A speckled band of torches lit up the horizon like a line of fireflies. Jessica considered approaching under the cover of the adventurers’ night-blindness but stopped when she remembered how many had either an elf or an animal girl, both of whom, by fantasy convention, could see in the dark. She instead paused at the tree line overlooking Barleyfield and went prone to observe.

  Bright pinks, reds, blues, and yellows of so many overly-detailed outfits flickered in torchlight beside the brooding black coats and cloaks of reincarnated adventurers. More had come while Jessica was asleep. With so many main characters in one place, the sleepy little hamlet became an overstuffed carnival.

  Against her back Jessica felt the first droplets of the coming storm.

  “Oh no! I told you we shouldn’t have sold the umbrellas!”

  The words, spoken like the punchline to a situational comedy, came from a teenage girl in a school uniform coming down the hill a few yards behind Jessica. At her heels were three young men, all vaguely in the 16-24 demographic.

  One had fuzzy bear ears despite a distinctly lean and un-bearlike physique. The other two were similarly rail-thin and almost indistinguishable besides one having black hair and a frown and the other brown hair and a smile. All three possessed unusually long and slender hands.

  “It’s just water,” the black-haireded sourpuss mumbled.

  “It’ll be okay, Yumi! It’s not gonna take long to find the Morkal!” his cheery companion said.

  “That sounds like dramatic irony,” the girl replied.

  “Rrgh! The storm is too smelly. I can’t make out the morkal or the reincarnated girl she brainwashed,” the bear man said, pawing at his human nose.

  It was clear enough to Jessica who the brainwashed girl was. She silently thanked the storm for its good timing. Those three little oxygen atoms saved her from being sniffed out by the animalar who orbited adventurers.

  Yumi and her trio of long-fingered boytoys departed and Jessica was planning to slink in behind them when an inferno tore through a thatch-roof cottage. Some of the adventurers stopped to watch.

  “Are we burnin’ ‘em out?” one asked.

  There was no single answer to this question but a general murmur that the quest was not worth an exhausting search for the Morkal and her brainwashed thrall. The second hovel went up in flames and Jessica gazed in numb amazement at the unrestrained sadism.

  Jessica sprinted for the Serf family’s hovel while the growing fires still hid her in the darkness. This gambit was successful until she found Min-woo waiting for her outside.

  “There you are.”

  Lightning flashed in the hills and for a brief moment she could see his eyes filled with false compassion.

  “W-What are you doing here?” Jessica said, backing up a step.

  “Come on, let’s not bother with this pointless bullshit. You blew up the entrance to the cave. That was dumb, but it was because the morkal brainwashed you. Because if you were actively working for remnants of the Demon King’s army like, say, his chief alchemist, that would be very, very bad, do you understand? So you were brainwashed. Fortunately, Angelica can fix that and then you’ll be good as new. No harm, no foul.”

  Jessica’s heart thudded. Her self-preservation told her to nod dumbly and make up fake memories of Morkal turning her into a thrall. Maybe if she bought herself time, she could think of some other way of handling Min-woo without giving him a reason to butcher her.

  “I chose to do that of my own free will,” she said.

  Her self-preservation screamed at her.

  “Really? Because then you would be a villain, and I don’t think it’d be wise to make your villainous debut in front of someone who can hack your head off.”

  “I saw what you did to Junfeng’s party members.”

  This stunned Min-woo for a moment before he burst out laughing.

  “Oh God, that’s why you sabotaged us!? That’s hilarious! I didn’t even touch Junfeng even though I could’ve beaten the piss out of him,” he said.

  “I’m not talking about Junfeng,” she replied.

  “You mean the side-characters!? Jessica, nuna, have you talked with any of them? They’re not real. They’re cardboard cutouts. Why do you think the girls fall head-over-heels for literally anyone who gets reincarnated here? Do you think it’s our sparkling personalities? Our fascinating lives as NEETs? Our dashing shut-in good looks?

  “Jessica, this is a fantasy world. It shapes itself to your fantasies so you can do whatever the hell you want. When I kill another adventurer’s party members I’m not killing an actual human being. They’re NPCs cooked up for our pleasure. We’re living in a dream world.”

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  Another crackle of lightning chipped the sky into pieces and exposed Barleyfield in a flash of purple-white. Min-woo’s expression in that moment was not crazed or sadistic, deceitful or malicious. He was fully sincere. He thought this was all a game.

  “I’ve talked with them! I’ve lived with them! They’re not NPCs!”

  He chuckled. “Like I said, this world reorganizes itself to give you what you want. Your fantasy was to be a rebel or something. I’ll bet you were some kinda political activist on Earth. Into animal rights or whatever?”

  She shook her head. “No, and the first thing that happened to me was I got made a serf. That’s not anyone’s fantasy.”

  Min-woo stroked his jaw. “Oh it definitely is. I’d say you like to get dominated. But don’t worry, I like submission in a girl.”

  Jessica shuddered. She was all too aware of how vulnerable she was. Fighting back would have been herculean even if she had a system. Unarmed and without magic, she was helpless. Her only option was to lean into it.

  “Y-Yeah. That’s right,” she said, forcing herself to nod.

  Min-woo stepped forward and hooked his arm around hers and jerked her forward, accentuating the three or four inches she had over him.

  “I can be both strict and tender. And since you seem to need a teacher, I think I’d be perfect for that role,” he said, brushing his hair back like a manhwa character.

  “Not here…” she said. “Not with other adventurers around. But I know somewhere.”

  Min-woo grinned. “Oh-ho! How forward! Alright, lead on, nuna.”

  Jessica was terrible at flirting. By all admissions she should not have been able to seduce him this easily, especially with attractive women falling all over him. What she guessed was that, locked inside a fantasy world for over a century, a woman from Earth, any woman, offered something he couldn’t get from his exotic fantasy companions.

  Even if his companions were real people, Min-woo didn’t believe that. That was why he was courting her so hard. Jessica was the hard edge of reality missing from his fantasy world. All his pleasure meant nothing without a bit of pain. Not that this revelation helped her in the slightest.

  Jessica led him on auto-pilot to the soapmaking hut. From the outside it looked like any other hovel other than being unusually tall. Min-woo opened the door ahead of her.

  “Ladies first,” he said.

  Jessica smiled demurely.

  The interior was bare dirt and undecorated wooden walls with jars and baskets of pig fat and sodium hydroxide. A pallet on the far end held several baskets of finished soap. In the middle was a large wooden barrel where the Barleyfielders put their wood ash as it filtered down into a bowl of caustic slurry.

  “The hell is all this stuff?” Min-woo asked.

  “Soapmaking supplies,” Jessica said. “No one’s gonna come here in the middle of the night. We should have plenty of privacy.”

  Min-woo grinned. “Getting antsy, huh?”

  “O-Oh, y-yeah…” Jessica said, fiddling around in the pocket of her apron. What she was looking for was the little sack of zinc she’d taken from Morkal’s lair.

  “Your little stutter is so cute, you know.”

  Min-woo backed her up against one of the walls and pulled a kabedon on her. Jessica’s breath hitched from fear which Min-woo took as excitement.

  “Wait!” she said.

  “What?”

  “T-The villagers screwed something up and I need to fix it real quick. I’m sorry, it’ll just take two seconds!”

  Min-woo frowned. “I don’t like to wait.”

  She smiled nervously. “I-It’ll be worth it, I promise!”

  This was the first time anyone had told him to delay his gratification in decades. The novelty alone must have intrigued him.

  From the counter of supplies she grabbed a glass wine bottle half full with caustic slurry. Her heart pounded. The timing on this had to be perfect. But with no time to experiment or write down an equation, all she had was seven years of accumulated chemistry instinct. Taking a deep breath, she slipped the zinc powder into the bottle and corked it. The bottle grew warm within seconds.

  “It’s dark in here. Do you know any fire magic?” she asked.

  “No, but I’ve got this,” Min-woo said, illuminating a ball of purple energy in his hand and casting the soapmaking hut in a sickly magenta glow.

  That wasn’t what Jessica was hoping for. She needed heat.

  “That ability doesn’t deal damage, does it?” she asked in a worried tone.

  “Only if I throw it. Although, now I’m wondering something. Did the Morkal take your powers from you?” he asked.

  Jessica froze. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have a system, do you? No magic? You poor thing! No wonder you keep getting screwed. You can’t manifest anymore,” he said, walking up to her and caressing her cheek. “But don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.”

  The Tapestry. He was referring to the Tapestry. The way the reincarnated distorted things through their desires. No wonder he didn’t want to leave. Why would he want to struggle when Tushita gave him whatever he wanted?

  She pulled her cheek away from his palm. “Could you give me a second?”

  “I’m running out of patience,” he said, eyes growing more feral by the second.

  “Last time, I promise,” she said, setting the bottle down in the dirt.

  Jessica grabbed the tinderbox the Barleyfielders used to light the hearth. Taking the piece of flint chained to it, she struck a fire over the pile of tinder. A small orb of orange light fought against Min-woo’s magenta glow. While Min-woo was figuring out what she was doing, she grabbed a stick from the floor and dipped it into the fire.

  “Could you uncork that bottle for me?” she asked.

  Min-woo bent down to grab the bottle. Upon touching it, he recoiled, hurling the cork stopper behind him.

  “Shit! That’s hot! What did you—”

  “Hydrogen gas,” Jessica explained, hurling the burning stick at the bottle.

  Fire raced through the bottle and then the hut exploded.