“Garth, tell me about morale,” Archmund said, leaning over the commander’s table.

  “Morale,” Garth said, leaning back in his chair casually. “We’re not on some long march, lad. These boys get to go home every few days and get a warm belly full of food. What could even dent their morale?”

  Sometimes, Archmund wondered whether adults took him less seriously because of his age. He’d certainly been guilty of the same in his past life, because children, defined as anyone five years younger than him, were idiots. Though now that he thought about it he’d also believed a great many adults were idiots, even the smart ones.

  He couldn’t remember if he was usually proven cynical, correct, or both.

  “Are they here because we’re paying them more than they could get from doing honest labor, or would they actually be willing to fight through the Dungeon for materials?”

  “What a question,” Garth said, stroking his beard. “What a question, indeed. What’s it to you, lad?”

  In Archmund’s past life, there had been a movement called “quiet quitting”. Essentially, people started doing just the bare minimums at their jobs because they simply didn’t expect to be rewarded for putting in higher amounts of effort. They’d seen their parents spend decades climbing the corporate ladder and giving up their personal lives for the sake of the company, only to be passed over for promotion and fired at the drop of a hat. So the new generation would come in and do their jobs, but you couldn’t expect any more out of them. You couldn’t expect them to go “above and beyond.”

  And risking your life in a Dungeon, instead of just standing around in the sun, definitely counted as “going above and beyond.”

  Archmund emphasized deeply with the urge to be lazy, but his perspective was different now that he was the boss.

  You had to pay people fairly, but you didn’t want to pay them so much that you completely ruined the chances of everyone else who needed an extra pair of hands, which was currently happening. The Dungeon was, in theory, a major security concern, but not yet, and not by much, simply because he’d gone too far in clearing it out.

  “At least tell me they’re learning how to fight?”

  “I’ve been teaching them forms and drills,” Garth said. “Some of them have potential. Some of them are just here because they don’t want to be working an honest job, and it’s been safe so far. But at the end of the day?”

  Garth drew his Gemstone Sword. It silently glided out of the scabbard and gleamed silver-white even in the muted light of the tent. “One of these gives you the strength of a year’s worth of training. And you’re keeping yours close.”

  Archmund closed his eyes, thinking. “Gemstone Gear means you have to sleep less.”

  “It’s hardly the largest benefit. And the sleep deprivation hits you like a horse eventually. But yes. You could use it for that, for a time.”

  “One person with Gemstone gear could do the fighting of… two? Three? Four without?”

  “It doesn’t scale so cleanly, lad. There have been heroes on the Frontier who’ve fought a hundred bandits and come out unscathed. There have been wicked nobles who’ve slaughtered their way through farming villages but were put down like dogs by the local priestess. Gem makes you stronger, but there’s no guarantee. You have to put in the work.”

  Gem made you stronger, but you had to put in the work. It raised the ceiling of your potential, but you still had to reach for it, for that cold and crystal sky.

  The solution seemed clear as day.

  “Make a list of the ones who might actually be good as fighters or guards,” Archmund said. “Keep it to about twenty. Make sure they’re loyal, too.”

  He walked over to the the crates at the back of the tent and pushed them open. Gemstone Gear glittered within, almost all of the gear they had scrounged up from across the County. Not the weapons with potential arcane effects, and not the useless trinkets, but things like gloves, shoulder guards, and other partial armor pieces. Enough to begin the training loop, but not so valuable that they needed to be allocated with great care.

  “And these… what do you think of equipping your best men with these?”

  He had kept a few in reserve at the manor for special talents or those he wanted to keep near him, like Mary, but overall he needed some sort of fighting force.

  “You’re building a personal guard,” Garth said. He leaned back, stroking his beard. He seemed to stroke his beard a lot. His tone was aggressively neutral in a way that implied he actually had strong opinions on the matter.

  “Is that wrong?”

  “I’ve met many who’ve gone on to great things or great lives after joining a noble’s personal guard,” said Garth. “And I know of many who were stuck with dealing with a petulant, capricious child for the prime of their lives, because they saw no better way to live.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Archmund chose to ignore the implied insult. It would just make him look like a petulant, capricious child if he retorted. “Make sure they know what they’d be agreeing to. No one gets trapped in a lifetime of servitude on my watch.”

  Garth appraised him. There was something regretful in his eye.

  “I presume you’d like to fire the rest,” he said after a moment.

  Archmund peeked outside of the tent, and saw a lot of soldiers joking around genially.

  Granavale Town wasn’t particularly large, a few hundred people at best. Firing twenty people and making them unemployed, just in time for winter and right after the Harvest Festival, seemed like it would be a mistake. Idle hands were the devil’s workshop, and the last thing he wanted was a bunch of resentful layabouts with military training starting unsanctioned fights.

  “Are the rest the type to actually enjoy fighting?” Archmund said. “Or do they just like the money?”

  “Money.”

  Said without hesitation.

  So they probably wouldn’t pick fights for the fun of it.

  That didn’t mean they wouldn’t fight if they suddenly had nothing better to do.

  Or if they thought they might starve through the winter.

  “How harsh is your combat training?”

  He wondered what Garth thought of his questions. From someone not privy to his inner monologue, it probably looked like he was jumping around from unrelated point to unrelated point.

  “As harsh as I can make it without them all refusing to do it at all,” Garth said. “They’ll thank me if Monsters make it out here. I’ll bet that only half of them would die.”

  Which was frankly still a much higher death toll than Archmund found acceptable. But he had enough information. Half of the recruits were good enough at fighting to be paid for it, but not good enough to not die from it. If they were turned out into the labor market, things might get hairy.

  “I was thinking I’d keep them on payroll,” Archmund said. “And have them do manual labor, maybe build some housing and maintain the roads.”

  “It’s your money to waste, frankly,” Garth said. “You could rent a slave crew for any of that.”

  Ah, yes. Slavery.

  An elephant in the room.

  Archmund didn’t fully understand the jurisprudence of slavery in the Omnio Empire. He’d expected the existence of it, to some extent, given that Alexander Omnio I had loved so many other fixtures of Roman culture, but it wasn’t a common practice in Granavale County.

  So without seeing any examples of “genteel” slavery or moral justifications for it, he was predisposed to his 21st century Earthling moral stance of slavery being wrong.

  Garth was a career soldier. He was old. He’d spent so long in this world that its morals weren’t even worth questioning. He thought of himself as a practical man, who’d seen so many comrades die that soft-heartedness was pointless.

  Moral arguments might not be the most effective on him.

  “If I rent a slave crew, the money goes to their masters,” Archmund said. “If I pay people to build, the money stays in the county.

  “I suppose so,” Garth said, though he looked skeptical. “Expensive for a vanity project, but I’ve seen nobles waste money on much worse.”

  It wasn’t a vanity project. It was an extensive public works project which would pay large dividends eventually in terms of quality of life and the prominence of Granavale County on the national stage. It was a crucial part of his long-term plans, and…

  Plans, so many plans, unwritten. Just floating in the air, mysterious. So much magic to learn, so many monsters to kill, so many public works projects to arrange. None of them organized.

  He was on the road to getting burnt out again. He just knew it.

  Meanwhile, in the Dungeon…

  “Is that a pony?” Mary said.

  “It’s a Monster in the shape of a pony,” Raehel said. “Big difference.”

  “Really.”

  The pony galloped towards them, and shoved its head through one of the parapets in the walls Raehel had erected.

  “It’s not very smart, is it?” Mary said. “Is that a monster thing?”

  It snapped at them, its ears bent back. Its teeth were sharp like fangs, not the flat and rounded teeth of true horses, which mostly ate grass and fruit.

  “A creature like this is driven by instinct,” said Raehel. “It doesn’t have the power to scare us off in the form of true darkness, so it adopted a shape that it could use to attack us.”

  “Yes, I think you’ve said that already. Several times,” Mary said. She scrunched her nose. The beast certainly smelled worse than a farm animal — grassy and musky, but also foul as death. It thrashed, trapped in place.

  “Horses are also just kind of stupid, from what I’ve seen,” Raehel said, giving Mary a glance over the tops of her glasses, “I really thought that you’d be running in terror.”

  Mary didn’t dignify that with a response. But still. It would have been stupid to just walk right up to the creature.

  “It’s better than I expected,” Raehel said. “Well, show me what you can do!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s why Master Granavale told you to go with me. He wants me to train you in a live-fire situation. That’s what I would do if it were me.”

  It was certainly possible, but she didn’t know whether Archmund thought that far ahead. He was the type to, but he was also somewhat self-centered. It hadn’t been all that necessary for her to learn how to read, after all, if she would just be stuck as his domestic servant for the rest of her life anyways.

  Raehel wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  “Well?” she said, crossing her arms. Her Gems floated lightly behind her, like a crowd of baby birds fluttering behind their mother. “Pull out your fan and show me what you can do.”

  Mary pulled out her fan. It looked dull, inert without refracting natural sunlight. She felt rather foolish just clutching it in her hands, when Raehel had a full rainbow of magic Gems at her beck and call.

  “Give it a wave, just like you did yesterday.”

  Still feeling like an idiot, Mary did.

  In the quiet of the Dungeon, without the cries of merchants and playing children, there was only the fan and her. There was no idle autumn wind to confuse her, so that she might imagine that the power flowed from elsewhere. It was only her.

  The fan was cool in her fingers, which grew warm. She flicked her wrist towards the pony — and the fan sucked the warmth out of her fingers with an electrifying sensation.

  A wind blew forth.

  It was as if it flowed from her fingers themselves, the magic running from her heart, down her arm into her fingers and then the ribs of the fan, where they became the wind. Raehel’s robes billowed backwards and her hat flew back, though mysteriously it hovered just a bit behind her head.

  But the wind flowed past them both and hit the pony, blowing its ears and mane back. It wasn’t a strong impact, and yet it bared its fangs and brayed.

  “Not bad,” Raehel said. “Not bad at all.”