The lamps lit themselves, and a golem on four wheels with a heck of a rack charged forward.

  “You deserve to be happy,” the golem said, in Bunri’s poor mimicry of a female voice.

  The golem was powerful but fairly predictable. It would come to the center of the room, charge at a target, bounce off the wall, and reclaim the center. It would then shoot its arms like ballistas at any perceived threat, both of the brothers in this case.

  And then it would charge again. If they stayed too close to it, the golem would switch to swinging metal fists instead of launching them.

  Duplicate. The golem had no difficulties targeting the real Izz.

  Force Bolt. No effect.

  Meteor. No effect.

  Slow. No effect.

  Paralyze. No effect.

  Feeblemind. No effect.

  “You make me feel safe.”

  None of their well-practised fundamentals did any damage or had any effect on the golem. It continued to cycle through its attack pattern, unimpeded. At this rate, the battle would go for as long as the brothers made no mistakes in their defenses. The Golds were seasoned adventurers, but they were mortals, and mortals would eventually tire. The golem appeared to have no such weakness.

  Izz spoke in a twisted tongue Hans didn't recognize. He might not have understood the words, but they still told him something: Izz was moving to higher tier spells where mages relied on will and incantations to manifest a spell. Until now, all of their fundamental spells were cast with will alone.

  Partway through, Izz’s voice cut to silence. He tried the incantation again, and his voice again cut silence, this time on the third syllable. He tried a third time and no words left his lips.

  “Silence spell?” Thuz shouted. His words came out just fine, which answered his question. “Apparently not.”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes!”

  When Thuz attempted his higher tier spells, he found them nullified in the same series of delayed mutes, until the words wouldn't spark any sound at all.

  “You're doing a really good job, babe.”

  How do they beat a golem immune to weapons, absorbs low level spells, and nullifies upper-tier spells?

  Hans watched as much as he could from the vestibule. The fight played out how he remembered, but whether the brothers had picked up on the same line of inquiry as Mazo wasn’t immediately obvious. If they were on track, they would have by now observed the following about the golem:

  -Weapons have no effect.

  -Fights in a predictable pattern.

  -Uses ranged and melee attacks.

  -The spells they can cast without words get absorbed.

  -The spells it doesn't absorb, the golem cancels completely by somehow muting an incantation part of the way through. After three attempts, it was completely muted.

  Izz attempted an experiment: He cast Force Bolt with the incantation. He no longer needed it, but the repetition of his study made the words of power a permanent memory.

  The three step mute happened again.

  “Ideas?” Izz asked.

  “Sound waves?”

  “I share the question.”

  They tried casting as a whisper and as a shout. Muted.

  “Hey baby. You look so handsome today.”

  They tried casting indirect attack spells, like icing the floors or summoning an air elemental to attack on their behalf. Muted.

  “You're so strong.”

  They tried a variety of aural attack spells–shouts, sonic waves, and so forth. Muted.

  “I love you the way you are.”

  Then a spell called Spectral Lance got through. Kind of. The first few syllables were muted, but the rest of the incantation was not. When Izz tried it again? Muted.

  Spectral Lance and Spectral Gauntlet shared the same first five syllables of their words of power, and the golem had already cancelled the latter. Where they differed, the words were heard aloud as they should have been. The three repetition pattern completely muted the rest of the spell for good.

  “I believe the absorption and the mute effect are two different abilities,” Thuz said, ducking a flying golem fist.

  “Agreed. And it absorbs all of the fundamental spells we have attempted.”

  “What if we cast a spell most commonly manifested with an incantation with will alone?”

  Izz smiled, his gecko grin wider than Hans’ head. “Shall we alternate attempts? When one tires, the other begins?”

  Thuz agreed.

  “Is it hard being so smart?”

  Failing a spell still used mana. The term was “burning.” If you failed the spell, anything you put into it, whether mana or reagents, was lost. Alternating who cast spells allowed one of the brothers to rest and recover their mana at all times.

  They failed several times over, and then Hans spotted Izz doing something different. Instead of trying to manifest a higher tier with will alone, he was still using the incantations. Words didn't leave his mouth, but Hans clearly saw lips moving.

  It will be any time now, Hans thought.

  A long jousting pole of the same ethereal wispiness as the Spectral Gauntlet formed and thrust forward at the same time, like it emerged from an invisible door. The rod smashed into the golem with the force of a charging knight. The impact sent the golem spinning and dented one of its breasts, inverting it completely.

  “I love the way you make me feel.”

  What was different in that moment?

  Besides the boob thing.

  Another Spectral Lance crashed into the golem. Then the third ended the battle. The golem slumped into a corner, missing an arm and two wheels. It wiggled for a moment, as if trying to right itself, and then stopped moving entirely.

  “I forgive you, my love. I know this wasn’t what you wanted.”

  Another Spectral Lance crumpled the golem even more, bending its torso in half. This time, Hans could hear the incantation clearly. The fight was over.

  While the brothers sat to reflect and ponder on the battle, Hans went to see what loot could be had.

  He kicked a piece of the golem’s hot metal shell to the side to create a larger opening. “Figures,” he said.

  When his party defeated the golem, none of the inner components survived except for a valorite cog maybe twice as large as a gold piece. Mazo’s theory was that defeating the golem triggered a sort of mana overload that ashed everything else inside. Only the valorite was strong enough to survive. Part of the Guild Master hoped that would not be the case in the dungeon so he, and people smarter than him, could study how Bunri built his one-of-a-kind construct.

  That part of Bunri’s genius would remain a mystery, it seemed.

  Hans felt the unnaturally cool valorite cog between his fingers. The original cog was one of his party's larger paydays. Mazo refurnished her Hoseki apartment. Gret went on an art buying spree, adding three new oil paintings to his collection. Hans bought a first edition Guild Manual, a positively ancient artifact that was incredibly rare.

  Boden grumbled about missing the score, but he admitted he wouldn't have fit through the books on the fifth floor. So it was for the best. They bought him drinks to make him feel better.

  “Mr. Hans,” Izz said, freeing the Guild Master of his memories. “When did Miss Mazo have her epiphany?”

  “After a week or so.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The brothers visibly relaxed.

  “You both seem really anxious about this. That's not like you.”

  “This was a lesson Miss Mazo could not teach us,” Thuz said. “If we fail here, we may never get another chance.”

  “Guys… About that…”

  Hans explained that Mazo always intended to teach them this lesson. She wanted the brothers to be ready for the insight, but before that she had to figure out the best way to teach it. Instead of explaining that to her students, she entertained herself with her own private game. Anytime she withheld information intentionally, she concocted some cryptic mystery to placate the student, a mystery that didn’t actually exist.

  She relished getting to play the part of mystic wizard.

  “I see,” Thuz said. “I must admit, your story frustrated me at first, but now the great wisdom of the technique is clear to me. Miss Mazo is an incredible teacher.”

  “Woah, woah, I'm not sure that's the takeaway here.”

  “We will meditate on what we experienced today and bring you our answer,” Izz said. “You can confirm if we are right or wrong, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then we will continue our work on the surface.”

  “Don't tell me,” Olza said in Hans’ cabin. “I want to figure it out myself. But don't think we're done talking about your leg.”

  When Hans limped out of the dungeon with Izz and Thuz, they found Olza at the entrance, waiting. From that moment until she finished changing the dressing on his burn, she scolded him. His potion tolerance made infection a much riskier prospect, and she specifically said that any sort of adventuring was out of the question.

  Thankfully, an interesting adventuring anecdote involving the arcane sciences bought Hans a brief reprieve.

  “Can I see the tower?”

  “I've been advised to stay out of the dungeon until my burn is healed.”

  Olza scowled. “Fine. Can you sketch the drawings from Bunri’s workshop?”

  “I can give you the three most important sketches from the collection. I know it's not the same but drawing thirty extra squiggly lines won’t do anything but slow you down with noise.”

  After thinking about it, she agreed. “Resonance is a tool in alchemy, so I know enough to pick up that those are sound waves.”

  She was on the right track, of course. Hans did his best to hide any sort of reaction to her hypothesis.

  He drew two different sound waves on two pages torn from a blank Bunri book. In the lower right hand corner of one, he wrote the words “Create Fire” and the words “Create Water” in the same location on the other.

  The third page reproduced both of those lines on the same paper. In the original, after the first four syllables or so, a single black line representing sound waves split into a red line and a blue line that ran parallel to each other all the way to the end of the page.

  Hans didn't have different colors of ink, however, so he used a solid line and a dashed line in his recreation for Olza.

  Create Water was written in the lower right. Creat Fire was written upside down in the upper left.

  Olza studied them. “Fire and water are elemental opposites…”

  She compared the two single line pages to the one dual line page. She overlaid the two single line pages and held them up to the window to see through them.

  “When opposites balance perfectly, like on a set of scales, they create a flat line. When one side gets higher, the other gets lower. Was Bunri doing something with fitting sound waves together?”

  Hans asked if she wanted more time to think. She declined. She had her fun but was comfortable skipping to the answer with something so far outside of her core discipline. If the incantations themselves played a key role, and it seemed that they did, she knew very little about that subject. Certainly not enough to make meaningful guesses.

  “This might sound like a boring textbook reading if the minutia of the mechanics aren't important to you,” Hans warned Olza. “We could skip a few paragraphs of that detail and not miss anything critically important.”

  “I've got time. Give me the long version.”

  Hans added one more disclaimer: everything he shared was his best recollection of Mazo's explanation. She'd want Olza to know that Hans might mess it up and not to hold that against Mazo’s intelligence.

  Manipulating sound was present in all known types of magic, Hans began. Mages used incantations. Bards used music. Clerics used prayers. Though they all had the use of sound in common, those classes were typically seen as completely separate types of magic. Bards couldn't sing a Force Bolt. A Black Mage couldn’t recite a prayer to cast Inspiration. A Cleric who knew how to play the flute wasn’t casting area of effect party buffs.

  Three separate doors with their own keys leading to three separate areas of magic.

  Bunri’s golem showed Mazo that her understanding of the role of sound in magery was incomplete. To explain, one had to know that many people described the vibrations of high-mana-volume enchantments as “hums.”

  “Sound and vibration are connected that way too. The louder the noise, the more vibrations. Remember that because we will come back to it.”

  Bunri’s golem was able to mute incantations, but not with any sort of Silence spell Hans’ party had seen before. Silence created a noiseless sphere. No sound whatsoever within its borders. Izz and Thuz, meanwhile, could talk just fine and get part of their incantations out before the mute hit.

  Hans returned to the scales analogy Olza used previously.

  Two equal weights could be represented as 0 and 0. When one side got heavier, the other side inverted the effect. Heavy side went down. Lighter side went up. That could be represented as 1 and -1.

  The nature of a scale meant that -1 and 0 wasn’t possible. One side couldn't go down without the other going up.

  “So say you have two scales,” Hans continued. “The first is 1 and -1. The other is -1 and 1. If you combine those two, where do you end up?”

  “0 and 0,” Olza said, grinning.

  If the scales were sound waves, adding the perfect opposite to the original leveled the wave, making it silent.

  Therefore, the golem muted spells with targeted sound waves, using the perfect inverse of an incantation to cancel it out.

  The part that mattered most to Mazo was how she–like Izz–still used an incantation despite the mute effect.

  For that to be possible, she hypothesized that words weren't the source of an incantation’s power. It was the vibrations that created the words.

  Bunri's golem muted the emitted waves but couldn't stop vocal cords from vibrating.

  However, not hearing their own voice during an incantation disrupted a mage’s focus, ruining the spell. Mazo also learned that when mages could not hear themselves speaking, their words unconsciously changed pitch, volume, and speed almost immediately. Also ruining the spell.

  But if a mage moved past that obstacle, and focused on replicating the vocal chord vibrations rather than the audible sounds, the spell still worked, including under a Silence spell.

  Remembering her meeting a deaf mage many years prior helped her have that revelation. The mage couldn’t rely on the feedback of his own voice the way other mages could, so he mastered recreating vibrations in his throat, literally holding a hand on his teacher’s neck to feel the movement. He watched lips and tongues to further improve his accuracy for his words of power.

  With some more experimentation, Mazo confirmed her hypothesis: if the vocal cord vibrations matched the incantation, the words being audible didn't actually matter.

  Moving mana with will? Just a different type of vibration because, as had been established, mana had an observable vibration.

  “We don't know if Bunri stopped at negating incantations or if he had the same realization as Mazo, but that golem made her rethink how she uses and teaches magic, and it's got her working on a unified theory of magic.”

  If manipulating vibrations was how mages cast spells, then Bards, and Clerics weren’t doing anything all that different. The techniques for managing those vibrations varied, but they each tapped into the same phenomenon. Three different doors to the same room.

  Mazo would have hated him repeating “vibrations” over and over. She argued that, like sound waves we can't hear or types of light we can't see, magic was tied to something that could not yet be measured but was very much there. Incantations, mana manipulation, spell components–These were all tools used to interface with this something.

  Hypothetically.

  The last Hans heard, Mazo had three items to address before she was comfortable publishing:

  -Define a repeatable process for training the ability to replicate the vibrations of an incantation with mana alone, producing no sound at all but not having to resort to pure-will casting.

  -Explore Druid magic to see if it fit within her unified theory.

  -Address the role of reagents in creating vibrations, in spells as well as in alchemy.

  Mazo found that last item particularly challenging. A few philosophers had posited that “everything” vibrated, but she hadn’t devised a way to measure the vibrations of mandrake root or garlic or any other reagent.

  When Hans or Mazo told the story of Bunri's tower to others, they intentionally omitted the part where the golem muted spells. Mazo wanted to withhold sharing her insight until she had done all of the proper diligence and had organized her thoughts. She planned to credit Bunri in the theory, by the way. Being a shut-in didn’t make his contributions any less meaningful, and were it not for him, Mazo might not have had this epiphany. Ever.

  “I didn't know adventurers were that scholarly,” Olza said.

  “There's more of them than you think, but not as many of them as there should be. Mazo's at the level where she'll turn over every rock she sees if it means moving her training forward even a small amount. So she just devours books and papers of all kinds, looking to find a new connection somewhere.”

  “Establishing a unified theory of magic would be quite the feat,” Olza said. “I had professors who said it couldn't be done.”

  “There are so many contradictions to resolve… she has a lot of work ahead to pull it off.”

  “So many. What's your favorite?”

  “My favorite contradiction?” Hans loved that question.

  “Yes.”

  “Energy. How energy works in the physical sciences doesn't seem to match how it works in the arcane sciences. The top voices in physical science say that energy doesn't increase or decrease, it just changes. A deer transforms the grass it eats into energy, then a wolf turns the deer into energy again when it eats it. And the cycle continues. A dungeon core seems to contradict that, though, which I think you pointed out once before actually. Like with ours, there’s no obvious source of energy. Is it drawing that energy from something we can’t see, or is the dungeon core exempt from that law of nature for some reason?”

  Hans argued that problem extended to spells. Measuring the exact amount of mana a caster used during a spell was difficult, but several mages reported spell A feeling easy and spell B feeling like a drain while other mages reported the opposite. Therefore, the spells weren’t using a set amount of mana, so using mana as the replacement for energy in the formula didn’t work. More power was coming from somewhere, but it was wholly unknown.

  Olza nodded along sagely. She agreed that was an incredibly large contradiction.

  “Yours?” Hans asked.

  “Adventuring instructors who encourage students to listen to their bodies and know their limits.”

  “Hey!”

  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.

  Locate Sven.