“Both,” said Alfric. “But we’re going to go through room by room in chronological order, give brief thoughts on what we saw and how we responded to it and what we might do differently next time. Mostly doing this is just a way of running the dungeon a second or third time in our minds, which means that we milk the dungeon for experience much more efficiently.”
What followed was quite a bit of talking. Isra stayed silent for most of it. It was interesting to get different perspectives on what happened, but her own part in the dungeons was relatively straightforward. If there was something to shoot, she shot it, using the slowed time from the bow to get as many shots off as possible, then using it a second time to retreat if necessary. In every fight, her contribution had been roughly the same, with the outcome being different largely because the monsters had their own biologies and defenses.
“So was this because I missed?” asked Mizuki, when they were discussing the giant man covered in mussels.
“Did you miss?” asked Alfric. “You blew the arm off.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to,” said Mizuki. “I was just lobbing the fireball at him and hoping it would kill him.”
“Is that something to work on for later?” asked Alfric. “Aim? So far as I can recall, you didn’t have a single miss through the whole dungeon, so I don’t have any actual complaints.”
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “Has it been working?”
“You had the majority of kills,” said Hannah. “But we’ve been facin’ what seems like more than our fair share of the big, slow-movin’ beasties, and those are what you’re best at.” She shrugged.
“We can’t really tell you what to do or how to do it,” said Alfric. “We’re not sorcs. Part of a postmortem is for you to reflect on what you’ve been doing and whether doing things differently would have been better. I have no complaints and no advice.” He hesitated. “Aside from, perhaps, not doing everything all at once?”
“Um,” said Mizuki, who seemed quite confused. “Meaning?”
“You work off aetheric imbalance, right?” asked Alfric. “So in theory, rather than doing a single giant fireball, you could do two smaller ones? Mostly I was thinking about the deer we fought and how a single large attack is less effective against multiple targets.”
“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She held out a hand and wiggled her fingers, and a series of pings, almost in unison, came up from the glasses of wine and water that were sitting around the table. “Like that?”
“I don’t know what you just did,” said Alfric.
“Applied force to all of the glasses?” asked Mizuki. “You heard the pings, right?”
Alfric gave a helpless shrug. “I did, but… yes, if you can do that in the dungeon with lethal force, it would be great. It was one of the only problems we ran into with the deer fight.”
“We… didn’t fight any deer,” said Mizuki.
“The black things,” said Isra. “With large heads. They had legs like deer.”
“Oh, those,” said Mizuki. “Right, I didn’t think of them as deer at all, more like a big black version of the long-legged skinks. I hated those.”
“Well, we’ll get to them,” said Alfric. “Does anyone have any more on the mussel man encounter?”
“Arrows did nothing,” said Isra. “I was just standing there waiting for someone else to kill it.”
“Some will be like that,” Alfric said, nodding. “Others will drop from a single well-placed arrow. Part of what we do, when dungeoneering, is to work a flowchart, and part of what we need to do, as a team, is to figure out what the flowchart looks like in practice. Mizuki putting down as much magical firepower as possible right from the start will probably be the default, and Hannah going in for a hex against something that’s already been injured is another good staple. So Isra, your role will be to loose arrows unless that doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work, then… I don’t know. You did really well up close at the end of the first dungeon, but I don’t expect you to do that, not when you don’t have a good melee weapon or the proper training to use it. Not everyone is going to be good in every scenario, and that’s okay, so long as we have everything covered and plans for these different scenarios. Sometimes, you’re going to be able to kill whatever we find almost instantly.”
“I’ll need symmetricalization,” said Isra. “I don’t have the stamina for longer dungeons.”
Alfric nodded. “Symmetricalization, training, entad support, and learning when to hold off. Dungeons require a lot of physical exertion, especially for you and me. We should all be building up stamina as much as we can, and if we’re not doing that by running dungeons, it should be in other ways, like going for a morning run.”
Mizuki laughed. “No, absolutely not, thank you.”
“Well, something then,” said Alfric. “It’s not as important for you, but it would be good if you were able to sprint for two hundred yards without getting too winded. Being able to run away from danger is where physical fitness is going to count the most, for you.”
“Fine, point taken,” said Mizuki. “But if you think for even a moment that I’m getting up at first bell to go running, you’re absolutely insane.”
“We’ll figure out something,” said Alfric. “It’s your heart and lungs I care most about. Running, rowing, things like that?”
“What am I going to row?” asked Mizuki. “We’ve got a pond, I guess, but we’re light on lakes.”
“I lift stones,” said Hannah. “Usually just the one side though.”
“Stones?” asked Mizuki. “Like, rocks?”
“Ay,” said Hannah. “There are lots of forms. What you need most is a nice craggy rock that your hands’ll stick to. I have two, back in my room at the temple, and will need to transfer them over, or find some new ones.”
“You just pick up and then put down rocks?” asked Mizuki.
“Over and over,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s about as boring as it sounds, but I like to have somethin’ to occupy my body when doin’ prayers. If I do it here, it’ll be outside, where I can drop the stones without too much worry about breaks or dents.”
“I’m not sure that I’m going to do that either,” said Mizuki. “Though I guess I could try.”
“Lifting weights won’t really get you the kind of benefit I would think you’d want,” said Alfric. “You want to work the heart and lungs, rather than gain strength, not that it would hurt to have both.” He waved a hand. “But that’s neither here nor there, because we’re still in the middle of our postmortem, and there’s quite a bit more ground to cover.”
They talked about each fight in some detail. Isra found it particularly interesting to get the perspective of Verity, whose effects could be felt but not seen and whose own view of each fight involved carefully watching all the others to see what was needed in any given moment. It also gave her an excuse to look at Verity, which she’d found herself doing quite a bit over the past few days.
“I feel bad that we were rushing on my account,” said Verity. “But if you want a song of that strength, it probably is necessary.”
“I trust you to know your own music,” said Alfric. “But I do think that I want to take the next dungeon a little more slowly. I think going from fight to fight is preferable for a number of reasons, but the fights are physically and mentally exhausting, and if they’re difficult or prolonged, there’s a limit to how many of them I can do in a row before getting gassed. The balance there is how warmed up and ready to go I am, and battle rush certainly helps to get through things.” The term ‘battle rush’ was unfamiliar to Isra, but from context, she thought he might mean how the whole body felt electric in a moment of intense combat.