After the quick introductions, the Spanish Speaker's Guild receptionist allowed the three of us newcomers to mingle among ourselves. We played a few board games, including a small tournament of Connect Four. We helped ourselves to coffee and cookies from the guild lounge. All the time, I acted out my part as the shy, non-talkative mage girl. In the late afternoon, we three decided to head out.

"Adios Maria," El Luchador Loco bid me farewell. I waved goodbye back at him.

I had been so nervous through the day, but by the end of it, I almost…enjoyed myself?

I continued to hang out at the Spanish Speaker’s Guild for the rest of the week. On Wednesday a guild member had their birthday, so we helped decorate, and someone brought cake to share. On Friday, a senior guild member approached me. He introduced himself and asked about my story. I told him that things hadn’t been easy. He told me that things would never be easy here. He talked of his cousin, who had died in the Summer Challenge, and how his heart still hurt over the loss. He told me he was doing his best to be grateful for those he still had. I comforted him with a hug.

The following Monday, I returned to the Combat Institute, to give an oral report to Tanin.

“The guild has about 80 members,” I informed. “But only about thirty are active.”

“Go on,” he said.

“They have a side room with board games. And they have another room with snacks and coffee.”

“…Alright?”

“They’re planning on starting a poetry club next month, and so far four people have expressed interest. They're trying to compile, like, a collection of Neruda poems from memory.”

“Cut to the chase, girl,” Tanin said. “What did you learn that’s actually important?”

"The poetry club's a pretty big deal. People are pretty hyped about it, you know? I mean, the whole Spanish-Speaker's Guild is more of a social guild, I guess.”

“Wait, what?”

“They’re mostly just there for the community. And to hang out. Most of them have jobs from other guilds."

“Oh, well,” Tanin said. “That’s mildly embarrassing on our end. I guess that’s the end of your mission then.”

I pursed my lips. How anticlimactic.

"You're still gonna employ me…right?" I checked.

"Yeah, of course. I'm not that much of a douchebag."

Tanin brought me to the Institute cafeteria, where he bought us coffee. We sat down to chat about my next steps.

He leaned an elbow on the table. "So. Besides Spanish, what else are you good at?"

"I'm a decent sniper. I'm decent at magecraft. Right now I have 30 Arcana Points, without any boosts from potions or items. So I could join the Research Division."

"Oh. That's not bad."

"My ring allows me to purify water. That's why I almost joined the Cleaner's Guild, before you took me."

"Alright, good. You'll be our janitor for now."

"...Eeh? What about the Research Division?"

"Takes too long to get in. If you wanna get paid now, janitor it is."

Starting life in another world: How I learned magic and became a guild janitor.

Hei, as my spying correspondent, also ended his mission. He told Tanin he'd like to join the Expedition Division. Should I tell him about how much of a prick their headmaster, Ms. Fink, was?

"Are you sure?" Tanin asked Hei. "Just between the two of us, it's not a place for everyone."

The Expedition Division had the lowest survival rate out of any group within the Institute, Tanin explained. Their job was to collect information during challenges. Which meant diverting attention away from actually surviving and winning. Some of them let themselves get hit by enemy attacks, just to figure out how much damage they did.

"In return, they get all the glory," Tanin said. "The brave, brave heroes that sacrificed themselves for progress."

"Let's not join them," I pleaded with Hei. He nodded.

"Of course," he said. "Glory won't bring us back to our world."

Maybe that explained why Ms. Fink had a stick up her ass. She had probably lost more comrades than anyone else in town.

"In that case," Hei said, "I'll be a janitor too."

His decision was a strategic one, it turned out. Being janitors allowed us to scout out stuff that happened around the Institute. First day on the job, he planned his schedule so that he cleaned through the Combat Division's courtyard right as they held their weekly duels. I joined him in observing them. An axe-wielding warrior was squaring off against a wind mage while a dozen more combatants watched on the side.

I gave Hei a playful nudge. "Think you could take them on?"

"Sure, I can beat any one of these."

I chuckled. "Shut up."

He continued to stare at them without blinking, as though he were trying to memorize every detail of the battle.

Saber, meanwhile, straight up got a job as a Doctor of Strategic Studies. And in 9 months, she could apply to become a Professor of Strategic Studies. Lucky. Or at least I thought so, until I heard how much her supervising professor overworked her. Heck, he'd even make her come in during weekends to help research existing literature. Poor Saber nonetheless defended her professor.

"It's not his fault," she told me. "He's also getting pressured by his higher-ups. And that includes the Headmaster of Combat."

"How's your headmaster?" I asked.

"I don't know. He's always wearing an iron mask, and doesn't talk with us commoners. We barely know what's going on in the department. He just doesn't communicate."

And so, we all settled into our work routines, Monday through Friday. In the evenings, Saber would continue to drill us on MOBA concepts in preparation for the next challenge. She'd spar with us, and teach us theories on how to play the challenges properly.

"Suppose the enemy team has high burst damage but low sustained damage," Saber quizzed me late one night in the comfort of my bedroom. "What stats should you buy? What type of potions?"

I had already tucked myself into bed, though I was still awake. "Hmm…Arcana Points," I replied.

"What else?"

"I think that's about it."

Saber whimpered in resignation.

No, I couldn't just buy Arcana Points and nothing else, she explained. Burst damage countered squishy mages like me, so I'd need to consider getting a Potion of Max HP, to raise my HP by 200 and re-counter the burst damage.

Saber, in her baby-blue pajamas, scribbled on a blank page in our shared team notebook.

Burst > Squishy

Durability > Burst

Sustained damage > Durability

"And sustained damage dealers are usually squishy," Saber said, "so they're countered by burst. Some players will have both sustained damage and durability, but they're usually melee and lack mobility, so they're countered by range. And mobility counters range."

"Oh wait yeah," I suddenly realized. "It's just like in video games. It's like these challenges are modeled after vide– oh. Wait."

Saber gave me a slow, deep nod. That was probably her polite way of saying, took you long enough to realize.

"Shut up," I mumbled.

"I didn't say anything..."

I had known for weeks, if not months by now, that the challenges were based on MOBA games, which I didn't play. But I hadn't made the connection that knowledge from other games could be used for these challenges. I played a decent amount of RPGs, and some battle strategy games, and the whole time I hadn't thought to apply the principles from them to our challenges. At least, not to this degree.

"What if a player is durable, has sustained damage, and is also mobile?" I asked Saber. "What counters that?"

"Nothing probably," Saber said. "That sounds overpowered. They might have specific weaknesses to exploit, but usually those sorts of characters don't have direct counters."

I wish I knew that when I asked the distant lady's voice for powers, so I could've asked her to make me a durable-mobile-sustained-damage-dealer. Instead, I just got water and ice manipulation. Which wasn't shabby, but I really missed out on what could've been.

Sometime during the day, when Hei and I finished our cleaning jobs early, we'd go together to the Combat Institute's library. I had imagined it to be a big library, like something fitting for a prestigious university, but no. Though the room itself equaled a basketball court in size, it had scarcely any books. In total I saw about…eight shelves? And all of them were sparsely stacked.

"Books are hard to make," a librarian gentleman explained to us. "Our town only has one printing press. The engineers were working on a second one, but the chief engineer passed away during a challenge."

He recommended to us The Silver Player's Guide to Challenges, one of the most popular books around. It had only forty pages, but contained some of the most important info we needed to know. Hei and I checked out two copies, both to read ourselves and share with our teammates.

We read that your progress toward Gold depended on both the number of games you win, and also how hard you win them. For example, if we were to always win with all five teammates surviving, we could get to Gold in, say, four seasonal challenges. But if we only won with two survivors, we'd hardly get closer to Gold at all. You could technically get to Gold in as soon as a month, but that required participating in the seasonal challenge multiple times. And that was because the seasonal challenges occurred over a period of 20 days. So every day, only 5% of the player-base would be whisked away into arenas to participate. The loophole was to join a team that went early, win, quit the team, then join another team that went later, and so on. This way, a player could play over ten games a season. But the book harshly cautioned against such tactics, since more often than not these tricks simply meant a swifter death for those that tried them.

The book also detailed 11 different robot types that could potentially show up as enemy players in the challenges. The two Hei and I faced in our Bronze challenge, the Mace-bot and the Archer, were listed. Apparently the Archer had an ability that raised its attack speed, but I just never noticed.

According to Tanin, since the publication of this book, four more robot types had been cataloged by the Expedition Division, for a total of 15.

Soon, the days grew colder, and I began to button up my coat more. Trees' leaves blushed dull gold, and the farmers of Ring Three reaped their harvests. Fall had arrived, and with it, 20 days of death games.

I checked page 50 of my team notebook, where announcements were written.

CHALLENGE BEGINS IN 1 DAY

YOUR TEAM'S SLOT: DAY 2

Our team took the day before our challenge off from work. We reviewed our strategies, reminded ourselves to read the shared team notebooks, and rested. And we had a will-writing party, which culminated in everyone sealing their will inside an envelope, which we then gathered and stored together in a kitchen cabinet.

All of us went to bed early, including Mr. Atlas who technically needed no sleep.

And when we awoke to a bright flash of light, we found ourselves back in the arena, inside the walls of our castle-like base.