If Jessica were to look at herself in a mirror during a nightmare, the result would look pretty close to the thing staring down at her.

  The monster had gangly limbs and a gaunt face with black eye sockets and garnet sclera. Its face was vaguely feminine, with frayed black hair arrayed like a hood. Jessica gazed up in horror, but the muscles in her jaw clenched closed leaving her unable to scream.

  “You come from another world, we see…” it said in a deep yet undeniably feminine voice. Stranger, it spoke without opening its mouth. “We thought the gods were done with invaders, but perhaps not. What shall we do with you, hmm? Shall we turn you into a puddle, as you did the doe?”

  Jessica squeaked in fear. This was all her throat was capable of.

  “Kill things to gain experience. Gain experience to become stronger. Become stronger to dominate life. We could ask you what you wish to do with this power and you would tell us you wish to protect the weak or destroy evil. But the end result is the same. Adventurers cannot be permitted to roam freely or they will destroy everything.”

  She was going to die. Jessica had been here less than 24 hours and she was already going to die. What would happen if she died in a fantasy world? Could she look forward to another rebirth? Or would this time be permanent? Panic burst through her eyes in frozen terror.

  Unnaturally long fingers scooped into the ground and bore her upwards. At the tips of these fingers were jagged claws resting against her flesh like unmoving knives. The creature moved on long, sinuous legs, taking the five-foot wide creek below in a single stride. As Jessica was borne away, she suddenly remembered Sir Hayek calling her a morkal.

  “A type of monstress. Wicked eyes with dark circles, sharp teeth, long black hair like a corpse, supernatural strength and agility, claws…”

  Everything matched except the sharp teeth, and for all Jessica knew it might have those too. She was mortified not only at having been taken by surprise, but at failing to take Sir Hayek seriously. Hitherto she had operated under the unspoken assumption that she possessed privileged knowledge and that this world’s native inhabitants were ignorant side-characters. Meanwhile, she had ignored basic warnings.

  Tears began to leak from her frozen eyes.

  “We do not plan to kill you,” the morkal said, “but we cannot allow you to continue as an adventurer.”

  Was this morkal going to cut Jessica’s limbs off? Blind her? Brainwash her? She wanted desperately to ask but her mouth and throat would not move.

  Jessica felt the morkal take her uphill then stop at the underside of a rocky cliff. The morkal rolled a boulder out of the way like it was a stray frond and stooped to enter a cave. Magical lanterns along the ceiling flickered on.

  At the end of a short corridor was a circular chamber with a cauldron bubbling in the middle. In barrels and pots, on shelves and counters, drying on racks and curing in salt were what Jessica could only describe as ‘witch stuff.’ There were body parts from animals, organs in jars, alien flora, and fluorescent minerals, the last of which lent the cave a kaleidoscope glow.

  Inside the chamber, the morkal stretched to her full height, which Jessica guessed to be about seven feet. The chamber was ten or more high and thirty in diameter with space set aside for a bed and a kitchen table. There was also a little nook full of bookcases and a large, overstuffed reading chair.

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  Jessica also smelled methanol. And what might be an aldehyde.

  One odor peaked through, however: The cat pee smell of an amine. Between these three odors, her best guess was that the morkal was doing reductive amination in her cauldron. Reductive amination most likely meant drugs. Jessica’s paralyzed eyebrows rose a millimeter.

  The morkal set Jessica down gently on the reading chair where she slumped into its plush cushions. The monstress then proceeded to rifle through a shelf of vials.

  “As we said, we do not plan to kill you, but adventurers and their powers grow like tumors. This is a preventative measure,” the morkal said, plucking a muddy, rust-colored vial and uncorking it.

  Anxious energy swirled impotently through Jessica as she realized what came next.

  The morkal tilted Jessica’s head back with its knife-like claw and pried her jaw open. The potion it poured down her throat smelled like butyric acid and tasted as bad as it smelled. She would have retched if her body was capable.

  A minute passed as her heart pounded in fear. Right as she was beginning to calm down, a crawling, itching sensation traveled upward from the soles of her feet through the rest of her body until it felt like she was covered in prickling thorns. Her fingers and toes twitched and spasmed against the paralysis. Hisses and wheezes squeezed out of her lungs. Her muscles felt like they were walking around inside her.

  The morkal hunched over Jessica, staring into her eyes with its blood-red ones.

  “This will remove your ‘system’,” it said. “You will have no levels, no skills, no experience points, and no job. No progression. You will not become another rampaging bandit, transmuting living beings into magical powers. You will live as the rest of us do, as someone who cannot escape their entanglement with other living beings.”

  The itching crescendoed into the sensation of being boiled. Her tear ducts leaked mind-scorching pain into open air. The morkal said more, but the pain seized Jessica’s mind in a white hot fury and obliterated her senses. For how long this went on, she didn’t know. When it ended she was lying on her back in a clearing, afternoon sun beating down on her.

  The pain was gone. In fact, she felt like she’d just had a night’s sleep and a stretch. Her muscles, though sore from the morning’s work, were in good working order. She was on the verge of chalking the whole experience up to a weird nightmare except that when she tried to will the system menu up, it wouldn’t come. Nor did any vial of cartoonish acid appear in her hands.

  Tears of frustration beaded in Jessica’s eyes. She might have broken down then and there but she recalled the Serf family’s lives were hanging in the balance and she needed to be back before Sir Hayek. Getting to her aching knees, she began the hike back to the fields.

  At the cusp of the woods she saw, off in the distance, a carriage pulled by four horses rattling up the road. There was nowhere to hide now so she kept walking.

  Jessica’s trajectory intersected with the carriage right as it rattled through the fork between Glassbed and Barleyfield. The carriage was painted sage green and highlighted along its decorative contours with gilded leaf. Coal-black mares pulled it at breakneck speed. They were urged on by a driver in a velvet vest who glanced at Jessica as though trying to decide if she was a morkal.

  As the carriage passed, a whipping cloud of pink grabbed her gaze.

  Glancing out the open back window of the carriage was a pale, elven woman with cotton candy hair flecked with gold. A dark red scar marred half her face from forehead to chin and ran through a pink bandage obscuring her left eye.

  Apart from the scar, the elf’s face was supernaturally soft save her remaining eye which was as cold, hard, and blue as a submerged iceberg. That eye flicked for a moment in Jessica’s direction. In it she saw pure, undisguised contempt. The force of the expression took Jessica aback. What had she done to warrant it?

  In the split-second before the carriage moved on, Jessica saw the elven woman’s silver plate armor and jagged sapphire greatsword.

  The contempt was not because of anything Jessica did, she realized, but because she wasn’t important. Whoever this elf was, she was powerful and important. Maybe even an adventurer. Had this been a light novel of the sort Jessica did not waste her time reading, the elf was clearly plot relevant. Jessica, meanwhile, was not. The morkal had made sure of that.

  Then the moment passed and the carriage carried on.

  Jessica was still processing everything when a well of anger burst inside her. Its source came from everything from her faculty advisor and Galveston to Sir Hayek and the morkal who took away her best chance at escaping this world. But even more immediate than them was the pompous, self-important elf lady who sneered at her simply for being in her line of sight.

  “Screw you too, cotton-candy looking bitch!” she screamed, words echoing over the hills.