Jessica had no reason to side with the morkal. The monstress had paralyzed her, carried her like a sack of potatoes, and force fed her a potion to take away her magic. She should’ve hated her. However, due to a combination of the morkal having access to important chemicals, or reminding Jessica of herself, or simply because she thought Akuhara was a little shit, she didn’t want him to kill the morkal.

  “Supposedly there’s a morkal between here and Glassbed. Do you know where we can find it?” Akuhara asked.

  “Didn’t know we had one near here!” Jessica said, unconsciously adopting Rosemary’s homely accent.

  Akuhara squinted. Jessica swallowed. Her eyes went to the dual, garnet-colored blades at his side. They looked like a cosplay prop but she had no doubt they could carve her like a turkey.

  He had a progression system and a class and a bunch of special abilities. She had soap.

  “You sure? The quest got posted yesterday and the adventurer’s guild doesn’t make mistakes,” Akuhara said.

  Jessica shrugged. “Some knight accused me of being a morkal. Maybe that’s why?”

  “Hmm… You’re probably focused on your cozy farming, I suppose. We'll deal with the morkal so it doesn’t bother you.”

  Jessica’s heart pounded as she watched Akuhara and his harem set off for the wooded hills. She didn’t know to what extent the law protected her from being butchered by random adventurers, but her instincts told her Akuhara had no qualms about killing people if they stood in the way of his progress. Everything was telling her to leave him alone. But she needed the morkal’s chemistry materials.

  Was she really going to risk the ire of a sociopathic teenager with magical powers for some sulfuric acid?

  “Hey, John?”

  John startled out of his adventuring daydream. “Yeah?”

  “Can you take over my threshing for a bit? If anyone asks I gotta go check on a batch of lye,” she said.

  “Er… sure. Are you goin’ somewhere with that Akuhara fella?” he asked.

  “If all goes well? No.”

  Jessica tossed down her threshing flail and broke into a jog.

  Teaching everyone in Barleyfield how to avoid blinding themselves with sodium hydroxide had given her a deeper understanding of the local terrain.

  The hamlet and the nearby fields were nestled into the crook of the hills where she’d gone to grind experience. The western end cut off Barleyfield from the freeholders on the other side. Those freehold farms were fed by the same stream that ran through the hills. In other words, there was a way into the forest that didn’t use the main road.

  Crossing over to the freeholder side of the hills, she spotted the stream rolling down into the farms. It looked perfect for cooling her heels in the water, and frankly there was a part of her that wanted to do that instead of risking her life for a monster.

  She put that thought away and Jessica chugged upward into the hilly forest.

  With no clue about where to find the morkal, Jessica jogged along the ravine, hoping to make herself a nuisance. Mostly this just scared the birds and squirrels. By pure chance she stumbled on the outcropping where she hunted the doe. Unfortunately, she’d been too terrified to pay attention to where the morkal took her afterwards.

  “No, hold on. You do know, Stop panicking,” she said under her breath.

  The morkal had crossed the stream then gone uphill. The sun had been in her eyes and since she came in the afternoon that meant the cliff cave was to the northwest.

  Jessica followed the stream west until she found some crushed bushes and then climbed the hill. A minute later she found what had to be the morkal’s lair. For one, it had a boulder blocking a cave. For another, smoke was coming out of a tree trunk above the cliff.

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  She banged on the boulder and immediately felt silly when this produced the most pathetic tapping sound. The front door was out. Next stop was the tree-trunk chimney.

  The hill grew steep enough she had to pull herself up by tree roots and branches. Despite the urgent danger, climbing the tree was fun. The last time she climbed a tree had been the summer before going off to college, when she and her friends hung out at her neighborhood park after dark. A neighbor called the cops and her mother was furious and told her she needed to get serious about life.

  Well, she supposed, this was as serious as things got.

  Atop the cliff Jessica smelled a sharp, pungent stench in the air. It took her less than a second to place it: Hydrochloric acid.

  The closer she got to the tree stump, the stronger the scent. The stump wasn’t a chimney, she realized. It was a fume hood. And whatever the morkal was cooking required HcL. The trouble was getting close enough to get the morkal’s attention without huffing acid vapors.

  Jessica spotted a pine cone nearby and an idea came to her. It was an idea that could go extremely poorly by accidentally splashing acid on the morkal. But if the alternative was being hunted by an adventurer, the monstress would have to forgive her. So she picked up the pine cone and hurled it at the tree stump.

  It came up well short.

  “Oh no, come on!”

  With her bone thin arms, Jessica didn’t have the makings of a varsity pitcher. Especially not after threshing grain all morning. Hitting a three-foot wide hole from fifteen feet should not have been hard but she couldn’t muster the strength.

  To calm down she moved to the edge of the cliff where the vapors didn’t sting her nose and took a few deep breaths. As she breathed, she surveyed the rolling hills and trees. Pinpricks of purple, green, and red grabbed her eye. She could see the three women from earlier following behind a blob of edgy darkness.

  Images of the fox woman and her vacant-eyed smile circled in her head. There was no denying what her metal collar had been for, even if Jessica wasn’t aware of genre conventions. Which she wasn’t. Not even a little bit. But it was clear there were fates worse than serfdom in this fantasy world, whether or not the victims wore dopey little smiles.

  Jessica picked up another pine cone, pulled her wool gown over her face, charged to the chimney, and hurled the pine cone down. There was a splash and a yelp and she had to stop herself from shouting an apology.

  Wasting no time, Jessica hurled herself down the hill and made it to the cave entrance in time to watch the boulder roll out of the way. The morkal stepped into the sun, unfurling into her seven foot frame like a tent being pitched. Jessica’s entire thought process ground to a halt as she was reminded how frightening the gangly creature actually was.

  The morkal glared at her with furious red eyes. “You fool! Do you understand what you’ve done!?”

  “Y-Yes? I splashed you with muriatic acid,” Jessica said.

  The morkal frowned and held up a pale, thin limb burnt pink and red. “Worse. You have splashed us with spirits of salt and scalded our flesh. Do you seek revenge? You shall die for it.”

  “No wait! You’re in danger and I didn’t know how else to get you out! The Adventurer’s Guild posted a quest to kill you and now a party of adventurers are coming to take your head. You need to run!”

  “We do not believe you. Why should a reincarnated such as yourself warn one such as us? No, you lead us into a trap. We will not believe you. Flee now, or we will kill you.”

  “I’m helping you because you’re a fellow chemist! And quite frankly, I’d rather have a freaky monster woman running around than a psychopathic slave-owning teenager who wants to liquidate everyone into gold and experience.”

  The morkal did not have eyebrows, but the skin on its ashen forehead wrinkled upwards.

  “By chemist you mean alchemist? We are, but not as you understand it.”

  “I understand it a hell of a lot better than you think. What you were doing in your cave when you abducted me the other day, it was reductive amination, wasn’t it?” Jessica said, talking at a machine-gun pace. “You probably don’t call it that, but you’re combining ammonia compounds with aldehyde and— shit, what’s the old-timey term? Doesn’t matter! You’re using a reducing agent to create amine groups to uh— you’re making drugs!”

  The seven foot monstress squatted down to Jessica’s level. Her courage gave out and she let out a whimper. All memory of Akuhara and his adventuring harem was obliterated in a singular point of fear.

  “You use strange words, little alchemist girl, but you arrive at a correct conclusion. There are many things we make in our cave, but brews of the spirit are among them. You seem to know the arts. Perhaps we will—”

  The morkal was interrupted by a stifled yell. Both turned to John Serf standing atop the cliff. He raised a trembling finger.

  “G-Giant Jessica!”