Side Story: Xander's Teachings

The second of the two side stories for April.

"Ahhhhh!!!" screamed Freya. "Get it off! Get it off!!! GET IT OFF!!!"

Noah picked off the harmless grass snake from her shoulder and flicked it into the bushes, while Robin and Jared did their best to suppress their laughter. Not for the first time, I considered that maybe I had made a mistake coming here. I had viewed it as a twenty floor dungeon that had reasonable compatibility with our party composition, but Freya had neglected to mention her... issues with snakes.

Oddly, it wasn't the monsters that were the problem; they simply led to her being a little more reckless with her fireballs than normal, which given the dungeon's weather didn't much matter. The difficulty were the critters, harmless little things that dungeons seemed to add for decoration. The ten centimetre long grass snakes completely freaked her out for some reason and had a nasty habit of dropping out of trees at random. Rather ironic, given that it was her who had pushed most strongly for us to rotate our workplace.

"That's enough for this trip anyway," I declared, deciding to give our traumatised mage a break. "Our bags are almost full. Let's head back to the surface."

It's a pity this dungeon only has teleporters every five floors, and while each floor is only a single chamber, that 'chamber' contains a whole jungle. It's a long slog back to the surface when we're a couple of floors away from a teleporter.

Despite the trek, we made it back out without further critter-induced incidents. This dungeon is located far from civilization, and there's no settlement here. The dungeon entrance is surrounded by nothing more than a couple of barracks, a warehouse, a few workshops and a tavern. It's not even defended against dungeon breaks, although since we're on an island off the coast of the mainland, there would be nowhere for monsters to go even if they didn't starve.

It was the middle of the night by the time we emerged, stars glistening in the cloudless sky. Unlike Dawnhold, this dungeon wasn't run on a regular daily schedule; the deeper dungeon and large gaps between teleporters made it impractical, and the way monsters re-spawned even on occupied floors made it unnecessary. Fortunately, since delvers were leaving the dungeon at all hours, it meant that the tavern likewise served food at all hours. Even I would be glad to get some fresh food into my stomach after our latest two-day trek through the snake infested jungles.

Upon entering, a waitress handed over a letter. At first glance, the use of the tavern seemed an odd choice for passing messages, but since every delver would swiftly end up here after leaving the dungeon, I had to admit it was effective. Maybe we should add a few more members to our team, to give us the leeway to bring cooking equipment with us. Or get a storage item big enough to carry a few days of fresh food. Field rations might be designed for optimal ratio of high nutrition, low weight and volume, and high durability and shelf life, but whoever came up with them really skimped on the taste and texture.

The envelope was stamped with a mark indicating it came from the Dawnhold guild master, which was interesting; he shouldn't have any reason to be contacting us. With Freya staring eagerly over my shoulder, and even the consummate professional Noah looking intrigued, I pulled out the letter.

A situation had occurred in Dawnhold; the village that you once defended from a slime attack has been attacked again. As a result, young Silvanus has found it necessary to send one of the children of that village into the dungeon to level. Given that the child in question is already rank two, he has little to gain from joining a conventional newbie party. Instead, I would like an experienced party to give him a week long crash course in delving before assigning him to a party that matches his level. Given your teaching experience, and your party's previous interactions with him, I'm offering you first refusal for the job.

"Our previous interactions with him?" muttered Freya, interrupting my reading. "Wait, this is about Peter?"

I glanced over the rest of the letter, which meandered off into unimportant details like the compensation offered, and did indeed see the name Peter mentioned. Had I met him before?

"What's with that face?" exclaimed Freya. "Remember, that five-year-old [Apprentice Mage]? Lord Reid said that he was worried that the slimes were an attack on 'him', and I'm like ninety percent sure that the 'he' he meant was Peter."

Freya's excitement dredged up the memories, and I did remember the boy she was talking about. I'd never interacted with him myself, hence my poor recollection of his name, but Freya and Noah had stayed in the village for a couple of weeks of guard duty. I also remembered Lord Reid's commentary, and that was enough information for me to reject the offer.

"I intend to decline. The job is too dangerous."

"What?!" exclaimed Freya. "But that kid is really interesting! He was already halfway through [Apprentice Mage] three years ago. He's probably almost finished his first real mage class by now!"

"No, he hasn't, or we would be an appropriately levelled party. Dawnhold's guild master explicitly called out that Peter would be assigned to a lower level party once we were done. And being interesting is the problem. Surprises are the last thing we want in a dungeon."

"Oh, come on. What do you think is going to happen? Robin, you'll back me up here, won't you?"

"I'd be interested," Robin answered, "but not so much as to argue against Xander."

"Freya just wants to get away from the snakes," added Jared with a smirk.

"Actually, I'm interested too," said Noah, much to my surprise. He was one of the two who stayed in the village, and was rather less whimsical than Freya, so it was worth taking his opinion seriously. "Can I read the letter?"

I handed it over, and he spent a couple of minutes looking it over.

"It fails to mention why Peter is being sent into the dungeon, but that in itself is telling. If Dawnhold's guild master thought that something dangerous was involved, he would have mentioned it."

"Frankly, I can't think of any scenario that requires a child to be sent into a dungeon, dangerous or otherwise," I commented. "But you do make a valid point. So, does everyone want to go?"

Freya, Noah and Robin nodded their agreement. Jared indicated that he didn't mind either way. Looks like I'm outnumbered.

"Okay, we'll give it a go, but the first abnormality we see, I'm going to quit."

Unfortunately for Freya, the job didn't start until spring, so despite her hopes of escaping the snakes, she would need to put with them for a few more weeks. When the time came, we took the gate back to the Emerald Nest, and from there to Dawnhold. Thankfully, this counted as guild related travel rather than personal, so they didn't expect us to pay; the trip would have cost us a large gold otherwise.

Back in Dawnhold, I managed to extract a few more details from their guild master. What he had neglected to mention in the letter was that Peter had been attacked by an orc. That was not a monster that should ever be present on the surface. Not in a mana field, not in a dungeon break, not ever. And yet one had been spawned specifically to attack Peter, endangering not only him, but a young girl who happened to be with him at the time.

Had I known that beforehand, I would have been far less inclined to take this job. The guild master insisted that whatever being had created the orc was not trying to kill anyone, and that may very well be true, but I don't try to kill ants either, yet I still accidentally tread on them, often without noticing. Getting my team involved with an unknown entity that can create an orc out of thin air is not something I want to do, regardless of its intentions. Still, we were here now, and with the encouragement of the team I decided to play along.

Thus began the strangest job I'd ever taken on. Peter blatantly had the intelligence of an adult, but sorely lacked in the life experiences that a real adult would have been through. It wasn't just the intelligence of an adult either; he had the power of one too. Our purpose was to give him a crash course in delving, to try to bring his knowledge up to par with his skills. He listened carefully to all of our teachings, and despite a brief bout of immaturity, the first day of delving went well. Until the point we left the dungeon...

"Are you saying that the System..."

"Talked to me? Very creepily? Yes, I am. And then it gave me a quest."

Well, there goes the guild master's hope that sending Peter into the dungeon would cause our mysterious entity to quieten down. It even offered evidence that the culprit had some measure of control over the System, or else was the System itself. Nevertheless, I actually found this development encouraging; this quest wasn't the entity attacking again, but rather it was acknowledging that Lord Reid's idea of sending Peter into the dungeon was acceptable to it, and setting out the rate of progress it expected to be made. Not that the rate of progress was sane, for any reasonable person...

The other side to this was that the quest heavily implied that failure would result in our mysterious System-controlling entity losing interest in Peter. The guild master let him make the choice, and he chose to fight on.

That put me in a difficult spot. While delvers typically grow faster than people working peacefully on the surface, the difference isn't that great. I could probably challenge the dungeon solo, but it wouldn't be risk free, and reaching my level from that of Peter's would normally take a decade or more. Building him into someone who could do it in a mere two years was not something I would have considered even remotely possible, had I not already witnessed his ridiculous rate of growth. If I assumed he could complete his current class before his time limit, what route would give him the best chance?

And it was only a chance. I would do what I could to enlarge it, but my honest opinion was that he was going to get himself killed. I can make sure that doesn't happen on my watch, but he won't be with our party forever. The growth required meant that he could never join a party of his own level. He'd either have to stay with a much higher one while pulling his weight on floors he should never even set foot on, or else operate alone.

I was certain he understood the risk to his life that this involved, but I wasn't sure whether he was considering all the other implications. Given that he didn't even know what type of monsters populated this dungeon, there's no way he would know what the tenth floor boss entailed. I would need to show him. He also needed to understand that there wasn't a hard line between flawless victory and death; he would need to learn to deal with wounds and injuries without the aid of a healer.

And so I showed him. I made him fight monsters that should have been far beyond him and stood by as they tore open his immature body. Ordered my party to stand by, much to their horror. I made him walk through the dungeon, through disguised traps, while so badly injured he could barely remain upright. I suspect I lost some of the respect of my party that day, but not so of Peter. He understood, and in some ways that made things worse.

If I'd known what this job would involve, I never would have agreed, and one day of that torture was all I could manage. For the third day of the assignment, I decided to take him to the tenth floor. Perhaps it was selfish of me to think so, but I was hoping that seeing the array of monsters that would stand against him would convince him not to walk this path.

It didn't. But then things got even worse. He pointed out an invisible exit from the tenth floor boss chamber, and we were forced through it. Whether that was by the dungeon, by the System or something controlling both, I don't know, but it had the ability to disable the teleporter and lock us in. That was the sort of surprise I was afraid of, hearing the details of this job.

Fortunately, beyond the invisible doorway were no traps or monsters, or apparent dangers. If anything, what was there was worse. A list of names of the dead, and statues of the monsters responsible for reaping their lives. Something was keeping score. Something that tried talking to Peter.

The fact was there that it didn't try to harm our party; it was as if it wanted nothing more than to let us see its existence and then get rid of us. But the fact remained that the something interfering with Peter's life was still willing to manipulate the dungeon around us, despite the quest. What if it shut off all the teleporters? What if it flooded the first floor with orcs? I deemed this too dangerous to continue, and for the first time in my career I quit a job part way through.

What I didn't admit was the relief that quitting brought me. The pain of standing by while I deliberately let a child suffer serious injuries at the claws of monsters was not an experience I care to repeat. Never again.