Jessica nodded dumbly, stunned by the sudden change in mood.

  Angelica patted her on the arm. “We’ll be right back.”

  Min-woo’s party left her to follow the scent of whoever this Junfeng was. It didn’t escape her notice that this was in the exact direction of Morkal’s cave.

  Content as she was to stay out of the way, something felt off. Since it seemed unlikely either Min-woo or Junfeng knew about the cliff with the fume hood, she decided to circle around to the top of the cliff overlooking the entrance.

  As she came down the hill toward the cliff top, she heard voices below.

  “There’s nothing in there anyway! Just a bunch of weird bottles and shit,” said a nasally male voice.

  “Doesn’t matter. Stay out of our way while we’re completing our quest,” Min-woo replied.

  “The quest is open to anyone! You have no right!”

  Jessica got down on her hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the cliff. Below, Min-woo and yet another boring-looking teenage boy with long black hair were standing across from one another. The other one, Junfeng, wore a white-and-gold hanfu and had a glaive strapped to his back.

  The two boys’ respective harems were arrayed behind them with weapons drawn. Behind Junfeng were a pair of twin dragon girls (one red, one blue) complete with claws, tails, and horns, and a beautiful woman with skin Jessica might tentatively refer to as ‘jade-like.’ She wore a cerulean hanfu and carried bladed fans.

  “We have no ‘right’? Quests go to whoever completes them. And it’ll be hard for you to do that if you get in my way,” Min-woo said, arms outstretched in a half-shrug.

  Sunlight glinted off his obsidian daggers like quasars escaping a black hole. This metaphor became even more apt as swirling accretion discs of purple energy spawned at the daggers’ hilts.

  “Where the hell else am I supposed to go!? There aren’t any more god-damned quests!” Junfeng said.

  “Wrong,” Min-woo said. “There’s this one and it’s ours. Leave, or we’ve got a problem.”

  “Don’t you dare speak to the young master that way!” the dragon girls said in unison.

  “Huixing Liuxing! Knock it off!” Junfeng said.

  “But master!”

  Jessica watched the fight with growing discomfort. Not just because of the potential for violence, but because she was starting to notice a pattern in the ‘teammates’ of the adventurers she’d met so far.

  The model harem went something like this: Two girls were exotic in some way, be it elven, animal-eared, or otherwise, and the third was conventionally attractive. Each of the three fell on a continuum of tall and sultry to short and sweet and their variations were mostly aesthetic. So where the hell did all these girls come from and why did they keep attaching themselves to impulsive teenagers?

  Min-woo smirked. “Come on girls, don’t tease your master about his inferiority. He’s embarrassed enough.”

  Junfeng whipped his glaive around to point at Min-woo. “Being part of the Original Eight just means you reincarnated earlier. It doesn’t mean you’re stronger. I don’t care if you fought the stupid Demon King, I’m not letting you take my quest.”

  Min-woo scrunched his face. “Oof! Awful choice.”

  Jessica’s ears rang from a sound like someone crashing a cymbal. The sonic force of clanging metal was so loud it bled into her other senses and it took her a second to catch up with what happened.

  The clang had come from Min-woo whipping his obsidian daggers at Junfeng. His opponent knocked them away with the head of his glaive, but by the time he was readying a swing at Min-woo, his opponent had covered the distance. Both daggers reappeared out of the discs of sickly purple energy.

  Junfeng thrust his glaive outward and then, anticipating his opponent’s next move, yanked the haft backwards as Min-woo blinked behind him.

  One of Min-woo’s daggers was knocked away by the haft. The other found Junfeng’s shoulder and stained his hanfu crimson. As Junfeng screamed in pain, Min-woo grinned.

  The twin dragon girls split apart and rushed Min-woo from both sides. An arrow and a crossbow quarrel forced them to raise their scaly claws to deflect the missiles. While the red one was distracted, Min-woo flashed forward and drove his dagger into her eye socket.

  Jessica shuddered. The dragon girl didn’t scream so much as let out a shocked whimper. She expected Min-woo to follow this up by killing her but he instead swept her legs out from under her and left her to bleed.

  “Liuxing!” the blue dragon girl screamed.

  The pale woman with the bladed fans trembled in shock. She backed away, her wide, doe eyes fixed on Min-woo now covered in the pulsing purple-black energy.

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  There was a sound like harp-wire being plucked and an arrow found the jade-like woman’s neck. Two more drove into her breast and cheek as she fell. She writhed on the ground but made no sound besides the frantic shuffling of her legs against leaves.

  Bizarrely, Junfeng ignored his own teammates and instead beelined for Min-woo’s party members. In response, Angelica flipped the pages in her tome and a pearlescent forcefield engulfed herself, Ritva and Saengjwi. The glaive crashed against it and waves of distorted light rippled along the surface, but the field held. A furious Junfeng retracted his glaive.

  The blue dragon girl, her face contorted in rage, drove her claws into Min-woo’s back. Studded leather greeted them. Desperate for any revenge she could find, she tried to bite down on his neck. But with all the effort of removing a scarf, Min-woo plucked her up with one hand and with the other drove a dagger through her jaw and into the cavity of her mouth. She shuddered and went limp and he dropped her beside her sister.

  “Fine! You can have the stupid quest!” Junfeng said.

  “Thank you,” Min-woo said in a tone of mild annoyance.

  Junfeng walked over to his slaughtered teammates’ corpses and began picking up their weapons and various bits of jewelry they’d been wearing. At first Jessica found this disrespectful, but as Junfeng handed over the jewelry to Min-woo as a blood prize, she instead found it downright heinous

  “It didn’t have to come to this, you know,” Min-woo said.

  “Man, shut up,” Junfeng replied. “I hope the Morkal kicks your ass like it did Akuhara’s.”

  Min-woo laughed. “Akuhara is as weak as you are so I doubt it. Oh, and next time, if a member of the Original Eight says it’s their quest, you back off. Got that?”

  Junfeng responded with a middle finger.

  While the two reincarnated adventurers bickered, Min-woo’s teammates were celebrating. Saengjwi was gleefully high-fiving the other two while Angelica was praising them with her motherly voice. Even Ritva managed a lukewarm smile. Above, Jessica was grinding her knuckles against a rock to keep from vomiting.

  Any notion of adventuring with Min-woo was gone. The fact that she had even considered it, had allowed herself to be drawn in by his fake charm, made her sick. Morkal had warned her. This was what adventuring looked like after the Demon King was defeated.

  “Is there anyone else around, Saengjwi?” Min-woo asked.

  The mouse girl sniffed.

  Jessica’s heart skipped a beat and she rolled backward away from the cliff edge, hoping the few inches would make a difference. Wind brushed against her cold sweat. Northerly wind. Toward the cave. She was downwind, thank God.

  “No one coming from the road,” Saengjwi said.

  “Good,” Min-woo said. “Let’s dump the bodies and then go get Jessica.”

  From her vantage point Jessica watched Min-woo’s party carry the corpses of the three girls down to the stream, toss them behind some bushes, wash their hands in the water, and trek back up the hill.

  “Should we have someone stand guard while we fetch her?” Angelica asked.

  “Nah,” Min-woo said. “I only saw one other team when we were coming in this morning and I don’t think they’d pull the same shit Junfeng did. That uppity little prick reincarnated in the middle of the war and thought that made him my equal.”

  “Equal to an Original Eight? What an idiot!” Saengjwi said.

  “He comes from China, right? No wonder he was so rude and arrogant,” Angelica said.

  “Are all people from China like that?” Saengjwi asked.

  “More or less,” Min-woo replied. “In any case, let’s not waste any more time and go back and grab Jessica.”

  “Do we still need a guide? We’ve already found the cave, haven’t we?” Ritva asked.

  “We don’t need a guide, but that’s not what I wanted with her.”

  This wasn’t new information, but to hear him say it so nakedly made Jessica’s skin crawl. Worse, the three women were unfazed, both by his words and by the slaughter of their counterparts in Junfeng’s party. They were just as peppy as before the battle.

  Jessica waited for them to leave before scrambling down the cliff and into the cave. She knew exactly where to find the sulfuric acid and tucked a vial of it into a pouch she found lying around. The sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride, however, were odorless white powders/crystals, making them significantly trickier. They were not among the handful of things Morkal had thought to label.

  “Come on! Come on! Morkal why…” she whispered.

  Each second passed like a knife across a chalkboard. Every snapped twig or rustle of wind outside the cave heralded Min-woo’s return. The last thing she needed was for him to find her in a confined, isolated space.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath ahead of the panic that was moments away, a technique she learned from grad school. When she opened them, she suddenly noticed Morkal had organized the rack of materials by texture. Crystals to the right, powder on the left.

  Grabbing a jar of white crystals, she popped it open, dipped her pinkie finger in, and licked. Salty licorice flavor. Here, at least, was her ammonium chloride.

  On the other end of the rack there were a dozen identical white powders. How Morkal kept track of them, she had no idea. From the thought of Morkal her mind leapt to the fume hood and the smell of muriatic acid. Something clicked, but she didn’t know what yet. To help she imagined John asking her to explain what she was thinking.

  “So— so… Hcl… Oh! It has a neutralization reaction! Easy! We mix the powders into water and pour in the acid!”

  Morkal had left a cauldron of water out and Jessica scooped some into a mug. Into this she whisked the first of the white powders until it formed a solution and then added muriatic acid. It frothed and turned milky white and salt settled at the bottom. Definitely sodium carbonate. She breathed a sigh of relief at something finally going her way.

  Since she had some extra space, Jessica also grabbed some zinc powder and put it in a cloth sachet Morkal used for measuring. While doing so, she noticed something else of interest: A little glass jar Morkal had labeled ‘Blasting Oil’.

  She took it off the shelf, popped the lid, and wafted. There was a slight tang of smoke and sulfur. The liquid was greyish with black specks floating in it. The solution itself was likely odorless and colorless and the sulfur smell came from the black specks. Between that and the label, she suspected she was holding a suspension of black powder and nitroglycerin.

  Jessica grabbed the suspension and a torch hanging from the wall and took both to the mouth of the cave. She set the vial down and then the torch beside it and ran.

  Halfway to the stream, an explosion rocked the hillside and sent rocks tumbling down the hill. Roiling clouds of orange flame and black tar rose into the sky.