I Stopped Simping and the Heroines Lost Their Minds

Arthur and Felix filed into the smaller classroom with the rest of the students.

The room was nothing special, with rows of desks, a slate board, and a few faded dungeon maps hanging along one wall. Professor Vale was already at the front desk while people found their seats.

Arthur and Felix took seats near the middle. Leon was there too, talking to another student near the door. He joined their row once the room started quieting down.

Vale didn’t bother with a syllabus. He turned to the board and drew a rough map of a dungeon floor. It was just chalk lines—several corridors, a central chamber, an exit, and a marked route.

"A five-person guild party entered this dungeon several years ago," Vale said, facing the room. "They were properly equipped, above the recommended level, and had already cleared similar dungeons before. Two of them died. Why?"

That immediately got people talking.

One student suggested they had underestimated the monsters. Another guessed poor scouting. Someone near the window said it was healer failure.

Felix quietly muttered, "People always blame the healer first."

Arthur heard him but kept his eyes on the board.

Vale listened as the answers bounced around the room, occasionally asking someone to explain their reasoning. Then he added the next piece. "They didn’t get ambushed. Their equipment didn’t fail. Their healer was perfectly competent. They actually won every fight they started."

The guesses changed.

Leon raised his hand. "Exhaustion."

"They were tired," Vale agreed, "but not enough to explain what happened."

Felix spoke up. "Did the dungeon layout change behind them?"

"It hadn’t."

Arthur was paying more attention now. Whatever had killed them was starting to sound less like bad luck and more like a string of stupid decisions.

Vale picked up the chalk and traced the route on the board.

"The party entered here. Fought through several groups. Reached this chamber. Then they encountered monsters that retreated farther into the dungeon. The party followed. The monsters retreated again. They followed again."

Vale dragged the chalk line deeper across the map until the sheer stupidity of the route became obvious.

"Every fight was a win. And every win moved them farther from the exit. They spread farther apart. One of them got hurt. Their supplies were running low. But nobody wanted to turn around because they’d already come so far."

Vale tapped the board. "At what point did they make the wrong decision?"

The room split over it. Some blamed the first pursuit, others the injury. Someone near the back argued they should have turned around as soon as the healer’s supplies dropped below half.

Arthur eventually spoke. "When they stopped asking if pushing farther was worth it and started thinking they’d already come too far to turn back."

Vale looked at him. "Exactly."

He walked around to the front of his desk. "Adventurers do this constantly. They’ve already spent the money, already spent six hours inside, already taken injuries. Then someone sees a rare monster or decides the boss must be one room farther in. That is how a manageable dungeon turns into a body-recovery contract."

Felix leaned forward. "Retreating also gets harder the longer a formation has been stretched."

Vale looked at him. "Explain."

"You have to protect the rear while moving an injured party member," Felix said. "The farther you’ve stretched out, the harder it is to pull everyone back together."

Leon nodded. "And somebody has to call the retreat early. If you wait until everyone is exhausted, getting out becomes the problem."

Vale spent the next part of the lesson pulling apart different retreat decisions. A student near the front kept proposing neat textbook formations, and Vale kept finding ways to make them fall apart.

"Would you actually manage that while something is trying to eat you?" he asked after the third one.

A few people laughed.

Near the end of the hour, Vale gave them a short scenario.

"Four-person party. One injured member. Unknown number of monsters ahead. The exit is forty minutes behind you. You’ve already spent six hours inside. What do you do?"

Most of the class said retreat.

Vale changed one detail. "The target you’re contracted to kill is believed to be in the next chamber."

The room hesitated.

Arthur stopped spinning his pen.

Vale started packing up his folders. "For next class, each of you will choose one failed expedition report from the academy archive and identify the first decision you would have changed."

Felix let out a long sigh and shoved his pen into his bag.

Vale caught the reaction as he walked past their row. "The dead adventurers already did the practical portion for you."

Arthur, Felix, and Leon walked out together into the corridor.

"I hate reading," Felix grumbled.

Leon shrugged. "I actually liked the lesson."

Arthur looked at Felix. "You only have to read about people dying instead of personally testing the mistakes."

"You sound suspiciously like Vale already," Felix said.

They reached the main intersection where students from other classes were starting to pour out of the lecture halls. Alicia came down another staircase with several sword-track students, carrying a pair of heavy practice gloves.

Leon spotted her, and she joined them for a minute as the crowd moved.

"How was it?" Leon asked.

"Better than sitting in a lecture hall," Alicia said.

Arthur looked at the practice gloves. "We spent an hour studying how people died because they were too stubborn to go home."

Alicia gave a small nod. "Sounds like half the adventurers I’ve met."

Leon and Alicia eventually turned down the same corridor toward their next classes.

Arthur checked his schedule. He had about forty minutes before his next class. Felix had something elsewhere sooner, so they split up.

Arthur headed out to the courtyard food stand and bought a cold drink. The campus was still noisy from the first-day schedule chaos. Students were asking for directions, someone nearby was complaining that a classroom had changed buildings, and a professor was trying to force his way through a massive group blocking the stairs.

Arthur found a quiet spot on a low stone wall and checked his messages.

Emily: Weapons practical is bullshit.

Arthur: You haven’t even been there an hour.

Emily: Exactly.

Arthur finished his drink and walked to his next class.

Applied Mana Theory had a very different mix of students. Arthur recognized a few faces, but most were people he’d barely spoken to before. Cedric was sitting near the middle of the room.

Arthur took the empty seat next to him.

Cedric looked over when Arthur sat down. "You have this too?"

"Apparently."

"Didn’t expect mana theory to be on your schedule."

"I use mana."

Cedric couldn’t really argue with that.

Professor Mira Solenne walked in. Arthur recognized the name from yesterday’s schedule. She put her materials down, looked across the room, and started with a question.

"How many of you think having more mana automatically makes you better in a long fight?"

A little over half the room raised their hands.

She looked around. "Good. By the end of the week, some of you are going to stop answering that question the same way."

Mira turned to the board and started breaking down how much mana different actions actually wasted.

Arthur half-listened at first.

Then she moved into the cost of keeping abilities active for long periods.

Arthur looked up from his phone.

Mana Quiver wasn’t exactly cheap to keep running.