They came in low and quiet.
When they were close enough, Ren signed to Asuna — there — and raised his Tang Dao.
He pushed a thread of Magic Power into a wind element circle and released it.
The wind blade hit the bushes like a blade through paper.
Gyaa!
Green skin. Pointed faces. Squat, ugly, scrambling in four directions at once.
Goblins.
Asuna's reaction was physical and immediate — every hair on her arms standing up, her sword already clearing its scabbard as her expression went from interested to intensely unimpressed.
She crossed the distance to the one Ren's wind blade had clipped and removed its head with a single clean stroke.
Ren was already moving on the next one.
He tried the upward-launch slash he'd been practicing — the opener for the combination he was developing — and immediately discovered that Goblins were not convenient training dummies for this particular technique. The blade's edge was sharp enough that instead of launching his target, it simply carved through it.
"Huh." He stepped back from the results, mildly impressed by the Tang Dao's quality and slightly inconvenienced by the mess. "That's sharper than I thought."
He adjusted to a style more appropriate for the actual situation and worked through the remaining Goblins efficiently. The creatures recovered quickly once the ambush shock wore off, scrambling up rocks and hurling them with the cheerful malevolence of something that didn't quite understand it was losing badly.
Ren batted the incoming rocks out of the air with a series of blade flicks, found the motion genuinely satisfying, and pressed forward.
Less than a minute from start to finish.
Asuna circled the perimeter while Ren scanned the bodies. Clean kill, no additional motion in the surrounding area.
"Clear," she said.
"Clear," he agreed. He looked at the Goblins and immediately crouched down with the practical efficiency of someone who'd been taught exactly what to do in this situation. His Tang Dao located the first Goblin's Magic Stone in one probe.
A soft crack, a careful lever with the blade, and the stone came free — smooth, translucent, about the size of the last joint of a finger.
Asuna watched this operation with an expression caught between interest and profound reluctance.
They covered this in middle school, she reminded herself. I knew this was part of the job.
Ren worked through the rest quickly and collected the stones, then looked up at her. "Fifty-fifty."
"Keep them." She shook her head. The stones were coated in material she didn't want to think about too hard. She'd just taken a shower. "All yours."
"You sure?"
"Very sure."
"Alright." He pocketed them without ceremony. The practical math was favorable anyway — he needed magic stones for the Array he was planning. This was a start.
Asuna watched him with mild amusement. "You're planning to sell those?"
"No. I'm going to build a meditation Array in my apartment. Same type as the one on the third floor at school." He was already checking the quality with a quick Jianjigu assessment. Goblin-grade — low tier, but usable. "These are the core component. Everything else I can buy."
Asuna stared at him. "You already know how to set up a Magic Array?"
"I memorized the school's one when Jin-sensei activated it. Building it from scratch isn't complicated once you understand the underlying structure." He met her look. "It's really not that hard to learn."
"It's extremely hard to learn," Asuna said. "Array Masters are a specialist category. It takes years of study."
"Years if you don't have my talent." He said it without arrogance — purely as a statement of logistics.
Asuna thought about that. Then she thought about something else.
"If you can set up Magic Arrays — are you interested in earning some extra money?"
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