Chapter Seven: Contentious Cooking Battle
A massive kitchen was quickly prepared in the beer garden of Seya’s restaurant. I shook my head at the facilities on display; it seemed like they did this a lot. Then a mysterious group of cooks gathered around Seya and faced us down. While this crazy drama was unfolding, the hostess girl, who looked like she was going to act as MC, snaffled some ingredients to snack on and glared us down. Was this an intentional parody?
The cooks lined up against the wall of the restaurant.
She began, “This is it, folks! The fight begins! Seya’s restaurant versus the cooking assassins from who-cares-where!” They didn’t seem bothered about getting the facts right or even learning our names. “I’ll now explain the rules for everyone who has never taken part before. The time limit is one hour and a half! You need to bring the judges your dishes within that time! Then it will be strictly but fairly judged. And which dish is more delicious will be ultimately decided.” The girl pointed toward the judges. The rotund guy was there, along with numerous others, all raising their hands. “Strictly but fairly judged,” she said. I didn’t expect any of those words to apply to judges who were looking at us like we were trash off the street.
“We raise these markers, do we?” one of the judges asked.
“That’s right,” the girl confirmed. All the judges immediately gripped a stick with what looked to be a logo for Seya’s restaurant attached and ignored the stick that presumably represented us. They had completely been bought off, for sure, and the result seemed to be in the bag already.
I’d rushed into this, foolishly. Nothing was as subjective as food.
“How did it come to this?” Kizuna was shaking her head. I was right there with her.
“I have no idea. Glass and the others got riled up for some reason,” Raphtalia said.
“Raph,” Raph-chan agreed, puzzlement on their faces as they stood in the spectators’ seats for our side.
“Master’s food!” Filo said.
“They’ll get a surprise when they taste what you’re cooking, kiddo,” L’Arc said.
“Indeed. Your victory is assured, if that’s the best they can do,” Glass agreed. I was still concerned about how aggressive they were being. Were they hopped up on endorphins or something? They weren’t acting in character at all.
“Ingredients have been prepared in each seating area. You are not permitted to use ingredients belonging to your opponent. You may also bring in any ingredients you like . . . if you are capable of doing so.” Her attitude was already getting on my nerves. “What genre of cooking will be the topic this time, Master Seya?” Oh God, he gets to choose?! There was nothing fair about this at all, I could tell that already. It reminded me of my second day after I was summoned. This girl really was shaping up to be Trash III.
“Hmmm, an excellent question.” Seya looked me up and down, mocking me completely. That very attitude made it far more likely that we were looking at another vanguard of the waves. Then he chatted a little with Trash III before looking at me again and laughing.
“The genre can be whatever you like. I have to teach these cooking thugs the sheer degree of difference between us,” Seya said. Whatever! He was really going to make this a pain, wasn’t he?
“I can use people to help me, correct? And I need to make food for each of the judges?” That was about all I needed to ask.
“Correct,” she said. Then the ingredients Seya’s restaurant provided were brought out. I needed to cook whatever I could with these ingredients or whatever I could get my hands on in an hour and a half. Normally there would be some time to prepare a bit first—
“Start cooking!” Trash III shouted, and a gong rang out. Seya rushed over to where his ingredients had been placed and started to select what to use. From what I could see, he had the choice of all sorts of different produce from various regions, and it all looked to be good quality. I moved over to the table where my ingredients were laid out and checked the vegetables.
Grassear carrot
quality: close to rotten
Biped radish
quality: hard
Boom-boom potato
quality: about to explode
I swore. Then I looked over at the judges’ seats and Trash III to see them looking back with mockery in their eyes. I wondered for a moment if winning like this would damage their pride at all—but of course it wouldn’t. Without really wanting to know what was in it, I looked at a barrel of water.
Trauma tiger pufferfish
quality: excellent—danger! warning! deadly toxin!
Appraisal indicated it was poisonous. I couldn’t help but give a sigh.
“You expect me to use these?” I accused.
“You have a problem, do you? Look more carefully!” Even before I had finished complaining, Trash III was already pointing at the handful of ingredients on the table that looked almost edible.
Grassear carrot
quality: normal
Biped radish
quality: normal
Boom-boom potato
quality: normal
One of each. And I had to make enough for all the judges using these?
“Are you really a chef?” Trash III taunted. “You can’t even spot the good ingredients!”
“This is a setup!” L’Arc raged.
“You cowards!” Tsugumi shouted. No one was really paying any attention, however; they were all watching Seya cook.
“You poor fools. Everyone who has battled us before has always brought their own ingredients with them. It’s just common sense,” Trash III said. Like we knew anything about the silly rules to this thing. If you didn’t like what you were given, you could go get your own . . . but what could we manage in an hour or less? There was no market selling produce in the town. It was just the fields, perhaps. There would be monsters outside the town, but we didn’t have the time to go hunting, let alone drain and prepare the meat. There might be fish in the river . . . but it would require some pretty hardcore hunting.
Cowards, indeed. This was all shaping up to be a royal pain, but losing would be an even bigger one.
“Kizuna, Kizuna,” I called, beckoning her over.
“What?” she replied. I proceeded to fish a trauma tiger puffer from the barrel and slapped it down on the slab.
“Do your thing,” I told her.
“Huh?” she responded, startled.
“Cut out the poisonous parts and make some puffer fish sashimi or something. You’re good at dressing things, right?” I said. In the moment I told her what to do, the faces of the judges all turned pale. They knew the fish was poisonous, clearly.
“Daring to even try and feed us such a fish is like throwing the battle away already,” the rotund noble spat. He was a noisy little ball. I’d have L’Arc strip him of his authority and pack him off into exile once we were done here.
“But hold on . . .” Kizuna said.
“It’s not to feed to them. Just for you to practice. If you make it work, let Filo eat it for all I care,” I told her. It was the one excellent-quality ingredient we had been given, and a rare one too. It would be wasted on the judges. We’d just keep that one to ourselves.
“What about you, Naofumi?” Kizuna asked.
“I’ve got some moves. Don’t worry,” I told her. I selected whatever looked like I might be able to use from the mountain of ingredients. “It looks like there are actually some usable ingredients among the rotten stuff they have provided. They probably didn’t have the capacity to spot them.” A lot of the meat was rotten, for example, but it also included some that had been treated in order to let it age. They had carried it all out seemingly without understanding that fact, so they must have thought it was just rotten. Many amateurs thought that fresh meat meant it was the most delicious, but that simply wasn’t the case. It looked like Seya and his underlings were among those who didn’t understand this.
I noticed a few of the cooks against the wall were looking at me, and looking shocked, perhaps realizing their mistake.
“I’ll leave cutting all this up to you too. There’s less edible stuff here than I thought,” I told Kizuna.
“Okay,” she replied. Even as I quickly sorted through my own mountain of ingredients, Seya placed a large cooking pot onto a kitchen range, filled it with water, and then lit the flame beneath it. Once it started bubbling and boiling, he touched an accessory on his right wrist, which seemed to just be a recreation of the vassal weapon drop function, and started to fiddle with something. A mysterious bag suddenly popped into existence in the air, and Seya grabbed it and turned it upside down. A brown powder spilled out and filled the pot that Seya had prepared.
From where I was standing, it looked like he’d created ingredients using the auto cooking function found in the holy, seven star, and vassal weapons. I wondered if this was an advancement of accessory modification or perhaps customization technology. If he had achieved that through his own personal modifications alone, then he wasn’t so much a chef as he was a master accessory craftsman.
The smell of consommé started to waft over from Seya’s pot. What a neat trick. Maybe I should try copying it, but I wasn’t sure if it would work. It must have been a pain to prepare that powered consommé, and yet the final quality probably wouldn’t be anything special.
“There it is!” Trash III and a second MC were now passionately describing everything that Seya was doing. “Master Seya’s magical power!” That made it sound like something you definitely didn’t want mixed into your food.
“Drown in the rich flavors of my food!” Seya taunted, even as he stirred the pot. It looked to me like he was stirring a bit too hard.
“What was that powder? Looks suspect to me!” Raphtalia said.
“You’re really going to call mixing some powder into water ‘cooking,’ are you?” Tsugumi added.
“You look like you’re just screwing around to me!” Glass finished off, all three of them not missing their chance to get a hit in. I had to agree that it was a bit much to call what he was doing “cooking.”
“Right! Time for the next dish!” With that, Seya touched his accessory again and took out . . . something in silver packaging, it looked like. Then he put the entire thing, bag and all, into a pot of hot water and started to boil it. He looked like nothing but someone . . . making boil-in-the-bag curry. Seriously.
“That’s the best dish Seya’s restaurant has to offer! Seya’s curry bag! And it’s Fifth Floor too!” one of the MCs shouted. I barely stopped myself from tipping over onto the ground. He really was just reheating a premade curry in a bag! So he was allowed to heat and serve already finished dishes? I mean, that might give me some ideas myself . . .
“The flavors that are normally lost in reheating have been sealed in the bag using proprietary technology! Now you get the maximized flavor from the moment you open the bag! This truly is the ultimate culinary technique! Everyone, watch this kitchen miracle closely as it unfolds before your astounded eyes!” The MCs continued their diatribe, but it just made it harder for me to keep a straight face. It was all a matter of perspective. Capturing the flavor in a bag was certainly a worse approach than making it on the spot.
“Naofumi . . . am I imagining things? It looks to me like he’s just adding or warming up instant ingredients using hot water,” Kizuna said.
“What a coincidence. It looks like that to me too,” I said. I mean, that was one way to prepare some food. I hadn’t seen it done like this before, so I hadn’t given it much thought, but if we could make use of it ourselves, then it might be worth checking out.
“I remember eating powdered soup as a portable meal, but I don’t recall it being all that tasty,” L’Arc muttered to Therese.
“Edible, but no better than that,” Therese agreed. Drying it out, turning it into powder, and then turning it back into a soup was possible, and it could certainly be eaten. I wasn’t going to deny that form of cooking. However, Seya continued to just produce bags and warm them up. He really was a one-trick pony.
“This is the one, folks! You are about to witness Master Seya’s very own legendary noodle dish, which he perfected all on his own!” Spurred on by the MCs, he took something out of a bag, revealing instant noodles. So he was recreating things that four holy heroes from the past had talked about. All of this cooking would be commonplace back home, and there were already numerous dishes in these worlds that originated with tales from the heroes.
Still, being able to complete his meal so quickly would mean he could quickly get it out in front of the judges. That was what he was clearly thinking when he looked over at me, a grin on his face.
“Cooking is all about speed. How long are you going to be standing around for?” he taunted.
“Come now! Challenger! Master Seya is waiting! Finish your dish at once and prepare to learn the superior flavor of his cooking!” the MC squawked.
“I’ll let you go first. Just do your best,” Seya said. It sounded like he wanted to go second. Just a moment ago he’d been saying that cooking was “all about speed,” so this seemed like a bit of a contradiction. He hadn’t put the instant noodles into the pot yet, clearly worried about them going soggy if left in for too long.
I wasn’t enjoying this. I’d just started to feel like I really was in some kind of cooking-manga battle, and then my opponent started wheeling out nothing but instant stuff, completely ruining the atmosphere. I wondered if he was even taking this seriously.
Seya continued his cooking, anyway, proceeding to dessert. He took out some fruit from what looked like a refrigerator—a simple ice box recreated using magic—and chopped it up. Then he put some water in a bowl, added more powder, and mixed it up. So this time he was just putting frozen fruit in instant gelatin.
“Just what is cooking, anyway?” I mumbled. It wasn’t like I’d reached some great truth or wanted to have some deep philosophical discussion. But all the energy was just draining out of me as I looked at this menu from my opponent that made all my cookery efforts look outlandish and ridiculous. Why did he even have that mountain of ingredients anyway? It wasn’t like he was using them!
Even as I thought that, Seya proceeded to use his accessory to suck up some of those very ingredients. He was using some kind of special compounding. It amazed me that no one was asking any questions about how he was “cooking.”
“Stop watching him and start cooking!” Kizuna said, snapping me back to myself.
“Okay, okay,” I replied. Ah, but perhaps thinking that it was too much to rely on just instant stuff alone, Seya now took out some fish and meat and started to do something with them. I put aside the fact that it looked like he was just frying up some readymade wieners or something. He cut the meat, did no further preparation . . . and cooked it like steaks. That would bring out the flavor, but nothing else.
“Right . . .” I took a moment to think about the curry we had eaten here before the battle started. We were going to get to serve our food first. In either case, we didn’t have enough ingredients.
“I’m going to go collect some ingredients. Kizuna and . . . Raphtalia! You do the basic prep while I’m gone,” I told them.
“Huh?! Hold on, Naofumi!” Kizuna shouted.
“Mr. Naofumi?” Raphtalia said. I left her with preparing the ingredients we already had and headed over to the MCs.
“Hey, MC. I can go and get more ingredients, right? Including finished dishes?” I asked.
“Yes, if you can make it in time,” she replied, with an attitude that barked, Why are you even asking me something so obvious!
“Okay then. I’ll be right back.” I quickly hurried out of the beer garden and away from the restaurant. Scroll of Return would have worked too, but using a movement skill would allow for a more advantageous use of cool-down time. And it would be quicker too. I headed for the wagon with the mirror on it. Along the way—
“Hey, you’re the chef challenging that restaurant,” someone said. I turned around. Normally, I wouldn’t expect anyone to be talking to me, but in this case, it seemed pretty clear. I was almost expecting an assassin sent by Seya.
Instead, I was faced with the muddy kid we had seen working in the fields on the way here. He was a young boy, with a basket on his back.
“What is it, kid?” I asked. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.” There was a clock on this, so I could do without any interruptions. Then the kid pushed his basket into my hands.
“You don’t have any ingredients, right?” he said. “I’ll share ours with you.” I couldn’t help but be suspicious of a stranger suddenly showing up like this and offering aid.
“What do you get out of this?” I asked. I checked out the basket. It was loaded with wild plants and herbs. Even politely, it would be hard to call them good quality, but I could tell it must have taken him a long time to pick them all.
“There are guards in the fields and storerooms, so you won’t get anything from there. If you can’t bring in any of your own ingredients, you’ll have to use that rotten pile they provided you with,” the kid said. I’d worked that much out myself. Not that I had been expecting much help from the other side. “You don’t have much time to get anything, right? This is about all we can offer,” he went on. Some kind of peace offering, then. “I saw what happened before the battle started. You’re actually a good chef, right? And you’ve got allies who are more important than the guy on Seya’s side. So please . . . defeat Seya for us!” This was unexpected. I’d thought almost everyone in the town was supporting Seya, but this kid seemed to want to support me.
“Why are you coming to me with this? I need to hear your reasons or I can’t take you up on anything,” I said.
“I didn’t suspect anything from Seya’s cooking at first,” the kid said, glaring at the building back in the town. “It was super delicious and filled me with energy, and everyone in town was eating it. It felt like it was making the place so much better,” he said. It was strange. It almost felt like I was talking to Keel. “But then, one day, my grandma and mother suddenly collapsed. They had seemed so full of energy, but then they just fell down, like puppets with their strings cut,” he said. Cut strings, huh? There were tears of frustration in the boy’s eyes as he went on. “We tried to help them, but they died . . . and then my dad too. I was so shocked. I remembered how much we had all enjoyed eating at Seya’s restaurant, and I just didn’t want to go anymore . . . so I started cooking for myself.” The boy suppressed his shaking hands and looked at me with hate-filled eyes. “It reached the point where I could only think about the food from Seya’s restaurant. Then my body had this terrible spasm, and I was laid up in bed! There’s definitely something up with that food!” Then he looked at the basket he had handed me. “Now I only have to smell his food and I start to feel sick. There’s definitely something strange in it.”
Then suddenly some other voice interjected, “I helped collect them too!” This came from another child, a little girl looking at the boy with worry in her eyes . . . his sister, probably. She grabbed onto the boy and the two of them looked at me. They had innocent faces, but they also looked kind of thin. They reminded me of Raphtalia when she was small—or Fohl and Atla, who were also brother and sister—and I let down my guard. I’d seen kids this age lie, and lie convincingly, but I couldn’t see any merit in tricking me like this. If they were trying to trick me, that might involve mixing some poisonous plants in with the medicinal herbs. But I could appraise them easily enough. I’d only taken a quick look, but poison didn’t seem to be the case.
“Seya loved to cook for others ever since he was small, but after opening that restaurant, he started to take out all the competition and make it the only place in town!” the boy continued. “Everyone living here said they just wanted to eat Seya’s cooking and stopped cooking at home. That’s how we got here!” It had smelled a bit like a dictatorship from the start . . . and then I realized that maybe my village was in a similar situation. But no, in my village everyone cooked together, so it was different. The idea was that everyone ate together. The adjacent neighborhood had been pretty normal too. But here . . . there was definitely something going on here.
“There’s been a big increase in people suddenly dropping dead or being defeated by monsters and dying!” the boy said. “But no one thinks it’s odd! It definitely is! But when I say that, everyone just gives me weird looks . . . Please! The only people who are going to believe me are outsiders like you!” It sounded like the boy had tried to act on his suspicions, but no one had believed him. Considering the permanent state of addiction coming from that toxin, it certainly wasn’t impossible. This was one of those situations in which it seemed to be making the people healthy but actually wasn’t. Food might even be mixed in that extracted life energy in exchange for immediate strength. There were such status-boosting drugs among the drops of the monsters in this world, but I hadn’t heard anything about side effects directly making you weaker even when you looked strong and healthy.
Then there was Seya’s attitude, which could be considered an affront to cookery. I mean, I was using cooking to dope up my allies as well, so I could hardly take a holier-than-thou attitude here, but I was confident I could get a result that would please this kid.
I looked over the vegetables and herbs in the basket again.
“Sure, I can use this stuff,” I said. Why not? “Okay. I’ll use these ingredients to make your wish come true. Just you wait and see.” There were some things mixed in that I’d been planning on getting from the castle anyway. I could make this work.
“Really? You promise?” the boy exclaimed.
“I promise. You just be good and wait here,” I said. I continued over to the carriage and set up the mirror we had onboard. The kid watched me, clearly puzzled about what was going on. “I’ll be right back. You watch that basket,” I said.
“Sure thing!” he said, still a little unsure about what was happening.
“See you soon. Transport Mirror.” After making sure I had a good lock on the mirror, I incanted the skill and returned to L’Arc’s castle.
“Huh?! What the—” The boy’s voice was cut off mid-sentence, and I emerged from the castle mirror right into the killer whale sisters.
“Oh my, little Naofumi!” said Sadeena.
“Oh dear! Just you, sweet Naofumi?” Shildina said. It looked like Sadeena had managed to track down the lost Shildina after all.
“Great timing, girls. I need you to carry some stuff for me,” I told them.
“Oh my,” Sadeena said. I proceeded to fill some sacks with whatever we had on hand in the castle and then had the killer whale sisters carry those sacks. Then I headed to the kitchen and picked up with both hands one of the pots I had left in the care of the castle chefs. Of course, for a normal person it would have been too heavy to carry, but in addition to the other-world concept of levels, I also had the protection of the mirror. It wasn’t heavy or hot for me at all.
“Good luck—” S’yne started, sitting in the food hall and eating all the food I had left behind.
“You are doing a good thing,” her familiar relayed. “Please make that boy’s wish come true.” S’yne was waving, and her eyes looked assured that she understood the situation and was sure I would win anyway. From her attitude, it seemed like things were fine here.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Movement Mirror.” I used another movement skill to return to where I had just come from. On the way out, I had used Transport Mirror, a skill that connected two mirrors together. On the way back, I had used Movement Mirror, which allowed me to jump to any mirror I had been to before. They were both pretty similar skills, but the difference was the cool down. Transport Mirror took a lot longer. Spending some points on Portal Shield could really reduce the cool down, but I couldn’t use that right now and so had used a combination of these two skills.
Now I was back to cooking and had more ingredients.
“You came out of the mirror!” the boy exclaimed.
“Awesome!” His sister’s eyes sparkled as she looked on.
“Right, back to the battle. Pass me the basket,” I said. He did so, and I returned toward the battle venue.
“You have to win!” the boy said.
“I will,” I replied to the two kids supporting me, continuing to walk as I did so.
When I arrived, the hostess girls and MCs at Seya’s restaurant were looking at my dishes and ingredients, obviously wondering where I had got all them from.
“Sadeena and Shildina?” Raphtalia said, looking at the sisters and then at me. She had finished cutting the meat.
“Yeah, I wanted to bring all the basics, so I brought those two along as pack mules,” I said. Levels and enhancements and whatever might let me carry a lot, but I still only had two hands. Bringing volume was the problem.
“Little Naofumi, where should we put this?” Sadeena asked.
“Right on the table there,” I said.
“Okay!” Sadeena replied.
“Let’s get cooking,” I said. I put some pots on the stove and then got started. It had taken a bit of time to reach this point, but I still had plenty left. I let life force flow around my body, as though I was about to go into battle. I grated the herbs and compounded them. Then I took up the knife. I was pretty sure I didn’t have to make a full-course dinner, which for a continental course would have been an appetizer, soup, fish, meat, sherbet, roast meat, salad, dessert, fruit, and then coffee. I’d cooked similar meals back at L’Arc’s castle. I’d used roasted beans similar to coffee beans and medicinal herbs to make a tea. I didn’t have time for all that in this cooking battle, though. Just something quick, something I was accustomed to making, would be fine.
The order I served the dishes in would be important, of course.
I appraised the aged meat that Raphtalia had pared out and trimmed it down to the part that definitely wouldn’t cause any food poisoning. Imbuing it with life force further activated the aged meat, filling it with power, and by the time I finished cutting, the quality had been raised to excellent.
That was definitely something we could work with.
As for Kizuna . . . I handed her some of the fish we had brought in and had her cut it up. She’d finished with the poisonous fish already. Her life as a fishing fool was paying off now. She knew her way around a fish. The blood had been skillfully drained, and overall, she was a step ahead when it came to gutting and cleaning.
“Kizuna, give me that,” I said.
“Huh? Ah, okay,” she replied. I used the herbs I had brought back with me and arranged the cut pieces of fish on a plate. Then I added a dressing made from those same medicinal herbs and some cooking oil. Finish off with plenty of life energy . . .
“There we go, one finished. That’s a fish carpaccio—almost,” I said. Next, I melted the fatty part of the meat in the frying pan, then added the rest of the meat and lightly seared it to seal in the flavor. All the while I continued to provide a suitable volume of life force in order to keep the quality from falling.
“What are you doing?” Seya was looking over, a mocking tone in his voice. “You need to cut meat up before you cook it! You can’t cook a lump like that.” It made me wonder what kind of chefs he had fought against so far. Not very good ones, from the sound of it.
Adding some life force allowed the heat to pass through more easily. It was the perfect temperature before I knew it, and then I arranged it on a skillet with the remainder of the vegetables I had selected and put it in the oven that Raphtalia had carefully adjusted. I then moved on to reheating the soup I had brought in with me. I transferred some over to a separate pot, added some chopped vegetables and meat, and started stewing.
All my cooking experience so far was really coming to bear now. I was even able to cover for the Japanese vegetables we couldn’t get here. Then I added some of the milk and cheese I had got from the castle, and the stew was complete.
“Just a few more things . . .” With the remaining time, I made an original sauce from a combination of the medicinal herbs and a simple appetizer.
That appetizer was sliced chicken and medicinal herbs with a side of gelatin. The soup was consommé, made from the bouillon I had carried back with me. Then there was the stew that my brother had so liked—it was rapidly becoming a favorite among Kizuna’s allies—and the “almost” carpaccio. The main dish was roast beef. For the dessert, I had gone with a kind of faux fruit punch, mixing subtle fruit flavors with sweet herb juice.
I could have tried for something flashier, but in the time allotted, this was the best I could do. I’d never taken part in a battle like this before, after all. I’d been thinking of a full-course meal but hadn’t been able to turn out that many dishes.
I mean, in the cooking manga I had seen, they normally won with a single dish. So I thought I’d made a pretty good account of it myself. The gong to signal the end of the cooking time rang out pretty much right at the point everything was finished.
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