“It’s done!” John said.

  “It’s done? Already?” Jessica asked.

  She was suspicious of how easy it felt. Moving a seven-foot monstress across a tight-knit hamlet of rubber-neckers felt like it should have been more difficult than that.

  “Both her and the toad?” Jessica asked.

  “Yup!”

  Jessica put down her stick.

  There was virtually nothing to do to pass the time once work was over aside from what Rosemary and Charles had (politely) kicked her out of the hovel to do. To keep herself busy Jessica had taken to drawing carbon allotropes in the dirt. Given her medium and tools, these were mostly just badly-drawn scribbles.

  “Is that Elvish?” John asked.

  “It’s chemistry stuff.”

  John’s eyes went wide. “Didn’t Sir Hayek say he’ll burn you at the stake for that!?”

  “John, we’re hiding a monster. I don’t think that’s our main concern.”

  “Oh… yeah.”

  He wasn’t wrong about needing to be careful with anything that reeked of soapmaking witchcraft though, so she wiped the equations away with her foot.

  Before dinner she had John show her where the watchtower was. It was closer than she expected, residing on the northernmost of the chain of hills separating the serfs from the freeholders. It was hardly more than a five minute walk from the Serf’s house.

  The reason she hadn’t seen it before was that two stories had been lopped off leaving the original second story a decapitated stump.

  “And we won’t get any kids trying to explore the place?” Jessica asked.

  “Not a chance. I told ‘em a monster lives there so they’re too scared to check.”

  “Why would you tell them that!?”

  “Cuz I told them that years ago, before we moved a monster there.”

  Jessica groaned. “What if some adventurers come by and ask them if they know where any monsters are?”

  “Adventurers will ask grown-ups, won’t they? And all the grown-ups know there’s no monster up in the old watchtower.”

  “I hope you’re right. It’s not like we’ve got anywhere else to move her.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. In a pinch she could turn Morkal back into a toad. The trouble was that Morkal would have destroyed the Polymorph Morkal potion the moment she switched back to her regular body. Unless they made another—which Morkal would not agree to—they would have no way of turning her back to normal.

  “Did she say what she wanted us to bring over first? Bits and bobs are probably easy enough, but if she wants cauldrons and tubes or the stuff to make another fume hood she’ll have to wait until we come up with an excuse for carrying alchemical equipment,” Jessica said.

  “She said vitriols and spirits and the like would be best. And that you’d know what she meant,” John replied.

  It was what Jessica had in mind anyway. She could do a lot with high-quality solvents and solutions and not a whole lot with rare fantasy ingredients. That was something video games got wrong with their crafting systems. Not that she played any, she’d just seen her dad play them growing up. That she was still deadset on producing morphine to impress King Capra with may have also played a role.

  Jessica spent the following day buzzing with excitement about getting started. This buzz continued right up until not one, not two, but three adventuring parties came down the King’s Road toward Barleyfield. One was walking toward her field. They looked almost identical to Akuhara’s party in having an animal-eared woman, a smaller girl, an elf, and a forgettable-looking teenage boy.

  Jessica sucked air through her teeth. “That’s bad. That’s really bad.”

  “It’s why we moved her, ain’t it?” John said.

  “I didn’t think we’d be put to the test this quick!” she whispered.

  If Akuhara had told the other adventurers where Morkal’s lair was they were probably going to ransack it for clues about where she went. Good-bye sulfuric acid.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Shit, shit, shit…” Jessica muttered.

  She at least needed to get the morphine supplies away from the idiots. Everything else would be a terrible loss but not catastrophic. If she was fast, she could make it.

  “I’m gonna grab a couple things. Cover for me, okay?”

  “Huh? Cover how? What does that mean!?” John asked in urgent confusion.

  Jessica dropped her threshing flail and power-walked as fast as she dared toward the hills. She crossed paths with one of the adventuring teams on the way but kept her head down to avoid notice. She was almost free when one of them called out.

  “Hey!”

  Jessica kept walking.

  “You! Peasant lady! With the brown hair!”

  She grimaced and looked up with a pained smile. The party in front of her consisted of a little mousy girl with a metal collar around her neck, a tanned elf in a revealing tunic of leaves with a bow strung over her back, and a mature, blonde-haired woman dressed as a cleric. Their leader, unsurprisingly, was a carbon-copy teenage boy, albeit with brownish-black hair like hers.

  “You know your way around these parts?” the boy asked.

  Jessica swallowed and glanced at the obsidian daggers tucked into his studded belt.

  “U-Um… Not—” She thought how suspicious it would look if a native Barleyfielder didn’t know their way around. “Not once you get too far out. I stay inside Barleyfield. Don’t go wanderin’ and all that.”

  The boy squinted. “You look strange for someone from Barleyfield. Are you from Ongoku?”

  Jessica froze for a second until she realized he was probably referring to this world’s definitely-not-Japan region. She made a note of that. Ongoku. From now on that was where she was from.

  “Distantly. My ancestors moved to Elsifeya after the Demon King was slain. I’ve never been to Ongoku though,” Jessica said.

  The boy stroked his chin. “I see. I’m looking for a cave where a monster lives. Know it?”

  Jessica’s mind turned into a supercomputer going through a billion calculations a second to figure out whether it was better to waylay him or take him directly to the lair ahead of the other adventurers and try to control the situation. Her supercomputer decided to freeze.

  “Uh…”

  “You’re not very smart, are you?” the boy said.

  Jessica hated that. She really hated that. But she shook her head. “Not really. Sorry.”

  The boy looked her up and down. “That’s alright. You’ll do fine. Lead the way.”

  “No, really, I’ve got—”

  The boy put his hand on her arm. “Aw come on. You don’t get adventurers through here much, do you? Don’t you wanna hear stories? I fought against the Demon King, you know that?”

  “O-Oh! How interesting! I um—”

  “My name’s Min-woo. This is Ritva,” he said.

  The wood elf curtsied and spoke in a soothing alto. “How do you do?”

  “Next to her is Saengjwi.”

  The little rat girl—who was apparently actually a mouse—grinned and flashed a peace symbol. “Hiya!”

  “And this is Angelica.”

  The cleric lady nodded and in a suitably sultry voice said, “The pleasure is mine.”

  It was Jessica’s turn now, but ‘Jessica’ didn’t sound very Ongokuese.

  “I’ve got two names. My parents named me… um… On… ko?” she said, hoping that was a real name.

  “Unko? Your parents named you ‘poop’?” Min-woo asked.

  “N-No! Anko! Anko. Sorry. Long day. Silly me.”

  “Your parents named you ‘red-bean paste’?”

  “Yes,” Anko replied. “But around here I go by Jessica.”

  Min-woo nodded. “Makes sense. Now that we’re all acquainted, let’s mosey!”

  The easiest path, she decided, was to take them straight there and grab what she needed when she had the chance. That wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, would it?

  Certain she could beat the other teams to Morkal’s cave, Anko took Min-woo and his team up through the path toward the freeholder farms while staying as far from the farmers as possible. Unfortunately, the farmers had other ideas.

  “Hey! It’s Min-Woo!”

  Like ants crawling out of a hole, freeholders popped out of fields and sheds and barns to watch the procession of adventurers pass. Min-woo put on a bright smile and waved.

  “You’re going up to defeat the monster, right? Have some fruit!”

  A middle-aged farmer came over with a basket of kumquats. The mouse girl, Saengjwi, shoveled them into her mouth while Angelica and Ritva graciously accepted some. Min-woo’s attention, however, was on Anko, clearly trying to gauge whether or not she was impressed.

  “You’re famous, huh?” Anko asked.

  Min-woo laughed and rubbed his neck. “You could say that! I did help defeat the Demon King after all. I’m surprised you don’t know me.”

  “I’m bad at history.”

  “That’s alright. I like when girls are a little ditzy.”

  Jessica wasn’t sure exactly how her lack of historical knowledge equated to being ditzy, but remembering that she was actually Anko, she politely chuckled.

  “I’m not dumb, I just don’t need to know much to be a serf,” she replied.

  “Would you like to not be a serf?”

  Anko blinked. “E-Excuse me?”

  “If you want to join my harem your lord wouldn’t dare stop one of the Original Eight.”

  The way he said this made Anko think ‘Original Eight’ might be capitalized.

  “Who are the Original Eight?” she asked.

  “Wow! You really don’t know jack, huh?”

  Despite being two inches shorter than her, Min-woo patted Anko on the head. It was all she could do not to punch him in the solar plexus.

  “The Original Eight are the first eight adventurers who came to this world to defeat the Demon King. They’re ranked by their strength and accomplishments rather than by summoning order. I’m #7 even though I was the third reincarnated here. Magnus is #1, obviously, even though he was the last to come through the portal. Lucky bastard found the most overpowered build but, oh well, you can’t re-spec later. Oh, and by the way, I can tell you’re from Earth.”