“It’s good to have you all back home,” Hans said, sitting on a bench in the Leebel training room with Terry while Kane, Gunther, and Quentin warmed up. “Learn a lot from Master Bertram?”

  “Yeah, but I like the way we train better,” Quentin replied.

  “Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse.”

  “Aren’t you writing books about how the way adventurers are trained is wrong?”

  Terry coughed in an attempt to muffle his laughter. His attempt failed.

  Hans crossed his arms. “Easy, easy, everyone. I don’t think that all instructors should teach just like me. There are just better drills. That leaves plenty of room for style.”

  Terry stared back at Hans with the same blank face as Quentin.

  “I might come off as a know-it-all sometimes.”

  Quentin cracked a smile when Terry snorted.

  “I don’t mean to. I’m just… passionate. Shut up. We’re not here to talk about me.”

  “Master Bertram was a good instructor,” Kane said. “He talked a lot about mindset. I liked that.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Kane thought. “He wanted us to be able to fight when we were really tired. He said it was important to have a motivation to keep you going when a fight went bad. He pushed us hard.”

  “See? I don’t disagree with him.”

  “But we don’t train like that here,” Quentin said.

  “It’s hard for me to teach like that,” Hans admitted. “Master Bertram has a different style, so he’s better at things that I’m not. That’s why I wanted you to get some time with him.”

  “I liked it,” Kane added. “It was really good for Gunny too.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Different perspectives make you more well-rounded.”

  “Berserker is an amazing class,” Gunther said, cracking his neck. “Master Bertram is a genius.”

  “Feeling good about it then?” Terry asked.

  “Uh huh.”

  Terry sighed. “Just take it easy on me when we spar.”

  “I already do.”

  Hans was almost the one to snort that time. “Let’s get to running some rounds,” Hans said, standing. “Shall we?”

  Kane stepped up first. “Spells or no?”

  “Go nuts.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hans and Kane slapped hands and started sparring. Kane moved slowly at first, trying a few tentative strikes but keeping his distance otherwise. He rushed in suddenly, pressuring Hans to retreat with swift but blockable slashes and thrusts. Hans felt the presence of a low Force Wall behind him. He dispelled it with a push of his mana, just like an infernal centaur would.

  Kane blinked and slid back out of range.

  Hans felt a Pull spell yank his ankle, but it was only the sensation of an attempt. His foot didn’t budge.

  The tusk parried a half-hearted thrust and circled to Hans’ left, but frustration flashed across his face again. In the brief time Hans fought with one eye, Kane had become accustomed to moving toward the blind spot, and that blind spot no longer existed.

  Kane pressed the attack, and Hans could feel how much his student’s power had grown in a few short months. He hadn’t become an entirely new fighter or anything so extreme, but it was obvious Kane had been training hard on top of the development of his orcish gifts.

  The pace of the fight quickened as Kane leaned into being the aggressor. Hans parried, parried, parried, dodged, and then ducked a slash traveling high. He poked his wooden sword into Kane’s thigh.

  Kane sighed, his frustration directed inward at his own technique.

  The match resumed, and Hans adopted Kane’s aggressor strategy. He chased the young tusk around the ring, launching attack after attack that was swift but lacked in strength. Kane had to respond, however, so the unending flurry kept him moving, forcing him to answer every attack instead of launching his own.

  In a little over a minute, Hans tagged Kane three times using that strategy–another strike to the thigh and two strikes to the chest.

  When the round concluded, Kane chuckled as he wiped sweat out of his eyes. “You’re faster.”

  “You knew all my injuries were healed.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think they made that much of a difference.”

  Hans laughed.

  “Sorry,” Kane said, “I didn’t mean for that to sound disrespectful.”

  “I didn’t take it that way. You’re fine.”

  “You ignored all of my spells. That was definitely new.”

  “That part is new, yes,” Hans admitted. “Hopefully that gives you a few new problems to solve over the winter.”

  Kane rotated out, and Hans did a round with Gunther and then with Quentin. When Kane stepped up for a turn against Quentin, Hans sat next to Terry and took a drink of water.

  “What’d you see?” Hans asked.

  “I knew you were going to test me,” Terry faux-grumbled. “You always encourage pressure, but they seemed more aggressive than usual. Their confidence is up, which I think accounts for a lot of that, but there are definitely a few Master Bertram fingerprints too.”

  “Was that equal across all three of them?”

  “No,” Terry answered immediately. “Kane is a lot more aggressive. Quentin’s approach feels similar to what it was, but he counterattacks way more often. Where Kane came at you right from the go, Quentin didn’t do that until he was countering.”

  “What about Gunther?”

  Terry pursed his lips for a moment. “I’m going to bet his progress is most obvious with Berserk, which I’m fine not seeing or experiencing for a while yet, maybe never, even.”

  Hans laughed.

  “He still has that stalking style with that big-ass shield of his, but he seemed more willing to chase an opening and then not let go of it.”

  “I agree with all of that,” Hans said. “Good eye, Terry.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “What’d I miss?”

  After a moment of thought, Hans spoke. “Let’s leave Gunther out of the discussion for now. Kane and Quentin took all of the same classes and had all of the same training partners, but they developed in different ways. Why?”

  “They’ve got different styles.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Kane’s always been the more aggressive of the two.”

  “That’s true, but why does that seem more pronounced now?”

  Terry leaned back. “Their styles still seem like the answer. I’d expect them both to stay on their own paths, you know?”

  “You’re not wrong. Let me phrase the question in a different way: Do they both need the same kind of training now? If so, what? If not, what’s different and why?”

  “You didn’t tell me there would be tests today,” Terry said before descending into deep thought. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve got an answer.”

  “Don’t apologize, and this isn’t a test. Bert’s people like to bully when they fight. They keep pressure, and they throw these attacks that aren’t hard to block but are heavy and difficult to parry. There isn’t always intention for a kill stroke. They’re content to hit you just for the sake of hitting you.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “No, it’s just different. Did they look technical to you?”

  Terry nodded.

  “Agreed. They aren’t making technical mistakes. Bert thinks about fighting differently than I do, so he uses the same tools but applies them in his own way. It’s good that our guys found that perspective useful. That’s the kind of thing that makes adventurers two generations from now monumentally better than we are now. Kids like Kane and Quentin are smart, and they’re collecting knowledge wherever they can. They’ve trained with me and Bert so far, and in both cases, they got to look at techniques we spent a lifetime developing.”

  “And they snatched the stuff they liked the most and ran with it,” Terry said, completing the thought.

  “Exactly. Our job is to encourage that in our students while keeping them from developing bad habits along the way.”

  “We just established that Bert was a technical instructor, though.”

  “That’s true, but we aren’t coaching Bert,” Hans replied. “The bullying style very much suits Kane and his physical gifts, so it makes sense to see more of it come out of him than Quentin, but there’s a trap there we need to keep Kane from stepping in. It’s really easy to get used to being the bully, and I’d wager that Kane had a hard time finding training partners as big or bigger than he is.”

  “So he’s always the bully.”

  “Exactly! That’s a common big guy problem. Nobody is big enough in the training room to bully him back, so his habits can start to drift too far in that direction. Quentin has a more average build, so he gets to experience both sides of that coin, and that makes it easier for him to calibrate his offense with his defense. Kane already frustrated most of his sparring partners because of his athleticism, and he just spent a bunch of time learning to be even better about using that. Fighters like him have a tendency to crumble as soon as the roles are reversed because they don’t have any practice getting bullied.”

  “That makes sense. How do we address that without a stable of Kane’s to choose from?”

  Hans laughed. “Yeah, when you get toward heavyweight, it’s hard to find training partners. We’re not going to magically have those kinds of adventurers on hand, so we have to force it in different ways. Devon and I will be able to push him around, but for other sparring sessions we’re going to encourage Kane to bait and counterfight more, especially against partners he can easily bully.”

  “What do we do for Quentin?” Terry asked.

  “Students like him can be harder to teach because his body type naturally balances a lot of the things that skew how someone like Kane fights. Quentin isn’t always the smaller guy, and he’s not always the larger guy, and he has a lot of sparring partners who are pretty close to him in build. He’ll get a lot out of the typical class structure. Our job is to help maintain that balance as he develops. He’s going to have ruts and stretches where he leans too far into something and too little into something else. If we’re mindful about that, he’ll progress just fine.”

  “Right, right.” Terry took a moment to process everything he had just heard. “What about Gunny?”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Terry set his chin in his hand as he mentally reviewed the sparring he had observed. “His style has gotten stranger,” Terry said after a while. “That scutum looks like it should slow him down, but it doesn’t. That makes his plodding style an even weirder puzzle because he’s fast when he wants to be. You wouldn’t think that to be the case when you first square up.”

  “Agreed on all fronts.”

  “He’s going to be bigger than Kane, so we probably need to make sure the same bully-getting-bullied problem doesn’t creep in there. I’m not sure what he would need after that.”

  “You’re right about the bully problem. That’s a good catch even if that’s not what we’re seeing in matches. He’s still a bully. Doing it slowly makes it look like something different, though. Beyond that, we need to challenge him to experiment and branch out more. His style works for him so well that it might make his perspective too narrow.”

  “Yeah, I can see how that would happen.”

  “Beyond that, tell me when you get ideas,” Hans said. “I’ve never trained a student like Gunther before. Your perspective will help us give him what he needs.”

  “The guy who trained Devontes hasn’t seen this kind of student before?”

  “Devon’s progress looked a lot like Quentin’s, actually. Gunther is working with a very unique set of tools, and we’re not even talking about the Blue Berserker factor yet. You mix that in, and it’s his instructors who need to be more careful and vigilant. We need to look at the habits he’s making now and imagine what the consequences for them will be ten years later. We’ll be just as tempted to lean into the cool new thing that works well for him as he is just because it’s not like other things we’ve seen.”

  Terry whistled. “That makes my head hurt.”

  “You’re getting better at this than you realize. I’m really grateful to have your help in all of this, Terry.”

  Hans sat on the roof with Olza. They each sipped cups of tea.

  “It’s nice having the boys back,” she said. “Gomi feels more like Gomi with them around, even if they’ve grown into giants.”

  “Boys are strange like that. You turn around one day, and suddenly it’s a grown man trying to take your head off instead of the punk kid you remember.”

  “I’m worried about Gunny.”

  “Because of what he said at dinner?” Hans asked.

  “Because of what he said and everything else he’s gone through before that. We’ve talked about him being angry, but he was so calm about it at dinner, so sure of it.”

  “That could be a good thing.”

  Olza lowered her teacup. “In what way?”

  “I don’t know many adults who can be angry and not lash out at people who don’t deserve it. I know I struggle with that. I’ve never seen Gunther have that problem.”

  “That’s true. He’s always kind to everyone in Gomi. Still, though. It worries me to hear him be so hateful.”

  “Do you think it’s unjustified?”

  Olza thought. “No. It’s justified. I don’t think it’s productive, and I don’t think it’s healthy.”

  “I mean… I don’t disagree with you, but I don’t think it’s fair for someone like me to tell him he’s wrong. First of all, I’m not sure that he is wrong. Second of all, I don’t have to live his life. The world is dangerous, and it’s even more dangerous for tusks. I can imagine what that’s like, but I’ll never really know.”

  “Violence never solves anything.”

  “You know you’re living with someone who has made a career out of violence, right?”

  “Hunting monsters is different from hunting people,” Olza countered.

  “Diplomacy doesn’t work with goblins. The histories show that we tried it, but humanity couldn’t even get them to talk. They killed all the messengers and envoys, and any delay in culling goblins just let them multiply and get stronger, which made them even more violent.”

  “People aren’t goblins.”

  “There are a lot of humans who don’t think tusks are people.”

  “But not all.”

  Hans shrugged. “It seems like Gunther knows that. He’s perfectly nice to people who are nice to him. Bert’s human, and they adore each other. If he only hates the people who hate him, do you have a problem with that?”

  “I have a problem with encouraging more bloodshed.”

  “That’s fair, but so far that bloodshed has been pretty one-sided,” Hans said. “Gunther grew up watching tusks try to make peace work. As far as he can tell, that not only failed, but it very nearly made his people extinct. Then the rest of them were herded here like cattle, presumably to starve to death. I can see how he walks away from that with the conclusion that being the better person won’t protect him or his people.”

  “What you described is the exact cycle I’m talking about,” Olza replied. “That’s why this nonsense never stops. You don’t see that?”

  “I do.”

  “Are you okay with it?”

  Hans poured himself a fresh cup of tea from the pot on the table between them. “Of course I’m not okay with it. I wish that the cycle stopped when one side refused to participate, but it doesn’t. If Gunther hurts someone who wasn’t a part of that, I would be upset, but I won’t fault him for wanting to fight the people who think he’s worth less than livestock.”

  Olza leaned back and looked up at the dungeon ceiling high overhead. “I want you to be wrong.”

  “And I want you to be right.”

  Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

  Monitor for independently grown sections of dungeon.

  Complete the next volume (Bronze to Silver) for “The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers.”

  Learn to help your advanced students as much as you help beginners.

  Relocate the titan bones to the dungeon entrance.

  Master your Diamond boon.

  Test the limits of the dungeon roots.