There was a particular feeling Jessica had not experienced since reincarnating in Tushita. This was the unique sensation of wanting to call in sick and not being able to, just like back home.

  Knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to sleep off her hangover, Jessica rubbed the crust from her eyes and forced her body to move. This triggered a nuclear bomb in her head and sent shockwaves of nausea through the core of her soul. The dizziness was bad enough to get her out of bed and onto solid ground.

  It was at this point she realized she’d stripped down to her underwear, apparently in front of John, and the rest of the night’s embarrassments came back to her all at once.

  She drew the blanket over her head. “Oh my God…”

  “Jessica?”

  She rubbed her face with the blanket. “Yeah?”

  “I think I mighta become an adventurer.”

  “That’s nice, John.”

  He hadn’t done anything wrong, but she really didn’t want to hear him talk right now. Or anyone else for that matter. Not until she found some water for her splitting headache. In the meantime, she got out of bed and dug around in her bags for one of her pre-measured bottles of aspirin and poured the foul-tasting powder into her mouth and chased it with spit.

  Footsteps thumped behind her and John sprinted out of the room.

  “John, I don’t— nevermind.”

  It was easier to indulge his ye olde hang-ups than re-litigate them for the hundredth time. Throwing on her clothes, she met him out in the hall, his face still beet red.

  “I’m going to Traehagen. Mind packing up?” she asked.

  “S-Sure, but Jessica, I—”

  “Thanks.”

  Jessica walked down to the same Traehagen she’d bought her bottle of vodka and Riza’s clothes at. It was the same middle-aged woman with greying Dutch braids behind the counter. She raised an eyebrow at Jessica’s arrival but said nothing.

  Jessica leaned against the counter. “Any chance you got something with caffeine in it?”

  “Ma’am I sell food and drinks here. If you’re lookin’ for magic you’re at the wrong place.”

  “Any of those drinks make you feel more awake?”

  “Got holly tea. Best I can do.”

  “I’ll take some of that and two sausage buns,” Jessica said.

  The holly tea was smoother and earthier than Jessica was expecting. The tea and aspirin hit at around the same time and all of a sudden she no longer felt like death. There was definitely caffeine in the tea, she thought. Her tolerance was as low as she’d ever let it get and even the tea was hitting like a truck.

  Jessica returned to the inn with sausage buns in hand. She found John waiting out front with Burnish’s reins in his hand looking tired and anxious.

  “Hey… so… sorry about last night,” she said, making little popping noises with her lips to diffuse her embarrassment.

  “Last night? Oh, no, that’s fine. But more importantly, I—”

  Jessica groaned. “You don’t have to sweep it under the rug for my benefit. I know I made an ass of myself. I’d feel better if we just came out and acknowledged it.”

  “Really, I’m not bothered. I don’t even remember what all you said cuz in the middle of the night I—”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “John. Please. For my sake, just tell me I was being an obnoxious sad sack drunk and I made you uncomfortable by taking my clothes off and—”

  “Jessica, it’s making me pick a job!”

  She blinked. “It’s what? What job? What thing? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Now that she was paying attention, she could see the anxiousness in his eyes came less from unresolved second-hand embarrassment and more from hallucinating words and icons across his retinas.

  “Holy shit. Holy shit! You got a system! John, what the hell!? How did you get a system!?”

  Jessica shook him by the shoulders which wasn’t exactly helping the poor, overstimulated peasant boy. She stopped and let his eyeballs come to a standstill.

  “Th-This is what— what adventurers get, r-right? This is how they pick their job?”

  “Can you read the words?”

  “Y-Yeah.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Job selection.”

  Jessica pressed her fingers to her temples. “What the hell did you do? No, wait, don’t panic, John. This is a good thing. I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but it’s never, like, a bad thing to suddenly gain magical powers, is it?”

  Her brain called up at least a dozen pieces of media to refute that. It was a good thing John had never seen any of them.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “But I don’t know what to do! And I can’t live my whole life with these words in the middle of my vision, I’ll go crazy!”

  Jessica swallowed. She’d picked her own job right off the bat so she didn’t even know it couldn’t be dismissed. Apparently John, terrified of doing anything without conferring with her, had sat in the dark with those words in the middle of his vision since last night.

  “Does closing your eyes help?”

  He shook his head. Jessica bit her lip.

  “God dammit. I don’t want you to pick the wrong one cuz Min-woo said you can’t change your job once you pick one and apparently there’s a bunch of noob trap jobs. If you’re gonna have a system we wanna make sure it’s one of the non-shit ones, right?”

  John gave a hesitant nod. Regrettably, anyone who might know the best build also wanted to drag her in for a bounty. The bandit leader probably didn’t, but even if they felt like helping, they could be days away. Was she really going to have John sit with bright, blinking words in the middle of his vision for several days just to min-max his build?

  “So we can ask the rebel leader about what to pick, but that might take days…”

  She saw his eyes go wide at ‘days’ and expected him to vehemently reject the idea.

  “If we have to, I'll put up with it.”

  “Wait a sec! Don’t just say that cuz you think it’s convenient for me!”

  During her time with the Serf family, she couldn’t think of a single instance where John said no to someone. Maybe to Sir Hayek with the whole bomb thing, but considering that involved nearly throwing his life away for someone else, she wasn’t sure that counted. Her fear was that he was doing the self-sacrificing thing again.

  “If you need to pick something to keep yourself from going insane, just do it. Whatever calls to you. God knows we didn’t expect any of this,” she said.

  John shook his head. “I’ll wait. Don’t worry about me. I can put up with a lot.”

  Jessica went through another few rounds of playing self-sacrificing chicken with John before coming to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to win. Not even directly ordering him to pick a job at random worked, though it came the closest of the strategies she tried.

  “Fine,” she said, pulling herself into Burnish’s saddle. “But if it gets bad enough, promise me you’ll pick something, okay? It won’t do either of us any good if you have the optimum job class but your brain’s too fried to use it.”

  John agreed to this and the two of them made their way to the fort to meet up with Jessica’s escorts. Unlike her, they were up bright and early and not hungover and were thus less than amused when she arrived an hour and a half after they were supposed to leave.

  “Is this a regular occurrence?” one of the two asked as she winced from the sunlight.

  “Not since freshman year,” Jessica said. Pointing a finger at John she added, “Any chance we can get boy wonder here a mule or something?”

  The Fort Neusa stables could only spare an old mare on aching legs who had been waiting to die up to this point. With no better option and a desire to keep Burnish from having to bear two people the entire way, Jessica accepted.

  “Does she have a name?” Jessica asked the stablemaster as he handed her the reins.

  “Bertha,” he replied.

  “Congrats, John. You’re now the proud owner of Bertha.”

  John stared at the mare. “I’m just borrowin’ her, right? I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout horses, just a bit about cows. And sheep, some.”

  The stablemaster shrugged. “I ain’t got a use for her. She’s yours as far as I’m concerned.”

  John looked shocked at that. The horse was really not that impressive, but she if you’d never owned a car, a 90’s Toyota probably also seemed impressive. She just hoped Bertha didn’t collapse out from under him.

  They were almost ready to leave except the soldier assigned to be their mountain guide, a guy named Bill, was awol. After waiting an hour in the eye-searing sunlight, Jessica took matters into her own hands and demanded they get a move on.

  “You can’t go without a guide. You’re asking to get lost,” said one of her escorts.

  “I’m not asking. As royal concubine I am demanding,” Jessica said.

  Despite invoking her vague ‘royal concubine’ title they still refused to leave without Bill. Fortunately for her—and unfortunately for her escorts—Jessica had connections. With a gentle reminder to Captain Aster about the package she delivered, the presiding commander of Fort Neusa ordered the gates opened and their party headed northward toward Kantai.

  As it turned out, the guards’ fear of getting lost was unfounded. The mountain pass was a straight shot north aside from some steep trails that would kill a horse. They rode for half an hour before the pass opened onto an enormous vista.

  Ahead lay a wide-open taiga with miles and miles of spruce and pine trees broken only by a crystal-blue lake stretching to the horizon.

  “Is this where you all depart?” Jessica asked her escorts.

  “It is,” one said.

  “Any ideas where to start looking for these rebels?”

  “No. But a word of advice,” the other replied, “we’re already in enemy territory. You should keep your voice down.”

  Jessica looked at the sheer stone cliffs to her left and the open air to her right.

  “Isn’t the whole point to get caught so I can negotiate with them?” she asked.

  “That’s your risk to take. These are bandits you’re dealing with. You ought to see what they’ve done to people before saying that.”

  This gave her pause. Up to this point she had thrown herself at her quest for lack of any other option to free Riza and Naga. But now that she and John were staring down the prospect of walking into a camp full of murderers, she wasn’t quite as gung-ho.

  “Jessica’ll figure somethin’ out. She always does,” John said with the vacant stare of someone half-focused on blinking words.

  With nothing more to say they parted ways and Jessica on Burnish and John on Bertha began their trek down the mountain. They stopped for lunch just before the path grew steeper and hooked inside the curve of the mountain.

  The garrison had packed her a bit of fresh food for her to eat first before dipping into their dried reserves so she and John had some lukewarm beef stew.

  “Wow! This stuff’s good! What is it?” John asked, poking a lump of brown meat.

  “Beef?”

  “You sure? Beef’s only for Yulemeal.”

  “Oh you poor thing.”

  It wasn’t even good beef stew, Jessica thought. But if you only had beef for ‘Yulemeal,’ it probably tasted pretty good. Not that she was in position to be tasting much of anything this high up. Everything just tasted like nosebleed to her.

  “Guess we oughta pack up, huh? Gotta find somewhere to camp by nightfall before we go looking for the SSLA,” Jessica said as she rooted around her bag for Burnish’s mint candy. She was rationing them now, but she supposed old Bertha deserved a couple too.

  “Uh… Jessica…”

  “You didn’t pick a class did you?”

  Jessica heard a husky laugh behind her that did not belong to John’s ‘aw shucks’ countertenor. Standing up slowly and carefully with her arms raised, she was greeted by not one, not two, but six figures, all wearing cloaks to match the barren grey of the cliff and holding long wooden barrels that looked suspiciously like guns.