Hans hadn’t visited the dungeon campus directly in some time. During the winter, he never went farther than the Forgeborne Mines, and his focus had been entirely on the dungeon in all of the time since, minus the brief period where he was imprisoned in a terathan hive.

  The original plans for the campus were ambitious, but those plans were made under several assumptions that were now outdated. The surface town of Gomi was no longer the hub of the community’s activity. They had a tunnel leading directly to the inhabited section of dungeon. And that same section of dungeon was also where the new guild hall was located.

  Everything revolved around Leebel’s Rest now.

  Still, the armory, the stables, and the dorms were no less useful. Several members of the harvesting team preferred their cabins on the surface. Traveling from the dungeon entrance to Gomi by wagon was more convenient for anyone already up the mountain, and adventurers perpetually rotated through stints in the dorms.

  The very first cabin on the grounds, the one that was little more than a bushcraft shelter, still stood, but Hans guessed it wouldn’t last another winter. The small structure was barely large enough for one person, so no one had used it in some time, probably not since he or Olza used it last. Weeds tangled around the walls. The roof sagged. And a family of groundhogs had burrowed beneath the cabin.

  At this end of the dungeon, Hans had pushed the dungeon core to extend its roots to just beyond Yotuli’s meditation retreat. He had come to the surface to see if he felt the same limits up the mountain as he did in Gomi, but seeing the old cabin had him feeling nostalgic.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at the decaying shelter. A sparrow landed on his shoulder, bringing him back to the present.

  “Hey, you no-wing-having, earth-walking piece of shit. Tweet tweet, fuck you. Go, get away from all these people. Use that tiny little brain of yours if you can.”

  Hans stared at the sparrow on his shoulder.

  “You dumb motherfucker. Hello, ugly! I’m giving you a message! Think real hard about how this worked before. You can do it. Hurry, hurry.”

  “Hi.”

  The sparrow stilled, staring back at Hans. Its head rotated to one side and then to the other.

  “Can you…”

  Hans nodded. Speak with Animals was another ability he didn’t know he had.

  The bird blinked. “You might have misheard me earlier.”

  “I must have.”

  “My Lady would like an audience.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The bird flew away. Hans took the trail to the meditation retreat. The Lady of the Forest formed out of twigs and green leaves, appearing in almost the exact place as when she and Hans had last spoken. Back then, she had distorted his senses so that he would die in the snow of hypothermia.

  Her sculpted form didn’t speak.

  “Should I be thinking about protecting myself right now?” Hans asked, resting his left hand on the pommel of his sword.

  “I do not come to you with intentions of war.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Your roots spread through my domain.”

  Hans waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “So?”

  “Do you intend to destroy me?”

  “What?”

  “To expand your power.”

  “No…”

  “Yet you twist your roots through mine.”

  “Does every plant in the forest ask your permission?” Hans asked.

  The dryad was quiet.

  “If you have a question, ask it,” Hans said, finally. “If you’ve come to kill me, get on with it. Otherwise, leave me be. I’m not playing your game of riddles. Never again.”

  “Why do you spread roots if not to seek retribution?”

  “I thought the Merchant settled that matter for us.”

  “Perhaps at one point he did, yes.”

  “But that was before.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for appearing before the fae on my behalf,” Hans said. “I don’t trust you, but people I admire do. As long as you’re good to the people of Gomi, we have no quarrel.”

  “Truly?”

  Hans nodded. “You leave me alone. I’ll leave you alone. Agreed?”

  “War gods are not known for turning the other cheek, but I do not doubt that you speak the truth. I too would prefer this arrangement over others, but your life is not as simple and as brief as it once was.”

  “Be direct, please.”

  “The Merchant and the Forest have an understanding for our mutual benefit. We pursue our own goals, but when it comes to threats from beyond the Dead End Mountains, collaboration is also to our mutual benefit.”

  “I don’t speak for Gomi,” Hans said.

  “Do you not understand yourself?” the Lady asked. “You are the keeper of the dungeon. You are as much a part of this place as my trees or the Merchant’s mountains. I have come to parlay with the dungeon, not with Gomi.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “Coexistence. We honor each other’s boundaries and do not meddle, but we face threats as allies.”

  “I have no intention of bothering you or the Merchant,” Hans replied. “But I do not trust you to be my ally.”

  “Our dispute is in the past.”

  “Why did you go out of your way to protect Petal?” Hans asked.

  The dryad hesitated, as if her own thoughts stumbled. “I do not understand the question.”

  “Answer honestly. Why was Petal so important to you?”

  “I am protective of all Druid familiars.”

  Hans’ stomach churned, as if twisted by foreboding dread. “Lie.”

  The dryad stilled. “Petal has the strength to overcome a dungeon core.”

  “Destroy it, you mean.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Wouldn’t that hurt you too? My understanding is that dungeon cores are quite destructive.”

  “No war is free of casualties. Prices have to be paid.”

  “What about the people living there?”

  “There were no such people when this began.”

  “Would you sacrifice them?”

  “No.” And that wasn’t a lie.

  “Do you still intend to destroy the dungeon core, or me for that matter?”

  “No.” That answer was truthful as well.

  “The surface is your domain,” Hans said, finally. “I will move through it, as will my people, and I will protect it from harm to the best of my ability. You are not my enemy, and I am not a war god.”

  “Very well.”

  The form made from twigs and leaves collapsed and spread across the forest floor.

  When his heart and mind calmed, Hans waited a bit longer for the dryad to speak or to follow their conversation with some kind of action, but the forest was as it should be in the late summer. A few leaves fell when the wind rolled through. Birds chirped. Insects buzzed. If the dryad intended to betray Hans, she didn’t seem intent on doing that now.

  Hans rubbed his face to compose himself and returned to his true purpose for venturing to the surface: learning more about dungeon roots.

  He had spent a few days willing the roots around the campus to expand, and he now walked the perimeter of their reach. As it was in Gomi when he visited with Olza, he could not venture beyond the edge of the dungeon roots. Hans again told his body to step over the invisible boundary, and it refused.

  Quest Complete: Learn more about the limits of the dungeon roots.

  Duty had already bound the Guild Master’s honor to Gomi, but now he was certain that he was physically bound to this place as well.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “I didn’t know you were teaching today,” Terry said when Hans entered the Forgeborne training room.

  “I’m not. I just came to observe.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Not at all,” Hans assured him. “I’ve been pulled in a lot of different directions lately, and it occurred to me I haven’t given you the support I should have been.”

  “I didn’t feel unsupported.”

  “I’m only watching. I promise this isn’t a test. I don’t feel like walking down to Leebel’s yet, so I’m killing some time in the training room. That’s all.”

  Terry gave a shaky nod and turned to start class. By the looks of the warm-up drills, Hans guessed that today they were covering frontline formations and movements. He was ashamed to realize he knew very few of the adventurers in the room by anything more than passing familiarity. Since transforming into a training destination, Gomi had seen a steady flow of adventurers coming and going. Far too many for Hans to keep track of.

  Hans wasn’t running a podunk chapter anymore. This was a big academy, and many of his classes were better attended than training sessions in Hoseki. He wouldn’t have another close-knit cohort like the DCs, the Crawlers, or the Minotaurs. Gomi wasn’t a small town, and the Borderless Association of Adventurers was not a small entity. Hells, the entire dwarven kingdom was part of the Association now.

  When Terry seemed to have the class well in hand, passing almost an hour with no obvious need for feedback that Hans could see, the Guild Master headed to the Bayou drawbridge. The tunnel project connecting the dungeon entrance with Leebel’s Rest was still in progress, so materials and equipment filled much of the corridor around the opening to the new route.

  A younger dwarf taking inventory of mining supplies and equipment spotted Hans approaching. “The foreman is down the way. Probably more than an hour to walk it. Want me to take a message?”

  “No, that’s okay. I was only stopping by. Things are going well?”

  “Yes, sir. Might connect to Leebel’s by mid-winter.”

  “That soon?”

  “Mr. Honronk got us more sedimanders, and we’ve gotten pretty good at working with them. Makes a job go smoothly.”

  “That’s great to hear.”

  “Anything I can do for you, sir?”

  Hans shook his head. “I didn’t mean to pull you away from your work. Thank you for humoring me.”

  The dwarf smiled and went back to taking inventory of pickaxes and other tools.

  Entering the Bayou and cutting a hard right to walk along the dungeon wall, Hans paused to confirm he was well out of sight of any workers or adventurers. With that peace of mind, he pressed himself into the cold surface of dungeon brick and swam the rest of the way to Leebel’s Rest.

  “Didn’t know you were coming by today,” Uncle Ed said.

  He was on the shore closest to the lake project’s initial test pond. He was either readying a rowboat for a voyage or had recently returned. No, the hull was dry, and Ed’s boots were still on. He was almost certainly preparing to leave.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Hans replied. “This was a whim.”

  “Becky and Buru are on the surface. Roland’s in town helping with some construction. Got a few more families moving into town that need housing.”

  “Tusks?”

  Ed shook his head. “Plain old humans. We’ve gotten a few batches this summer, and a good many of them are from Gemtown. With winter looming, I guess folks are taking a hard look at their chances and making tough decisions now.”

  “And the others?”

  “All types, I’d say. A few were living on the streets, and none of ‘em were well-off for that matter, but there’s some who came to Gomi looking for opportunity rather than to run from something.”

  “That’s good to hear. Do you need a hand?”

  “Nope,” Ed answered. “I was about to row out to check on our progress.”

  “Want some company?”

  “I do, but let me warn you, it’s not an exciting job. Not in the slightest.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Hans helped Uncle Ed get the boat into the water and shoved off from the beach. Ed insisted on rowing for the two of them. Protesting at first, Hans relented. The boat wasn’t really big enough for two people to row at once anyway.

  “What are we doing?” Hans asked.

  “Since we can’t go down and see how things are going, we’ve got to learn what we can from up here. We’re getting more bugs coming down from the surface with the tunnel open, so that’s made it a little trickier, but basically I row out and look for air bubbles or small movements. Stuff is living in here already. It’s just small.”

  “Happy with the progress?”

  “We’ve been doing a bit of head-scratching recently on that front, actually. We’re further along than Buru and Becky thought we would be. I’m not sure what they measure, but I guess we’re way ahead somehow.”

  “Way ahead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hans looked over the edge of the boat. Far below the surface were silhouettes of bronzewood trees underlit by the yellow glow of Summon Light torches. To Hans, it looked like a living watercolor painting of some fanciful nighttime scene.

  He asked, “When do you add the fish?”

  “In the spring at the earliest. We still have a lot of lake to touch yet.”

  “But you’re ahead of schedule? Do you know by how much?”

  “A month or so, but don’t hold me to that. Becky or Buru would be the real ones to ask.”

  “An estimate is fine,” Hans said, turning his eyes back to the water. If the project was ahead of schedule, that meant his suggestion to the dungeon core to replicate Buru’s special mud worked.

  Quest Complete: Test the extent of your dungeon influence.

  “Gods, did something die down here?” Hans asked, descending the stairs to Mazo’s lab.

  He paused mid-step, his eyes fixed on a severed orc head on Mazo’s workbench, but only half of it was identifiable. The halfling had bisected the head down the middle and opened it up like a cross-section. One half of the head sat to the side while the other half was pulled and cut into several dozen more pieces.

  That’s what Hans presumed the scraps of flesh and gore to be, at least. Very little of that was recognizable, save for an intact eyeball and a few teeth. And now that he was seated, he could see at least one other head in a bucket under the table. Its condition wasn’t immediately apparent, but the bucket was enough of a clue to satisfy that curiosity.

  Mazo, meanwhile, looked exceptionally bedraggled. Far more than usual.

  “When was the last time you slept?”

  “Umm…” Mazo thought for a moment. “Our run in the Caves. Yeah, the night before that.”

  “That was two days ago.”

  “If you say that’s the right math, I believe you.”

  Hans sat across the room from the dissected orc head. That didn’t help with the smell to any meaningful degree, but it was the best he could do.

  “I was about to send a message for you,” Mazo said. “You coming over saves me the trouble.”

  “I’m here because one of the guards said you wanted me to be.”

  “Really?”

  Hans nodded.

  “Huh. I don’t recall doing that.”

  “What’s this about, Mazo? Why are you carving up orc heads?”

  When Mazo didn’t burst into a grin and assume the posture of a stage presenter, Hans sat up straighter. If her manic obsession had gone far enough that she didn’t relish the idea of bragging about her genius, the reason had to be serious. The last time he saw her like this was when Gret died, and she spent several weeks attempting to puzzle out the mechanics of a Disintegration trap.

  The time before that was shortly after she read through Bunri’s notes. She worked for four straight days in that instance.

  Mazo had yet to look up from her work to address Hans directly. Even now, her wide, bag-laden eyes didn’t leave her bench. “The jawbone necklace, the one we pulled from Wargod with the gazers.”

  “I remember it.” Presently, one copy of the enchanted jawbone sat beneath an alarmed glass case in the guild hall.

  “Why wasn’t Wargod wearing the same item in the next section, with the tityos?”

  Hans opened his mouth to answer because it was a question he himself had proposed, but Mazo barreled on.

  “There could be all kinds of reasons, right?” she continued. “Perhaps it broke, or perhaps he found a better method. Maybe it was decorative and never really mattered. None of those possibilities are outlandish. Those sorts of things happen all the time.”

  Not bothering to attempt to speak, Hans waited.

  “Wargod is more deliberate, though. He’s smart. If the jawbone served a purpose with the gazers, if it gave him an advantage in any way, I don’t see him giving that up. No matter how small. He knows every drop of power counts. It all adds up. It all matters.”

  “Okay…”

  “Look at this,” Mazo said, grabbing the untouched half of orc skull. She turned it so Hans could see the intact face and pulled down its lip, exposing the orc’s lower gums.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The runes. Look at the runes.”

  Hans squinted. “I don’t see any runes.”

  Growling, Mazo dropped the head back on the workbench and lifted a cleaned piece of bone with a pair of forceps.

  “Is that the enchanted jawbone?”

  Mazo nodded excitedly. “It’s not the exact version from the gazers. It’s an improvement. He never got rid of the necklace. Well, the actual necklace, yes, he got rid of that, but he didn’t discard the magic. He kept it.”

  “You’re saying he etched runes into his own jaw?”

  “Yes. Now look at this.” Mazo set four pages in front of Hans one at a time. The pages were dense with numbers and hastily jotted notes in the margins.

  “What is this?” Hans asked.

  Mazo frowned. She looked down at the pages. “Oh. My mistake.” She flipped the order of two pages.

  “That doesn’t help me.”

  “Based on the runes I recognize, I think that Wargod used enchantments to strengthen Barrier. That’s why your Barrier sucks compared to his. You don’t have the enchantments giving you a boost.”

  “How does that work?”

  Throwing up her hands, she shouted, “I don’t fucking know! Nobody does this. Enchanting your own bones? Gods, we thought Honronk’s tattoos were a major step forward in enchanting knowledge, but Wargod was doing it on living bone however the fuck many centuries ago.”

  “Damn.”

  “If I knew how to do this, I wouldn’t stop at my jaw. I’d do every bone in my body.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be a lich?”

  “This is pre-lich!” Mazo retorted. “He did all of this and decided it still wasn’t enough. It’s hard not to admire his ambition and vision at this point.”

  “I don’t have any problem withholding admiration for Wargod.”

  Mazo sighed. “You know what I meant.”

  “So the takeaway is that even if I can copy his skill, I can’t copy his ‘equipment,’ so to speak.”

  “Correct.”

  Hans puffed his cheeks and exhaled slowly. “That’s… This is a lot to get my head around. If he did this with Barrier, he probably did it with a bunch of spells.”

  “A fair hypothesis, yes.”

  “What’s next? After you get some sleep, I mean.”

  “First of all, get that jawbone out of the guild hall,” Mazo said. “Ancient magic did a lot with bones, but we can’t have someone figuring out that this is possible.”

  “Because you want the publishing credit.”

  “Seeing this makes me understand why wizards of yore would destroy knowledge. We only saw a fraction of the sacrifices Wargod made in his ascent. He used his own kind in rituals. He sold them into slavery. He experimented on them. Recreating this technology would be bloody. Very, very bloody.”

  Studying Mazo’s face, Hans said, “This scares you.”

  “Yes.”

  Knowing that a form of magic scared Mazo terrified Hans.

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  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.

  Brainstorm more competitive dungeon games.

  Run future tests in a secure part of the dungeon.