“Th-this flavor... is just... what the hell... what did you do to it...!”
He put the food I’d made into his mouth,
and now the chef was sweating cold sweat, staring blankly down at the dish.
Yeah.
That man, Howard Jin, his cooking skill was definitely the real thing.
To build up that level of skill,
he must have gone through a hell of a lot.
But...
that so-called “real” cooking skill was, in the end,
only real by the standards of a chef before the world ended.
“This—this shouldn’t be possible! There’s no way this is just cooking! You used something else!”
“Hey, didn’t we agree to accept the result honestly?”
“Ghh...!”
His pride as a chef was on the line.
This was a perfect chance to feed him [Kitchen Chef’s Special Sauce], too, but I intentionally didn’t.
I didn’t use anything besides cooking.
Neither of us had any special equipment on us.
This was a place where we were testing nothing but pure skill.
‘When it comes to cooking skill built up as a chef, he’s clearly above me.’
However.
If you measure it by cooking skill as an Awakener...
‘The true value of the [Chef] job only really starts once you begin cooking monster meat.’
This guy
hadn’t even properly set foot on the starting line.
[Intermediate Chef Jin Yangsik Lv.21]
[War Cook Shin Youngjun Lv.36]
Between him and me,
there was a gap so huge he couldn’t even begin to look up at it.
“Fine, then explain this! What is this liquid?!”
He plunged his spoon into the dish I’d made,
scooped up some of the thick liquid there, and said,
“At first I thought you’d ground the oats, but... no. No matter how finely you grind them and mix with water, you can’t get a liquid this perfectly smooth. And yet it still keeps all the nuttiness of the oats...! You mixed in some other ingredient with a similar flavor, didn’t you?!”
“Nope.”
“Then how the hell...!”
At that,
I smiled faintly,
and,
“Your tone’s a little rude for someone asking their senior a question... but I’ll tell you at least this much.”
I walked over to the oats we’d pulled from storage.
Then.
I scooped up a handful of oats.
[Elemental Cuisine]
Right away—
“Wh-what the hell is that.”
“Cooking.”
The handful of oats in my hand
turned straight into liquid and flowed down.
“Then what about this fish flavor! This fish doesn’t have this kind of fattiness by nature. That’s just a fundamental trait of the ingredient—there’s no way you can just change that...!”
“Like you said, it felt a bit lacking in fat... so I added some.”
“‘Added’?”
This time I lightly pinched some lard oil from the corner,
and placed it on top of the fish.
[Force-Feeding]
The fat shimmered with a strange light as it melted,
then soaked into the ingredient.
“...What is this.”
When I showed him the skills I’d used on the cooking,
Howard stared and muttered blankly.
“That... that’s not cooking.”
“It is cooking.”
Yeah.
It is cooking.
It’s just—
‘It’s not cooking by the standards of this world.’
It’s so alien that
you could say it’s closer to magic.
So it’s a cooking method that’s extremely difficult even for me.
Even so,
it’s unquestionably a “cooking technique.”
“...What the hell.”
“You’ve got them too, you know.”
The dishes he and I had made.
Not to brag, but,
the difference in flavor between them was enormous—something you couldn’t possibly cover up.
And the difference that created that result was just one thing.
“Skills and Traits as a chef.”
“......”
He’d clung to the cooking of a pre-collapse chef.
I’d been cooking as a post-collapse chef.
He, an Awakener, had continued to make ordinary human cooking.
I, as an Awakener, had boosted my stats,
and mastered cooking methods from another world.
Which of us
was closer to [Chef], not just “chef”?
That difference.
“Yeah... Skills, Traits... that’s what it is.”
No matter how good a martial arts fighter you are,
if you’re a normal human, you can’t beat a level 1 combat-class Awakener.
Actually, you don’t even need a combat class.
Just think about the miracles I pulled off as soon as I first got [Lowest-Rank Dagger Mastery].
Even those feats with that dagger were things that even sword masters from history, the kind people named in books, wouldn’t have been able to do.
‘If this guy had the same level, stats, and skills as me... maybe I’d have lost.’
But.
Reality wasn’t like that.
‘Probably... because he was already such a good chef. That’s exactly why he was tied down by the common sense of a normal chef.’
The reason a chef who was likely better than me hadn’t adapted to Awakener-style cooking was, in the end,
because he was better than me—
because he was bound by the knowledge and common sense he’d built up.
“Haha... good god. Here I was thinking the Skills I have are already freakish enough... but there are Skills like that, that barely even look like cooking.”
At my words,
he looked like he’d taken a massive hit. He lost control of his body,
then slumped down in a corner of the kitchen.
“You’re right. After tasting that, I can’t deny it.”
“Then.”
“You win.”
With a smile full of defeat, he said,
“I admit it. Yeah... if you want, I can even call you ‘Senior’ from now on.”
“I like how fast you’re admitting it.”
Looking down at him where he’d collapsed,
I coolly declared,
“I’m going to start cooking now.”
“......”
“Like we agreed, don’t get in my way while I’m cooking here. And don’t go around telling people I’m cooking in this place.”
At that,
flinch.
“Cooking... cooking, huh.”
His body, his head still lowered, twitched slightly.
“I know this sounds pretty pathetic coming from the guy who just lost, but... can I ask you just one thing?”
“...What. If it’s about cooking, we can talk later.”
“Why do you insist on cooking in the kitchen?”
I was scanning the kitchen, getting ready to start,
when I turned at that ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) question.
“What did you say?”
“Here’s the thing. I’m not bragging, but... I wasn’t exactly living a wholesome life, you know?”
The man who’d been slumped on the floor
was looking up at me.
“Until I became a chef, I was pretty much living the life of some third-rate punk delinquent.”
“...I kind of figured as much, from your look and the way you talk.”
“Heh-heh. But you know this? Living like a punk isn’t exactly easy either. It’s not that simple to survive among people who are deadly as hell and could explode any second. Especially for someone like me, with no backing, no nothing... if I didn’t read the mood, I couldn’t survive.”
We were in a rush and every second counted,
but this guy suddenly started monologuing about his past.
“Thanks to living like that since I was a kid, I’d say I take pride in my sense for reading the room. Even when I got sick of that life and started cooking... that same sense is what barely let me survive.”
I was just about to grimace at the thought that I’d listened to pointless nonsense,
when the man opened his mouth again.
“Like you said, we’re not ordinary chefs; we’re Awakeners. Honestly, if you just want to cook, you can throw together something decent right there on the street.”
“......”
“Even I could do that much. For someone like you... even something you slap together like that would have a huge effect. Tell me I’m wrong.”
No.
He wasn’t wrong at all.
Exactly like he said,
I could make a normal dish right this second.
If I wanted, I could just buy a portable gas burner from the Shop and do some simple grilling.
But—
‘Right now, my cooking power is weaker than it was in the Legion.’
The performance of [Chef]’s cooking is affected by an Awakener’s stats.
And since I’d lost all the equipment I’d been issued in the Legion,
while my raw stats were still overwhelming compared to other Awakeners,
compared to what I’d been back in the Legion, I was in a pathetic state.
‘Meanwhile, the people I have to feed are all high-level.’
The higher your level gets,
the more resistance you have to supernatural effects.
Unlike back when I broke people like Lieutenant Kim and various criminals,
right now I couldn’t just lock these people up somewhere and keep feeding them over and over.
“Even so, if you still need proper facilities... that means you really have to make proper cooking.”
That’s why.
If I wanted to cook something that could break them with a single dish,
I needed the power of a dish made thoroughly, properly.
“You need cooking with that level of effect. Which means you’ve got a reason that strong.”
His gaze
stabbed into me.
“So that’s what I want to ask. What’s the reason you absolutely have to make that ‘proper cooking’.”
“......”
You could say it was a trivial question.
But.
I couldn’t give him any answer.
—I’m going to control other people’s emotions and use them however I want.
There’s no way I could say something like that
out loud with my head held high.
“I knew it.”
When I couldn’t answer,
Howard nodded and muttered,
“I’ve lived off nothing but reading the room—through my years as a punk and my years as a chef. I might not be able to cook as well as you. But my instincts are still sharp.”
Only then did I finally understand
why this man had suddenly picked a fight with me.
“You... you’re trying to cook for a bad reason, aren’t you?”
Back when our eyes first met,
he’d given me a strangely searching look.
—You’re going to cook for your own goal, huh?
Back then,
this guy had already picked up on it.
—And that “goal”... doesn’t feel like a proper one.
That the cooking I was about to do
was in no way normal.
But.
“So what?”
For my goal,
I had no intention of stopping here.
“No matter what reason I have for cooking, what does it have to do with you? I won the cooking battle. Or am I wrong?”
“...You’re right. Your food. It tasted fucking amazing.”
“Then the right to use this kitchen comes to me. That’s the condition we set.”
Meeting his eyes head-on,
I looked down at the fallen chef.
And then.
I...
let out, without holding back at all,
the presence I’d been deliberately suppressing all this time.
FWOOOOSH!
My stats were already beyond any point of comparison with other Awakeners.
If you wanted to compare, you’d have to compare me to boss-class monsters.
The key one, of course, was [Mana].
...Gulp.
If I really decided to unleash my presence,
it was similar to a boss-class monster spreading its mana to crush you with pressure...
no, it might be even more threatening than that.
“...Here’s the thing about me.”
Unlike me,
this man was a pure chef with no step into a combat class.
“I really did live like absolute trash—some third-rate punk. I didn’t have any education, didn’t inherit anything... when a guy who couldn’t do a single damn thing looked for some way, any way to survive, the only thing left was punk shit.”
“......”
“But one day, I started thinking—‘Is this really how I should be living?’”
Since he’d never really fought,
the pressure must have felt like he was about to be crushed to death.
“So I quit being a punk and went around begging at random restaurants. Asked them to teach me how to cook. Of course, I got rejected over and over. People asked if I was insane all the time. But... with how short-staffed the world was, there was a place that took in a guy like me.”
Instead of passing out under my pressure,
he pushed himself up from where he’d fallen.
“I thought it’d at least be better than living as a punk, but it was anything but easy. It was so hard I honestly thought I’d pass out. Even guys who’d gone to fancy schools, the kind of people totally different from a punk like me, ran away because it was too much.”
He reached out and pulled down a dagger hanging on one side of the kitchen, gripping it in his hand.
“But... I somehow survived. And I became a chef.”
“......”
“Thanks to that, I could turn from a piece of garbage into a somewhat decent human being.”
The way he held that dagger
was very familiar to me.
“Cooking changed my life.”
“......”
“So I can’t just sit by and watch someone insult cooking like that.”
[Dagger Mastery]
Before I learned “Martial Art – Form,”
this was the stance I’d used all the time.
It was the fighting stance
of a chef.
