“The next dungeon addition will be armillarias,” Hans explained to the adventurers gathered in the staging area of the Forgeborne Mines. “As we’ve discussed in previous lessons, fighting armillarias is a different kind of challenge. They aren’t strong. They aren’t fast. They don’t have teeth or claws. But if you get hit by a spore, night night.”

  Adding this area to the dungeon was meant to train awareness, positioning, and timing. If the Apprentices tried to rush the battle, they would most likely get caught in a spray of spores, launched in every direction around a threatened armillaria.

  Spray, not cloud–their dispersion of spores was more like a splash of heavy droplets instead of a fine mist or airborne powder.

  Furthermore, whether or not those spores hit an adventurer, their release summoned other armillarias. Every walking mushroom within half a mile would converge on the location of those spores.

  “A cheap Magic Resistance potion nullifies the spores completely, making it pretty easy to chop them down,” Hans said, “which is why you’ll do it without one.”

  Each run, one member of the party would drink a potion before entering the armillarias section. That adventurer would observe for that run, their only job being to rescue their party if they made a mistake and got spored. With immunity, hacking down the mushrooms was like bushwhacking a trail. Not much to it beyond a mild workout. Once they were all dead, the party would wake on their own in thirty to forty-five minutes.

  “Never, I repeat, never run the armillarias without someone drinking the potion. They need about a day to turn a sleeping adventurer into fertilizer, so another party might not check on you in time. As long as you take the potion, though, this will be the safest place in the dungeon. You’ll get swarmed, so don’t feel bad if you end up taking a nap.”

  When Hans’ party had this encounter, they were sleeping on the top floor of an inn. The small town was overrun by armillarias during the night. The rest of the residents were asleep, and the party didn’t have the supplies to give themselves immunity. Of the four adventurers, only Boden got slept. His little dwarf legs couldn’t run fast enough to escape a spray.

  The memory made Hans smile.

  At the end of class, Quentin approached Hans. “Do you have a minute, Mr. Hans?”

  Hans said he did.

  “I wanted to apologize for letting you down.”

  “Letting me down?”

  Quentin nodded. “Taking second in the tournament. I wanted to represent Gomi better than that.”

  This was another one of those conversations Hans had with students dozens of times before. Regardless of how much he talked about tournament records not really mattering to him, someone always came back to training carrying self-imposed shame. Knowing Quentin, he should have expected him to fall into that trap. He could have cut this off days ago if he had.

  “If you have twenty people in a division,” Hans began, “Nineteen of them will lose. They have to because that’s how competitions work.”

  “I know, but I trained so hard, and–”

  “Hey. You’re damn right you trained hard. I’m just as proud of you as I am of Kane. I got the details about your finals match. You drew someone older with more experience. He was better than you that day. Nothing shameful about that.”

  “But Kane beat him…”

  “Did you talk to Kane about your opponent before he was up to face him?” Hans asked.

  “Yes…”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  Quentin looked at his feet. “I pointed out some mistakes I saw that I thought Kane could exploit.”

  “I thought so. Losing sucks, I know. But I’ve only heard things I’m proud of. Learn from the match, and get your head back into training. You’ll do more adventuring this week than that guy does this month, I bet.”

  When Quentin seemed to accept Hans’ perspective, Hans asked the boy what else was on his mind.

  “You know how Kane and I started a bit after the original Apprentices?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Shouldn’t we have our own team name? I don’t feel like a member of the Dungeon Cores.”

  Hans rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Did Terry put you up to this?”

  Terry, Honronk, and Yotuli ran the mushrooms first. Hans drank the potion so he could pull them out if they failed.

  The dungeon recreated the town from Hans’ memory–a village of thatched roofs where the largest structure in town was the two-floor inn. Like with Bunri’s tower, however, the dungeon core took interesting liberties with how the new section was incorporated into the existing layout.

  As Hans requested, the new area was added as an offshoot to the last stretch of gnolls, the hallway that ultimately led to Luther Land and the dungeon core room. He expected to find himself walking through the town’s main gate to begin the encounter, but instead he found a new wooden door in the dungeon hallway.

  Just a door, and not a particularly well-constructed door at that. Seeing it gave Hans pause. He recognized the door, but he couldn’t say how.

  When he opened the door, it emptied into the hallway of an inn. This was the second floor of the inn where Hans’ party had stayed in the original memory. Down the stairs was the rest of the village, including the shambling armillarias. The dungeon core was picky about where a memory “started,” but Hans’ suggestion results were too varied for him to settle on a static set of rules that the core followed.

  He sat on the steps of the inn and thought while Terry’s party gave the encounter a try. Because of the relative safety of the armillaria section, Hans gave the Apprentices no insight into the town layout or monster movements. They knew how to fight one of the giant mushrooms, but they were going in blind for everything else.

  As he listened to shouting and the sounds of combat coming from outside the inn, he mentally reviewed the dungeon core rules, hoping to find a way to bring Terry’s chokepoint idea to life.

  The rules he believed were unchanging including the following:

  -If the area or monster did not exist in Hans’ memory, he couldn’t suggest it to the core.

  -The people from his memories never grew in the dungeon, including their equipment.

  -The dungeon rejected suggestions that did not come from an adventuring job.

  -Luther Land was an empty town from a multi-day job, which was why the core allowed it, Hans believed.

  -If he suggested a new area from a job, the core would accept minor requests for modifying hallways and doorways, but as he saw with the entrance overhaul, the core applied those changes in its own way.

  -When he added new monsters like the fool’s root elementals, the dungeon allowed him to designate where they should appear in a pre-existing area.

  -The dungeon did not recreate items of value, like the necromancy pages in the shaman room of the Bone Goblins, but would regrow more benign items like beds, blank books, firewood, and water in wells.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  At first, he thought the Luther Land loophole would open up all sorts of suggestion possibilities, but as he combed his memory, he found very few jobs where something like a whole town was completely safe. A job meant monsters, and while it was great to spawn the village from the armillaria job, no one could live there. Killer mushrooms appearing in your bedroom when the dungeon regrew would not be pleasant.

  “If I can suggest a singular geode gecko, could I suggest a singular room from a job? Also, does the age of the memory matter?”

  Hans scribbled those questions in his notebook.

  He paused to listen. Everything was quiet. No sounds of battle or party members communicating.

  Time to go wake everyone up.

  Hans joined Olza and Tandis on a wagon ride back to Gomi.

  “I see the value of expanding the dungeon with stronger monsters,” Olza said, “but I’ve been thinking, should we be bothered by killing intelligent life over and over for no real reason? Celestials? Cyclopses? I've heard celestials are comparable to fae.”

  Tandis joined the conversation. “We raise pigs and cows to slaughter for meat. We hunt deer. Is the dungeon all that different?”

  Olza straightened her back, surprised by an explanation she hadn’t considered. “I see what you're saying, but those don't talk. If something can beg not to die… Doesn't that matter?” She looked between Hans and Tandis.

  Tandis said she’d have to think before giving an answer. She hadn’t thought of that wrinkle.

  As for Hans, he said, “I have no concerns whatsoever.”

  “Not the slightest hesitation?” Olza asked.

  Hans shook his head. “I feel worse killing a deer than I do killing an ogre or a goblin, to be honest. And we would hunt one fallen celestial that very nearly killed me.”

  His conversation with Sven about mistreating the orc prisoner came to mind. He summarized their discussion for Olza and Tandis and shared that he believed Sven left Gomi because of it.

  Olza looked at Hans, her face slightly pale. She hadn't known about the tendons and the execution. Tandis seemed unbothered.

  “What?” Hans asked Olza.

  “I’ve never seen you be cruel,” she answered. “It’s hard to imagine you being cruel, actually.”

  “Does it change how you think of me?”

  She nodded timidly. “That sounds… It sounds pretty brutal, Hans.”

  The wagon bumped and bounced in silence for several minutes.

  “Like I told Sven, as far as my code is concerned, if my enemy doesn’t have rules of engagement, then I don’t either. I’d feel differently if I was a soldier and my prisoner was some unlucky schlub from the next kingdom over. Orcs though? They had belts of human hands. They forced adventurers to fight and kill their friends. I’d torture a thousand orcs to save one innocent life and have no regrets about it whatsoever.”

  Olza nodded and looked at the trees passing by the wagon. Her face was still ashen.

  “I told Sven this too: I never ask my people to do things like that, and I never will. I do it myself for their sakes.”

  The alchemist didn’t answer. Tandis seemed to be avoiding participating in the conversation, but she caught Hans’ eyes. She widened hers to indicate she knew Olza was upset.

  Is this how I lose Olza? Or is she already gone?

  Olza didn’t look at Hans for the rest of the wagon ride. When they finally stopped in Gomi, she climbed down and walked to her shop without a word.

  “She’ll come around,” Tandis said. “She just needs some time.”

  Hans hoped Tandis was right.

  After another round of asking folks if they had seen Sven, Hans felt certain that the Apprentice had indeed left for good. Fairly certain, at least. All of the nonsense with orc Blood magic mind-controlling tusks gave him pause, but Sven survived the battle, he had the ward tattoo, and there was no indication that Sven had been taken against his will.

  If he was being mind-controlled, he wouldn’t have packed all his things before leaving. Probably.

  Quest Abandoned: Locate Sven.

  New Quest: Find a new Apprentice Rogue to fill the gap in Gomi’s adventuring capabilities.

  As Hans walked up the road toward the guild hall, Galinda called for him to wait. She covered in one stride what took Hans two, and soon she was next to the Guild Master.

  “I believe you would like to drink this,” she said, handing Hans a bottle of clear liquid.

  Hans didn’t know what was in the bottle.

  “Olza or Galad hasn’t told you? The fool’s root distillery is complete.”

  Ohhhh.

  “Thank you, Galinda,” Hans said. ‘Thank you very much.”

  He savored the heft of the full bottle in his hand as he finished the trek to the guild hall.

  “Harry said you wanted to see me, and that it had to be in the guild hall,” the blacksmith said, still wearing the clothes and dirt of his typical workday. “Was that boy pulling one over on me?”

  Hans chuckled. “Not this time. I wanted to have this conversation in private.” As if remembering just then, he stood and locked the front door as well as the side door to the training yard. From his desk, he pulled a leather pouch–made by Luther from camahueto skins–and handed it to the blacksmith.

  Curious, the smith opened the pouch and emptied its contents into his hand. Five valorite cogs slid out.

  “Oh gods,” the smith said, his awe turning his voice to a whisper. “This is the real thing, isn’t it?” He held one of the cogs up to the light.

  “Sure is,” Hans confirmed. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you here and not outside your shop.”

  “There is more wealth in my hand right now than what I might earn in a lifetime. I don’t know if I want to be holding something like that.”

  “Not many of us know the dungeon is making valorite. I think we should keep that circle tight for the time being, though.”

  The smith hadn’t taken his eyes off the cogs, not once. “Think someone might try making off with it?”

  “That is quite the temptation to dangle in front of good people,” Hans answered. “If word that we had valorite got out, let alone that it was grown in a dungeon, half the Guild would descend on this place to ask a lot of questions.”

  Hans said that he had an item he needed made from the rare metal, but he didn’t tell the smith about the Takarabune or its manual. He also didn’t tell the smith that he would have had the specs for the item right then but Hans was too afraid to bother Olza. The manual was still at her shop.

  The item he had in mind was fairly small. He asked the smith if there was a way to “stretch” the valorite to get more from their steady yet limited supply when they used it for other items.

  “You can make an alloy out of any kind of metal, really. Whether what you get is any good is the real trick. I’ve never heard of a valorite alloy though.”

  “There’s probably never been enough of it for someone to do those experiments.”

  The smith put a hand on his stomach. “Gods, the idea of any of this going to waste makes me sick.”

  “I understand. We don’t get a lot of it from a run, but I think the short term sacrifice is worth it. If we end up finding a process that works, we could get way more use out of everything moving forward. Even if the armor or weapons are half as good as an alloy than as pure valorite, that’s still pretty far above our standard metals, right?”

  “Aye.”

  Hans asked the smith how much he would need for early tests. The smith said one cog to start would be sufficient, but both Harry and Eduardo were by his side in the shop at all times these days. They would notice a piece of brilliant blue metal and ask questions.

  “I’ll figure it out,” the smith said after pondering. “Charlie might not appreciate a smith working a nightshift, but he’ll get over it.”

  The smith slid the cog into his pocket and returned the pouch to Hans. As Hans put the pouch back in his desk, a thought occurred to him.

  New Quest: Acquire a safe for the Gomi chapter.

  For the rest of the day, he imagined how it might feel to wield a sword forged from valorite. It was like being a child again.

  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.

  Visit the locations of old Diamond quests with Becky.

  Await the delivery of lockpick training tools.

  Explore the idea of training “dungeon lifeguards” to accompany adventurers in training.

  Ideate on physical chokepoints to prevent monsters from escaping the dungeon.

  Determine if the golem is a threat when the tower is undisturbed.

  Find a new Apprentice Rogue to fill the gap in Gomi’s adventuring capabilities.

  Acquire a safe for the Gomi chapter.