“I’ve not tasted venison quite like this,” Donbia said. That’s because it was smoked and salted camahueto. Hans didn’t correct her for obvious reasons. “It’s good though.”

  The visiting adventurers sat at a guild hall table with Hans, Becky, Kane, and Quentin. Each had a steak and a sweet potato, which was pretty much the extent of Hans’ cooking skills. He didn’t mind the simplicity.

  “You have any trouble with orcs recently?” Hans asked.

  Donbia shook her head.

  “No, sir,” Marrok added. “Have you?”

  Hans’ letter must not have arrived in Kohei before the adventurers departed. They didn’t know about the Gomi encounter. He said they found a warband in the forest, but otherwise, no other issues. He left out any specific details about the fight.

  “Many tusks in Kohei?” Becky asked, a mouthful of meat. Though the table glanced uncomfortably at Kane when she asked the question, he never lifted his head from his plate.

  “A few, mostly old-timers,” Marrok answered. “There’s two who play chess in front of our tavern every day. I mean every day. They’ve been doing it since I was kid.”

  “We were reluctant to send Kane to Osare,” Hans said. “Sorry to talk about you like this, Kane.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  Hans nodded. “But yeah, we don’t get much news out here. We did hear tusks were getting roughed up and run out of a few towns though.”

  “We’ve heard that too,” Donbia said. “As far as I know, there’s only been a couple scuffles in Kohei that got broken up pretty quick. Usual tavern stuff.”

  “Nothing like Kirai?” Becky asked.

  “Absolutely not, thank the gods.”

  For a minute or so, the only sound in the guild hall was adventurers chewing. Becky was the loudest.

  “Would it be rude to ask about Izz and Thuz?” Marrok asked, respectfully.

  “You know ‘em?” Becky asked before Hans could answer.

  Marrok chuckled. “Of course. Everyone knows them.”

  “Huh?”

  Hans cut in. “I don’t mind.”

  “What are they like in person? Ever go on a job with them?”

  Hans nodded. “They have the kind of character that makes you want to be a better person. Kind, softspoken, respectful. They have a code, and they don’t compromise it, even to their own detriment.”

  “Seen them fight? Are they like people say?”

  Quentin leaned forward to look down the table at Marrok. “What do they say?”

  “Yeah, what do they say?” Becky echoed.

  Donbia and Marrok glanced at each other, confused and surprised. They shared the same glance with Hans, and the Guild Master offered a small shrug. “Izz and Thuz are pretty private. Not many people know that story out here.”

  “The Ikari Dragons are legends,” Marrok said. “They stopped the Ikari Massacre by themselves. Did what three Diamonds couldn’t and they were only Gold.”

  Kane, Becky, and Quentin looked at Hans. Kane and Quentin hadn’t heard the story. Becky had.

  “That was Izz and Thuz? Our Izz and Thuz?” Becky asked.

  “Let’s change the subject, and if you meet them, please don’t use that nickname.” Hans said. “They hate it. I did a few jobs with them, if anyone wants to hear a story that’s a bit less dark.”

  Marrok and Donbia said yes, please.

  Hans gave himself a moment to select a tale. His choice for an Izz and Thuz story included another adventurer he really didn’t want to talk about, but it was one of his better examples he had for how the brothers carried themselves in combat.

  “Did you hear about the cyclops job? Man, almost ten years ago now. Wow.”

  The Kohei adventurers said they were aware of a cyclops battle but didn’t know specifics. None of the Gomi locals had heard about it at all, so Hans started at the beginning.

  The inciting incident was a contentious topic, but the largely accepted story was that a party of Golds went deep into the frontier and killed an adolescent cyclops. The Golds didn’t realize how young the cyclops was at the time. They drained its eye into jars–its aqueous humor, to be specific–and pulled its teeth. They set out to return to the kingdom to cash in their loot.

  Unbeknownst to them, the mother cyclops returned to her nest a good while later to find her child had been slain. As an aside, Hans said, a male and female cyclops look the same from the outside. At any rate, the furious cyclops pursued the adventurers all the way across the frontier. When they finally crossed the border and stopped to rest in a little mountain town, she caught up.

  Hans explained that an adult cyclops was roughly as tall as three Hans stacked on top of each other. For Becky, he added that ogres were roughly two-thirds the size of cyclops.

  “Gods, that’s big,” Becky said.

  “If the Golds were prepared, they might have managed, but they were drunk and unequipped when the cyclops came over the mountain. Smashed everything. Ate any person it could find. We only know what happened there because two kids survived. Parents half-tied them to a horse and sent them off early in the attack.”

  Hans’ party intercepted the cyclops on the road, when she was on her way to destroy a third town. His party consisted of him, Izz, Thuz, Mazo, Gret, Boden, and Devontes.

  “Really? Master Devontes?”

  “Yes. The brothers and myself were the only Golds. Everyone else was Diamond.”

  The battle took place in a heavily forested area. The trees in this region were mostly maneras and sequoias. Both species grew incredibly tall. The sequoias also grew incredibly wide, their diameter as long as four guild halls laid end to end. Next to those massive plants, the cyclops looked like a human standing next to a regular tree, like an oak or a maple.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Later, when the party researched the scarification patterns on the cyclops, they learned that they had fought a warlord–or warlady? At any rate, a title like that meant that other cyclopes agreed that she was scary. A cyclops was challenge enough, and this was an above average cyclops.

  The cyclops carried a unique weapon: A flail made of scarlet steel, and she wielded it with the precision of an expert. Most of the buildings destroyed in her rampage fell to the weapon.

  The heads of flails that humans might wield were usually around two inches in diameter. Hans put his hands together like he was thirteen again, awkwardly slow dancing at a festival with his arms straight and his hands on the hips of a neighborhood girl, to show how big the cyclops flail head was.

  “The plan was to eliminate her flail and her mobility as soon as we could. If she went on the offensive with both of those, we’d have to retreat. That’s not a great backup plan because, I’m not sure if you know this, cyclops legs are much longer than human, dwarf, and halfling legs. Outrunning her was wishful thinking for the most part.”

  As the cyclops stomped down the road, she spotted adventurers ahead. Hans, Boden, Devon, and four air elementals blocked her path, maybe fifty yards ahead. The cyclops charged at the adventurers.

  A house-sized fireball erupted from the ground a few steps later–one of Gret’s Greater Fire traps.

  The monster roared and stumbled but resumed its charge. The three warriors held up their shields, bracing for the flail arcing over their heads, rapidly descending on their position.

  The adventurers and the air elementals winked out as the head passed through their duplicates. When the flail hit the ground, another Greater Fire trap triggered. The monster's confusion gave Mazo the second she needed to cast a spell she called “Gravity.” She learned it from a void demon. When the spell was used against a living creature, the force of gravity beneath them became so strong that many of their bones broke instantly, collapsing the target into a mangled pile. A cyclops was too big for the spell to be effective, but that wasn’t the intention anyway.

  She cast the spell on the flail to glue it to the ground.

  Hans backtracked a moment to explain that Mazo was a Blue Mage. That’s how she could use void demon spells.

  A pack of four air elementals swarmed the cyclops, circling its head. Abandoning her flail, she swatted at the air elementals. Two disappeared–simple duplicates–and one of the remaining two arced a thick bolt of lightning at the monster’s face. To the monster, it looked as if both were attacking even though only one was real.

  Hans, Boden, and Devon came out from the trees, targeting the monster’s left ankle. Two swords and a spear bit into cyclops tendon, buffed by a Greater Strength and Greater Agility spell from Thuz. Meanwhile, Izz cast Meteor Swarm from behind the monster, peppering its back with searing rocks. The cyclop’s back looked like a human’s if they had just been lying on a rocky beach and sat up, pebbles sticking to their skin.

  Except these meteors didn’t stick. They embedded, many disappearing beneath torn muscle and flowing blood.

  The cyclops' face turned from enraged to afraid. She fled into the forest, limping on her wounded ankle.

  “The amount of ground that thing could cover was outrageous. We’re on foot, and her path is right through the woods, some of the worst terrain to move quickly on.”

  Devon crouched, preparing to give chase, but Izz called for the party to hold. Without another word, Thuz began dumping buffs on Devontes. Angel Shield. Barrier. Iron Skin. Stone Kin. Truesight. Repel. Sharpen. Second Chance. And on and on.

  “Devon doesn’t know what’s happening. Only the brothers did. Izz’s last air elemental, the only real air elemental in the whole fight, swoops down behind Devon. As it approaches, Izz says, ‘Dash at the end.’”

  The next second, Devon spun around inside of the air elemental as it raced after the cyclops. Like tornadoes and hurricanes, the shape of air elementals was derived by quickly moving air, rotating in powerful circles.

  “The air elemental had all the same buffs as Devon, so it launches at the cyclops like an arrow. Devon’s still inside, and he’s just a blur, going round and round.”

  From their vantage point directly behind the fleeing cyclops, it was hard to see exactly what happened next. When the air elemental seemed close to the cyclop’s good leg, its knee burst forward into red mist.

  What Hans’ party couldn’t see was that Devon used his Dash ability. Combined with the air elemental’s rotation, the sudden forward movement hurled Devon at the monster’s leg like a stone leaving a sling. The Paladin burst through unharmed. The cyclops, now missing half a leg, fell. She continued fighting, desperate to survive, but with her mobility and reach neutralized, she died soon after.

  “At the end of the fight, Boden looks around and asks, ‘Where’s the boy?’ He meant Devon. Izz pointed into the forest. Devon’s lying on the ground puking his soul out. He was dizzy for the next two hours.”

  “Devon?” Marrok asked.

  “Apologies. I mean Master Devontes. At any rate, one of the things that makes Izz and Thuz so good is how well they synergize and improvise. They do that with each other, and with their party, and they find ways to make an adventurers’ strong suit even stronger.”

  “All due respect, Mr. Hans,” Donbia began, carefully, “If you ran with adventurers like that, what are you doing in Gomi?”

  “Needed a change.”

  Donbia and Marrok ended up staying in Gomi for nine days. Hans spent time with Marrok to find the best overlaps in shortsword and greatsword technique. By the time the Silver left, his A-game was tighter, relying on far fewer techniques.

  For her part, Donbia had a habit of pausing momentarily when she blocked or parried, so they ran reaction drills relentlessly, eliminating her slight but crucial delay between defense and counterattack.

  Hans didn’t revolutionize their technique or send them home as completely different adventurers. In the larger scope of their training, Hans’ contribution was akin to hammering down a nail that worked itself loose on a set of stairs. The change itself was small, but it had the potential to impact everything the adventurers did moving forward.

  As for the risk their presence posed to Gomi, the Kohei adventurers encountered other Gomi tusks during their stay–Galinda and Eduardo–and revealed no reaction that gave Hans concern.

  The Bronze and the Silver were the kinds of adventurers Hans preferred: All they wanted was to eat, sleep, and train. If they weren’t in the training yard, they were asking Hans about class structures and training drills in the guild hall, or they were asleep in their bedrolls. From what Hans saw of them, they didn’t go beyond the Gomi walls until they started their journey back to Kohei.

  Hans and Becky stood at the front gate to see them off and watched until the adventurers disappeared into the forest.

  “Seem like good kids,” Becky said. “We might a’ been too nice, though. They might wanna come back.”

  “Friendly ties with another chapter wouldn’t be the worst thing,” Hans said. “Gomi could do without new enemies for a while.”

  “I could drink to that. But I need to ask you a question, boss. You’re not thinking of adding a cyclops to our dungeon, right?”

  “I’m definitely thinking about it.”

  Before Donbia and Marrok departed, Hans snuck to their bags. As they said farewell to Kane and Quentin, he stuffed the gold they gave him when they arrived as deep as he could, hoping they wouldn’t discover its presence until well into their journey.

  Later, he gave the adventurers a bottle of fool’s root and asked them to deliver it and a letter to their Guild Master.

  The letter read:

  Bertram,

  Donbia and Marrok reflect very well on the Kehoi chapter. They were attentive students, courteous guests, and humble adventurers. They treated our chapter as if it were their own, and they approached lessons with an open mind.

  If they are examples of the culture you’ve built there, I imagine you to be an excellent Guild Master.

  Thank you for entrusting part of their training to me. I hope they found it helpful.

  I sent them home with this letter and a bottle of vodka. If they didn’t give you the bottle, they probably drank it.

  -Hans

  Quest Complete: Manage the Kohei adventurers while they are in Gomi.

  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."Visit the locations of old Diamond quests with Becky.

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

  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.

  Await the arrival of a safe for the Gomi chapter.

  Complete construction of the Takarabune (still need diamond, scarlet steel, celestial steel, and mimic blood).

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

  Talk to Uncle Ed and Tandis about Gunther spending time at the dungeon.