"Don't worry about the guards," Sara said lightly as she finished checking another steel dagger and added it to the growing pile. Their small coffee table hadn't been enough to display all the loot, so several piles of items were scattered around the common area of their shared unit while Jun, Sara, and Cecilia sorted through things while Shiori loafed on the back of one of the couches.

  "Forest's Edge might be a decent sized city in the kingdom, but it’s still a frontier town full of adventurers with more coin and muscle than sense.” Cecilia paused as she held up a dirty necklace from the pile of unsorted loot. As Jun looked closer, her eyes widened as she recognized it as an iron IAG amulet like the ones Sara and Cecilia wore. “A couple of those thugs weren’t just criminals and gang members, but IAG members as well,” she said with a scowl, tossing the medallion into a pile reserved for junk.

  ”Shouldn’t we return that to the guild?” Jun asked, eyeing the medallion.

  “Only if you want to get thrown out of the guild and enslaved,” Sara said, shaking her head as she examined a sheathe of throwing knives. “Hmm… well balanced.” The elf set the set of knives on the side before looking at Jun. “IAG medallions are all enchanted to record the moment of an adventurer’s death like a painting. When you turn in an amulet, they check the record. And if the record shows you had a hand in killing the owner, they’ll just capture you and hand you over to the guard or issue their own Justice.”

  Jun stared at her roommates. Even though she’d just joined the IAG, she’d already read through the rule book they gave her several times, and their medallions being enchanted was news to her. “But the guide didn’t say anything about that kind of enchantment!”

  Cecilia laughed. “I said the same thing when Sara told me. The medallions don’t feel enchanted at all, even if you run mana through them like other enchanted items, they just feel mundane, but they are.”

  ”Your friends are right kitten, the enchantment is very well hidden, but all of your medallions and the ones you took off the thugs that were killed have one,” Shiori said privately as she jumped off the couch and padded over to the junk pile. As if she were just playing with something that caught her attention, Shiori batted at the iron medallion with her paw, hitting it in the center of the front design. "Hidden in the middle of the medallion is an engraved formation that's been lined with powdered monster core. It's a relatively weak enchantment that simply monitors the life of the owner and sends out a minute pulse of mana if it detects the loss of brain function. It won't work if the medallion is removed before the owner's death or if the medallion's center is destroyed."

  Jun stared at the medallion Shiori was playing with as a complicated range of emotions ran through her. Part of her was bothered that the IAG didn't tell them about the hidden enchantments when they joined, feeling like hiding a magical recording device in the medallion was a violation of her privacy, though from what Shiori had said it sounded really limited. It wasn't nearly as intrusive as the smart phone she'd carried around on Earth, but the realization that magical recording devices could exist was unpleasant. Another part of her had felt uneasy since she took all of the loot out of her bag so they could sort through it, each item evidence of the fight that ended with the deaths of six men and how they'd just dumped the bodies into the river. Guilt that they'd killed them ate at her, and finding out that three of them had been adventurers like herself and her friends made her feel like she'd betrayed the guild right after joining it.

  She didn't realize she was crying until Sara wrapped her arms around her in a hug. Jun squeezed her eyes shut as tears leaked from them, burying her face against Sara's chest as her emotions flooded out. The fear of fighting, the danger, the death. Her relief that she and her friends had escaped their fights with their lives. The feelings of accomplishment as each fight had pushed her skills and strength further, helping her grow. Her greed at looting their enemies and selling those valuable items for gold. All of it tinged by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

  She'd helped her friends kill humans, her spells helping to turn the tide of battle. Even if she only wanted to save her friends, to protect them, her actions had led to the deaths of six men. Six men who had family and friends. Hopes and dreams. Lives. Though she knew that the men had followed them, planning something dark and twisted, Even though they'd been protecting themselves, it didn't erase the guilt she felt over their deaths. Images of a man floated through her mind, crumpled among the roots of a willow tree, his neck twisted and blood trickling down his once familiar face twisted in accusation. "You did this to me! You're a murderer!" the face seemed to scream at her.

  "I... I'm a murderer..." she confessed quietly.

  Sara rubbed her back gently as a larger hand firmly gripped her shoulder. "You're not," Cecilia said with confidence, squeezing her shoulder in reassurance. "You didn't do any killing, and while your spells helped, Sara and I are the ones that struck the killing blows, not you."

  Two lightly callused fingers pressed on the underside of Jun's chin, lifting her face up from Sara's chest. Jun opened her eyes to see Sara giving her a small, soft smile. "Sometimes I forget how innocent you are Jun," she said softly. "When we found you in the forest, you looked lost and scared, but your spells saved us, and you were carrying a weapon most only hear about in legend. When you went along with our suggestion of coming to the Academy, of being an adventurer and learning how to fight, I—" Sara paused as her eyes flickered towards Cecilia for a moment and back to Jun. "—we," she corrected herself, "thought that whatever you went through in the Forest had hardened you, made you ready to handle this. Before you even started here, you had real battle experience and grew up in one of the most hostile places on the continent, even survived it with just you and your cute but admittedly abnormal cat. But despite all of that, you're still pure and innocent, almost like a tiger cub that's innocent, not realizing how fierce she might one day be. As wonderful and precious as your innocence is, in this moment, it's hurting you."

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  Sara turned to hug Jun from the side as Cecilia pressed in, sandwiching her between her roommates. The elven woman pointed at a small bag that had been tied shut and pushed off to the side. "That powder the men carried, the one we dosed the survivors with to knock them out. It's a drug called Blackout. It not only renders victims unconscious but also erases hours of memory. It's only used by spies, thieves, and slavers. Each man carried enough to knock out five Bronze ranked people, or one Silver ranked person."

  Cecilia pointed out a pair of short swords that had been set aside from the rest. "Those swords were the ones used by the two silver rankers we killed. They're both enchanted so that wounds hurt more and the pain lingers for days even with healing. Both Sara and I had to use emergency healing pills with a painkilling effect to keep going after getting cut by them. While you were in class Corin had to heal us both for almost an hour to get rid of the curse. He gained several personal and skill levels from it and he's a high iron healer."

  Sara pointed to the set of throwing knives she'd been looking over. "Those throwing knives are made out of a metal that has a weak paralytic effect when it reacts with blood. They're a single use item meant to paralyze lower-level people."

  "Those boots have a sound dampening enchantment."

  "Some of the coins in those purses are from the Empire of Flesh."

  "The cudgels are a design commonly used by slave lords of the Empire."

  "Those daggers are made with Crecian steel. Crecia used to be a slave city before the Republic of Mercy took it two years ago."

  Rubbing away the itchiness in her eyes from her tears, Jun looked with new eyes at all of the loot they'd been sorting through. Knowing a bit more about what she was looking at, her eyes moved from the cruel iron banded cudgels to the enchanted short swords. Weapons designed for pain and torture. The IAG medallions took on a different meaning. She hadn't betrayed the guild by helping her friends kill them. Instead, the guild had criminals amongst its members that she needed to be wary of.

  "These men were slavers. If we hadn't fought, we'd probably be fitted with control collars and already moved out of the city. Those men are not deserving of your tears Jun."

  Jun sniffled and nodded, feeling her guilt ease a bit, but replaced by embarrassment at her childish behavior. The violence and the killing still ate at her, but things weren't as simple as they'd been on Earth... or perhaps... things had never been that simple, she'd just been naive. One thing she knew for certain though was that she needed to be stronger. Her eyes lingered on the dangerous sack of drugs filled with smaller leather pouches of the powder. Each of the men had carried enough Blackout to knock her out five times, or Sara and Cecilia each once. If they'd managed to use it when the girls ambushed them, things would have gone far differently, and she wasn't sure if Shiori would've been strong enough to resist either.

  As her tears dried, the girls resumed sorting through everything, with Sara and Cecilia adding more context with every new, horrifying item. A bracelet meant to link with and control slave collars. Amulets with a foreign script Sara said came from the Empire of Flesh. More coins with images of chains and the same foreign script in silver and gold. More evidence that, despite Jun's feelings of guilt at ambushing them, these men had been monsters that her baser instincts said got what they deserved and regretted leaving some of them alive.

  Sorting through the loot from the thugs had taken a couple hours, but they'd come up with a plan to dispose of them. Sara and Cecilia would go with Gareth and the others to sell off most of the items, especially since it would be too suspicious if Jun was somehow linked to selling weapons suited for Iron and Silver ranks despite only being in bronze. The coins they would take to a money changer to be melted down and recast, taking a slight hit to the value of the coins but coming away with coins not linked to a gang slavers. While the other odds and ends and most of the jewelry Jun held onto for identification and later sale, but the IAG amulets Sara took to be destroyed.

  The next morning, Jun woke with a headache, the aftermath of her crying the night before. Chugging a canteen of water from her Void Bag helped chase the worst of it away, but most of the morning was spent feeling groggy. At least with her having tested out of the General Education courses for the year she could sleep in, and after a late breakfast she was feeling mostly normal. With some time to kill and feeling the new wealth in her bag from the weekend's events, Jun took the opportunity to finally check out the Academy's student store and finally bought her first real piece of gear. It wasn't anything special, just being a slight upgrade of a shield over what she used in training classes, but she finally had something she could use if she ever ran out of mana, and it had only cost her a handful of silver. Even better, the thick kite shaped shield, though it had straps for a harness so she could wear it on her back, fit into her Void Bag, the item magically shrinking as she experimentally pushed it in.

  As she moved through the exercises in her afternoon fitness and combat training courses, she noticed her increased stats, moving faster, with more stamina, and better able to track the movements of her sparring partners. Her substantial increase in strength didn't go unnoticed, with several of her classmates muttering about her sudden changes, including Melody and her friends who kept shooting dirty looks towards her when they thought she wasn't looking.

  Once class was over, Jun put them out of her mind as she rushed to the cafeteria, her new levels and stats allowing her to finally move with only a small amount of tiredness after the Sergeant's punishing training. Hurriedly eating a quick dinner, Jun met up with the rest of her team near the dormitories before they headed as a group back to the room Arwen had taken them to, but not before Jun swung back by her dormitory and picked up Shiori to come along. If their advisor tried anything strange this time around, she'd feel better knowing her Master was there.

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