“Okay, if you all have your bearings, we’re going to start moving forward.” Shouting out to us, the instructor completely ignored the armored man’s original question. “I’ve already said everything I needed to say in class, but we’ll run through it one last time for anyone who needs a refresher. Walk and talk.” She motioned the five adventurers forward, their rogue taking the lead, and soon thereafter, we all slowly followed them down the hallway.

“As much as some of you would enjoy it, we’re not just throwing you all in the dungeon and hoping for the best. These first few weeks, we’ll be doing a lot of shadowing with a retired adventuring party so you can get a better sense of what good party tactics look like.”

Seeming to relish a good captive audience, the party’s tank jumped in. “And what bad party tactics look like. Wouldn’t be much of a good lesson if we got you kids killed by making it look too easy and leaving you overconfident.”

The instructor nodded, seconding the interruption. “That too. Now, before we get into the meat of this excursion, let me quickly reiterate the various dungeon perks that make this all possible…”

Rather than listen too closely, I opted to scroll through my previous notifications until I found the relevant lines.

You have entered the Sylum Metal Dungeon! Note, this run has been marked as a classroom trip, and you have been designated as a student.

No experience, monster loot, treasure, or resources can be gained from this run.

As a student, your health cannot drop below 10% from dungeon monsters or traps.

As a student, your instructor may teleport you out of the dungeon at any time.

Dungeon party size restrictions and penalties are lifted for this run.

Hidden rooms and dungeon secrets will not be present for this run.

Certain class quests will not update from feats you accomplish this run.

By default, monsters will not target you, and traps will not activate due to your actions.

It was an impressive list, made all the more daunting by the fact that I had firsthand knowledge on how much dungeon perks cost. Sylum had likely spent decades worth of settlement energy just unlocking and purchasing upgrades for its dungeon, and it seemed a good deal of them were geared towards safely training up each new generation of adventurers.

Of course, teaching perks weren’t the only upgrades that were in play: Apparently even the decor was the result of spending some settlement energy. Normal metal dungeons supposedly looked much more mundane. It was only through a host of cosmetic perks that the first floor of Sylum’s dungeon looked so shiny.

I thought it was a little silly, but I’d been assured by both Verin and Alara that such things were important. According to the prior, it was because buying the decor options sent a message of power and prosperity to any visiting dungeon delvers. According to the latter, it was because the metal walls looked cool.

My musings were interrupted as we reached the first room and the monsters therein made themselves known.

No fierce battle roars assaulted us. Nothing came sprinting forth or descending from the sky.

Instead, a host of monsters aggressively (if somewhat slowly) rolled our way.

A gaggle of twenty calf-high metal balls honed in on the five adventurers. They lacked any features whatsoever, and were it not for the way they shifted directions and continued to roll over a flat surface, I would have hardly guessed they were animated in the first place.

From our first semester’s lessons, I recognized them: Metal Slimes. One of the easiest foes one could encounter in a metal dungeon.

“All right,” the leather-clad tank shouted out. “Now a lot of you kids have eyes that look like those slimes: You’re rolling them right about now.” He let out a hearty guffaw, seemingly undeterred by the fact that he was the only one to do so. “You think these are easy monsters. And they are! Doesn’t change the fact that they’re good at killing you if you’re not safe. So to start off, we’ll show you how to do things the wrong way.”

Thus said, he let off a berserker cry and charged forward, rushing directly into the throng of slimes.

In a flash, he was on them. He pulled the hammer from his back and swung it down, the air filled with the sharp crashes of metal on metal. When he drew his weapon back, the slime he’d hit was deformed and dented, partially flattened from the force of the blow.

Before our eyes, however, the damage was quickly undone. The slime quivered in place before springing back into its previous spherical form, now completely indistinguishable from the others beside it.

Paying this no heed, the tank continued to smash his way through the slimes. More and more of them managed to circle him, however, and bit by bit, it grew harder for him to beat them back. When he was well and truly surrounded, seeing no way to get at their main foe, a few of the slimes split off to target the rest of the party.

What followed could only kindly be referred to as a clusterfuck. The five adventurers fought completely independently. The highly agile rogue led a few of the slimes on a chase, easily evading them but not managing to do much real damage to them either. The warrior hacked and slashed at the slimes that approached her, managing to fare a bit better than the tank, but not by much. The mage encased himself in a dome of magma, effectively hiding himself away but doing little in the way of helping the others.

And lastly, there was the healer. The first of the slimes reached him, and connected with his poorly armored ankles with a sickening crunch.

With a cry, he fell to the ground. The rest of the slimes didn’t opt to give him the time to recover. Delving dungeons was hardly a career choice for the squeamish, but I still saw a few classmates look away as the harmless-looking rolling balls rapidly became coated in red.

The tank fell next. He was well armored, but surrounded as he was, he was still overwhelmed. It took considerably longer to finish him off, but the swarm of slimes was relentless. The warrior followed. Then, as the slimes managed to chip through the magma barrier, the mage went next. The only party member spared was the rogue, though there was little he could do as he ran about.

“All right! You should all get the point by now. I’m resetting.” The instructor snapped her fingers, and all the slimes disappeared, reappearing a moment later at the far end of the room.

One by one, the downed adventurers lifted themselves from the ground, shaking themselves off. They regrouped in front of us, all five of them sporting wide smiles.

“Never gets old,” the tank chuckled out. “Or at least the pay we get for doing that never does. Ah, don’t look at us like that. We have a host of perks that makes this easier for us, just like you kiddos do. Now! Round two!”

As soon as he finished speaking, a wave of magic shot out from the mage and the healer. Magma climbed up each party member’s legs, forming glowing pairs of boots. Identify Skill activated, letting me see what he’d done.

Rapidly Cooling Volcanic Boots

When stationary, these boots solidify into volcanic rock, rooting the target in place and preventing them from getting knocked over. When the target attempts to move, the rock heats up and melts into magma, permitting them movement again.

A host of shields and buff skills then came from the healer, including one that enhanced all attacks’ piercing effects. It was at this point that I expected the tank to charge forth once again, but it turned out their preparations were nowhere near complete.

The mage started to cast once more, this time targeting the terrain rather than his party members. Two short walls of volcanic rock poked out from the earth, each of them slanted inwards to form a funnel of sorts.

At last the tank ran forth, taking a ready stance at the tip of the funnel. Noticing him advance, the newly respawned slimes started rolling his way. Instead of being able to surround him, however, he easily kept them at bay as only one slime was able to approach him at once.

With all the slimes now grouped up, the next stage of the operation came into play. In the center of the large gathering, the ground erupted, lava oozing upwards to envelop over half of the enemies. Their exteriors shifted from silver to red in moments, and they began to destabilize, melting and sloughing off their metallic skin.

Small black spheres were left in their wake, though not for long.

A hammer flashed down. Thrown daggers whistled through the air. A sword -- well, the sword didn’t really do anything. The warrior just chilled out beside the healer. That’s how some fights went, after all.

In the end, though, it was an overwhelming victory. With the lone slime in the front easily kept at bay by the tank’s hammer, none of them even got a chance to land a single blow on the adventurers. It took a few more casts to melt the remainder of the slimes enough to clear them all, but it was a relaxed affair, not one of the five looking tense in the least bit.

When the final slime fell, a few claps started up. The five regrouped and turned to face us.

“Good. Thank you to you five for the demonstrations.” The instructor added her own claps into the mixture. “We’ll have plenty of time for discussing exactly what we saw at the end, but I promised you all that this would be a practicum, and it will be.” She snapped her fingers again, and the slimes which had moments ago lay melted and defeated appeared fresh and new once more.

“Depending on your role, you’ll be swapping out with one of the adventurers and giving the room a go. Based on who you swap out for, the strategy might change a good deal, so we’ll get to see a lot of different ways to handle this room. To start off… let’s go with you!”

As perhaps unfortunately expected, the instructor pointed directly my way. It was the curse of standing out a bit too much.

Well, might as well get it out of the way. It was time to kill some slimes!

After far too many slimes had met their demise and a number of other rooms had been cleared with the help of the adventurers, I found myself back home, pondering what to work on. Lenda had given all the Resistance Training students some DIY torture kits for those of us who were feeling extra ambitious to train at home. I had some carving I could be doing. There was no shortage of skills for me to level up either.

Looking through my character sheet, however, one stuck out more than the rest. Advanced Internal Mana Manipulation. Even as my spell schools ticked up closer and closer to the Apprentice rank each day, it still sat languishing all the way at the novice rank. I’d pushed it up to level 9 a few weeks back, that had been more by accident than through serious training.

Been a while. Might as well?

Rather than sitting cross-legged or assuming some special pose, I flopped onto my bed, face down. I covered my head in a blanket and shut myself off from the rest of the world as best I could before directing my attention inwards.

As soon as my mana core came into focus, I ran through the various exercises the archmage had given me, poking and prodding the lump of mana. I drew threads of it off, trying to make some as thick as I could while I attempted to make others impossibly thin. I strung them out, seeing how far I could pull them, as well as pulling off as many individual threads as I could muster.

As was probably expected, I found each exercise leaps and bounds easier than I had when I’d started. That wasn’t to say they were easy for me, but the difference between level one and level nine was pretty evident.

Anything else I should be doing to get this leveling faster? I thought back to one of the earlier times I’d leveled it up, back when I’d been training in the forest. I hadn’t been doing any exercises, but I’d earned a level just from channeling multiple different types of mana at once.

Feeling like it was worth a shot, I shifted the mana in my core towards water, pulling off a few threads of the now-blue mana. From there, I shifted towards fire, my core erupting into an angry red in all spots save for the few blue threads I was still holding onto.

Weird. I guess the shift happens for everything I’m not actively manipulating? Then what if I…

I plucked another thread, this time of fire mana, and brought it close to one of the blue ones. There was a pressure as I tried to join them, pushing them apart, but I struggled through, brushing them against one another.

“Gah! Fuck.” The water thread shriveled up and severed itself from my core before sending an unpleasant jolt down the fire thread, and I jerked up in bed. The backlash resulted in a sort of pain I didn’t know was possible, as if I’d just gotten a papercut on a tail I didn’t know I’d had.

All right. Maybe not like that. The brief pain not enough to deter me, I opted to try again. This time, however, I channeled two actual skills: Waterwalking, and Heat Sight. With my attention glued to my mana core, I oohed and ahhed as the duo of mana types spread across the sphere.

At first they were like oil and water, resulting in a kind of hectic kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting blues and reds. The threads leading from them were haphazardly pulled about, until at last the two mana types reached an equilibrium of sorts, forming pockets and islands which remained stationary or only slowly drifted about.

I canceled the skills but maintained my grip on my mana core, managing to keep it in its partially watery, partially fiery state. Oddly enough, now that the skills were no longer active, I found it immediately much harder, and the strain wore at me second by second.

Before choosing to end my experimentation, I figured I’d try to throw a third mana type in. Mentally gripping half of my core as tightly as possible, I relaxed the other half and tried to shift to earth mana. The dark brown of earth flickered in and out of view, and I could feel my core groaning at me.

Reluctantly, the earth at last joined the other two types, however, only for a second. I lost control and all three schools of mana winked out of existence, replaced with one completely neutral and completely sore lump of mana.

The soreness lingered, several times more unpleasant than the earlier blip of pain, and I would have cursed if not for the notification that greeted me.

Advanced Internal Mana Manipulation has reached level 10!

Congratulations! You have reached the Initiate rank in Advanced Internal Mana Manipulation.

Based on your skill usage, you have been granted a skill augment.

Augment of Multiplicity

Increases control over your mana when casting multiple different spells in tandem. Additionally increases your ability to use multiple mana types at once.

This skill has gained a new effect!

Advanced Internal Mana Manipulation now grants increased ability to understand and manipulate spells. Based on your skill level, the Spell Adjustment and Spell Insight skills are now strengthened and gain levels more quickly.

I read and then reread the prompts, surprised to find that I’d gained both an augment and a new effect. The augment was perhaps a bit expected based on how I’d just leveled the skill, but the new effect was something else entirely.

Spell Insight? Spell Adjustment? Despite the two skills being mentioned, I was certain I hadn’t picked them up before, nor had the archmage informed me of them.

Well, there’s a pretty easy way to fix that. Removing my head from underneath the blanket, I got ready and left the house, intent on paying the archmage a visit.

“Ah! Yes.” Xander’Callis sat in his usual crystalline chair, a piece of furniture that somehow suited him more now that I could see his true form. “I was wondering when you’d get around to finally leveling that one. I was going to save some of these lessons for when you reached the Apprentice rank in a few of your skills, but I suppose now is as good a time as any.”

Abruptly, thousands of barely distinguishable threads of mana erupted from all over the archmage’s skeletal form, dancing and swaying and wrapping themselves into dizzying forms. They shone in a wide variety of different hues, as if the archmage had been possessed by a rainbow that had been run through a blender. His mandible stretched upwards in a way I was certain bone wasn’t supposed to, a grin spreading against his otherwise inexpressive face.

“Come. Let us teach you what separates a student from a true mage.”