"Huff... huff...."
Get a grip.
I was sprawled on the dining hall floor, drenched in cold sweat.
The time I spent as the “chef of Dasmur” hadn’t been particularly long.
Maybe it was because the latter half of those memories was so intense.
Tremble...
My whole body was quivering.
A fierce sense of dissonance hit me.
"Is this... me?"
This small, slight body.
A body that felt like it didn’t have a shred of strength.
Was this really my body?
A vicious disconnect.
It felt like my whole self was twisting out of shape.
"...Calm down."
I clenched my teeth and forced my trembling body to move.
I barely made it to the break room tucked in the dining hall’s corner.
Running my hands over myself, I repeated in my head, over and over.
"This really is my body."
That experience just now...
The ten-meter-tall giant of water—
"That’s not me."
And also—
The death I suffered there—
"That isn’t my death...."
Crrrk.
Right.
I—
No matter what happens—
"I won’t die like that."
****
"...Hoo."
I stayed curled up like that for a while,
and eventually I felt my body settle.
Only then
could I start to calmly retrace what I’d just gone through.
"...Annihilation."
I’d heard about it a few times, as a story.
Seohwan and Miho—
how their world, too, had been destroyed by an oncoming enemy.
But—
Hearing it as a story,
and seeing it with my own eyes and living through it—
those two are vastly different.
"The Pontiff... said he wasn’t an invader but a [refugee]."
Sure enough.
After watching those memories,
I could more or less grasp what he meant.
[Dasmur], too,
was invaded by another world—just like us.
The place where the chef stayed was at least a sea under a god’s protection.
It seemed they kept peace there for a time, but—
"It couldn’t last forever."
I call back the scenes from the memory.
At first, the sea teemed with many living things swimming freely.
As time went on, the life I could see dwindled away.
Monsters that appeared in the outer world—
to fight them,
everyone but a minimum cadre was dragged to the front.
I, at least, was the Pontiff’s personal chef.
Not a combatant, so I wasn’t sent to other seas.
But when even the sea under divine protection was invaded,
and that god had to descend in person,
even he had to step onto the battlefield.
"...They said the [Dasmurians] inside the dungeon were all but children."
Even the Pontiff, who was at least fully grown,
was a spent old man whose lifespan would already have ended without the chef’s aid.
After the final war,
everyone capable of fighting died,
"and only children, with an old man to lead them, fled to another world."
That was the dungeon—
the true form of [Erosion Abyss — Dasmur].
He is the Pontiff who tried to drown our world in the sea.
I don’t regret killing him and freeing the dungeon.
"But that he wanted to raise the last surviving children of his race properly... I can understand."
He and I—
we both had to fight a fight we couldn’t avoid,
and the stronger side survived.
That’s all.
It did leave me with a faint, sour aftertaste,
but—
"Forget the dead. Let them go."
What matters is
how I’m going to keep living from here.
In those memories,
the thing that stood out most
wasn’t the god who descended at the end—"Master of the Endless Sea — Dasmur,"
nor the colossal monsters that fought that god.
"Zombies."
The living dead.
An existence that is a contradiction in the very term.
Literally,
the dead walking around.
"Monsters that hadn’t even shown up in our unit."
And yet—
the monsters that destroyed Dasmur—
the ones that made up the greatest numbers among them were precisely those zombies.
Especially—
the Sacred Beast advancing while zombified—
"the despair the chef felt when he saw that..."
I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it for a while.
"Up to now I didn’t even consider them a threat."
No wonder.
When I’d barely awakened, zombies were troublesome enough.
But I leveled up, and received rewards far beyond my level.
The unit’s average combat power rose to a level incomparable to the past.
"A warrior-class Awakened with a decent level could shove his arm into a zombie’s jaws and not get a scratch."
So,
zombies had come to be treated as a fairly light opponent by the unit.
But—
"Not anymore."
The zombies in those memories just now—
I had a strong hunch they’re not something we can afford to handle complacently {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} like we do now.
"We need countermeasures... as fast as possible."
****
But before that,
there was something else to take care of.
Knock, knock.
"Youngjun? When you said you’d try it, what did you mean...."
The one who opened the kitchen door and stepped in
was none other than Sergeant Lee Minjae.
It felt like I’d ended up seeing something even more important by accident,
but the reason I cooked and ate the [Essence of the Chef of Dasmur] wasn’t the zombies.
It was to solve the problem right in front of us.
"Dealing with the monster occupying the power plant."
It feeds on the plant’s electricity to grow stronger,
and with that power it blocks our approach.
[Salmo-neus, the Lightning-Eater]
And—
that problem was already...
"As good as solved."
"What?"
No surprise.
Because right now, my status window showed—
[Traits]
[Elemental Cuisine] (New!)
The art wielded by that overwhelmingly skilled chef I saw in the memory
had taken root in me.
Now then.
If I want to use this, hmm.
"I’m going to need you to suffer a bit again, Minjae."
"...?"
****
[Elemental Cuisine]
A cuisine of another world.
Elemental cuisine.
I did just gain this trait,
but the way to use it had already settled naturally into my body.
The power “I” in the memory used as if it were nothing.
Through the experience of a chef who had reached the pinnacle in this field,
the feel for handling this power remained in me to some degree.
And judging by those memories,
this cuisine—
"...Is this really cuisine?"
It runs on a completely different track
from the cooking I knew.
"A branch beneath mana cuisine."
From what I’ve felt while cooking up to now—
mana affects the taste of food.
The ordinary meats I used back in the army, and monster meat—
the taste of the two isn’t even comparable.
"Monster meat overwhelmingly tastes better."
That mana affects taste—
in other words,
to put it in reverse:
"Mana... has flavor."
Mana, magical power—
it always felt like something purely mysterious.
But if it has flavor,
then to me it’s nothing more than another ingredient.
[Mana Cuisine]
is literally cooking that mana—
drawing out the flavor mana possesses...
"From a human point of view, it’s an act closer to magic than to cooking."
The trait I learned this time,
[Elemental Cuisine], is a method derived from mana cuisine.
I thought of the dungeon we raided not long ago,
[Erosion Abyss — Dasmur].
The dungeon’s innate difficulty was considerable,
but thinking back now,
there was one puzzling part during the clear.
"The buildings in the central area where the monsters had settled had all disappeared."
If the buildings had been destroyed,
or only fragments were left drifting—
that I could accept.
The problem was:
the buildings that had been there had, quite literally, “vanished.”
"I remember wondering for a second where all the debris went."
No matter how thoroughly monsters might demolish something,
it doesn’t make sense for it to disappear without a trace like that.
And—
the answer was simpler than I thought.
[Elemental Cuisine]
[You can process ingredients and convert them into a specific element.]
[You can process a specific element and cook it into something even more delicious.]
"They cooked and ate it?"
The fishfolk called Dasmurians—
in their world, the culture of “elemental cuisine” had simply become natural.
You know how even someone who “can’t cook” can usually at least fry an egg?
For them, elemental cuisine felt like that.
And using that elemental cuisine—
"they liquefied the buildings and ate them."
Come to think of it,
there wasn’t much for the [Dasmurians] to eat inside that dungeon anyway.
Humans were holed up in buildings, and there weren’t that many fish.
"Who would’ve thought they were liquefying and eating the buildings."
I’d never have imagined it,
but when I think about it, there’s something similar on Earth.
"Fly larvae, for example—don’t they dissolve the flesh of dead animals to liquefy it before consuming it?"
This was just a scaled-up version of that.
What I witnessed firsthand
was the dish that turned the Parasite of the Sacred Beast into liquid.
A method so overwhelming that just watching it made me level up.
But—
"the name of this trait isn’t [Liquid Cuisine], it’s [Elemental Cuisine]."
The ways and ingredients you can cook
aren’t limited to liquids.
****
"...Are you sure this actually works like you say?"
"Yeah. Just trust me."
A few hours later.
I was aboard the boat heading for the island.
We had a solution.
No reason to stall.
Myself, the soldiers,
and Minjae headed straight for the island with the power plant.
"Even so."
And—
from before he even set foot on the boat, Minjae had been repeating the same line.
"You’re really serious about this, right?"
"That’s the thirtieth time you’ve said that."
"Ungh."
Minjae, one of the most rational and cool-headed in the unit.
It wasn’t like him.
"But I get it."
No wonder.
The order I’d given Minjae—
if this went wrong even a little...
"it could kill every last one of us on this boat."
No matter how gutsy you are,
it’s an order that would make you balk.
"We’re almost in range!"
Soon after,
the engineer piloting the boat shouted back,
and as the island drew near—
-BZZZZZZT!!!
Just like last time,
a curtain of lightning bloomed over the entire island.
"Even on a second look, that’s an absurd amount...."
"How much energy has it sucked in there?"
The soldiers, watching it, muttered through cold sweat.
If I cooked something for it,
I could probably grant lightning-attribute resistance at least.
But even then, I doubt we could nullify all the damage.
That’s how powerful that lightning shroud was.
"Even if we force our way in somehow and kill the monster... our losses would be brutal."
Of course,
that’s only the method you use if there’s nothing else.
"Minjae."
"Y-yeah."
I turned to Minjae.
"...All right. Do it."
"Yeah."
"...You’re really, really sure we can do this, right?"
"Man! Do you think I’ve spent my life getting scammed?"
"...Hoo!"
Minjae let out a sigh.
But we’d come this far.
Turning back without doing anything wasn’t an option.
He raised his hand into empty air.
Our unit’s strongest mage—
Sergeant Lee Minjae’s signature magic blossomed from that hand.
Rrrrrrumble...
Over our heads,
a small thundercloud formed.
The one who made that cloud—
Sergeant Lee Minjae—spoke, tension threading his voice.
"Making a storm cloud this close...."
It was an ability Minjae acquired after passing level 20.
By charging that cloud with lightning, he could unleash a devastating strike,
and in general it was versatile in many ways.
However,
a thundercloud laden with lightning is, in itself, a lethal natural hazard.
When facing enemies, he’d always keep it high in the sky.
"This time, the opposite."
A storm cloud formed low enough that I could reach up and touch it.
Into that,
Bzzzzzt...
RRRRUMBLE...
Minjae
began hurling his lightning.
"I fed him dishes that increase mana capacity for this."
And—
when that thundercloud swelled to a size that felt genuinely dangerous—
"This much is enough."
A monster that eats lightning, was it?
When I first learned what it was,
I thought there was no way lightning could be cooked.
Not anymore.
Just wait a bit.
"I’ll make the plant’s electricity the last thing on its mind."
A crackling, blatantly threatening storm cloud.
I thrust both hands into it.
