That night, a few of the workers set up spits for two pigs and invited everyone on campus to share a meal. Hans happily accepted, and he was thankful he did. The smell of the cooking pigs was tortuous enough, but to miss out on the meal completely? Horror beyond imagination.

  Yotuli, Sven, and Chisel had planned on leaving with a late-night wagon run, but the fragrance of fresh pork charmed them into staying. As the sun set, everyone on campus gathered around the two fires, which meant all of the Apprentices, the Silvers, the Golds, the workers, and the quartermaster. Becky had departed to fulfill a request for the forest, so she would not be present for the festivities.

  One of the workers raised a toast to his brothers and sisters in Gomi and began carving off cuts of meat to much fanfare.

  “Mr. Hans,” Thuz said, coming up beside the Guild Master. “Is this a regular occurrence in Gomi?”

  “From time to time.”

  “Your people are very generous.”

  “My people?”

  “Yes, the people in Gomi.”

  Hans was taken aback by that description at first, but it felt right.

  Yeah, these are my people.

  As food was distributed, the crowd present began to break into groups to enjoy smaller conversations with one another. The Golds and the Silvers formed around Hans. Quentin and Kane joined as well, but they positioned themselves in the background, a comfortable place where they could listen to the upper ranks talking without being in their way.

  Hiding his smile, Hans didn’t disturb them. He did the same when he was an Apprentice, hoping to absorb every piece of wisdom experienced adventurers might share as they reminisced.

  “I hear the dungeon is getting a golem soon,” Bel said between mouthfuls of sweet potato.

  Izz and Thuz looked at the ground, nervously.

  “That’s interesting,” Hans said, a mock seriousness in his tone. He looked at the lizardmen. “The last time I talked about it I said I had to give it serious thought first.”

  Izz shrugged. “My enthusiasm may have gotten the better of me.”

  “Mine as well,” Thuz added.

  Chuckling, Hans said, “I said it was a possibility. For a Gold-ranked encounter, the golem is the safest option.”

  “Why is that?” Bel asked.

  “Anything we grow in the dungeon, we have to be able to keep in the dungeon. If we grow a bunch of encounters that only Izz and Thuz can handle, what do we do when they leave? I couldn’t live with myself if you all got wiped and then Gomi did too.”

  “Did you have that worry with ogre valley?”

  “Of course, but that encounter isn’t totally out of reach for the Apprentices. When you and Lee leave, Becky and I can run it if the Apprentices aren’t ready. If worse came to worse, I could run it solo.”

  Unlike a fallen celestial or a greater demon, the golem job Hans had in mind should be safer because that golem was inactive until a security protocol was tripped. He couldn’t be sure, however, that it would stay inactive. What if a mildly intelligent monster found a way to turn it on, intentionally or by accident? Maurice was proof that creatures could wander quite far in the dungeon. Could a zout trigger the golem to come to life if it bumbled around enough?

  “What made you request a golem in the first place?” Lee asked the lizardmen.

  Izz turned an open palm to his brother, suggesting he answer the question.

  “In this case, being pedantic is of great importance,” Thuz began. “We do not wish to fight ‘a’ golem, but rather ‘the’ golem that Mr. Hans, Mr. Gret, and Miss Mazo encountered on their travels. The golems commonly known to us are machinations with rudimentary abilities. They can perform basic labor, and they respond to basic commands. The golems commonly included in stories–the ones who can speak and reason and perform complicated feats of movement and strength–are complete fantasy. We have no proof that golems were ever used for warfare nor do we have evidence that any of them ever gained consciousness.”

  “This golem was different,” Izz added.

  Bel and Lee’s eyes widened. When Hans looked to see Kane and Quentin’s reaction, he saw the same look but discovered that Terry and Sven had joined them in listening to the upper-ranks talk.

  “Do not misunderstand my brother. This golem did not gain consciousness, but it had incredible combat proficiency.”

  Bel asked, “Why would only one golem in history be capable of combat?”

  “We don’t know,” Hans said. “We kind of destroyed it before anyone could study it. Had to, really.”

  “What about whoever built it?”

  Hans realized they were starting the story at the end. He said as much and started the tale at its true beginning.

  “A wizard died,” he said. “Old age, so nothing nefarious or exciting. He passed while under the care of a White Mage in the town closest to his home. Before he died, he told them he had no family or friends, but he did not tell them about his tower.”

  Mages who chose research over adventuring often had homes that were designed to be defensible without losing the gravitas due to an expert in magic. In other words, they didn’t want anyone to see what they were working on, but they wanted their power and prestige to be as visible as possible.

  For small town wizards, that often meant a tower, a structure that could be built on a hilltop to further exaggerate the superiority of the mage who lorded over local peasants. If someone was ambitious enough to attempt to attack or break in, they might have dozens of heavily boobytrapped floors to pass through before reaching anything of value. Mostly, though, people avoided anything that was known to be owned by a mage.

  “When Bunri–that was the wizard’s name–passed away, he left no will for his estate, nor did he leave any instructions for how to disable the security in his tower,” Hans explained. “After an attempt to find a next of kin failed, the tower went to auction.”

  “And no one had any idea what was inside?” Bel asked.

  Hans smiled. “And no one had any idea what was inside.”

  Unbeknownst to Hans at the time, many wizards passed the way Bunri had, with no heirs and no instructions, spawning a little-known industry of investors who exclusively bought the abandoned estates of mages. In most cases, they were like Bunri’s tower: locked tight. Contents unknown. Buyer beware. Research into the previous owner’s career was critical.

  Bunri, however, was not a known or respected wizard.

  “Before the job, I tried to learn more about him, figuring that would give us some hints as to what to expect for traps and security. No one in town knew anything about him, so I tried to track down colleagues or friends. I found one mage who met Bunri when they were students, but they didn’t talk then and they hadn’t talked since.”

  Despite his intense digging, the only facts Hans could confirm were that Bunri existed at one time, and he could cast spells. He found no clues about his proficiency, his specialization, or his research interests. Bunri shut his tower door shortly after leaving school and seemed to have not opened it again until he desperately needed the services of a Healer almost a century later.

  He had waited too long, apparently.

  Hans’ party was tasked with clearing the tower of monsters, traps, and security measures that might make the property less valuable. That could mean disarming a trap that cast Petrification on the victim, or it could mean simply unlocking a door whose key was lost.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  For Bunri’s tower, they had to do all of that with no intel on what they might find inside.

  Hans said this was important: jobs like this one usually paid a flat fee for success, but sometimes they offered the contents of the structure as payment. For the Bunri tower job, the new owner proposed the latter, presumably because they didn’t expect Bunri to own anything of value.

  Mazo insisted they take that deal despite the expenses the job would incur. To her, the chance of a great find was worth the gamble. The party agreed to Mazo’s preference and set out for the job.

  “Wizards are showoffs, so most towers don’t have first floor entrances–visible ones, anyway. Instead, the primary entrance is typically on the roof. That sounds silly, but it’s the best place for a wizard to entertain guests. Good view and all that.”

  There were no stairs from the ground to the roof. Bunri likely had a magic platform somewhere that would ferry guests up and down, but Hans’ party didn’t need to locate it. The tower’s new owner had already erected scaffolding in preparation for emptying the tower’s contents when the structure was safe to enter.

  For that job, Hans’ party consisted of himself, Gret, Mazo and an enchanter they hired for the job. The enchanter’s name was Dunfoo. He was a chubby halfling with an exquisitely bald head, and he was the most costly part of their operation. He demanded to be paid by the hour.

  Dunfoo wasn’t an adventurer, but he had the skillset required to safely disarm magic traps. Gret was responsible for any mechanical locks and traps, and he would assist Hans and Mazo in combat if they encountered guards or monsters.

  The footprint of the tower was roughly the size of a Tribe barn, making the rooftop a large, open-air deck. The view from that deck was all rolling farmland, with a dusty dirt road winding to a small village where every home was attached to at least one pigpen. In the distance, forest covered a few larger hills, but no mountains were within view.

  Despite the picturesque surroundings, the top of the tower had one chair looking over the edge. The rest of it was covered in garbage. Empty jars and bottles, mostly, but one corner seemed like a compost heap. Or it was just a pile of rotting garbage. Hans never could tell the difference.

  A set of stairs led from the roof down to a wooden door. As expected, it was trapped. According to Dunfoo, the trap transformed the door to solid stone if it was tripped, but otherwise it didn’t seem rigged to cause harm.

  Dunfoo worked out the trap and disarmed it.

  The first floor down was not what any of them expected.

  “We found stacks and stacks of books, most of them going from the floor to the ceiling,” Hans said. “There were so many books that the floor had a noticeable bow in it from the weight, and the only floor we could actually see was a small strip that snaked between the piles. When I say small, I mean small. I had to shimmy sideways at times to get through.”

  Gret went first, followed by Dunfoo, both searching for traps with every step. With careful and slow forward progress, Mazo had plenty of time to scan the titles of the books around them. None she saw pertained to magic, and none appeared to have any value. It was as though Bunri sought out libraries and bought only the books that hadn’t been checked out in thirty years–gardening, regional histories, memoirs, dictionaries, romance novels.

  The next floor down was more of the same, except stacks of papers, piles of scrolls, and empty ink bottles joined the collection.

  “The tower ended up having five floors,” Hans said by campfire light. “The top three floors were packed with worthless items, the only one of the three with any meaningful difference was the third floor down–Bunri’s bedroom.”

  The wizard’s mattress sat directly on the floor and had turned the twisted brown of old, weathered cotton. A bucket sat next to the bed. Among the stacks and stacks of books, the party found a pile of old clothes, every item worn until it was washed out and filled with holes. They found a collection of the wizard’s hair below a mirror. He seemed to cut and shave regularly, leaving the clippings where they fell, and never swept up.

  Mazo dutifully skimmed the book titles for anything of value. She found none.

  Gret searched for potential traps. He found none.

  Dunfoo also searched, and he too found no other traps beyond the one on the tower’s “front” door.

  “We’re going to lose money on this one,” Gret said with disappointment. “We should have taken the flat rate.”

  “We have more floors to explore,” Mazo argued.

  “I’m sure they’ll be just as exciting as the first three.”

  Dunfoo raised a finger to interrupt the conversation and ask a question. Before he could speak, Hans said, “You’ll still get paid. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay, good.” Satisfied, the enchanter resumed his work of searching for magic traps that didn’t exist.

  The floor beneath the bedroom was the wizard’s workshop, where one would expect to find all sorts of valuable ingredients and equipment, given a wizard's natural inclination for research and experimentation.

  Not so in Bunri’s tower.

  The party saw benches along each wall and a big round table in the middle. Everything was covered in scrap and junk. Old pieces of metal of all sizes sat in piles and spilled across the floor. Some scraps were rusted, some were mangled like they had been in explosions. All of it looked like it had been salvaged from someone’s garbage. Gret confirmed the theory by pointing to a raccoon skeleton buried beneath one of the piles.

  Every empty surface was covered in drawings of unbroken wiggly lines, starting on the left side of the page and wobbling to the edge of the right. No two were exactly alike, and there were dozens.

  Mazo found a few loose pieces of paper. One had a single sentence repeated over and over in two columns until the page was full: “Bunri is a failure.”

  Another sheet was a recipe for a green bean casserole. Nothing magical about it unless you considered beans a magical fruit.

  The last sheet had a schematic for a device the party couldn’t identify, but it had the hallmarks of a draft design. Much of it had been scribbled out in big angry zig zags. The back of the paper repeated the schematic but was scribbled over completely. Mazo tried studying it after the job ended but found no useful conclusions.

  And a lute. The strings were all broken.

  “Needless to say,” Hans said to his listeners, “Mazo was pretty frustrated. She was disappointed that even a mediocre shut-in wizard didn’t keep records. She kept saying, ‘What kind of mage doesn’t keep notes?’ The tools in the workshop were junk too. The hammers and wrenches we found… we’d have trouble giving them away they were so beat up.

  “But there was one more floor left, and the stairs down to it were covered by a metal hatch, locked shut with multiple padlocks. Big ones. The size of my fist.”

  Once Dunfoo confirmed the door had no magic locks or traps, Gret confirmed the same for mechanical traps and popped the padlocks as easily as if he had the actual key.

  When they lifted the metal door, they found another set of stairs like they expected, but the stairs ended with a landing and a heavily reinforced iron door.

  Hans said he would spare his listeners the two hours of troubleshooting that followed and cut to the good part: the reinforced door would only open if the hatch to the stairs was shut and latched from the inside, like a vestibule in a prison. The party–mostly Gret, really–tried several times to “trick” the doors, but every attempt to simulate closing and latching the hatch failed.

  If they wanted to see what was behind the iron door, they had to close the hatch behind them. Dunfoo was the least excited about being locked in a strange wizard’s basement, but Mazo convinced him that based on what they saw in the rest of the tower, they would only find more junk. Not monsters. Not traps. Just trash.

  As soon as Gret cracked the door, Dunfoo and Mazo spun to look at the hatch.

  “They both felt a surge of mana,” Hans explained. “Sure enough, the hatch was sealed by some sort of magic lock. Dunfoo freaks out and starts frantically trying to dispel the seal. He’s yelling for us to shut the door again so he can leave, but Gret swings it open. When he does, lamps around the perimeter of this big open room flickered to life, one by one. It was the only part of the tower that felt properly wizard-like… which was obviously a bad sign.”

  Hans noticed indents and cracks peppered across the wall like craters. A few of the lamps didn’t light because they had been smashed. The ones that did light revealed gouges in the floor.

  Then, Mazo commented that she felt mana moving through the room, all in the same direction. As she described the movement to Hans and Gret, Dunfoo begged for them to let him leave.

  Mazo pointed across the room and said, “All of the mana is going into that.”

  Right then, the final two lamps in the room lit, revealing a contraption parked between them. The base had four wooden wheels half as small as wagon wheels. Each wheel connected to its own metal rod, with all four rods meeting in the middle like the peak of a volcano.

  Everything from the top of the volcano shape up was fashioned after a human torso roughly the size of Buru’s. Metal plates of varying sizes, textures, and colors formed the shape of its body and connected to two metal arms.

  None of the construction was particularly impressive. If a piece of metal didn’t quite fit, Bunri seemed fine with letting an edge stick out or attaching another scrap to cover any gaps, big or small. The arms were like that as well, looking slightly uneven with sharp, boxy lines forming the approximation of shoulders, biceps, triceps, and forearms.

  The head was not much more than a box attached to shoulders. It had no facial features, but it did have a bunch of twine forming a wig of sorts.

  And the golem had two boobs each the size of Hans’ head. Well, the vaguely spherical attachments represented boobs. They were the only part of the golem whose edges were carefully hidden and filed smooth.

  A voice coming from the direction of the golem said, “Hey beautiful. I missed you. How was your day?”

  ***

  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."

  Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.

  Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.

  Finish transcribing the manual and decide on the next course of action.

  Help Izz and Thuz bring new opportunities to their home village.

  Investigate the locations of old Diamond Quests.