The next dungeon reset happened to fall on an especially early hour. For Hans’ part, he was up already. He had not gone to sleep that night, in fact. The reset would answer a question about his connection to the dungeon core that had buzzed in his head for days. As soon as he thought of the possibility, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  So he sat on his rooftop deck with a hand on a small bundle of dungeon roots, waiting.

  He blinked, and monsters roamed the dungeon halls again. Though he could have immediately looked in on his experiment from right there in his favorite chair, Hans felt this moment warranted an in-person visit.

  Stepping quietly down the stairs to not wake Olza, Hans gently retrieved his sword and closed his front door, venturing up the street toward ruins that had not yet been claimed and revitalized. He stopped in front of a house whose roof had half-collapsed. He picked up an unframed door with both hands and set it to the side so he could enter.

  Banging and scraping came from within.

  Hans waited.

  A squeaky shout joined the growing cacophony.

  Hans smiled and stepped through the doorway.

  This was one of the houses Hans considered for him and Olza back before they moved in together. Roland had said the roof looked worse than it was, and the space was reasonably large. Unlike a lot of homes in Leebel’s, this one had a basement. At the time, that struck Hans as unusual for a house on the lake.

  The basement came back to mind when he decided to test the extent of his connection to the dungeon core.

  And it worked. A box goblin bounced around the dirt floor at the bottom of the stairs, just as he requested.

  When the cube closed around the core, Hans believed that was the end of making suggestions to the dungeon. The time he spent traveling along the roots made him think that, perhaps, that wasn’t the case. If the roots formed the dungeon, and he could tell roots to grow, he reasoned he could ask them to grow into something more specific.

  He was right. The box goblin was proof that he could still make changes to the Gomi dungeon.

  Quest Complete: Confirm the results of your dungeon growth experiment.

  With a brief thought, a far-dorocha root burst through the ground and into the bottom of the box, killing the goblin inside. A trickle of blood leaked out and soaked into the dirt.

  New Quest: Test the extent of your dungeon influence.

  Adding new creatures could be useful, but Hans had other questions.

  Could he add monsters that weren’t already in the dungeon?

  Could he change the physical structure of the dungeon?

  Could he add completely new areas to the dungeon?

  Monitoring the dungeon and Gomi at large with dungeon roots was useful, but control of the dungeon meant that he could perpetually refine his training methods and address any resource shortage the town might face.

  Early in the dungeon’s growth, for example, Terry mentioned how useful it would be to have an arena-style training yard with various monsters separated into cages. Instead of taking an entire class on a crawl, students could sit around the edge and watch while they waited their turn to attempt a monster. Instructors could provide more coaching. Students could encounter a monster separate from the challenges of its environment or the number of its allies.

  For example, instead of running Ogre Valley, where there were multiple enemies to consider, a party could fight one ogre at a time.

  Mazo would want select monsters added to the dungeon for her research, but maybe that was less relevant now with the direction Purple Magery had taken. Olza might want some new ingredients. The smith and Dunfoo almost certainly had a wish list of materials they’d like to have. Galad and Luther might have food requests. Charlie and Galinda too.

  Hans smiled. He liked his boon.

  But he had several hours before the rest of Gomi woke, which meant plenty of time before his real responsibilities began. He could burn out his mana on dungeon roots and dungeon experiments in the meantime.

  Hans found it difficult not to skip the whole way home.

  “My schedule got a little messed up, so we won’t be able to run long today,” Hans warned Quentin as they readied themselves for that day’s private lesson. “Gunther is coming in at the top of the hour.”

  “If you’re too busy, we don’t have to train.”

  “Nope. Not too busy.”

  “Is Devon coming?”

  “Hmm?”

  “To manage Gunther’s Berserk.”

  Hans chuckled. “Today should be more like a check-in. Gunther’s been working with Mazo a lot since you all got back. She wants me to make sure his Blue Magic isn’t compromising his swordcraft. Try to catch a bad habit before it really solidifies, you know?”

  Quentin nodded.

  “What do you want to cover?”

  “Umm… It’s a broader question than usual, I guess. You say to learn from our training partners, but I’m not sure I’m doing that right. Everyone else’s style is so different from mine.”

  “Like Kane and Gunther, for example?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t mind answering that, but as I think about it, that advice might be more complicated than I’ve let on. We might not have as much time to spar.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Hans gestured for Quentin to join him on one of the benches bordering the Leebel training room. “You can learn from anyone, yes, but you’re correct that it’s not as easy as ‘I saw Kane do this so I do it now too.’ That’s where the trouble is creeping in for you, right?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Let’s think of that as a spectrum,” Hans said. “The closer someone’s style is to yours, the less you’ll have to adapt what you’re taking from them. You and I fight very similarly, so there isn’t a lot between me showing you something and you making it work for your body. That’s less true if you’re learning from Kane, and someone like Honronk is so far outside of your class that it seems like there’s nothing there to learn. How is this sounding so far?”

  “It makes sense.”

  “For a training partner like Kane, there are a few steps that come before whether you add something he does to your style. And that’s assuming we’re talking about swordplay alone. We’ll talk about the Spellsword side of his style in a minute. Let me ask you this: When does something stand out to you that makes you think it might be worth learning for yourself?”

  “If he beats me with it. That’s the easy answer, though.” Quentin stared at the floor as he pondered. “If it surprises me, I guess. If it’s something I wouldn’t think to do or if it's so effective that I can’t ignore it.”

  “Good. You’re starting in the right place. Your next set of questions should be things like: Why does it work for Kane? How does it connect to his style? Is the technique fundamentally sound, or is he exposing himself unnecessarily? Is it something he uses with everyone or only with certain opponents?”

  Hans paused to let Quentin fish a notebook out of his bag.

  When Quentin looked up from his furious writing, Hans continued. “If you decide the technique isn’t bullshit, your next question should be whether or not it makes sense for your style. The answer might be anything from ‘not at all’ to ‘it’s perfect,’ but you’ll land in the gray area more often than anything. That technique would be good for your game if you made such-and-such modifications.”

  “How much modification is acceptable?”

  Hans smiled proudly at that question. “As soon as something isn’t purely additive, I’m wary of it. That doesn’t mean I won’t use it. It just means I’m more critical.”

  “Additive?”

  “Yeah. Additive. If a technique fits into a gap or builds onto something I already do, then it’s a matter of experimenting to decide if I like it enough to keep it. If using a particular setup would mean redoing other parts of my game, I think on it a lot more. Those parts are the result of a lot of reps and a lot of thinking, so it’s not a small thing to decide to deviate from that.

  “Let’s look at an example. Kane likes to attack in flurries, right?”

  Quentin nodded.

  “We talk about launching attacks in combination all the time, though, so what stands out about how Kane applies that idea?”

  “He’s faster.”

  “Gotta give me more than that.”

  After thinking more, Quentin said, “His combinations are longer. He stays with it when other people would have pulled back.”

  “Good. We already established his athleticism is part of why that works. What else makes that approach effective for Kane?”

  “Force Walls,” Quentin answered. “He pushes people around the ring so he can trip them up with Force Walls. I can’t cast, so that means that technique isn’t good for my game.”

  “That’s pretty close, but I’d add another step and ask yourself if your game has something similar to how he uses Force Walls.”

  “I don’t think it does.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I agree,” Hans said. “Your takeaway then should be a few things: pressure is a good strategy for making your opponent make mistakes, a larger and faster opponent might focus more on pressure than other opponents, and pressure would probably be good for your game too but not exactly in the way Kane does it. That doesn’t mean you have to go make changes to your training right away. Tuck it into your notes and think about it for a while first.”

  Quentin wrote all of that down.

  “Gret and I have-” Hans coughed. “Gret and I had very little in common with the specific techniques we used to fight, which makes sense because our classes were so different. I did, however, learn a lot from listening to Gret talk about boxing. The way he thought about counters and feints and strategy overall had a big influence on me. I couldn’t immediately inject boxing into my game, but those ideas made enough sense that I could adapt them. Boden liked the spear a lot more than I did, but he was clever with positioning and crowd control, so I learned a lot about those things from him.”

  “What did Mazo teach you?”

  Hans laughed. “A lot of things, probably. Her thoughts on chaos are the first thing that come to mind, though. She understood before I did that a battle between groups often came down to who was the most willing to adapt when things changed. Most adventurers–most people, really–try to find order in chaos or try to force order on chaos. Mazo showed me that accepting and embracing chaos is the best path for survival.”

  “I can confidently say I have never heard of creatures like this,” William said, studying the diagrams and statues in the art half of the gazer research project. “Not this ‘sixlets’ or any of these worshippers.”

  “If anything comes to mind, no matter how tangential it might feel,” Hans requested. “I appreciate you taking a look.”

  “The material is fascinating. I struggle to imagine gazers being this sophisticated.”

  “Why’s that?”

  William thought. “They’ve always been powerful, sure, but we’ve only ever found them living like bottom feeders. Orc culture, and goblin culture for that matter, seem much more developed by comparison. A species falling this far… I suppose I don’t want to believe it because it means we could do the same.”

  “A Mage told me once that the monsters on the frontier overtaking us was inevitable.”

  “I can’t say I agree.”

  “Everything out there is stronger than we are. If it figures out they can build an alliance like we did… I’m just saying that gazers having a more complex history doesn’t sound outrageous to me.”

  The old scholar chuckled. “I’ve never met a gazer in person, thank the gods, but I can concede how such an encounter would make one view them differently. I understand that they are formidable.”

  Hans nodded.

  “A thought: Have you considered that this history is not from this world?”

  “Go on.”

  Crossing his arms, as if settling in for a lecture, William began, “Are you familiar with the idea of invasive species?”

  “Sure. Like the carp around Hoseki. They weren’t native, so when they were introduced, there was nothing to control their population. Their numbers exploded.”

  “Which aligns with how Origin Theory tells us to think about competition in the wild, but one of my colleagues pointed out to me that Origin Theory is incomplete. It accounts only for creatures native to our plane. It may be that a great many organisms, like goblins and orcs and gazers, are invasive species in the most extreme sense.”

  “We knew that, though, right?” Hans asked.

  William waved a finger. “Ah, we know that creatures come from other planes, but have we truly considered the implications? Take your sixlets, for example. If they became gazers in another world and invaded ours, we’ll never find bones or fossils or ruins to definitively answer our questions. My colleague, and I do hope he visits Gomi at some point, argues that the majority of creatures on this plane were originally invasive.”

  “Okay…”

  “If we look at gazers as if they conformed to Origin Theory, we expect to find a linear history where they change over time. That thinking doesn’t truly account for creatures and beings from vastly different planes suddenly competing on this one.”

  Hans turned his attention to the art and notes papering the room around him.

  “All that’s to say, it may be a mistake to try and prescribe too much order to how this new knowledge fits into what our civilization already knows. If we have evidence of history, it may not actually fit into ours, at least not in the clean, orderly fashion that we imagine the past to be.”

  “How would applying that idea change what we’re attempting to do here?”

  William smiled. “This is not a dialog I would have expected to have with an adventurer, but yes, that’s the right question to ask. The exact right question, in fact. My answer for you: No amount of deep thinking can produce evidence where none is to be found. Take these sixlets as an example. Could their bones exist in some undiscovered corner of our plane? Sure, but you’re wasting valuable time circling and circling and circling that possibility. You’ve exhausted your sources for now, so set that investigation aside and focus on questions you might be able to answer.”

  Rubbing his chin, Hans paused to take in William’s recommendation. After a moment, he asked, “Of the questions you see us trying to answer, which would you say is the most worthwhile to pursue?”

  Instead of responding, the old scholar walked the perimeter of the room, revisiting every item present. “Sixlets may have never stepped foot on this plane, so evidence of their origins may not exist. The orc and goblin connections are intriguing, but we don’t have access to any of their histories, if such records were ever written. And it’s not as if we can ask them.

  “The art is fascinating and worth studying, but we are unlikely to deliberately discover more of it in our known lands. We should learn what we can from what we have while accepting that many of our larger questions about its subject matter can’t be answered without a secondary discovery of some kind.

  “The most concrete thread to me, as someone who has only spent a few days catching up on what you’ve learned already, is this idea of ‘tall ones.’ Their bones emerged when the undead rose, so we know they were on our plane at some point, and these dungeon memories seem to overlap with our known geography. Given the timing, it may be that not even the dwarves overlapped with their existence, but that’s where I would start. I’d look at the oldest records and legends for civilization that we can find. It may be that our tall ones are mentioned as gods or visitors or even as people, despite their apparent size.”

  Hans flipped the cover of his journal open and jotted down several follow-up items. “Do you think that-”

  “I have no problem sending a letter to request such resources,” William said, answering Hans’ question before it was complete. “I’ll see to it that such a letter leaves with the next caravan.”

  Extending a hand, Hans said, “Thank you.”

  William shook it.

  “Be careful, Hans,” Mazo said as the pair stepped into the sallyport of the mimic lab. “He’s probably after the publishing credit.”

  “I know you’ve been ripped off in the past,” Hans replied, “but we can’t assume every academic is trying to steal our research.”

  “But we can assume that some of them will.”

  The first door closed and sealed. Hans pulled the lab door open and held it to let Mazo inside. “He’s well-read. He has connections that we don’t. This might be the only way the research goes anywhere meaningful.”

  “I’d rather it not go anywhere at all than have someone rip it away.”

  “You’d rather a question never be answered if you can’t be the one to answer it?”

  “I don’t mind a friend or ally contributing, but I do mind a competitor.”

  “He’s not a competitor.”

  “You’re being naive.”

  Chisel looked up from her desk and smiled at Hans and Mazo. Honronk was across the lab, sitting on the floor in front of one of the mimic enclosures. He had books open next to him and seemed to be taking notes. He didn’t turn around.

  “Good morning, Chisel,” Hans said, returning the warmth she showed him.

  “Is it? I lose track. Feels like late evening to me.”

  Noticing bedrolls in the corner, Hans asked, “Have you guys been sleeping in here?”

  “It’s a long walk back home. This makes more sense sometimes.”

  “What about all of the monsters you have in the crypt?”

  “The imps keep them fed.”

  “How many imps do they eat in a day?”

  Chisel raised an eyebrow, confused, and then laughed. “No, no. The imps aren’t the food. They provide the food. They have orders to do that.”

  “They can handle an order that complicated?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Any developments?” Mazo asked, crossing the room to head toward Honronk.

  Chisel shook her head. “No change.”

  “We’re testing two things,” Mazo began when Hans caught up to her. The halfling pointed to a small enclosure containing a mouse and a rock that was roughly the same size as a beer stein. “First, we don’t actually know a lot about mimic metabolism. We know they can wait a long time for prey, but how long can they wait until they starve? This mimic hasn’t eaten for two weeks but hasn’t moved.”

  “Even with the mouse right there?”

  “That’s the second thing we’re testing. Honronk tamed that mimic and ordered it to maintain its disguise.”

  Hans leaned over to get a better look at the fake rock. “You’re seeing if it breaks the Charm when it gets hungry enough.”

  “Correct.”

  The Guild Master frowned. “I see what you’re doing, Mazo.”

  “It’s a pretty simple experiment.”

  “No, I meant with the direction of the experiments. If you can prove a tamed mimic won’t go rogue and start devouring things, that’s a step closer to using them outside of the lab.”

  “We’re following your rules,” Mazo said, innocently. “This is just research.”

  “You won’t be asking me to let mimics out of the lab three months from now?”

  “No… that’s probably nine or twelve months away.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  The halfling grinned.

  “I’m serious. You’ve boiled the frog with me before, but it’s not happening here.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  The urge to activate Sense Truth flared within Hans. He resisted it and spoke to Honronk instead.

  “How are you doing?” Hans asked.

  “Fine.”

  “How are things with Dunfoo?”

  “I’m learning. The shadow scorpion chitin frustrates him.”

  “And training?”

  “I have to find new ways to challenge myself. I am becoming too reliant on my pets in battle.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I use my own spells less and less. I feel my sharpness dulling.”

  “Might be time to do some runs in the Tainted Caves, at least up to the second demon tree,” Hans suggested. “That encounter is technically way over your rank, but the encounter math probably hasn’t applied to you in a long time. If Mazo supports it, we should give it a try.”

  “I do,” Mazo said. “He may be able to push as far as the alps even.”

  “One advancement at a time.”

  “I have a question,” Honronk stated, his eyes still on his notebook.

  “Yeah?”

  “May I travel in the spring? I’d like to pursue monsters not native to our dungeon.”

  Hans sighed. “You don’t need my permission. You know that.”

  “But I will need your support.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Your recommendations and insights will help me decide what is worthwhile.”

  “Then I’m here for you whenever you need me.”

  “Thank you.”

  Leaning closer to the enclosure, Hans could plainly feel the mana wafting off of the mimic. In his mind, he activated a Truesight spell. For how long it had been since the mimic last ate, it didn’t appear to be any weaker than he would have expected. Truesight reported its presence as being strong and healthy.

  Mazo grinned at him when he stood straight to look around the rest of the lab.

  Hans was adamant that he not fall for a slow boil and relent on using mimics outside of the lab, but he had a feeling he was already in the pot.

  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.”

  Learn to help your advanced students as much as you help beginners.

  Relocate the titan bones to the dungeon entrance.

  Master your Diamond boon.

  Get Dunfoo the materials he needs for a Holy enchantment.

  Learn more about the limits of the dungeon roots.

  Test the extent of your dungeon influence.