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“I… Was checking the stuff in the ring.”

“Huh? Then why the scare?”

“It’s just… I hadn’t seen it before and it turns out I have a ten-” Ace jumped, closing Necro’s mouth before she could finish talking.

“Don’t say a word” She looked around attentively to check whether the rest was within hearing radius, before whispering into her ear.

“Don’t tell this to anyone! If they know, they’ll protest us sleeping together.” She let go of Necro’s mouth after saying that.

“Okay…” It goes without saying Necro got stupidly embarrassed. Her world started spinning for a second after hearing Ace’s unintentional confession.

‘She said she wants to sleep together with me…’

“What else do you have in there?”

“Hm… Some home stuffs, clothes, some ingredients and food and a couple of drinks.”

‘I probably shouldn’t tell her about the money just yet…’

“Hmmm… If you have alcohol you could sell it when we get in town for some change. Oh, right, do you wanna join us?”

“Huh? But aren’t you an established party?”

“So what? You can if you want… And if they protest we can go on just the two of us. They need me more than I need them to be honest…”

“The hell are you talking about Ace?” Mary overheard the last couple of sentences and decided to object. “While we do need you it’s not like you can just dump us right? We are a B-Rank party because of you, you know?”

“Haah…” Ace just gave a sigh of frustration once Mary started speaking.

‘There we go… She’s gonna start saying **** so I can’t say I’m important…’

“What do you mean?” Necro, on the other hand, was pretty curious.

“We are a B rank party… But both me and Bid are A rank… Hal was on the top of B rank and we were about to rise the party tier to A-rank. But we felt we needed a decent mage to help us if we ever wanted to pick actual A-rank missions. Unfortunately there are not that many mages around here and we stumbled across a D-Ranked newbie that was very promising a month ago.”

“Stop it!” Ace was pissed but Mary didn’t pay any heed.

“She had never even taken a single mission but was a very powerful mage and we decided to take her, dropping our chances of getting to A-Rank.”

“But adding her didn’t increase your power?” Necro was confused. Ace was far more powerful than either Hal or Mary. Only Bid looked to be skilled enough to be able to defeat her, albeit with a lot of trouble. Ace was probably at least Garnet based on the quality of her magic. In the worst case, if she had a very small mana pool, she’d be an Amethyst Magician like she was. That is, only in general elements of magic, Ignoring her previous life knowledge, the Dark Magic and the recently acquired artifacts… If we were to consider all of these, Necro was way up into the Ruby class already. Just the fact that she could cast dozens of magical formulae without a pre-drawn circle already threw her into the Sapphire-tier. She, however, had no way to know that.

“Of course it did, but the fact that she was a very recent addition to both the Guild and the party made them wary of her being a drag… So we can’t progress to A-Rank for a while…” Mary did not lie, that was the very reason, and one that made Ace very self-conscious.

“Shut up! I’m C-Rank already and I’ve been here for less than a month! And you know my power is at least that of a lesser A-Rank.”

“Yeah… But it doesn’t matter if you don’t actually have that rank. You know?” Mary’s rebuttal was flawless, making Ace sulk.

“But we do need you, don’t be a b̲i̲t̲c̲h̲ and go leaving us behind. I’m sure nobody would question adding Necro… So long as she doesn’t burn us to a crisp accidentally…”

“I’ll avoid doing that… Sorry… But I’m also not sure you’d allow me to join since I have a clear destination…”

“Why! I don’t want you to leave m-, us! I don’t want you to leave us.” Ace’s gaffe was pretty obvious, but Mary and Necro decided to pretend they didn’t hear what she said.

“My father asked me to go to Ungri and deliver a letter…”

‘Ungri? Why the hell would you be going there!?’ Ace was a little confused, hearing the name of the nation she recently escaped from.

“Ace, aren’t you from there? This is a great opportunity for me and the boys to get to know another country. What do you say?”

“I… I don’t care about going there…” Ace had a troubled expression but Mary went with whatever she said.

“Then it’s decided. We’ll be taking missions towards there until we part with Necro.”

“Is it really okay? We haven’t asked the others.” Necro thought they needed to consult Hal and Bid since they seemed to be leaders or something.

“The boys? Chill, they do whatever I tell them to. I’m the one here who needs the money the most so it’s natural I’m the one who decides which missions we take based on how much we’ll earn.”

“I guess so…” Necro was…. not sure that that was the right way to go about that but… you do you, right?

“What are you girls talking about?” Hal casually approached the girls, followed by Bid, they realized they were talking about something once they started to stay behind and decided to fall back and check on them.

“Ah, Necro’s joining us!” Ace said in a very leisure tone.