Where Banned Items Gather (1)
The Thief Club room was tucked away in the most remote corner of the academy.
On paper, their size and performance ranked somewhere in the middle or better—the problem was how relentlessly they broke school rules.
Not only did individual members rack up penalty points and disciplinary actions, but the club itself faced sanctions on a fairly regular basis.
Budget cuts were one such measure.
As proof, the interior of the club room was shabby beyond description. The sofas were leather with the hide peeling clean off, and the chairs looked as if they'd been scavenged from who knows where, every one of them different.
And on an equally scavenged old wooden table sat the President of the Thief Club.
She was a beauty with straight black hair spilling down to her waist and a tall, slender frame. Even sitting there doing nothing, face expressionless, an aura of charisma seemed to radiate off her naturally.
Maybe that came with the territory of running an entire club.
"We're here, sis……."
"……"
The club president silently beckoned with a crooked finger.
As Shin Byung-cheol shuffled nervously closer, a white hand shot out and seized his tea-leaf head in a merciless grip.
"Yeouch! Did I tell you to slice it or not?!"
"Agh! Sis! My hair! Not the hair!"
"It's important! I told you to quit screwing around and listen!"
"I'm sorry! Ow! Stop! I'm going bald!"
Every time the president tightened her grip, Shin Byung-cheol was dragged pitifully around the room.
By the time the little farce ended, a good handful of hair—no, scalp hair—had apparently been extracted.
The president finally released his head, capping it off with a smack to the back of his skull that rang out with a satisfying thwack.
"You're an eyesore. Get out."
"Yes ma'am. Very sorry."
Shin Byung-cheol beat a retreat while rubbing his aching head, leaving the two of us alone.
When the president's gaze shifted to me, I promptly bowed.
"Pleased to meet you, sunbae-nim."
"I'm Dang Gyu-young. You probably already knew, but I'm the president here."
"Kim Ho."
"Let's get straight to the goods."
So she was the extremely blunt type.
From my end, too, skipping the pointless pleasantries and getting to business right after introductions suited me far better than exchanging words neither of us meant.
I pulled the Life Cube from my inventory and opened it up for her to see.
Dang Gyu-young stared at the banned items packed in tight to bursting, then drew one out to inspect it.
"……It was real. Honestly, I was only half-believing you until just now. An item that fools the Ban Wave? No matter how I hear it, it sounds like a lie."
"The world is wide, and there are a lot of items out there."
"Apparently so. I thought I'd handled every kind of item there was, but I've still got a long way to go. Hey, can I just steal this?"
Her eyes carried a mix of maybe twenty percent joke and eighty percent seriousness.
As president of the Thief Club, lifting a single item off a freshman would be child's play if she put her mind to it.
Of course, I'd anticipated this possibility too.
"You'd be caught in no time. It's a magitech item, believe it or not."
"What?"
Dang Gyu-young examined the cube far more closely. Covered as it was in all manner of plants and flowers, a casual glance would never give it away—but here and there, the traces of a 10x10x10 blueprint peeked through.
"Well, what do you know. It really is magitech. I've never seen anything like it. Who made it?"
"I did."
"Hey, you've got good hands?"
And with that, she gave up on the idea, muttering something about how that would've been anticlimactic.
The anti-theft measures on magitech items were on a whole different level of complexity from ordinary enchanted ones. They could be woven deep into the item at the crafting stage, making them both hard to find and hard to circumvent.
Granted, I'd never actually installed such a thing—but the bluff alone was deterrent enough.
If my claim turned out to be true and she tripped a tracker, she'd be well and truly trapped with nowhere to run.
"Tch. Anyway, you came to me directly instead of handing this off to Byung-cheol because you want something, right?"
"You read me exactly."
"You can see what state this place is in—we're a little broke. If we got robbed of this too, we'd be in the red for the month."
So, she claimed, there wasn't much she could offer in return.
I knew it was an act of poverty, but I chose not to poke at it. I hadn't come seeking material compensation anyway.
"It'll be something you're more than capable of granting, sunbae-nim."
"Go on. What is it?"
I let the moment hang for a beat before speaking.
"The Temporary Confiscation Storage."
"……!"
The instant those words left my mouth, Dang Gyu-young's face froze over.
The shadow at her feet writhed, and my own shadow crawled up my legs of its own accord. The presence of Dang Gyu-young, standing right in front of me, began to fade at the edges.
A situation where combat could erupt at any moment.
"Let's talk it out, sunbae-nim. You're scaring me."
"You're scary for someone whose expression hasn't changed an inch. Did the Disciplinary Committee send you?"
"Nope. We don't get along."
"Then who?"
"I came on my own."
"And you expect me to just believe that?"
"Why would I tell a lie that unravels in five minutes?"
After all, a little digging would expose anyone's affiliation without much effort. Telling a petty lie like that would only cost more than it gained.
Dang Gyu-young stared holes through me, apparently probing my true intentions, while I met her gaze with perfect calm.
Before long, the writhing shadows returned to normal.
"……Hah. Fine. For now I'll take it that you're unaffiliated. How did you find out about the storage?"
"I did some reasoning of my own."
Actually, it wasn't reasoning—it was experience.
A single Ban Wave netted hundreds of banned items confiscated from the entire student body. And did anyone think that was the only Ban Wave of the semester?
Absolutely not.
It fired up again just when everyone was forgetting, to keep the students on their toes.
So where did all those mountains of banned items go?
A confiscation vault existed.
Even I, the ultimate veteran of veterans, didn't know exactly where it was—it changed locations constantly. And even if you did find it, cracking it was practically impossible.
For instance, some principals kept a vast subspace as their vault and carried it on their person. That meant you'd have to defeat the Principal—i.e., the Hero of the previous generation—to get inside. Ironically, anyone with specs capable of that had no use for the items within.
But that was the final vault.
Before the banned items were ferried there, there was a place where they underwent a brief period of sorting and verification.
That place was the Temporary Confiscation Storage.
"You're probably moving on it tonight or tomorrow night, I'd guess."
Once this weekend passed, the storage would be swept clean. Whether they could raid it before then was the make-or-break question for the Thief Club right now. Sunday risked being too late, so Friday or Saturday night would be ideal.
The moment my objective became unmistakably clear, Dang Gyu-young's expression turned incredulous.
"So you're saying…… you want to ride for free?"
"Not free. I'm paying my fare."
The fare, naturally, being the banned items I'd just saved for them.
Perhaps because I was being so brazenly unashamed about it, Dang Gyu-young let out a hollow laugh.
She flipped the Life Cube upside down, dumped its contents out in a clattering heap, and handed the empty cube back to me.
"Junior. Kim Ho. Honestly, I'm grateful you got these for us, and I'm willing to pay fair compensation. But this deal is a loss for us. Do you have any idea how much work we've put in? You want to just lay a single spoon on a table someone else set? Not happening."
"I get the feeling, sure."
"So drop the storage and name something else. Something else."
Even adding up the full value of every banned item I'd saved didn't buy a seat on the bus to the Temporary Confiscation Storage. For the Thief Club, that place was nothing short of a treasure trove.
Dang Gyu-young probably assumed I'd settle for something else at this point—but I had zero intention of changing my demand.
Instead, I would simply add one more ingredient to the scale.
I opened my mouth.
"The storage. The Disciplinary Committee will be guarding it, won't they?"
"You even have to ask. It's an ironclad defense."
The Ban Wave had fired countless times before I ever enrolled. Each and every time, the Thief Club had cast greedy eyes on the storage, and each and every time, the Student Disciplinary Committee had mobilized its full strength to defend it.
This time would be no different.
"Getting in will be hard enough, but getting out after the job's done will be harder."
"Strictly speaking, the latter's the harder one."
Ideally, you'd slip in unnoticed and slip out unnoticed, but the odds of getting caught in the Disciplinary Committee's watchful eyes along the way were considerable.
The Disciplinary Committee was the most powerful force at Dragon Slayer Academy. A few heavyweights among the Four Major Factions might stand a chance, but the Thief Club was not an opponent they could tangle with. Fight back and you'd be overwhelmed in seconds; get caught fleeing and it was game over—you'd be forced to spit back up every item you'd risked life and limb to carry out.
And the terms I was about to propose were tied to exactly this problem.
"What if I could solve the latter for you?"
"Hey, say something that makes sense. Even we can't do that, and you…… wait a second."
When I casually cracked the Life Cube open and shut, Dang Gyu-young's eyes went wide.
"……Right. Why didn't I think of that? Just pack in the important stuff and……"
"You could walk out with it, guaranteed."
A hidden piece that slipped past both the Ban Wave and the crystal orb. Even if every single Thief Club raider got captured without exception, anything stowed inside the cube would never be detected.
There's no way she can refuse this one.
Granted, I understood Dang Gyu-young's position too. This was a project she'd poured blood, sweat, and tears into preparing, so some outsider hopping aboard at the final stage would stick in her craw.
But it would stick in her craw far more for that project to collapse at the very end. Even more so to walk away with nothing at all.
If she accepted my proposal, a minimum return was guaranteed—and not just anything, but only the items she wanted, the ones with the highest value even in the vault.
Dang Gyu-young looked just about ready to come over to my side. Even so, clearly dissatisfied with how things had played out, she lobbed a counteroffer my way.
"Hey, what if you just hand over that box—okay, fine, just lend it to me. Just for one night."
"No thanks."
"Oh, come on! If there's good stuff in there, you can just bring it to me after!"
"I have to see it and pick it out myself."
What counted as a good item by her standards and by mine were two very different things. I needed to judge with my own eyes what would actually be useful to me.
"So. Will you do it or not?"
"……"
"If you really hate it, I suppose there's nothing to be done."
"……Fine! Fine, I'll do it! Happy now?!"
"Then we're traveling together."
"Tch."
And so Dang Gyu-young accepted the deal, albeit through gritted teeth.
She glowered at me sullenly for a while before asking,
"Hey, be honest with me. You've done this before, haven't you? Like, a year's worth of before."
"How would I even do a year's worth here? Slip up on your grades and you're expelled on the spot."
"I've got good instincts, that's all. You just don't look like a freshman, no matter how I look at you."
"You got me. And this is just between us, sunbae-nim, but I've actually graduated over two hundred times."
"……Ugh. I should've just kept my mouth shut."
Dang Gyu-young's face soured. Shaking her head, she rose from her seat.
I was telling the truth, though.
[Next chapter — The Support Ate it All]