“Is…Is it really okay for us to just take these? Aren’t we supposed to like report things these things and hand them over to the authorities to decide what to do with them?” said Margot. Looking down at the items in her hand.

In Margot’s left hand was a dusty, rune covered, tome. Its cover was made of orrichalcum. Its pages were made of some form of anomalous gold alloy and imprinted with some ancient indecipherable language.

In Margot’s right hand was a weapon. It straddled the line of being either a short-sword or a long dagger. Though its blade was blunt covered in rust, and its hilt was made of chipped stone there was no mistaking the strong hum of magic issuing from the weapon.

“It’s fine. There’s a reason that most nations except for the ones lead by crackpot despots have adopted a sort of finder’s keepers approach. They want to promote and incentivize intrepid explorers like us.” I said. Patting Margot on the shoulder.

“R-, Really?”

“Yeah.” I said. Technically not lying. The real reason most nations didn’t bother trying to pass a law that would force most players and paranormal professionals who happened to find artefacts like the one’s Margot was holding, to hand them over, was because such a law would have ended up being a waste of the ink it was drafted with.

The law would either be nigh impossible to enforce because only an idiot would actually report their finds and give up something they’d paid in blood and sweat for because some silly law said they had. Or assuming a state took the prohibitively expensive measures necessary to enforce the law, the result would be a catastrophic cooling effect on magical goods trade and the sharing of magical knowledge.

The last thing any country wanted was to give the various secret orders and cabal more reasons to hoard their power and knowledge. Trying to push things further to force the groups to give up their treasures would likely result in the deaths of whichever heads of state dared to try. Worse yet it could lead to an exodus of those groups into friendlier lands.

Most nations adopted a formalized finders’ keeper law that incentivized the reporting of artefacts so that the state could offer to buy the item from the finder at market price. History in both this world and many others I’d visited had proven that being the one country that scared off all its wizards and adventurer-types was never a good thing.

“Oh, yeah...Mind handing those over.” I said.

“Huh?” said Margot.

“That knife is pretty much just rusted scrap at this point but its core is still good. As for the book, I’m pretty sure that’s not any language that’s being spoken in this day and age. If you hand them to me I can translate the book so that you can actually read it and I’ll turn the knife into something you can actually use.”

“Oh, okay. Sure. Here.” said Margot. Handing the two artifacts over.

As I took them into my hands, I couldn’t help pausing. The blatant trust I saw in the young woman’s eyes touched something inside me. It had been a while since someone trusted me like this, at the level I usually operated such unconditional trust was an extreme rarity. I decided I’d do an extra good job of refining the knife into something that Margot could make use of.

With our looted collected, and all the monsters killed, all Margot and I needed to do was to report our job completed. We didn’t have to go back to the player’s league to do so. Reporting a job was as simple as using the league app. Margot fished her smartphone out of her pocket. She went to part of the app menu that was for reporting a completed job. A small box appeared in front of us.

Margot’s eyes went wide but not too wide. She just sort of peaked behind her glasses at the box to use her true-sight on the spatial-temporal construct. I took a look as well. Impressed that this earth had already gone so far in blending magic and technology together till they could mold spells into their computer programming.

“I think we’re supposed to put the slime cores and trog ears into the box,” said Margot.

“Just the trog ears?” I said.

“Y-, Yeah...there’ll probably be another menu for handing over additional monster parts.” said Margot.

“Oh, that’s fine then.” I said.

“Hey...Do you mind if I keep some stuff?” I said.

“Stuff?” said Margot.

“You know...Like some of the slime cores and trog carcasses?” I said.

“Um, sure...Why though?” said Margot.

“I have use of them. And I can promise it’ll definitely be in your favor as well.” I said.

“I-, I guess it’ll be okay then. It’s not like the job says we ‘have’ to hand everything over we just won’t get paid for the things we don’t hand in.”

“That’s fine. We’ve killed far more than was expected anyway, so I doubt we’ll miss it.” I said. Mentally separating 100 slime cores and 120 trog carcasses from the rest we’d collected and sending them to a more specialized area within my subspace for my drones to analyze and process.

They looked similar to other such items I’d seen but I’d let the lab check them out first before I started making use of them.

The rest of the slime cores were sent into box. I also sent all of the trog ears into the box. Margot ended up being correct in surmising that we'd be able to hand in any other monster parts.

As soon as we’d submitted that main group of items and the box disappeared, another box appeared in its place for any other monster corpses, or monster parts we wanted to submit. I tossed all the trog corpses into that box.

“Oh!” said Margot. Jumping a little.

“What?”

“S-, sorry... I just got the receipt and our payout. I-, I didn’t think a job like this would pay this much.”

I looked over Margot’s shoulder and nodded in satisfaction. The job had originally paid $400 dollars for every ten slime cores. They paid $500 dollars for every ten pairs of trog ears. That was an average price of $40 dollars per slime core and $50 per pair of trog ears.

In total we’d killed over 230 slimes and 320 trogs. We’d handed over 130 slime cores and 200 pairs of trog ears. If I’d been thinking about it like a person who hadn’t once routinely wiped out entire nations on his own, I would have noticed that this was kind of a lot for just two people to do.

Now that I was seeing the numbers laid out, a part of me wondered if this would be a problem in the future. After tilting my head one direction and then the other, I clucked my tongue and decided it wouldn’t be, I decided I wouldn’t let it be.

There was no need for Margot and I to hide how powerful we were. We were nation-class already and would soon be world class. By the time anyone came looking for us to cause trouble we’d already be far too big and far too powerful for them to try and swallow. In the meantime, CS Corp was good about keeping player information out of the public’s hands. Even the national powers couldn’t force their hand.

“$15,200. That's not half-bad for a first paycheck.” I said.

“Uh-huh…” said Margot. Nodding.

Margot might have come from an affluent background but as the family unfavorite she’d never really had any money. She got an allowance but it was never much, since her family never wanted to give her the opportunity to save up and try to get out from under their thumb. This was the same reason she’d never been allowed to get anything that even remotely looked like a part time job.

Thus for Margot, this was probably the most money she’d ever had at one time. Naturally that wasn’t the case for me, but that didn’t mean I was looking down on the sum either. Even a single grain of rice was still food after all. According to current statistics, the average monthly cost of living for an average person living in the US was somewhere around $6000 dollars per month.

For mages and superhumans cost of living was closer to two or three times that of a normal person. As a result that $15,200 would disappear quickly, and that was assuming we still agreed not to split up the sum as we’d decided would be standard practice for us. Keeping the reward as an undivided lump sum because we needed the money as a nest egg.

Taxes would eat a huge chunk of it. Using aether or super powers meant needing three to five times the food of the average person, thus that would be another huge cost. Places that were more accommodating for those with occult powers and superhuman physiology were more pricey, so we could expect rent to be expense by default. Not to mention the increased cost of renter’s insurance for supers and mages.

Don’t even get me started about the ludicrous expense that came with pursuing magical knowledge and supplies on one’s own.

Long story short, if we expected to live comfortably, and intended to continue to progress as familiar and mage, then at the most that $15,200 would last us maybe two months. All the same, it was still a fairly decent starting point. It was better than starting with nothing, anyway.

“Wanna head back?” I said. Surfacing from the larger number of plans and considerations I’d been making during the ten seconds I’d been looking over Margot’s shoulder.

Margot nodded. Stepping away from me, her face looking strangely flushed.

“Y-, Yeah. A shower would be nice.” said Margot.