Hans learned the fallen adventurer was an Iron-ranked Ranger. His name was Philip.

  As the sun set, the sky turning from its usual crystal blue to a dark, heavy red, the snow at the tips of the Dead End Mountain looked red as well, like a colossal creature had recently been impaled on its peaks. Most of Gomi gathered in the clearing between the walls and the forest for the service. Philip wore a pristine white robe with his hands holding his sword to his chest. Flowers of all varieties covered much of his body, small tokens of respect from the townspeople who had walked solemnly by the pyre to see the adventurer off.

  “Thank you, everyone, for being here to honor an adventurer for their sacrifice,” Hans began, standing between the crowd and the carefully stacked pile of logs. “Before we see Philip off to the next plane, it is customary for those who knew him to speak the words of his final story.”

  Bel, Lee, and the two surviving tusks stood at the front of the crowd. Of the four, only Bel had the strength to step forward, so she did.

  “I met Philip when he was thirteen and he started studying at the Mikata chapter. The little shit had more energy than any kid I’ve ever seen.”

  Several present laughed softly.

  “All the things a proud parent would say about their son or daughter could be said of Philip. Compassionate. Loyal. Strong. Motivated. My Guild Master has high standards for the character of her adventurers, standards that–I must admit–I often fell short of. But never Philip. His heart was always kind, and he always put others before himself.

  “He came up with one of his best friends. When they were Apprentices, just a few weeks away from their promotion to Iron, his friend broke an arm, which meant he wasn’t fit to take the exam. Philip declined his opportunity to test, preferring to wait until his friend could be there with him. He spent an extra three months at Apprentice because of that, and he never regretted it. Not even for a moment.

  “I wish you all could have known him too. The world is darker without him in it.” Bel reclaimed her place standing by Lee. Lee’s face was empty, staring forward at nothing in particular, as if she were still in shock.

  Probably is.

  Hans spoke again. “When I finish the rights, I ask that only those who knew Philip stay behind. Everyone else, you are welcome to share a drink in his honor. We’ll gather again on the Tribe lands for a repast in Philip’s memory, but you don’t need to wait for anyone who stays behind. No honor need be delayed. Drink, and celebrate his life.”

  Hans paused to swallow the despair in his throat before he continued. He turned to face Philip and delivered funeral rights from memory.

  “Adventurers choose to delve the shadows of our world. Adventurers choose to stand by their comrades in battle. Adventurers choose to face the dangers that drive others to flee. Adventurers choose to spill their own blood in the name of their cause. Knowing all this, Philip chose to be an adventurer, so we choose to honor his life and his sacrifice. And we choose to carry his memory with us. Thank you, Philip. May our other fallen brothers and sisters greet you with open arms.”

  Hans cast Create Fire and joined the rest of the townspeople in leaving the service. Bel, Lee, and the two new tusks watched the fire until only ash remained.

  Hans stayed at the wake until the four adventurers watching the pyre had joined. He gave each one a hug. He still didn’t know the names of the other two tusk adventurers. He learned Philip’s name only yesterday.

  Bel introduced them. The Archer was Gootlab, and the Black Mage was Robert. They shook Hans’ hand and said they knew him from Theneesa’s stories. None of the adventurers, Hans included, felt much like talking. Thankfully, none of the townspeople pushed beyond expressing their condolences, so only those who wanted to fellowship did so.

  After another hour of showing his support with his presence, Hans reached his limit. When no one was looking, he slipped into the darkness to return to his apartment.

  Quest Complete: Give the fallen tusk an adventurer’s farewell.

  Hans found Galad waiting at the guild hall, sitting at one of the tables with an open bottle of whiskey, his back to the door. Without turning to acknowledge Hans walking in, Galad poured a new glass and held it out for Hans to take.

  The old adventurer accepted. He shot it and put the glass back down. Galad refilled it without a word.

  “I can stay, or I can go. We can speak, or we can drink in silence.”

  “Stay,” Hans answered.

  Galad nodded and refreshed his own glass.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen your share of funerals,” Hans said after a time.

  “Yes, many, but that was my first funeral for an adventurer. It was touching.”

  “Given funeral rites?”

  The tusk said he had, several times.

  He and Charlie shared those duties. Whoever felt the strongest at that time administered the rights. Sometimes, the same person would deliver several in a row because the other couldn’t step outside their grief long enough to be a leader.

  “The young ones are the most difficult,” Galad said. “Charlie takes those ones really hard, so it’s usually me giving the rights. Each one is more painful than the last, it seems.”

  Hans nodded. He felt the same. “Annalee is going to have a rough go of it. A lot of people don’t come back from losing a friend, but what she faces… Fuck, nobody deserves that.”

  “They were close?”

  “You don’t know?” Hans asked.

  Galad said he didn’t know what Hans meant.

  “Lee killed him.”

  The tusk nearly dropped his glass. “What?”

  “The Blood magic had him. I didn’t see it happen, but from what Buru says, Philip knocked Chisel to the ground. Lee put him down before he could do the same to Chisel.”

  “Gods.”

  “I wish that was all,” Hans said, shooting his remaining half of a glass, handing it to Galad to get another. “The other two, Robert and uhh… Gootlab, they told Bel that they remember some of the possession. Not all of it, just bits and pieces, but they had to watch themselves do some horrible things.”

  Galad exhaled slowly, processing Hans’ words as he passed the glass back.

  “The pieces are small enough that it’s unlikely the ‘real’ Philip was awake for the battle, but it’s possible.”

  “That poor woman.”

  Hans nodded and drank.

  “What about you? Are you doing okay?” Galad lowered his head to put himself in Hans’ eyeline.

  “I’m sick of burying young adventurers. It never makes any sense. Death comes for them, but passes by the old, used-up adventurer? Sometimes I think that it’s not time that ages me. It’s the guilt.”

  “My mother used to sing a song at services,” Galad said. “The saddest song I’ve heard. I remember a good bit of it–Galinda knows it all–but one line will never leave me: ‘The young die. The wise ask why.’ The gods have always been cruel, Hans. They always take the best of us and leave the rest to kill themselves with work, drink, or rope.”

  The faces of over a dozen elderly adventurers flashed through Hans’ mind. He knew some of their stories. All of them made surviving sound like a curse, a kind of divine punishment. When he was sixteen and an Apprentice, he remembered not understanding why some of the old-timers spoke so softly and moved so slowly. He thought death was a sad thing, sure, but how could someone as strong as a Diamond or a Platinum be affected so deeply by it?

  He understood it now.

  Every death hardened his heart just a little bit more. Enemy, monster, animal–It didn’t matter. Each death counted, and the gods never lost count.

  The deaths Hans wished he could undo–whether it was a close friend like Boden or Gret or a young adventurer like Philip–did more than harden his heart. The moment he thought, “I’d trade places with them if I could,” a piece of his heart broke off. It didn’t matter how well he knew them. The thought was enough.

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  Every person ripped to ribbons by a monster in their homes. Every small corpse he carried back to town in his arms. Every face younger than his on a funeral pyre.

  Chip.

  Chip.

  Chip.

  He’d think, “The gods took the wrong person,” but Galad was right. The gods always took who they intended to take, and they left people like him. On purpose. Another streak of cruelty as old as mortality itself.

  Hans said it was late and that he should be going to bed. He thanked Galad for visiting, and the tusk departed soon after.

  Hans was alone.

  Chip.

  Chip.

  Chip.

  Olza was asleep on his couch when he woke. He hadn’t heard her come in and didn’t know how long she had been there.

  Oof, his head hurt. Between the drink, the battle, and the funeral, there wasn’t a part of Hans that didn’t ache.

  He did his best to sneak by, but Olza sat up, her eyes squinted and her dark hair poofed into a tangle. “Hey,” she said through her grogginess.

  “Hey,” Hans said.

  “Can I have some?”

  Hans nodded and went downstairs. He returned with two cups of tea. Olza sat up completely now and made some attempt to contain her hair. It was better, but only slightly. Not that Hans' looked better. He found drool caked in his beard when he began sipping his tea.

  “How are you?” Olza asked, gently.

  “We can talk about anything you want but not that.”

  She agreed.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Charlie lent me his key.”

  “Should probably just get you one of your own at this point.”

  “Probably.” Olza smiled.

  After several sips passed with neither of them speaking, Hans asked how the injured were doing.

  “That doesn’t count as talking about it?”

  “No.”

  “If you say so.” She said that Yotuli was on crutches for a broken ankle, but since she didn’t have a potion tolerance like Hans, she would likely walk again in a few days. Becky’s broken arm was a similar story. The dwarf said she was leaving that morning and would return that night or the day after. She insisted she was fine riding Becki with her arm in a sling.

  Chisel had some minor scrapes. Honronk was a little more banged up, but not much worse than a hard sparring match.

  Robert and Gootlab both had a few old wounds that were getting infected, and they seemed to be malnourished. In time, they would recover just fine, physically.

  “Roland was looking for you the other day,” Olza said. “He’s usually pretty reserved, but he was smiling bigger than I’ve ever seen. This was before we knew about the attack.”

  “He was pleased with the tournament?”

  “Positively gushing. He wanted to tell you all about it.” Olza smile fell away. “Is it rude to talk about something happy like this?”

  Hans shook his head. “Not at all. I’m sure Galad has some saying about good and bad things happening at the same time and how that’s okay.”

  Olza laughed.

  “I’m happy for them. They’ve worked really hard, and they have a right to celebrate that,” Hans said. “We will, but we’ll wait enough time for the boys not to feel guilty about being happy.”

  Olza asked if Thuz had mentioned anything about the trip.

  “Thuz said there was a little bit of trouble but didn’t say what happened.”

  She recounted the story as she had heard it from Roland. When the group reached Osare, it was fairly late, so they got an inn room right away. In that time, they experienced a few dirty looks and heard a few whispers, but nothing direct.

  That changed the morning of the tournament. As was customary, every competitor and their accompanying coaches and instructors gathered in the arena for a final review of the event’s regulations and procedures.

  During the rules meeting, with every competitor and their coaches present, a Silver-ranked used some sort of slur to describe Kane. He wasn’t brave enough to say it to Kane directly, but he spoke loudly enough to be certain the boy would hear.

  “The way Roland described it, Izz pulled the guy across the arena. Not with his hands. With the spell. So in the middle of all these adventurers, Izz is holding this Silver up in the air with one hand.”

  “You might have noticed, Izz and Thuz take respect very seriously. Their whole culture does.”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed. So the Silver went ballistic. He’s kicking and yelling at Izz, calling him all kinds of names that Roland wouldn’t repeat. A few were specific to lizardmen, apparently.”

  Hans laughed.

  “So you know how this ends?”

  “Not exactly, but I have a few ideas.”

  Continuing her retelling of Roland’s story, Olza said that the Raven’s Hollow Guild Master intervened and told his Silver to shut up. Izz set him down, and the Guild Master stepped between them.

  “The Silver is still worked up, though, and he starts arguing with the Guild Master,” Olza said. “Then he stops suddenly and looks around his Guild Master at Izz. Can you imagine what his face looked like right then? Cause he left right after. Almost running.”

  Roland couldn’t hear what had been said, but he was certain the Diamond offered some summary of Izz’s abilities and accomplishments. Next, the Guild Master formally ejected his own student from the tournament and apologized to Izz and to Kane.

  Nobody bothered Kane the rest of his time in Osare.

  “How did Kane take that?” Hans asked.

  Olza said Kane was upset at first, likely feeling emasculated by someone stepping in to fight his battles for him. Izz assured him that parties hunted together. Who killed the monster didn't matter as long as it was dead. In Izz’s mind, him dealing with the Silver was no different from Kane doing it himself.

  “So Izz and Thuz have a reputation?” Olza asked.

  Hans said they did.

  “A bad one? They seem so nice.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” Hans assured her. “The Adventurers’ Guild is big, but the upper-ranks are much smaller than you’d think. If a Gold or higher does something impressive, word gets around fast.”

  “Well? You know I’m going to ask what they did.”

  “They put down a Diamond.”

  Adventurers killing adventurers was so rare at higher ranks that she knew of only two stories that could have involved the lizardmen. “Wait… The Diamond Summoner from the Ikari Massacre? I heard about that. That was Izz and Thuz?”

  “Correct,” Hans said. “Guy went crazy and killed his whole chapter. Killed three other Diamonds in the process. Then kept on killing.”

  The motivation for the attack was still unknown. Some believed it was a fit of jealous rage, while others say that the Summoner had talked about seeing demons months before the attack, demons that were only visible to him. Hallucinations.

  “The nickname for Summoners in the Guild is ‘Army-Makers.’”

  Given enough time, a talented Summoner could stroll into battle with several summoned allies protecting them. Elemental summons were the most common, as they could be powerful and were relatively easy to control. This Summoner had greater fire elementals and greater air elementals patrolling the city, ten of each, if the rumors were accurate.

  The more worrying summons were his four fiends, which were akin to demons but hailed from the abyssal and shadow planes instead of the hells. The fiends had done most of the slaughtering on the Summoner's orders.

  Like demons, fiends came in a variety of forms that widely varied in strength. The fiends spotted during the massacre were estimated to be greater fiends, putting them at a high-Gold encounter rating, when they were alone.

  These fiends were very much not alone.

  “The King sent a full battalion of soldiers to reclaim the town,” Hans said. “By the time they arrived, Izz and Thuz were done with the fight and were searching homes one by one for survivors.”

  “How’d they do it?”

  Hans wobbled his head.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not in detail,” Hans answered. “The Guild report on the event is sealed, and Izz and Thuz have trouble talking about it, so we don't bother them. Anyway, I said they were searching for survivors, but it was bad. Out of a whole town, they found two dozen or so still alive.”

  “That much I knew. Who is ‘we?’”

  Hans said he meant himself and Mazo. “All that to say, most veteran adventurers have at least heard of Izz and Thuz. They respect the hells out of them for what they went through, and–let’s be honest–they’re probably a little afraid too.”

  “Do Kane and Quentin know about this?”

  Hans shook his head. “I don't share that story. They hate the attention they get, and they hate how people look at them when they're recognized. I’d rather not do that to them if I can help it.”

  “I don't blame them,” Olza said. “So our people, the only ones traveling with Izz and Thuz, had no idea while the rest of the town is probably still talking about them?”

  “Now that you mention it, yeah. That's probably right.”

  “I wonder how Kane will feel when he finds out.”

  In his mind, Hans imagined a middle-aged Kane dropping a plate of food, his jaw following the dish when he finally learned who he had traveled with so many years ago.

  Hans laughed.

  It felt good to laugh.

  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.

  Await the delivery of lockpick training tools.