B2 Chapter 217: Cold Bodies, finale

Edit: Patreon went straight to posting instead of queueing because of a faulty double click, so this one in 9 hours early (sigh.). I'd ninja delete and requeue, but as I learnt the last time this happened, people get the full email either way.

Sitting on the warchief’s throne, Ro gave them a look as she sprawled out lazily—one leg crossed.

It was calculative—stern and judging.

Kaius struggled to respond, his mind still rooted in the spot by the simple sight of seeing her in the boggling cave.

Ro? Of all people—the strange force that had torn their way through the bogglings that had given them so much trouble was Ro?

They hadn’t even sensed her—and the obvious ease with which she had cut through the horde revealed she held far more personal power than he expected.

So it was a test, he realised. Rieker had said he would put them on missions that were at the very edge of their ability, but Kaius had thought that the man had meant their ability to handle in direct battle.

This…seemed different. They’d missed something crucial, and no doubt were going to suffer for it. 

Ro watched them standing in silence, her fingers drumming impatiently on the bone of the warchief’s throne.

“Come on, folks, I don’t have all day. I asked you a question.” her tone brooked no argument.

Kaius flinched—realising he’d just spent the last few minutes staring at the guild manager. In his defence, seeing her here—comfortable in the midst of a charnel house—was not what he had expected. Hells, a dragon would have surprised him less.

“Like ash.” he replied honestly. After so many hours to think about it, he’d continuously arrived at the same point again and again. 

They’d failed due to hubris and lack of preparation—not inability. Sure, they were poorly suited to such a fight. At least they were until Ianmus showed his capabilities with his new spell that had annihilated what must have been over fifty bogglings—a spell the man hadn’t even named yet.

Ro smiled at his response—it wasn’t a wide one. More a bare acknowledgement that they at least had the sense to know that they’d messed up.

“Good—you’re not entirely hopeless, even if today was a fucking travesty. I’ve seen Coppers who work better than this, you utter fools.” Ro tore into them, her withering gaze letting them know just how disappointed she truly was. 

“I mean, seriously, we tell you you’re up against an entire warren and you just…waltz in? Credit where credit is due, at least you didn’t go for a frontal assault, but there’s so much more you should have done. I hope that’s evident.”

“It is,” Kaius replied, stepping forward to take the brunt of her disappointment. As party leader, it was ultimately his failure—he was the one with the final say on their tactics. “We should have watched the horde for longer—tried to get an accurate reading on their numbers.”

“And your assault? What would you have done differently then?” Ro uncrossed her legs, leaning over in the chair to rest her elbow on the arm of the throne.

Kaius winced, thinking of all the things he should have done.

“There’s a lot. Sneaking in was probably the best ploy—as was leaving the raiders alone. If they’d known we’d been approaching we would have had to deal with ambushes and traps galore—probably magical ones too, with the bugbear shamans.”

Ro nodded—though Kaius could tell by the way she rolled her wrist at him to continue that she thought it was a bare minimum of tactical acumen. 

“Other than that, I’ve had the time to think. I can see two main things we could have done to improve our odds. Three, technically—but I don’t think the last is as applicable in this specific situation.”

Ro cocked her head, looking at him with a touch of genuine surprise. Kaius was almost offended by her lack of faith in his ability to recognise his faults, but he was sure she was more used to pampered nobles—and in her defence, they had been more than a little reckless right off the back of her warnings about the assassin spider.

“Oh? You’ve reflected—what a surprise. Shock me with your wisdom, greenhorn.” she replied, her voice sardonic.

Taking the jab with the grace Ro had earned—she had just saved their asses, after all—Kaius nodded.

“First, we were woefully uninformed of the difficulties of a large scale cull of bogglings—”

“Bogglings?” Ro cut in—unable to stop herself from chuckling at the unexpected word.

The mirthful smile she let slip cut the tension. 

They weren’t in trouble, Kaius realised. Her stern disappointment was smoke and mirrors, his Glass Mind was sure of it—cataloguing her every reaction against his memories. This had been planned.

Thank the gods he’d managed to crack her with a slip of the tongue, though he stood by the fact that bogglings was the best term for the monsters.

“Ah, the boggarts and bugbears…and whatever that is I suppose.” Kaius replied, nodding his head towards the stiffened corpse of the warchief. “Sort of like goblinoids.”

Ro tried to keep a stern face, but his eyes were sharp enough to catch the twitch at the corner of her mouth. “Right, yes—bogglings. It’ll do—the system calls the big one’s Bugganes, by the way.” The guild manager replied, nearly choking on the name for the largest boggling. “Continue.”

Kaius nodded, doing his best to ignore the humour that Ro had found in the names. He did admit it was a strange name, but regardless if it was expected for them to fail or not—they were being judged.

Trying to find the humour in it all—to joke with Ro as if she was a friend—would undoubtedly backfire.

He might have, back in the guild hall—if they were sharing a pint and swapping stories—but right now they were delvers who had failed, and she was their superior.

“We were uninformed. While bugbears and other developed forms of boggarts are new, cullings of a scale like this are almost certainly not. We should have asked for advice—found accounts in the guild, approaches that had worked in the past, and tactics that would maximise our success. We probably should have looked into goblins too, since they’re a similar plague to the dwarves, and they deal with them in far greater numbers than boggarts have ever been seen in.” Kaius said, laying out the first of their mistakes.

He’d thought about it a lot. Honestly, the fact that it had taken this for him to realise he should be leveraging the experience of the guild was an embarrassment. They were an institution, with all the knowledge and experience that came with it. Not just a mission board and a wallet.

“Yes!” Ro said, throwing up her hands like she wanted to throw herself to her knees and praise the gods. “I wanted to wring your fucking neck when you morons left Deadacre without asking to be shown to the Archives—we have more than maps, you know!”

“I won’t fault you for not looking into goblins—though I will be mandating that for anyone who takes on a boggling contract from now on—because this development of the ‘bogglings’ came as much of a shock to me as anyone else. I only knew as much as you did before we arrived.” Ro continued, before she leaned in and fixed them with a stare. “However, if you’d looked into boggarts you’d know that bugbears aren’t new.”

Kaius looked at her in shock—they weren’t? What in the gods’ names was she talking about?

It seemed he wasn’t the only one surprised by her response. Ianmus’s eyes were practically falling out of his skull.

“They aren’t?” Ianmus replied. “But I thought they were thought of as unique amongst the lower races?”

“Wrong, though a common belief. Boggart dens rarely grow above level twenty, or forty members, before they are discovered and stamped out. However, there have been a few accounts of them growing large enough to have chiefs and shamans…who are invariably bugbears. We just thought they were closer to ogres and trolls, where a single leader and a single mage can develop into a more potent form.” Ro replied, shaking her head.

Kaius sighed—so they’d been even more uninformed than he thought.

“That just reinforces my point—we should have researched. No doubt there would have been long held approaches to culling effectively.”

The guild manager gave him a slow nod, like he’d just said that cows could be milked. 

“There are. I’m glad you’ve realised this on your own—a delver needs to be prepared. The threats of this world are myriad and vast, but history is long. If you have any inkling of what you’re going to face, you’re doing yourself a disservice by ignoring the wisdom of your predecessors. Now, you said you had other failings—tell me.”

“Preparation.” Kaius replied. “We came in half-cocked. You’d outright told us an estimate of numbers—but we still stocked as if we would have the down time to recover.”

Ro clapped, each crack of her hands echoing through the cavern. 

“Correct. A common enough issue amongst fresh meat that has only delved—which was everyone in the central lands, before this phase change flooded us with monsters. The shallow layers of the Depths are forgiving—almost kind. In the deep wilds—everywhere now, with the rising mana—and the deeper layers, you do not get those pretty little encounters wrapped in a bow. It's a constant grind—rest only comes when you’ve killed everything nearby, hidden yourselves, or managed to run fast enough to escape.”

So the Depths did change as you got deeper. Kaius filed that knowledge away—it was another thing to research. He’d known the biomes got more expansive, and even more densely populated, but he’d hoped that being able to rest between battles would remain.

Ro caught his eye. “I see that look—yes, deeper layers of the depths are far more difficult than can be explained by levels alone. The monsters are smarter, tougher, and more coordinated. There's more of them, they roam larger areas, and rest spaces grow fewer and fewer. Regardless, the common wisdom is to approach every estimate as if the true numbers were twice what you had been told—and you didn’t even prepare for that much.”

“We didn’t.” Kaius agreed. “We should have had as many restoratives as we could purchase—potion toxicity matters far less when you’re fighting for so long, we could have fielded far more skills far more frequently if we weren’t worried about burning out. Even if I'd still had to save my spells, I would have been able to use my Bladerite far more than I did.”

Nodding along to his words, Kaius was surprised to see the guild manager looked almost pleased. Clearly, by offering up his own explanations for their failure, he’d taken a bit of the wind out of the sails of the lecture she’d no doubt been expecting to give.

She paused for a bit, tapping the armrest while she looked off into space—clearly thinking.

Suddenly, Ro rose to her feet, jumping down from the grisly throne to walk towards them. 

“I’ll be honest—those are the main issues I'd noted. I’m curious though—you said you made three mistakes, what was the third?”

Kaius cocked his head. He was sure that the last one had been something that she and Rieker would have wanted to drive home. 

“That we should have recognised we were not well suited to this mission, and asked for assistance?”

Ro paused midstep, looking at him like he’d grown three heads.

“Oh, that’s just precious—no.”

“What? I—”

“No.” Ro cut him off. “Learn to deal with your weaknesses and deficiencies, or you’ll die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—but someday you will. If you’re not confident in your chances of success on a contract you don’t take it.”

“More than that, the rise in mana has…changed things. In all likelihood—whether on the surface, or a deep delve—you will run into a situation you are unequipped to handle. When that happens, you run. You run fast, far, and only return when you are equipped to seize victory.” she continued.

Ro slapped her knee, clearly thinking through her words—focusing on how best to impress her teachings upon them.

“Being a delver is dangerous. We told you we had resources in place to handle this—if you felt unsuited, or found yourself out of your depths, you should have stood your ground and declined the job—or retreated. Regardless of temporary consequences. Yes, this was vitally important—but if you had died nothing would have been gained, and the bogglings would have been just as much of a threat. A living delver—especially of you and your team's calibre—and an incomplete mission is far more valuable than a dead one and a half-finished job.”

“That is what I want you to take away from this. Yes, we expected you to make this mistake. That is why I came, to ensure that you learned, while still extracting as much hands-on experience and levels as possible. Yes, there were developments neither of us expected—but if you had read the histories, you could have either handled it, or retreated to inform us of such an event. Remember, this is no true loss—take it for what it is, a teaching. You will have only failed us if this happens again.” Ro finished

Then she kept walking. Kaius expected her to slow—to join them where they stood. She didn’t. He spun, tracking her as she walked past.

“I’ve got shit to do—paperwork.” Ro spat the word like it was poison. “Don’t make these mistakes again, and come see me when you return to the city.”

Then she blurred, vanishing in a gust of wind.

Kaius stood there, rooted to the spot as he stared after the guild manager in disbelief. He struggled to wrap his head around the woman. She traveled all the way here to simply judge their performance, tear them a new one, and then just leaves? 

When he’d seen Ro sitting there, he’d expected a remedial beatdown at the very least—something like Rieker had done. If not a week or so of training as they travelled back to Deadacre. 

Apparently he’d been mistaken.

“Well, that was weird. Shall we look for loot?” Porkchop said, breaking the stunned silence.

Kaius sighed.

A/N: I struggled a little with this chapter, but I hope this shows that Ro followed them not because they were trying to pull a fast one - Ro knew no more than Kaius did about the job- but because they were there to ensure the safety of the team, the completion of the job, and that they took away the right lessons.

A lot of how Rieker and Ro have been acting is based on my understanding of the Zone of Proximal Development that I learnt about in my developmental psych papers at uni during one of my undergrads. Filtered, of course, through a world that is machismo AF (in a non-gendered sense), a lot more brutal and bloody, and knows a lot less about trauma and teaching theory.

It's the gap/zone between what can be completed alone/unassisted, and what needs assistance from teachers--the place where the most effective learning happens. This was a gamble on them being capable enough to succeed, but incapable enough to struggle. Ro joined to ensure that they worked through it themselves (incredibly beneficial to learning), while being able to effectively remove challenges (mostly unnoticed) that would have shunted it into the zone of needing assistance--which in this instance, would have meant at least one death.

Yes, they're gruff--but IRL i've seen tradies be far harsher to newbies, and most trades are a little less intense than professional monster hunting. A vital part of learning is the ability to make mistakes in a controlled and (sometimes unnoticed) supervised environment.

It's a different lesson than the one I tried to show last mission (which was 'just because you're strong for your level, doesn't mean that you're safe if you're blase about your potential')

I would love to know in the comments if--now that all the cards are on the table--that came across effectively! If you think it didn't, let me know if you have any ideas on bits that could be added to this sequence/mission arc to clarify this vibe (up to and including pov's being more explicit about this, though i'd love to hear what you think should be in them)