Jessica expected Burnish to be winded after his full-speed gallop but he kept a decent pace even as they began their climb up the mountain pass. Swiveling in her saddle, she was surprised to find Elsifeya City no more than a colorful splotch along the coast. As splendid and monumental as the city and its castle seemed from the inside, distance put into perspective how small it actually was.

  If this had been Ohio, the entire prairie would have been covered by suburbs and soybean farms by now. Isekai worlds were a lot prettier, she thought. Or maybe she was just in a good mood. Bounced between serfdom and prison and concubinage, riding Burnish was the most free she’d felt since being reincarnated. If this was how adventurers felt all the time, she couldn’t blame them for getting drunk on it.

  This happy feeling persisted as the hours wore on and the sun reached the top of the sky. With noon still hot this time of year, she turned Burnish off the path as soon as she spotted a creek running down the side of the mountain. She eased off the stallion and wobbled over to a fallen log. Her legs were doing okay for now, but she could tell tomorrow was going to suck.

  While Burnish drank from the stream, Jessica opened up her bag to pull out a chicken, apple, and brie sandwich she’d been saving. Upon doing so, she discovered that she grabbed the wrong bag. In all the commotion with getting Burnish moving she’d grabbed the bag full of chemistry supplies she’d been using to teach Cappy and Katarina and store the samples of specialty stuff she’d had the alchemist’s guild synthesize.

  The only edible thing in it was a pouch of sugar for making a carbon snake. And even then she almost grabbed the sample aluminum powder the alchemist’s guild had given her for outlining the Bayer process.

  She debated eating straight sugar for almost a minute before realizing she could accomplish the same effect more pleasantly by eating peppermint candy. Burnish snorted in annoyance at her eating his snacks but she wasn’t about to eat raw sugar if she could help it.

  A few minutes later Jessica and Burnish returned to the road and followed it up into a forested valley. The map Queen Samara gave her had Fort Neusa at the end of this valley right where the King’s Road emptied into wild tundra inhabited by, as the queen politely put it, savages. Specifically animalar savages.

  An hour of brisk riding put Jessica halfway to the fort. Up ahead she spied a collection of carts, wagons, and people. It looked like some kind of trade fair in the middle of a forest. As she got closer, she discovered this was exactly what it was.

  Where the valley widened and the trees opened there was a clearing large enough for around a hundred merchants to gather and sell their wares.

  On the northern side of the market there were furs, amber, honey, fish, lumber, and other things that came out of the snowy north, while on the southern side she saw basically anything that might sell to people who lived in the snowy north. Spices and herbs for pickling. Metal tools and weapons. Rugs. Ivory. And so on.

  Jessica was disappointed to see there was little in the way of cooked meals and she was about to turn Burnish back toward the road when something caught her eye.

  On the far side of the market there was a small wagon covered with grey canvas. It would have been unremarkable were it not for the the unmistakable gleam of metal bars beneath the canvas. Bars meant a cage. A cage meant live products.

  Under the inquisitive eyes of the merchants, Jessica steered Burnish toward the man in charge of the cage. Set up on his table were pelts from various animals. While Jessica was hardly a vegan, anonymous animal fur was a lot more ominous in a world where animals were sometimes sentient people.

  The merchant was himself an animalar with grey wolf ears and a long mane of grey hair down his back. His face was covered in old scars and a couple new ones.

  “An adventurer? Haven’t had one up here in a while. Interested in some furs?” he asked in a thick accent that lilted up and down.

  Jessica gestured at the covered cage. “I’m interested in what’s in there.”

  He smirked, the tips of two long canines appearing on his lower lips. “I’m afraid that’s not for sale. It appreciates in value the further south I go. Call it a return on investment. I’m not selling it here. Not unless you’re willing to compensate me.”

  “I might be if you tell me what it is,” she replied, pulse quickening.

  The merchant chuckled. “Only because you’re an adventurer and I know you might be interested.”

  The wolf-eared merchant grabbed the canvas and tore it off to reveal exactly what Jessica had feared: Inside was a small lizard girl with wide-set eyes, a scaly blue-white tail, and a tangle of porcelain-colored hair. The girl cowered back and hissed.

  “You don’t seem to have a harem right now, do you? If you’re interested I can let you rescue her from slavery for 100 gold pieces,” the merchant said.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Let me rescue her!? You’re selling her! What the hell do you mean ‘let me rescue her’?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what you adventurers always call it. Either way, the price is 100.”

  “I’m not paying anything and you’re going to let her go.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Newly reincarnated, eh? That’s not how you go about getting a harem. You can either rescue her from slavery”—he jammed his thumb in the direction of the lizard girl—“or you can piss off. Either way, skip the lecture. I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive in your own world. I know how the game works.”

  Jessica curled her fists. Ironically, with the leeway adventurers were given to be murder-hobos, she could just kill him and set the girl free. Any adventurer could. But remembering the collars around the necks of Saengjwi and Akuhara’s fox girl, she suspected most adventurers didn’t ‘rescue’ their harem members like that.

  Not that she could have killed him even if she wanted to. Without magic she wasn’t any stronger than him. And on top of that, she didn’t want to. Not because of any stupid, ‘I would become just as bad as them’ reasons. The slave merchant absolutely deserved to die. She was just a coward who didn’t have it in her to kill someone. And then there was the fact that killing him also wouldn’t stop anything. Not unless laws were changed too. And being a concubine didn’t give her the ability to change the law.

  She gazed at the lizard girl again, her wide eyes as white as a snow drift with an icy blue slit down the middle. They were eyes asking for help. The merchant, meanwhile, was watching Jessica suspiciously.

  “I think we’re done here,” Jessica said.

  The merchant folded his arms. “I think we are.”

  Jessica turned Burnish around with the full intention of not being done there.

  Riding off a ways, she dismounted Burnish to rest and think. As she saw it, rescuing the lizard girl required two things: A way to distract the merchant and a way to get the girl out of the cage. Nothing was coming to her on either front. She blamed her hunger.

  Jessica sighed. “God dammit, Burnish. I can remember the names of every carbon allotrope that’s ever been discovered but I can’t remember to pack a sandwich.”

  Her brain needed carbs. If straight sugar was all she had…

  Wait. She had sugar.

  She also had sand and sodium bicarbonate for the sugar snake experiment. In other words, she had a way to make a carbon tube emerge from the ground like some kind of demon worm. That was as good a distraction as she was going to get

  The cage door was an even easier matter with the aluminum powder the alchemist’s guild had given her. She only needed one more ingredient.

  “Sorry, do you mind if I scrape off some of your rust?” Jessica asked a merchant selling swords and spears. He had a pile of scrap metal scavenged from less-than-victorious warriors.

  “What in the world d’ya want rust for?” the scrap merchant asked.

  “I just love the stuff. Can’t get enough,” she said. “I’ll pay you to help me fill this bag.”

  ‘Pay’ was all the man needed to hear and in a few short minutes Jessica had all the rust she needed to mix with her aluminum powder. Once complete, she bought an iron wok from the same merchant, filled it with sand, drenched it in lamp oil, and poured a mixture of sugar and baking soda in the middle.

  She snuck the wok under the quilted cover of an unmanned stall just far enough away from the slaver to escape his notice. With flint and steel from Sir Hayek’s saddlebags, she lit the oil-drenched sand and backed away, waiting for the merchants to catch sight of the infernal worm rising out of a strange black portal.

  However, right as the fire spread to ignite the sugar and baking soda mixture, it leapt up the quilt and began a secondary fire.

  Jessica’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh shit.”

  “Fire!”

  “The stall’s on fire!”

  “Who’s got water!? Someone get water!”

  Jessica stood stupefied at her accidental arson until the wolf-eared slave merchant ran past and she remembered what she needed to be doing. Sprinting for the cage, she pulled out the bag of aluminum powder and rust and poured it out onto the locking mechanism of the cage. The lizard girl shrank to the opposite end, panting in fear.

  “You understand me, right?” she said, looking up at the girl through the bars.

  She nodded frantically.

  “Great. Do me a favor and look anywhere else but here. Got it?”

  The lizard girl stared for a moment, unwilling to give her back to a potential threat. But she saw something in Jessica’s no-nonsense expression that convinced her. Once the girl averted her gaze, Jessica ignited the thermite.

  Retina-scorching flames sparked and sputtered over the iron lock, burning through the mechanism. Jessica was forced to wait for the reaction to eat all the way through the cage before it was safe to survey her work. Unfortunately, the stall fire had been put out by then and all attention was now on the cage which had just burned as bright as the sun.

  “Hey! Hey, hey, hey what are you doing!?” the slaver screamed.

  Jessica ripped the cage door open and reached for the lizard girl’s hand.

  “You’re gonna have to get up and run!”

  Hands clammy with sweat grasped Jessica’s. She yanked the girl forward and out of the cage. Burnish trotted up behind, snorting and neighing in warning.

  With a burst of strength Jessica didn’t know she had, she hurled the girl up onto the saddle before jamming her foot in a stirrup and pulling herself up after. With no need for instruction, Burnish bolted through the labyrinth of wagons and stalls and out onto the road, galloping northward.

  ??? GOBLIN SMASHING ???

  by CSN Publishing

  GOBLIN SMASHING

  Tokyo, 2045. For most, a future costs more than they’ll ever earn. For Rin Kazehaya, it costs everything his family’s home, his mom’s life in a hospital, and debt collectors closing in on his siblings. The only thing that pays is hustle and hope.

  When Hero’s Glory Online launches its Crystal League expansion, a single tagline is everywhere: “Bring your business here.” One week. Discounted entry. Real cash for every match, every territory won. Anyone can play but not everyone survives.

  Rin gambles the last of his savings on a shot he can’t afford to lose, logging in from a battered first-gen pod built by his father. But a glitch locks him in as a Goblin the weakest, most-mocked race in the game. No reset. No second chance.

  Now, every victory means cash, every loss risks everything, and every move is broadcast to millions while Tokyo’s most ruthless family closes in on his real life. If he fails, he loses more than a game.

  But Goblins don’t know when to quit. With nothing left but his wits, a gambler’s instinct, and a dream nobody believes in, Rin’s about to find out what happens when the underdog brings his business and his fight to the world’s biggest stage.

  New chapters every Friday at 8pm Central Time.

  Goblin Smashing comes from someone who’s lived the grind as an esports organization owner and competitive MOBA player. If you love siege games, high-stakes MMOs, and underdog stories, you’re in the right place.

  This story is only published on Royal Road.

  If you spot it anywhere else, it’s fake, please flag and report.

  ?? Listen to the Official Goblin Smashing OST ??

  

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