John wasn’t smart, so the best idea he could come up with to make it in time was a pure, blind sprint. Horses would get there faster. Local guards would know the way. But if by some chance they took a second longer than him, it could make the difference. There was no room for doubt or fear. Either he was on time, or he wasn’t.

  “Plaza! Where’s the plaza!?” he screamed.

  Confused locals gestured in several directions. He chose the direction the greatest number of hands were pointing in and bolted, not wasting a single step. Noise from a distant crowd reached his ears. Daring alleyways and side-streets and sprinting through gardens, John beelined for the crowd. On his shoulder a toad clung for dear life.

  Somewhere, a clock struck six.

  John leapt a flight of stairs down an alley and the plaza came into view. Echoes of the final ring hung in the air. The Piazza del Mar in all its expansive glory lay before him like a vision of an afterlife, but the wooden platform glowing with the first embers of a conflagration shook him free of the spell.

  “Move! Outta my way!” he shouted with every ounce of rudeness he had in him.

  Heedless of the tutting and grumbling, he plunged onward, shoving and jostling his way to the platform. Above and ahead he could see Jessica thrashing in a panic as flames rose and swallowed more and more of the piled fuel on its journey toward her feet. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his tunic.

  “Oi! You can see from the back, brat!”

  He turned to see a young man in light armor surrounded by three exotic women. An adventurer. A week ago John would’ve been paralyzed in awe at the reincarnated man and his harem of women, the peak example of what one could achieve with the luck of being reincarnated. But with his home burned, adventures had lost some of their lustre.

  “Let me go! I bear orders from Queen Samara to free Jessica!”

  “Yeah, I bet. Get to the back of the crowd!” the adventurer said, yanking him back.

  John struggled, but whatever magic made this teenager so strong rendered his attempts futile. Something shifted in the satchel behind him. In his peripheral vision he watched Morkal drag a bottle out of the pack, brace it against his shoulder with her hind legs, uncork it, and kick the opened bottle at the adventurer’s hand. Colorless liquid splashed across his arm.

  “What did you— agh! What the hell is this shit!?”

  He tore his hand away and John wasted no time throwing himself back into the crowd as Toad!Morkal clung to his shirt collar, legs fluttering behind.

  “Kei-sama are you okay!?”

  “Someone stop him!”

  John’s senses faded to a blur. The crowd noise became a blanket of cheering, shouting, and booing. He heard the knight say something about executing adventurers but his stubborn, dumb mind only had space for one thing: Jessica and the armored knight standing between John and her.

  With strength given to him by a decade of tilling, sowing, weeding, reaping, threshing, and carrying, John vaulted onto the platform.

  “By order Her Royal Highness, Queen Samara, this execution’s gotta stop!” he announced, wobbling on his feet.

  The knight who had forced Jessica to become a serf and threatened to execute John and his family snarled at him. “Off, peasant! Unless you want to be added to the pyre.”

  The platform trembled with each mailed step he took toward John. Behind, Jessica was looking on with astonishment.

  “John, no! Run!” she screamed.

  From John’s perspective, abandoning her was as ridiculous as asking him to cut off a pinkie finger. The loss of Barleyfield’s homes and farms were superficial injuries. But if a single one of its inhabitants was killed, only then would the little hamlet called Barleyfield be mutilated.

  “Free her or I’ll do the queen’s justice myself!” John declared.

  The knight shook his head. “Delusional. Absolutely delusional. She had no problem setting your people to work on her toxic chemicals and you defend her? She wouldn’t show you the same courtesy.”

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  “We chose those risks! We didn’t choose to have our homes burned down, but I don’t see the adventurers who did it up here!”

  Fury outshone the embers flickering in Sir Hayek’s eyes. “Shut up, boy! You serfs haven’t a damn clue about anything but scrabbling in the dirt.”

  As the knight drew his sword, Jessica let out a panicked yelp. The flames were up to her ankles now but John could see no way around without catching a sword through his gut.

  Four pads scurried along his scalp. As if ordering a cavalry charge, Morkal pointed forward with one arm.

  John swallowed his fear. “I trust ya, Morkal!”

  He tilted at the knight. The man readied to take his head off. Morkal leapt.

  A glass bottle tucked between her springing legs glowed golden against the fire and shattered against the knight’s thrusting arm. The sword missed John by a hair’s breadth and he kept running.

  John heard Morkal’s pained warbling as her toad body was drenched in acid.

  “I’ll pour that in your eyes before I burn you!” The knight screamed, flailing at the straps of his gauntlets to throw them off.

  John sprinted up the burning pyre, oblivious to the rising heat.

  “Bottom ropes first!” Jessica screamed.

  With no other implement to cut with, John grabbed a healing potion and smashed it against the stake and with the glass sawed at the ropes around Jessica’s ankles. He only just had them free before a hand wrenched him off the pyre. Something in his ribcage cracked as he hit the platform.

  John watched Jessica plant both her feet on the stake and shimmie up the stake to avoid the fire. Her progress was stopped by a knife pressed into her chin, tilting her jaw upwards.

  The knight turned to John. “You reach into that pack of yours, you try throwing one of your alchemy experiments again, boy, and I give her a second mouth.”

  Wheezing, John raised his hands in surrender and shrugged off the satchel. In his dazed state he forgot to close it and the bottles spilled onto the platform. A few feet away, a pink-haired elven lady stepped onto the platform and came forward to drag John off. As she neared, John kicked at a bottle labeled ‘Blasting Oil’ and sent it into the fire.

  In his head, John imagined the oil would be something like a firecracker. Just enough to distract the two attackers to buy time for the queen’s attendants to clear things up.

  At this task, it succeeded.

  However, the strange alchemical mixture also succeeded at blowing the platform apart, turning its wooden slants and burning tinder into an enormous, stage-sized grenade. The crowd screamed and ran. Amidst the pandemonium John lay dazed with his ears ringing. His vision blurred. His nose full of burning wood and sulfur.

  Picking his head up, he found himself on the ground underneath the collapsed platform. What had been the pyre was now a starfield of scattered, burning wood. Jessica lay a few feet away. One side of her body was covered in ash and splinters but she seemed otherwise fine. John moved to stand.

  Metal ground against stone. The knight staggered to his feet, delirious with rage and missing a right arm. This last fact was only a minor nuisance to him as he brandished a plank of burning wood in his remaining hand.

  John lurched between Jessica and Sir Hayek. “Stop! Don’t you—”

  A boot kicked out his knee and pinned him to the ground by the back of his head.

  “Enough yapping. You’re ruining the show,” the pink-haired elf hissed.

  No matter how he wriggled, John couldn’t escape. He screamed for Jessica to get up and run. Whether she heard him or not, Jessica looked up in time to scramble on her hands and knees out of the way of the knight’s clumsy swing.

  “No more alchemy now!” Hayek laughed, swinging again and sending embers flying from the burning wood. “What are you gonna do now, adventurer girl? No magic. No alchemy. You’re helpless! Same as Meli was!”

  Every attempt Jessica made to get to her feet was stopped by the flaming wood. On the next swing she was a second too slow and Sir Hayek’s club smashed into her shin, causing her to scream in pain.

  “Someone has to answer for her!” Hayek yelled, blood and spit flinging in ribbons from his clenched maw. He stomped down on the same leg he’d already smashed. “Do you hear me!? Someone has to answer!”

  In the distance John heard the clatter of hooves on cobblestone and shouted orders, but the knight heard nothing but his own rage screaming inside him, urging him to kill an adventurer. Any adventurer.

  “Stop him! For the Emperor’s sake, stop him!” John said, trying to appeal to the elf lady on top of him.

  She laughed. “No.”

  The knight raised the burning wood one more time, his torso rearing back to drive it down onto her head. Jessica raised a feeble arm to block.

  Before the club came down, a small, charred toad, half-sloughed from chemical burns and missing a foreleg, leapt onto Hayek’s greaves and scrambled up his legs to his remaining arm. The knight thrashed to get it off and, forgetting his missing arm, dropped the club. Jessica grabbed it and drove the club into his knees.

  Before she could continue her assault, guards from the castle dismounted from their horses and stepped forward to announce Jessica’s pardon and haul her attacker away.

  The elf woman clucked her tongue. “Tch. Waste of a stake.”

  John felt her boot lift from the back of his head. As he tried to stand, a tsunami of vertigo and nausea slammed into him and the world went dark.