Jason set up the cloud house after they cleared out the adventure notices of the third village of the day. Henrietta gathered the team together to talk about their performance in the day’s combat.

“Obviously, most of those notices weren’t any kind of a challenge,” she said. “As a team, and even alone for most of you, very few iron-rank enemies will pose any kind of threat. That’s acceptable for now, but a full team of capable iron-rankers should comfortably handle not just most iron-rank monsters but bronze-rank monsters as well. One to one, any adventurer should be worth more than any monster of their own rank. That is not to say you all need to be able to handle monsters alone. Neil and Clive, your powers are obvious suited to a group environment. You need to make sure that your value to the team is greater than any monster to their pack.”

Neil threw a wary glance in Jason’s direction.

“What?” Jason asked.

“Nothing smarmy to say about my value to the team?”

“Are you kidding?” Jason asked. “You’re awesome. If the team gets stuck in a situation where you or me has to be kicked off the bus, it’s not going to be you.”

“Jason is right,” Henrietta said. “Neil, you are the most indispensable member of the team. That does not mean you don’t have improvements to make, which goes for all of you. You beat the bronze-rank monsters today, but if you’re still performing at that level by the time we get to back to Greenstone, then I will personally see to it you disband. I will not have my brother in a stagnant team, because right now you’re all potential and no payoff.”

She panned her gaze over the group.

“You have clearly been strategising around versatility,” she went on, “which is a good fit for your team makeup and power sets. Now I’ve seen you in action against a live enemy who poses an actual challenge, I could easily recognise the factor holding you back. That factor is a lack of dynamism.”

“We’re using a variety of strategies,” Humphrey said, “and we’re constantly devising more.”

“And that is a good foundation,” Henrietta said. “You’re combining your abilities well enough, but only when you fall into those devised strategies. When pushed out of them, you fall back to individual efforts. You need to internalise those strategies to the point that you can improvise on the move and adapt to the different configurations required in the moment. The key is that when you adapt, you have to include your team members instead of falling back on what you know works just for you.”

“Trust,” Jason said.

“Precisely,” Henrietta said. “To make the most of your versatility, Improvisation will be critical. You have to know what your team is capable of and trust them to do it. You have to learn to read each other. No discussion, no hesitation. Assess, adapt, act.”

“Surely that’s a matter of experience,” Neil said.

“It’s exactly a matter of experience,” Henrietta said. “Not just any experience, though. You have to know everything your team is capable of and you won’t figure that out if you keep falling into the same, easy patterns. From now onward, I will be picking you out for notices in different groupings. When you’ve been doing this yourselves, you’ve been going for the obvious, complimentary groupings. Jason and Sophie, Clive and Belinda, Humphrey and Neil. You’re going to find these new groups I put you in awkward, perhaps even dangerous. Your job will be to tease out everything your team mates are capable of. To find the synergies you never saw and exercise the abilities that have gone neglected. If nothing else, it will help you rank up all your powers on the way to bronze.”

Henrietta put her designs into action with the next village they came to. First up was the pairing of Jason and Belinda. Belinda had fallen into a pattern of resetting and duplicating Clive’s infrequent, high-impact powers, a tactic worthless with Jason’s rapid, low-impact abilities. They ended up with Belinda serving as a makeshift guardian, drawing enemy attention while Jason went to work.

“Pathetic,” was Henrietta’s assessment. “Jason, you’re squandering Belinda’s powers and trying to do it all yourself. Expect to be placed in this pairing again and again until you find the synergies that make you fight like a team instead of like nervous adolescents, fumbling around one another.”

“I think that means you, Humphrey,” Jason said.

“Is there something in my tone that suggests inviting light-hearted whimsy?” Henrietta snapped. “If you have time to levy your wit against my brother, Mr Asano, I suggest you leverage it in the development of your combat skills, rather than your socials ones.”

Humphrey received a similar dressing down after being paired with Clive, Henrietta berating them for working as a pair of disconnected individuals.

“It’s not enough to be a distraction for your damage dealer,” Henrietta told her brother. “You’re trying to set up Clive to use his attack spell, as if he didn’t have nineteen other essence abilities. I want to see you luring people into his trap spell. Baiting the enemy into making big attacks where his retribution damage powers will have the greatest effect. And you, Clive need to stop waiting for everyone else to give you your chances. You have to make them yourself.”

As they went from village to village, fight to fight, the team was placed in a variety of configurations. Neil was grouped with Jason, whose usual stealth tactics would leave the healer alone and exposed. Then he was paired with Sophie against a high-defence monster. Neil and Sophie made for a combination even harder to harm than the monster itself, but they lacked the offensive power to hurt it in turn, turning the fight into a battle of attrition.

Belinda saw the most action of anyone in the team, combined with everyone else in different configurations of two or three. Not only were her powers the most varied and untested, she was also the one most in need of experience.

The next bronze-rank monster encounter came at the final coastal village before their route would take them inland. Henrietta’s intention had been to let them face bronze-rank monsters in smaller groups, but this one was an aquatic monster. Not only was she allowing the full group to act together but also participating herself.

The monster wasn’t notoriously strong, but it was aquatic and had the environmental advantage. They used water breathing potions, Jason finally taking Clive’s advice and getting Humphrey to hold his head under water until he gasped out and broke the reflex to breathe. It took multiple attempts before Jason could actively stop breathing without his instincts freaking out and starting him up again. Only after finally overcoming the drowning reflex did he manage it.

“This feels very weird,” he croaked in a gasping voice. “I have to get used to talking when I’m not breathing.”

“No rush,” Neil said.

“It’s kind of unnerving,” Jason continued. “It’s like my body senses something is wrong. It definitely doesn’t want me wasting breath I don’t have on talking.”

“Trust your instincts,” Neil said.

“That’s not helping,” Henrietta said to Neil.

“It’s helping me,” Neil said.

“It will take time before your body adapts,” Clive said. “It’s actually an unusual and fascinating process. Your body, as it stops doing things the way a mortal body does, will start find new ways. Your voice, for example, won’t come from breathing through your throat but by using vibrations to generate sound. It’ll take a while before you sound like your old self, but along the way you’ll find yourself picking up interesting tricks. Throwing your voice or projecting it to fill up a room. Or just blasting louder than you ever could with something as maudlin as lungs.”

“Don’t try and rely on not breathing in combat, yet,” Henrietta told Jason. “You’ve been breathing your whole life and you don’t just kick the habit that easily. You can do it fine, standing around, nice and safe. You go underwater and get caught up in a fight and you’ll find that drowning reflex coming right back.”

The fight against the aquatic monster was a mess. While breathing water, spells could still be cast but it had to be done with careful enunciation of the incantations, slowing the process down. The leverage required to swing weapons underwater was impossible to achieve without an item like the necklace of the deep that Humphrey was wearing, and even then it took all his strength to swing his sword through the water to even minimal effect. Mobility was obviously impacted underwater and team coordination fell apart, even using Jason’s voice chat for silent, telepathic speech.

“That was an absolute shambles,” Henrietta told them as they dragged themselves out of the surf after eking out a victory. She had done much of the work, using a spell that allowed her familiars to act freely under the water.

“Neil, you were the solitary stand-out,” she continued. “The way you covered the team and their many, many mistakes was a credit to you. Well done. How much mana do you have left?”

“I’m drained,” he said, collapsing onto his back on the sandy beach.

“And that’s how close you were to failure,” Henrietta told the others. “If the fight had gone on any longer, there was a danger of some of you suffering real damage when Neil’s mana ran out.”

“The fight was in an extreme environment against a bronze-rank monster,” Humphrey said in defence of the team. “If you expected us to do well, you wouldn’t have participated yourself.”

“And if I wasn’t here to participate?” Henrietta challenged her brother. “What would you have done?”

“Sent for someone else,” Humphrey said. “If it was aggressive enough to leave the water to attack, we could have fought it on land. If not, we’d have had the time to send for an adventurer better suited to fighting it.”

Henrietta grinned, surprising the team.

“Good answer,” she said. “Recognising when not to fight is also a strength worth cultivating. If the top reason adventurers die is bad information, the second is lacking the courage to admit they aren’t a match for the fight in front of them.”

“Not to dismiss the fact that I was the best,” Neil said from where he was sprawled in the sand, “but how useful is learning to fight underwater anyway?”

“We won’t always get to pick our fights, or the chance to walk away,” Jason said. “We have to be ready for the fights we don’t want. That fight showed us the strength of having the right items to compensate for environmental challenges. If we pick some more up and keep them in storage, then with some more experience we should at least be able to hold our own.”

“Asano is right,” Henrietta said. “Always be as ready as you can. We’re done with these coastal villages, but once you’re back in Greenstone, pick up some items and practise more underwater combat in the mirage chamber.”

As the team turned their path inland, they started crossing the empty desert sands. The heavy skimmer allowed them to travel in relative comfort, sitting under an awning as the seemingly endless desert passed by. The air was hot, rushing over their faces with the speed of the skimmer, but not oppressively so with milder winter temperatures.

Jason and Clive both had oasis bracelets that shielded them from the heat, as did Belinda. Jory had gifted it to her in preparation for her first real adventuring expedition. For the rest of the team he had provided less-valuable, but still welcome heat protection for a nominal fee. Sophie, Neil and Humphrey all wore head-cloths that were alchemically treated to remain wet and cool. Henrietta had a fire essence and could eat worse heat that the desert could throw at her.

They made their way through remote villages that were torn between gratitude for their arrival and frustration it had taken so long. The villages were all located on oases sourced from apertures to the rainforest astral space. One village had even experienced attacks by Builder cultists who had fled through the local aperture, following the battle with the expedition in the astral space.

The villages in the sandy regions of the desert were largely there to serve the more remote spirit coin farms. With many magical practises prohibited in the area of the sensitive coin farms, the people staffed there turned to nearby villages.

Moving deeper in, the sand turned to rocky wastes. Most of the villagers they encountered quarried the stone for which Greenstone was named, while others were mining towns. Most of those towns were built around dig sites for a magical ore that appeared in the desert, and while investigating to serve his own curiosity, Jason made an interesting discovery.

The magical mineral sun gold could be found in iron and bronze-rank veins and mostly appeared in arid lands that saw clear skies all year round. For that reason, most sun gold mines were located in deserts. Sun gold was always found with large quantities of what they called trash gold, which was normal rank and had no magical properties. It simply formed in large quantities around sun gold veins and had to be carefully separated from the valuable stuff in the smelting process.

Jason picked some of the discarded metal.

Item: [Gold Nugget] (normal rank, common)

A lump of non magical gold. Has little value in worlds with magical equivalents (crafting material, metal).

Effect: Non-magical crafting material.

The sun gold was refined by a local whose iron and transmutation essences turned him into a human smelting machine. Trash gold was a cheap cosmetic material considered too heavy to be worth shipping off and was largely discarded. Jason paid the smelter to go though the slag piles, helping him experiment with what sizes he could fit into his inventory. It turned out he could stack twenty ten-kilogram bars of purified trash gold into a single slot, as the restrictions were more size than weight-based. Jason left the village with two slots filled with heavy gold bars.

“What do you want all that trash gold for?”

“Someday I’m going to go home,” Jason said. “Where I come from, there’s no such thing as magic gold. In my world, trash gold is just gold.”