you?” Hans asked. “Are you getting any time to relax with winter here?”

  “Yes, thank the gods. I was happy to see the snow come early.”

  “When I first moved to Gomi, I thought winter would make me feel trapped. But it’s much more like locking the door to your house. Good to know the stuff on the other side will stay on the other side.”

  “Hear hear.”

  Crackling fire filled the lull in conversation. Both men nurtured their glasses and watched the flames dance. For Hans, a fire felt different when snow was out the window, not just warmer, but more welcoming as well.

  “Can I ask you something, Guild Master? You ever think about where’d you be if your life had gone differently?”

  “All the time.”

  “Nights like these… the fire, the drink, the solitude. Sometimes feels like I’m mourning the lives I didn’t live. The person I could have been if I chose not to stay in Gomi.”

  “What’s that Galad like?”

  “Probably a bit of an asshole,” the tusk chuckled. “Maybe I’d run a tavern in one of the big cities. Work late, sleep late. See plays and listen to music on my off days. Take trips to the country every year with a pretty woman. Probably get some fancy clothes too.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It does.” Galad leaned his chair back to retrieve the bottle from the table. When he sat forward, he refilled his glass and did the same for Hans. “I love Gomi, and I’m so proud of what it has become, but I can’t help but feel sad for the Galad that never got to be. Does that make sense, or am I rambling drunk?”

  “Makes sense to me. I feel that way sometimes too.”

  “What’s the other Hans like?”

  “Honestly? I’m sad he doesn’t exist sometimes, but I can barely imagine him. I can imagine what it might feel like to have lived a simpler, quieter life, but that’s as far as I get. I can never picture a version of me that wasn’t an adventurer.”

  “The nature of answering your calling, I suppose,” Galad offered.

  “Maybe, but I think it’s more that I know nothing about anything but adventuring. If I wasn’t on a job, I was training or teaching. Even when I was injured, I’d sit in the training room and observe. My friends, my chosen family… they were all adventurers too. Like, I’ve seen more of the world than nearly everyone, but I was always so focused on my craft… I don’t know how I can have this many experiences and for all of them to be so narrow.”

  Galad put another log on the fire and adjusted it with a poker. “Perhaps abstract regrets are more of a blessing than you know. It does me no good to see so clearly all the lives I’ll never have. This life is the only one that matters.”

  “Think you’ll start a family one day?” Hans asked. “Or maybe not kids of your own, but Uncle Galad sounds pretty good to me.”

  “Between us, my sister has tried for many years to have children of her own. Like many tusks, she is unable.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  After a long pull, Galad shrugged. “It’s another life that will never get to be.”

  Hans supposed he agreed. “Knowing what you know now, would you have made different choices back when you were younger?”

  Galad shook his head.

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  Transcribing the Takarabune manual had been more of a chore than Hans anticipated, giving him a whole new respect for the scribes who duplicated manuscripts as their trade.

  He hoped to uncover more insights along the way, but no entries stuck out as being notable or remarkable. As Olza had suggested, exploring that data scattered throughout the manual’s pages had the highest likelihood of revealing something new. His next project was to separate all of the entries on Diamond quests, searching for trends or outliers.

  Visiting one of Gomi’s Diamond quest locations deflated his enthusiasm for that quite a bit, however. The Guild described Oezys as a forest spirit, but she was nothing of the sort. He already knew the colors associated with each entry would be inconsistent at best, but mislabeling Oezys called the validity of everything else into question.

  Could he really learn something new if the data could be so wildly inaccurate?

  He’d make the effort, regardless of his enthusiasm. He had the time to spare.

  Hans shut the original manual and wrapped it in cloth and then leather.

  New Quest: Deliver the Takarabune manual to Luther for safekeeping.

  For several minutes, he attempted to shift his focus to his manuscript on training adventurers. He failed. Instead, he refreshed his beer and sat on the couch to read another Haynu novel. The memory of Olza spending so much time in that very seat had him reading whole pages but remembering nothing.

  He abandoned the couch and sat on his bed, his back against the wall.

  In book twenty six, The Lost Party Member, Haynu spent most of the story lost in a dungeon labyrinth. Through some form of lost magic, the maze itself acted as a kind of combination lock. The first room on the first level trapped Haynu. The exit locked behind him, and he could travel north, east, and west, finding a door at the end of each of those hallways.

  If he walked east, he would find himself entering the same room through the west door. If he traveled north, he would enter the room again from the south as though it had never led to the surface.

  At first, Haynu didn’t realize it was the same room over and over, but he verified it, leaving a trail of stale bread crumbles when he attempted every direction again. Same room. Same breadcrumbs.

  He solved the puzzle by remembering the dance steps a fae taught him earlier in the book. When he executed the correct series of turns, he finally emerged into a new room with stairs down to the second floor.

  Oddly enough, that same fae was the reason he was locked in the labyrinth in the first place. Her fae lord father caught Haynu in her bed, used a spell to steal his penis, and then locked him in the dungeon.

  Haynu was incredibly motivated to beat the dungeon and recover what he lost.

  Gret loved to repeat a particular line. On long hikes, the Rogue would nudge Hans gently and with a serious face ask, “Hey, have you seen a modestly sized penis laying around recently?”

  With a sad smile, Hans decided beer wasn’t strong enough.

  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.

  Investigate the connection between elementals and their severed limbs to find a method for preserving larger diamonds from the diamond elemental.

  Make and test valorite armor and shields. Bonus Objective: Think of more cool items to test.

  Deliver the Takarabune manual to Luther for safekeeping.