After assigning the engineers to build the cannon and shells,
I headed for the mess.
And...
—tik tik tik tik...
I lit the burner
and started cooking.
‘Mm. A normal quantity won’t cut it.’
For the dish I was making now,
the most important thing wasn’t actually the dish’s effects.
‘Quantity.’
Pure, overwhelming quantity.
I hauled out every ingredient we had stored in the pantry
and started cooking with everything I had.
“I don’t need effects... only taste and volume.”
This wasn’t like when I fed the soldiers at full power.
I didn’t care what kind of effect the dish might carry.
I focused solely on the finest taste.
[War Chef’s All-Out Stir-Fried Fish Cakes of Happy Feelings for a Specific Being]
After I completed one dish,
I placed my hand over it and murmured:
“Five Loaves and Two Fish.”
[Activating skill — ‘Five Loaves and Two Fish.’]
Then—
the dish multiplied to the maximum amount my mana allowed.
“Hff...”
Thanks to a mix of skills and traits, the fatigue from cooking had come down a lot,
but as the phrase “all-out” implies,
producing a best-of-the-best dish still wasn’t easy.
And the better the dish,
the more mana it cost to duplicate—exponentially so.
“Gonna kill me.”
One pass of cooking, and one duplication.
That alone had emptied the mana in my body.
But—
luckily, I guess—
[Jerky of Mixed Mana Infused with the War Chef’s Dense Mana]
“I’ve stockpiled plenty of mana-amplifying dishes.”
For a simple reason.
I’d originally planned to use these dishes to fill that [Mana Reservoir].
‘The mages who were supposed to eat them all passed out, so these ended up in a weird limbo.’
When it comes to stats, I’m a monster in at least one area.
The buff-tolerance ceiling I can endure is overwhelmingly higher than the unit’s.
As I chewed the jerky,
I felt the mana in my body gradually refilling.
“Next menu...”
I started the next dish immediately.
What I needed to make was simple.
The most heartfelt dish I could produce,
in the largest possible amount.
So—
I focused on cooking for a long while, and then—
“Sergeant Shin!”
“The items you requested are complete.”
The engineers came,
announcing they’d finished what I’d asked for.
‘Already that much time?’
I’d gotten so absorbed in cooking,
I had no idea how much time had passed.
Checking in with my body,
I’d ballooned my mana to the limit while cooking, yet barely any remained.
“No matter what, I don’t think I can cook any more than this...”
I rose to my feet
and stepped out of the mess.
Right.
Then it’s about time—
“Let’s start the operation.”
****
[An Underground Mine Dug Too Deep — Morzan]
After leaving the mess,
I went straight into the Gate beneath the inner fortress.
A cavern broad to the point of excess.
In its center stood a gigantic cannon.
[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]
[Legion Special-Purpose Direct-Fire Battery]
“This the guy?”
“Yes. We modified a direct-fire gun captured from another unit.”
[An old weapon of fallen humanity, modified by the Iron Legion’s engineers.]
[Performance has been dramatically increased using otherworldly technology in the modification process.]
Otherworldly technology.
So they’d applied the Dwarven tech we’d obtained, right out of the gate.
“It’s a direct-fire piece for now... but I’m pretty sure it surpasses the range you asked for.”
“What? Why overshoot it?”
“Haha—once we got building, it turned out to be more fun than expected.”
The engineers stroked their creation with pride.
Since this was their first go at their home turf after receiving that otherworld tech,
they’d put in more oomph than I’d ordered.
‘That’d explain it.’
The finished cannon exceeded
what I’d hoped to see.
A massive gun emplacement.
Braced platforms splayed out around it to absorb recoil,
and a long, hulking barrel anchored at their center.
The oddity was—
‘the barrel pointed not up, but down.’
Built to fire into the underground,
not across the ground or into the sky.
After confirming the cannon’s performance,
I headed to the center of the cavern at the Gate’s mouth.
‘Come to think of it... this seal ended up useless.’
The seal beneath our feet,
it had originally been built by the Dwarven to block the ‘wrath of a god’ that might surge up from below.
A device installed at the priesthood’s behest—who believed the mountain range itself was the god’s gift—because they feared the god’s wrath.
But—
‘Even a seal crafted by a civilization that powerful, at full effort, couldn’t stop the wrath of a mere leftover scrap of flesh.’
A god watching the children it made treat another child as a slave.
You weren’t going to block that fury with some seal.
Even in its utterly fallen state,
they hadn’t even been able to mitigate the damage wrought by that wrath.
It gave me the slightest feel
for how powerful a “divinity” was.
I walked atop the thick seal
and took my place exactly at the cavern’s center.
“Set the cannon here. Exactly here.”
“Yes!”
This underground mine was shaped like a very thin, very long drill.
Where I stood was the drill’s topmost tip.
And—
‘[Morzan] was... at the drill’s far end.’
Standing at the center now,
it was far too distant to sense or see,
but—
‘directly below, right here...’
the god that couldn’t properly die would be lodged.
“Kkamang!”
—Kkiing!
Kkamang bored a massive hole where I stood,
and—
“Installation complete!”
the engineers emplaced the cannon to fire down that hole.
And last...
“These are the shells you asked us to make, Sergeant.”
“Oh—must’ve been a tough ask, but they look great.”
The special shells I’d requested—
there were hundreds of them.
“By the way...”
“Why did you ask us to build them like this?”
These shells’ purpose was very different from ordinary shells.
The reason I’d wanted shells like these
was actually straightforward.
“Mm. Truth is, my cooking kit has one fatal weakness.”
“Sir...? Your cooking?”
Chef.
I basically think it’s not just satisfactory, but a busted-good class.
But there were a few fatal weaknesses I simply couldn’t do anything about.
‘The duration issue I felt recently is one...’
But the biggest weakness was—
“Effects only trigger if you eat.”
“Ah...”
For buff-type dishes, that flaw didn’t stand out much.
The problem was—
‘when I needed to use cooking as a debuff.’
Some beasts—on the animal-level—would eat whatever you threw and you could work them that way,
but when it came to monsters with real intellect,
feeding them was close to impossible.
In games, the standard for boss fights is allies’ buffs and enemies’ debuffs.
My cooking did half of that—
I’d been able to fulfill only the buff role.
But—
“Not anymore.”
Not long ago,
after I job-changed the Demon Contractors into Hunters,
I got a trait for that achievement.
[Trait ? Forced Feeding]
Reading its effect,
I took the shells the soldiers handed me.
[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]
[Legion Special-Purpose Bespoke Shell]
I opened the lid.
[Unlike typical shells, these are designed to hold contents within.]
[Upon contact with the target, they do not explode; instead, the shell opens and spills its contents...]
“Nicely done.”
With the lid open,
it wasn’t so much a shell...
Right.
‘It looked like a somewhat unusual, giant side-dish container.’
And what else
goes into a container like this?
“Ah—ah?”
“What are you doing!?”
“Hm? What else would I be doing...”
Into the opened shell,
what I began to load was—
“Food.”
The food I’d made with everything I had,
in staggering quantities.
****
—Y-you’re going to fire food...
—I can’t load all this alone. You guys, help get the rest in.
—Sir? That’s not hard, but... what about you, Sergeant?
You pack the food into shells and fire it.
When they first heard the concept, the soldiers were thrown,
but then, since it was me, they just went, “there must be a point,” and moved on.
An enormous mass of food had been sitting in the shadows.
Instead of bowls... we packed it
into ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ shells—leaving that part to the soldiers—
—and I...
“I need to go see it with my own eyes.”
Once again,
I headed for the underground mine choked with miasma.
‘I’m really sick of this place.’
Please.
Let this be the last push.
—Master.
“Hm?”
On my way down,
a vassal in the shadows spoke to me
and stepped out of the darkness.
“...I’m sure you’ve noticed, Master.”
“Ah... yeah. I have.”
I’m not an idiot.
No way I wouldn’t notice what had changed in my body.
‘I got soaked in that miasma.’
In the ordinary course, I should’ve died.
Yet I made it back alive.
There had to be a reason I could, and—
I realized it the moment I stepped out of the ward.
“When you came up from underground, your condition was as bad as bad gets...”
“Right. I probably couldn’t have reached the surface alive as I was.”
“So, unavoidably...”
I recall the sensation
when I stepped into warm sunlight outside the ward.
‘It stung like hell.’
It wasn’t even a particularly harsh sun that day.
Just ordinary daylight, an ordinary sun—and yet
it felt hot and prickling, like I’d taken a mild burn.
“You did emergency treatment with your blood.”
“Yes.”
Thankfully, the pain wasn’t severe,
but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t throw me.
“Do you remember when you asked if I’d made you a vampire last time?”
“Yeah. I remember. Back then I freaked at your regeneration.”
“At the time I said you were half a vampire, but...”
Was Ariella gauging my mood?
She spoke carefully.
“Looking back now, it wasn’t that far then.”
“‘Then’... meaning now—yeah.”
“Now it’s less ‘half’ and more...”
She scratched her cheek, embarrassed, and went on:
“Precisely forty-nine percent of you is a vampire.”
“...”
Even as I descended the dark mine,
I wasn’t using a light.
Because even without a light,
I could see as well as if it were day.
‘Dark Vision.’
That too
would be the vampire traits at work.
I sighed and opened the [Status Window].
[Awakened — Shin Youngjun]
[Class: War Chef Lv.33]
[Primate — Human?]
I didn’t see traits like [Dark Vision] listed,
and my species value seemed to still classify me as human.
‘“Human?” What’s with the question mark.’
Apparently,
I was just barely within the threshold of “can be called human.”
So much so that even this System window wasn’t sure.
“I’m sorry. I acted without your permission...”
Ariella bowed her head, as if braced for a scolding.
But—
“No. You did well.”
“...Sir?”
I wasn’t the kind of tyrant boss
to get angry over something like this.
“I was the one who overreached. Thanks to you, I’m alive.”
“...”
Being alive—that’s what mattered.
She’d done her best to save me.
If there’d been another way, that’d be one thing; but absent that, there was no reason to get angry.
“You’re... officially no longer fully human now, Master.”
“Heh. No kidding.”
I let out a laugh, half-amused.
How long has it been since the world went to hell, and I’m already like this.
At my answer,
Ariella seemed to think of something.
“...Do you regret it?”
That was her question.
“Regret, huh.”
Mm, I don’t know.
That I’d become half vampire—
in the past, I’d have been beside myself.
I’d have regretted it like crazy, too.
“Now? Not really.”
“That is... surprising. Didn’t you take pride in your identity as human?”
“Hm? That’s still true. If anything’s changed, well...”
Think about it, and it is odd.
How much time has passed since back then,
that I can shrug off being half monster.
“Even if my pride in being human stays the same,”
the difference between then and now—
there’s only one likely reason.
“my hostility toward other races... has probably gone down a little.”
“Pardon?”
“What’s with the surprise. How many non-humans are in our unit now? It tracks.”
At first,
since they’d attacked humanity living its ordinary life, I treated them purely as enemies.
Then, when I met the brood-mother in the [Subway],
I realized these were living beings with emotion—and maternal instinct.
Even so, the hostility had remained,
but then I met more and varied monsters.
‘Still enemies, but with circumstances of their own.’
Whether Dasmur-folk,
the Green Manes,
vampires,
Beastkin, or the Mek—
they weren’t unconditionally beings to hate,
and when needed...
I learned they could be taken under my wing.
There would still be cases where our reasons forced enmity,
but compared to the past—when I just loathed them as monsters that ate humans—my perception had shifted quite a bit.
“I still don’t like becoming a monster, but—hey. I’m barely still human, right?”
“...”
“Then it’s fine.”
What mattered was—
I was still alive.
“I don’t regret it... because I’m satisfied with what I did.”
Even though I’d acted accepting death,
I still managed to survive.
For this price, you could even call it cheap.
“...From here, you’ll have to go on alone, Master.”
After descending for a long time like that, we finally reached
the very stretch where Ariella and I had parted last time.
“The one saving grace is that vampires have higher poison resistance than humans.”
“Hm?”
“If the last time you drew was a Viscount’s blood, this time it was a Baron’s? No—the reverse: you took a Viscount’s now. The purity is on a different plane... your regeneration will be far stronger than before. You should be able to go down much more easily than last time.”
“Heh. Not bad, getting hand-me-downs until I die.”
I chuckled lightly
and headed for the deepest point—
where the densest thought-mass piled up.
—Hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts.
When that thought-mass
started to crawl into my skin—
Thoooom!
To the side,
I felt something dropping at insane speed.
I glanced over.
Thooom...
KRRRAA-BOOOOM...
From the far ceiling above,
I could see an enormous number of shells
raining down.
“It’s started.”
A hunk of flesh that had once been a god—even if I’d nearly fallen to my death—
its takedown
had finally begun.
