The four of us spent a few hours running through the sewers, before we exited from the same building we had entered from. Along the way, we almost ran into three other groups of people. The exceptional hearing Sallia and I possessed saved us from all of those potentially dangerous encounters - and also saved us from leaving behind any witnesses. Even if it probably didn’t matter either way, since we hadn’t had anywhere near the essence needed to wipe out all of the soldiers who had seen us, masking which direction we had escaped to was probably still somewhat useful.

When we exited the sewers, I was too exhausted to even clean up at the entrance. When we had first entered the sewers, I had intended to use some water to remove the foul stench of once we exited.

Sadly, I didn’t have the essence for it.

I quickly glanced back to the shelf where I had stolen the potions, and paused.

We had taken a lot of artifacts from the facility when we had rescued Felix. And I had also stolen a few guns. Surely, they were all worth something? But after a few moments, I realized how silly that idea was.

The artifacts I had stolen were probably valuable. The problem was that they were likely so valuable and unique that anyone caught possessing them would immediately be recognizable. I hadn’t exactly seen manifestation essence lightning bolts laying around in this world. Anyone who knew how to interact with essences would immediately realize something was wrong with them.

Which probably meant every Alchemist on the planet would realize something was up with the lightning bolts the moment it was near them. The lightning bolts were probably worth an insane amount of money, and I had no way at all of turning them into money without exposing us to a massive amount of risk. The fights with the soldiers had both solidified my confidence in our skills as a team, and had also given me a reality check on how powerful we actually were. We could definitely crush small groups of soldiers, but there were only so many bullets I could handle a second. A critical mass of soldiers could still kill us, even if a couple soldiers stood no chance against us. Even though I had the essence to handle dozens of people on my own, I didn’t have the brain capacity to do the same.

In other words, we needed to avoid exposing ourselves to the government. I might still be able to sell the guns we had looted, since they didn’t seem special, but everything else would need to stay within our group.

And since I was so unsure about the ability to sell the guns, I couldn’t return the potions I had stolen.

Sallia glanced at the potion shelf as well, but her eyes seemed to slide right over it before she continued looking around.

Had she noticed the potions were missing now?

On some level, it felt almost ridiculous to worry about my friends realizing I had stolen the potions. We had just killed several people inside of the base, and I didn’t even really feel bad about it. They had been trying to kill or seriously hurt us, and while I didn’t want to be trapped in my own emotions, so perhaps part of my brain still felt that we had been acting in self defense.

On the other hand, it was incredibly strange that I felt better about killing several people than I felt about stealing a few potions from someone I had never seen before. Maybe my sense of morals was more messed up as a result of joining the Market than I had thought it was. Being able to die and come back to life over and over again had definitely messed with my perception of what death meant, and had seemingly spilled over into my perception of what was ‘bad.’

I found myself starting to spiral into my own thoughts again, before Anise touched my arm.

“Miria?” she asked.

I blinked, and focused on my friends again. I sighed, and shook my head. I could think about morality and how I felt about all of this later. We needed to finish escaping first. Now wasn’t the time to relax.

I gave myself an exploratory sniff. The odor of the sewers hadn’t clung to me quite as badly as I had expected, but there was definitely a smell I wanted gone as fast as possible.

I looked around, and grimaced as I checked the buckets, before shaking my head. The buckets in this building were absolutely disgusting. I wasn’t willing to use them to rinse off at all.

I wondered if any of the potions that I had stolen were cleaning or odor-removing potions, but I had no idea what most potions were. I sighed.

“Here, I’ll splash all of us with some water, and we can just clean off using that,” I said, as I stuck a hand into my dress. I really would have preferred a cloth to use to help wipe down, but most of our clothes had the same awful reek that we did at this point. The only items that didn’t smell foul were the ones we had brought with us from the Market - most of which, thankfully, had self-cleaning functions.

“Sounds good to me,” said Felix, nodding at me. “Ah, I have the origami kit. It’s not exactly an ideal wash cloth, but there are worse options,” he said.

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I shrugged. It was better than nothing.

I quickly started splashing the four of us with water, and we started doing our best to wipe ourselves down using Felix’s endless sheets of paper as paper towels. It wasn’t perfect, but at the very least the smell of the sewers was much less noticeable than it had been before.

I eyed the origami papers that we had used. They looked rather soggy and messy now.

“Let’s find a place to throw these away,” I said.

I cracked open the door to the building, and confirmed that nobody was watching us. In fact, there didn’t seem to be many people nearby at all. We had maybe an hour before dawn, and it seemed like the earlier bustle of the area had vanished.

The four of us crept out of the building, found a nearby trash can, and tossed all of the paper origami into it. Then, we made our way through the red light district. After several minutes of walking, the four of us arrived at the edge of the red light district, where this region and the slums intersected with each other.

“So… I guess this is it for the night,” I said, hesitantly.

“I guess it is,” said Sallia, also hesitating.

“There’s nothing left to do,” said Anise, looking around us. For a moment, she seemed a bit sad.

I sighed. “We got what we came here to do. Felix is saved.” I paused for a moment. “Ah, your orb,” I said, before digging Anise’s manifestation orb out of my backpack. I handed it to her, and she grabbed it, before concentrating on the orb… and then frowned.

“Very odd,” she said, after a few moments. “I can channel manifestation essence into it, but it’s very different from the magic circles of my homeworld. And it doesn’t… feel right, either. It feels like it conflicts with this world, just a little bit.”

I nodded. “It’s probably using dimensional laws from another dimension or something. Let me know if you need help with it. I don’t know how much I can mess with the item using alteration essence, since there’s a chance I’ll accidentally break it in the process. But if you guide me, we might be able to make minor alterations to the orb once you figure out what it is and how it works. Hopefully it proves useful to you.”

Anise nodded. She grabbed her orb, and then quickly gave me a hug. “Stay safe, okay? Let me know if I can help you with anything, too. I know that I may not be as strong as you three, but I still have the best family situation this time. I can maybe sneak out some food or money if you need it.” she hesitated, looking at Felix for a moment. “Also, you said that you can permanently alter people’s face, right? When you get the time, could you change my hair color? I want it to be pink again.”

I smiled, and gently ruffled Anise’s hair. “Absolutely. I’ll spend a few days messing with Felix’s appearance to get him back to his proper appearance, and make sure that it’s hard for people to recognize him. After that, contact me over the friendship bracelet. We can meet up somewhere and start changing your hair, and then hang out afterwards. We should probably make the transition from strawberry blonde to pink gradual, so that your parents don’t just wonder why your hair color changed overnight. But we can definitely find a way to make your hair pinker and pinker over the next few years, until it’s back to normal.” I frowned. “I’m not sure if I can do anything about the eyes, though. Right now I have a hard time making that kind of alteration to delicate organs like eyes without messing something up.”

Anise frowned, but then shrugged. “I’ve survived without them this long, so I guess it’s not a big deal. I mostly liked the vision they added, but I would probably also be pretty distinctive if I had four eyes. Being recognized right now isn’t ideal.” She sighed.

I gave her a quick hug. “We’ll figure something out in the future. Maybe I can find a way to make invisible eyes, or something. Or maybe the Market has a solution. We can look into it later.”

Anise nodded.

Sallia gave me a hug right afterwards. “Felix is crashing at your place for now, huh? Let me know if your mother does anything that puts you two in danger. I’ll come immediately. And let’s meet up at Old Mo’s soon. I think he knows how to deal with stolen goods, so we should definitely sort something out with him..”

I froze. Sallia mentioning stolen goods reminded me of the potions I had swiped.

“All those guns won’t sell themselves,” she said, tightening her arms around me.

I relaxed and hugged her back. I also steadied my nerves, and tried resolve myself not to react so heavily to mentions of ‘stealing’ in the future. Even if my friends knew, I still felt like I had done what I had to. I just felt… guilty about it.

Then, Felix nodded at all three of us.

“Thank you for helping me,” he said. “It means a lot. Really. There’s no way I could have gotten out of there on my own. Things got a bit crazy towards the end, but we all got out of there intact.” He smiled at all of us. “You guys are the best friends a guy could have. Really.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Sallia. “You’d definitely help if one of us was in a bad spot, too. And if you didn’t Miria would chew you out until all of us died of old age.”

Felix laughed, and glanced at me. “True enough,” he said.

After that, we had one final group hug, and then broke apart. I started walking back towards my house, with Felix in tow. We still had a lot of things to organize and figure out, and I still had a bunch of System notifications that I hadn’t even looked at. I hadn’t even swapped Status Screens with Felix yet, since we just hadn’t had time yet.

But after fighting through dozens of people, killing Aplos, stealing several room’s worth of artifacts, and spending hours running through the sewers, I was exhausted. My System notifications could wait until tomorrow.

I quickly checked on my drugged-out mother, confirmed that she had gotten home safe, and then dragged Felix into my room.

He grimaced as he looked at the mold and yellowed walls.

“Sorry,” I said. “You take the bed for now - I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“You don’t need to sleep on the floor,” said Felix, as he rolled his eyes. “I’ll do it. Actually, how about I sleep in the closet? Just in case your mother wakes up and is lucid enough to realize something is wrong. It would be hard to explain if she found me.”

I paused. I felt bad about making Felix sleep in a cramped little closet where all of my ragged and undersized clothes were stored, but he was right.

“All right, fine,” I said. I pulled the blanket out of my tiny crib, handed it to Felix, and helped him get situated.

Then I collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep almost instantly.