Hans invited the first generation of Gomi adventurers over for dinner. He and Olza borrowed some tables and a few chairs to accommodate a group meal that large on their deck.

  And they all came. Buru, Chisel, Honronk, Yotuli, Terry, Kane, Quentin, and Tandis. Petal, Gunther, and Willow were there as well. Inviting the others but leaving those three out didn’t seem right. There were several imps as well, but Hans asked that they stay downstairs.

  Olza passed out plates while Hans went around the table with a pitcher of beer. They had meatloaf and sweet potatoes for dinner, and for dessert they would have fresh oranges.

  Fruit was much easier to come by in Hoseki, so he hadn’t had anything more exotic than an apple in all his time in Gomi. Hans hadn’t realized how big of a privilege that was for city dwellers until he lost it. With the new fruit trees, the scenario reversed. Now that fruit was this easy to come by, living anywhere else would be difficult.

  To have an orange this fresh in the middle of winter? It was luxury. The deep, sit back and groan with your eyes closed kind of luxury. The bounty of Gomi’s new fruit trees was already spoiling him.

  He desperately wanted to peel his orange that very moment, but he had business to take care of first.

  When Hans stood, the table quieted.

  “I think this beats sharing a one-room cabin,” Hans began.

  The table laughed.

  “We’ve packed a lot of adventure into a very short amount of time. I get kind of dizzy if I think too much about where we started versus where we are now. I mean, damn. You all did a very brave thing when you stepped up for this job, and I admire all of you for that. I always will. Even though things didn’t work out with Sven, I’m thankful for him too. He stepped up and put himself at risk just like all of you did.

  “I say all this because, first of all, thank you.” Hans raised his glass to emphasize his point. “But I also say this because I want you to think about yourselves for a change. You are as legit as Irons come, but your path there was harder than anyone else’s. You were in the shit right from the start, and you never got the chance to really have the young adventurer experience. As of today, we’re making it official that your first job is complete. You tamed a dungeon and kept a whole town safe in doing so.

  “Spring is on its way. If you want to get out there and see new things, go do it. We’ve got sister chapters now if you aren’t sure where to start, and you could even take an honest-to-goodness vacation instead of leaving Gomi to work somewhere else. Come back in the fall or take a few years. Whatever you want to do.”

  “Are you kicking us out of the nest?” Chisel asked.

  Hans chuckled. “No, absolutely not. I really like having all of you around. There are plenty of reasons why any of you might choose to stay, and that’s of course okay, but I also don’t want to hold any of you back. There’s a lot of potential at this table.”

  “Do I get to take a vacation too?” Terry asked.

  “No,” Hans replied, jokingly.

  “I’d like to stay,” Yotuli said. “Another food run or something similar would be nice, but I think Daojmot wants me here a while longer. I’m learning a lot from the people in Gomi.”

  “Nobody has to decide right now or even talk about it publicly. Just to be clear.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t mind saying that in front of my brothers and sisters.”

  Hans nodded. “Again, I am grateful for all of you. I fell in with some really good people all the way out here at the Dead End Mountains. To bastards and wanderers!”

  The table drank to that and returned to casual conversations soon after. It wasn’t long before the tables were rearranged for a drinking game centered around bouncing copper pieces into a cup. Hans knew what kind of skill the young adventurers had, so he followed Terry’s lead and opted out of that competition.

  As Hans gathered up plates and silverware, he passed by Kane, Quentin, and Gunther.

  “Mr. Hans?” Quentin asked. “Did you mean us too?”

  “Sure did,” Hans answered with his arms and hands full.

  Kane asked, “What should we do?”

  “Let me run these downstairs, and I’ll be right back up.”

  Hans returned a minute later, looking sourly at a spot of gravy on his shirt. He pulled a chair over to sit with the three boys.

  Not boys. Young men. Even Gunther was doing the work of a grown adult several days a week even if he was still quite young, and he might be the only Apprentice in the history of adventurers who ran with a party that was all Bronze otherwise. And did it well.

  “Okay. What should you do? That was the question, right?”

  The men nodded.

  “You should spend the summer in Kohei with Master Bertram. All three of you.”

  They looked between one another, slightly confused.

  “It’s Gunther’s fault really,” Hans said, smiling. “Kane really likes having him around for some reason, so Kane probably isn’t going anywhere without him. And I also know that Kane and Quentin are kind of a package deal, so you need something that’s good for all three of you. All of you would benefit from seeing how other chapters and instructors do things. Bertram is trustworthy and knows more about the frontier than I do, so you’d still be learning plenty. And Gunther, you can already guess why it would be good for you.”

  The young tusk nodded.

  “Like I said before, none of this is mandatory, but I’ve been around you all long enough to know that you’d be too worried about letting people down to even ask about traveling.”

  “Okay,” Quentin said, already seeming anxious about making the decision.

  “Kohei is just a suggestion, though. Nothing wrong with heading somewhere else to explore a bit.”

  Hans excused himself to get back to hosting the party.

  “Was that as hard as you expected?” Olza asked, climbing into bed next to Hans. He was trying to unwind with a Haynu novel, as was his tradition.

  “Yeah. I always get too attached to students, but it’s something else entirely with this group. I’d rather they never left, ever. That wouldn’t be fair to them, though.”

  “So sagely,” Olza joked.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Hans laughed. “It’s true though. My job is to get them out there so that they can push our world a little bit further forward.”

  “No matter what happens or what they decide, I hope you know that you did right by them. By all of them. They really look up to you.”

  “I appreciate you saying so.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Olza said. “And you know, we should think about a vacation at some point too.”

  “Let’s not get crazy.”

  “We can argue about that later. For now, I’m proud of you.” Olza kissed Hans on the cheek and hugged him before fluffing a pillow to read a book of her own.

  “You know all those ideas Luther had about Gomi in the spring?” Hans asked.

  “The fairgrounds and businesses and such?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I do.”

  Hans closed his book. “It got me thinking that my spring plans for the Association might be shortsighted. Maybe not shortsighted. I mean, there’s potential there that Luther saw that I didn’t.”

  “This sounds like an excuse to invent more work for yourself.”

  Chuckling, Hans said, “Maybe, but I’m serious. Limits on class sizes, implementing waitlists, extracting job debriefs–I think all of that is still worth pursuing. Luther’s thinking considers more about how to turn interest in Gomi into something that benefits the people living here.”

  Olza didn’t close her book, but she laid it flat to give Hans her full attention.

  “Right now, adventurers ‘pay’ for their training by culling the dungeon. That protects our people and sets our harvesters up to do their work. Then we ask upper ranks to share a few stories about jobs they’ve run and what they learned.”

  “Which gets them room, board, dungeon training, combat classes, and lecture classes.”

  “Right, and all of that is funded with dungeon harvests. We aren’t in danger of going broke, but that’s a lot of value that could go to Gomi instead. Here’s what I’m thinking: We offer a straightforward rate for training. An adventurer pays the fee, they get the training. Simple. If they want to train ‘for free,’ they have to volunteer to help out around Gomi. That could mean stepping in for our undead patrols on the surface, helping some of our older residents with their day-to-day, getting their hands dirty on a farm. That kind of thing.”

  “What’s the secret lesson?” Olza asked.

  “There’s not always a hidden motive in the way I teach.”

  “What is it?”

  Hans sighed. “I want adventurers to be better people,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’m qualified to teach something like that or to even tell someone what being good means, but maybe if we force a little community service, we can help that along.” When Olza didn’t reply for some time, Hans asked, “No thoughts?”

  “Give me a second.”

  Hans waited.

  “May I offer a suggestion?”

  “Please do.”

  Olza sat up, crossed her legs, and leaned forward. Hans couldn’t help but smile at her enthusiasm.

  “I like it, but it limits a lot of that good to Gomi, which seems weird for an Association that wants to help everyone in the alliance, not just the kingdom and not just Gomi.”

  “That’s a fair point,” Hans admitted.

  “This takes some value away from Gomi in the short term, but what if you extended the community service aspect to all of our chapters? If one of Bert’s people wants to come here and train for however long, they can do the same kind of work but around Kohei to earn their spot. Would be easy enough for Bert to certify that with a letter and send it along with the adventurer.”

  Hans stared at Olza blankly for a time and then looked up at the ceiling. Laughing and shaking his head, he looked back at Olza. “That’s really smart.”

  “I thought so. Where are you going?” she asked as Hans got out of bed.

  “I need to write this down.”

  “I hate Olza,” Mazo said.

  She and Hans were on their way up from Leebel’s Rest to the Forgeborne training room. They were both scheduled to teach classes over the next few days, and hiking through a dungeon solo could get pretty lonely.

  “We’re making so much progress with Universal Magic,” she continued, “but I think Purple magic might be a dead idea.”

  Universal Magic was a project Mazo had pursued for much of her adult career. Since all forms of magic–from Black magic to Bardic abilities–came down to moving mana, she believed there was an underlying framework that had yet to be discovered. By figuring out what all magic had in common, she believed divisions between magic users could be eliminated entirely. She could cast a Bard’s Provocation spell, and she could teach a Blue spell to someone else without having to track down the same monster all over again.

  Purple magic was what Mazo called a Blue Mage who learned active as well as passive abilities from monsters. With current knowledge, she could learn a gazer’s active attacks, such as their Eye Beam, but she couldn’t learn its ability to permanently hover.

  When Olza identified that a gray slime’s ability to absorb slashing attacks without taking damage was a combination of Stoneskin and the monster’s unique physiology, the idea of Purple magic began to fall apart. Mazo’s initial hypothesis was that a monster’s passive abilities were unique spells, but the data for gray slimes suggested otherwise.

  She already knew the Stoneskin spell. No matter how effective her Stoneskin spell was, she couldn’t replicate the gooey body of a slime. That part wasn’t a spell. It was an interesting biological adaptation that hinged on the benefits of a spell but was not magic itself.

  So a gazer’s hover ability could just be an adaptation of Fly.

  A shadow scorpion’s active camouflage ability could just be an advanced application of the Camouflage spell.

  An armarillia’s ability to sense when a nearby armarillia was in danger could just be an adaptation of Herd Instinct, a Druid spell, but a spell nonetheless.

  The possibility of discovering an unknown spell was not completely eliminated. A lamia’s ability to project a vision of a victim’s perfect love, for example, was a passive spell with no direct corollary to a known spell. Reproducing that would undoubtedly expand the knowledge of magic significantly, but that wasn’t the sprawling implication of Purple magic Mazo imagined.

  Olza’s discovery suggested that Purple magic wasn’t viable. Mazo didn’t really hate Olza for that, but she was salty about having to reassess and reconfigure a great many of her ideas, several of which aimed to dramatically bolster the halfling’s already substantial power.

  “There’s opportunity in learning spells from other classes, though, right?” Hans asked.

  “Barely.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s nothing a Bard or a Druid can do that’s better than anything I already know. There’s a few novelties and party tricks, sure, but those won’t change much for me.”

  “Ah. No meaningful power gains.”

  “Exactly. This can’t be the summit. There has to be more.”

  “Doesn’t the existence of gods and such already prove that there is more?” Hans asked.

  “It might prove the opposite, actually,” Mazo replied. “Wargod is stronger than I am, right?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  Mazo scowled. “It’s not. We both know Wargod is stronger. It pisses me off, but I can’t deny that it’s true. He pursued knowledge, sure, but he did much more than that. He changed himself from a torc to an orc. Then he went from being an orc mortal to being an orc lich. I’ve always thought that becoming a lich was a hack’s way of skipping the hard work, but in the case of Wargod, I think it might have been his only option for getting stronger.”

  “But there are a lot of beings out there that are powerful that haven’t traded their souls or whatever. Devon, the Merchant, most of the fae.”

  “Olza’s work explains that too,” Mazo replied. “The physiology of a gray slime is part of its strength. Devon looks human, but the dungeon core classified him as a monster. I’m not a dragon, and I wasn’t born from a people and in a realm with exponentially more mana than we have on this plane.”

  “Ah.” Hans understood. A halfling could have a hard ceiling on how much power they could wield. “Does that mean you’re thinking about becoming a lich?”

  Mazo stopped walking. “Don’t insult me, Hans, but I refuse to accept that this is as far as I can go.”

  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.”

  Establish a Hoseki-grade library in Gomi.

  Prepare the first collection of job debriefs for publication.

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

  Adapt.

  Enjoy it.

  Prepare the Association for spring.