“Nope,” he said. “Why do most people die out in the wilderness? Starvation and thirst. Our number one priority should be getting water bottles and food. I don’t think the test will last longer than a week, do you? So we need seven day’s worth of food and water each.”

“Ooh, you’re so clever, Max,” said Casey. “Next time I steal test secrets, I’m coming straight to you! I’ll never have to study again!”

Max laughed. Casey was clever and proactive enough—more so than any of the other students including himself—to steal information on the mid-term exam and yet she was still so lazy when it came to studying that she didn’t want to work even when she practically had the answers to the test in front of her.

“Oh,” said Casey, just realizing something else. “What about shelter? We might need that if it’s a survival test?”

Max nodded his head. “Yep, that’s the next most important thing in terms of survival. The only issue with shelter is I’m not sure how much shelter material we’ll be able to carry in our pouches.”

“Oh, that’s a good point,” said Casey. “We can still maybe get some tarpaulin?”

“Definitely,” said Max.

“Oi!” came a loud voice. “You kids going to shop! Or are you just going to stand there and scare away customers!”

Casey yelled back, “If anyone’s scaring customers, it’s you, you dope!”

Toto looked to be shaking his tiny gerbil fist in outrage alongside Casey.

The merchant grumbled and turned away.

Ironically, now that they did have their shopping list figured out, Casey refused to buy anything from the heckling man’s stall.

By the end of their shopping spree, they’d picked up a 24-pack of plastic water bottles each along with twenty-two protein bars each as well. It all fit into their pouches just fine.

“What can these things not hold?” asked Casey. “This is the most basic form of pouch and it doesn’t seem to fill up.”

Max considered this. During his training, he’d amassed a huge amount of monster cores and coins, which didn’t seem to overfill the pouch at all. He wondered whether it had less to do with weight but dimensions? Or was it only based on mana density? Or a combination of all three? Or was there no feasible limit on the amount of items, but rather on each individual items weight?

He remembered talking it over with Sakura a while back. “You can’t use it for holding pockets of air or large amounts of water...there are some very rare and expensive pouches that do that, but I wouldn’t worry about that for the time being.”