“Hell, we might as well try to get some.”
“...?”
At my casually thrown-out words,
Jo Beomseok opened his eyes wide and said,
“Don’t tell me... you mean you can get enough fuel to move all this equipment?”
Well.
I mean, I don’t really know whether it will work or not myself.
“There is a method worth trying, at least.”
“What in the...!”
It was something I’d been thinking about ever since I first heard the story about the fuel...
I guess you could say.
‘No, saying it goes back even before that would be more accurate.’
As it happened,
I also had had one method in mind for a while now.
“The fuel to run tanks isn’t something you can get just by looting a gas station or two. The reason I insisted on raiding a Supply Unit was because there were no other options if we wanted that much fuel.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“And you’re saying you can get that much?”
“No, I already told you.”
I’ll try to get it,
but I don’t know if it’ll work out.
“So don’t get your hopes up too much.”
“Don’t get my hopes up... The fact that it might even be possible is already absurd...”
He looked at me with a face that said he just couldn’t understand and spoke.
“...Come to think of it, I don’t actually know your Job or your abilities, do I.”
“Sir?”
“What kind of ability do you have that something like that would even be possible?”
At those words,
I tilted my head and asked,
“Uh, why are you suddenly asking about my abilities?”
“...Huh? What are you talking about. Weren’t you saying you were going to secure fuel with your abilities?”
Jo Beomseok looked bewildered at my words.
Only then, hearing that, did I realize.
“Ah. You’re misunderstanding something.”
“...?”
This old man
was misunderstanding something.
‘“What kind of ability do you have that makes that possible,” huh.’
That question itself was a bit off from the start.
“It’s true I said there was a method worth trying.”
Jo Beomseok was looking at me, cold sweat beading.
I scratched my cheek, a little embarrassed, and said to him,
“I never actually said it was my ability, though?”
“What?”
We’re talking about getting that much fuel.
I mean...
‘How the hell would I do something like that alone.’
With my abilities alone,
it’d be a little difficult.
*****
Even after that,
Jo Beomseok kept asking me for more detailed explanations.
‘I don’t even know if this will work yet; I can’t exactly tell him everything.’
I somehow shook off Jo Beomseok’s hand as he tried to grab me
and returned to Southern Branch.
And the first place I headed to was...
Well...
where else would a chef go.
“What the, Senior? Where’d you go and now you’re only getting back?”
“Mm, I had a little errand.”
“...You seem like some kind of chef who does more outside work than actual cooking, Senior.”
Obviously,
it was the kitchen.
When I opened the door and went in,
Howard, who had been absorbed in looking at something, lifted his head and greeted me.
“What were you looking at?”
“Ah, this?”
When I asked, curious what he’d been looking at,
Howard opened something like a notebook and showed it to me.
“It’s what you told me, organized.”
“...”
In there,
the secrets of being a [Chef] as an Awakener that I’d taught him were written densely.
‘For how he looks and acts, he’s got a real model-student style... this guy.’
I felt it last time too.
Despite his prickly personality and thug-like appearance,
when it came to cooking, this guy was nothing if not diligent.
“I didn’t think you’d go as far as taking notes. If there was something you couldn’t remember, you could’ve just asked me again and I’d have answered.”
“It’s not... like I wrote them down just to memorize them.”
“Hm?”
“Honestly, the contents themselves are the kind of thing you can remember after hearing once. They’re so shocking that even if I wanted to forget them, I can’t, I guess?”
Fertilizer is cooking.
You have to be able to cook iron plates.
“On top of that, you have to be able to cook elements like water or fire, and even yourself, going forward... It’s so absurd that I couldn’t forget it even if I tried.”
“Ahem.”
Lined up like that,
it really did completely break away from the usual concept of cooking.
“So if you remember it that well and still took notes,”
“There were so many parts that were extreme and hard to accept, right? My stubborn head just couldn’t take them in. But if I want to do the next stage of [Cooking] in this world, this knowledge is essential.”
He tapped his own head with the notebook as he spoke.
“It’ll take some time, but if I keep reading it over and over like this, I figure I’ll be able to accept at least a little of it.”
“...So that’s how it is.”
Howard Jin.
His Korean-style name was probably Jin Yang-sik.
After I ate [War Cook’s Calm-Emotion Panteron Steak] and cooled my head,
I’d heard a bit more about this guy in detail.
And there was one thing I realized after that.
‘This bastard, for how he looks, was actually doing really damn well.’
He’d come into cooking comparatively late,
but even so, he grew at a tremendous pace thanks to his unique perceptiveness and sincerity toward cooking.
I hadn’t known it,
but he’d built up his skills while working as a direct disciple of a really famous TV chef,
and it seemed he was quite well-known in the industry in his own right.
‘Hard to accept... huh.’
Even though he was that kind of amazing chef,
his abilities as an Awakener had been on a level that couldn’t even be compared to me when I was in the low twenties.
‘Not just in combat, but in cooking as well.’
And the reason was exactly this.
“Breaking your preconceived notions is not as easy a thing as it sounds.”
He’d been a chef before Doomsday.
Most of the concept of cooking as an Awakener just didn’t go down easily for him.
“Well, when you think about it, it makes sense it’d be hard.”
Honestly, the weird case was someone like me, a mess hall soldier, becoming a chef.
For orthodox chefs who’d devoted their whole lives to cooking, this meant smashing the preconceptions they’d built up over their whole lives.
Of course it’d be hard.
“Yeah... I get that it’s hard.”
“Hm?”
The problem was,
“those preconceptions... I think I need you to break them a little.”
“What do you mean?”
This time,
I figured I’d have to make him do that hard thing.
*****
“Halt!”
I took the bewildered Howard out of the dining hall
and started moving toward a certain place.
Then,
the people standing guard in front of where I was headed stepped out and blocked my way.
“This is the storage sector!”
“Even if you’re with the Association, please refrain from approaching if you’re not authorized...”
Their leader, Jo Beomseok, was a former general, and this group was supposed to be rebuilding the military.
No wonder even the ordinary members were disciplined.
“I came with General Jo’s permission.”
“From the General? May I have your name...?”
“Shin Youngjun.”
“Ah...! So you’re him. We’ve heard about you.”
“We were rude. Please, go on in.”
Fortunately,
I’d already personally asked the boss here for cooperation for this job.
I was able to enter the storage section without any trouble.
“You suddenly dragged me to the storage area.”
“Your Senior has his reasons for everything, you punk.”
I walked straight across the storage sector and opened the door of a warehouse on the inside.
“Here, carry this.”
“...Aren’t these monster corpses?”
After I pulled out the monster corpses that were there,
we went back to the dining hall.
And...
“What are you... trying to do?”
“Just watch.”
I butchered the monsters’ meat properly and put it into my shadow,
“That’s fat.”
“Sharp eye.”
Leaving only the fat,
I put it in a large pot with a bit of water and started boiling it.
“...I don’t know why, but you, Senior...”
Howard was also a fairly seasoned chef.
He was quick to figure out what I was trying to do.
What we ended up with was,
this.
“You were trying to make oil.”
“Yeah, punk.”
[Animal Oil of Mixed Magic Power]
Animal oil made from monster fat.
It was animal oil.
*****
“So, you need fuel to move vehicles and tanks?”
After we roughly finished the work,
I told Howard about what had happened with Jo Beomseok.
Then,
Howard spoke with a look of disbelief.
“And this is what you came up with as the alternative, Senior?”
“That’s right.”
[Animal Oil of Mixed Magic Power]
Animal oil that came out by rendering down monster fat.
By pre-Doomsday standards, it’d be something like lard, pig fat,
or roughly similar to vegetable oils like cooking oil.
“This... you can use it like fuel for vehicles?”
“Of course. It’s oil, at the end of the day.”
It’s not just oil made from this monster meat that’s like that.
Cooking oil or pig fat can basically be used as fuel for vehicles.
In fact, there used to be videos of people actually running vehicles on pig fat,
and doing the same thing with cooking oil or sesame oil,
and there were even cases where people used the oil from their own noses to do the same thing.
‘Back in World War II, there are supposedly records of tanks being run [N O V E L I G H T] on pig fat because there was no oil at all.’
Because of that,
when I first discovered this [Animal Oil of Mixed Magic Power],
‘...Should I try driving a vehicle with this?’
was a thought that crossed my mind.
The first time I discovered and used this oil was right before we ran into Blackie.
After we discovered this oil,
we managed to retake the hardware warehouse Blackie had been guarding,
and using the materials there, we were able to use vehicles.
In other words,
‘we finally had vehicles we could run properly, and we had oil.’
So the idea of using that oil as fuel for those vehicles
was the most natural thing in the world.
However...
that plan fell apart not long after.
‘Obviously, it wasn’t without problems.’
The mileage was one thing,
but since the machines weren’t made to use that kind of oil in the first place, nine times out of ten there were going to be problems if we used it as-is.
“I get what you were thinking, Senior, but it’s ridiculous.”
The biggest problem among them was...
“If you use this oil in a vehicle, it’ll solidify right away.”
“Well, yeah, that’s true.”
Animal oil
has the property of solidifying if you just leave it alone.
Animal oil exists as a solid below a certain temperature.
That pig fat, so-called lard,
was usually stored in solid form in restaurants.
“No, still, it’s not like it solidifies immediately the way you’re saying.”
“...Huh?”
“If you start the vehicle up, the engine heat keeps it melted for a fairly long time. An engine where oil is circulating is basically high-temperature by nature.”
At those words from me,
Howard muttered blankly.
“Is it just me, or does that sound like you’ve actually tried it before...?”
“...”
Thanks to that, we had to scrap one precious vehicle...
is, well, not important right now!
“The important thing is that once you turn the engine off, it solidifies in the end.”
Only while the engine was running
did it stay melted thanks to the heat from the engine and the battery and work as oil.
‘Once you turned that engine off, that was it.’
The solidified oil would clog the fuel lines and tiny nozzles,
the paths the oil was supposed to pass through.
Unless you put in an insane amount of effort to restore it,
that vehicle became unusable as-is.
Because of that,
we scrapped this plan in our unit as well,
and even though our unit has a fortress that can supposedly even fly soon,
we ended up in the ironic situation of having no choice but to worry about fuel for running tanks...
“But it’s a little different here.”
“...Huh?”
I looked at the chef in front of me,
Jin Yang-sik...
no, Howard Jin, and said,
“Hey, junior.”
“...Why, why are you calling me that?”
“When do you think animal oil is in its ‘optimal state’ as a cooking ingredient, junior?”
It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue question,
but Howard tilted his head and quickly gave an answer.
“Mm, well. When it’s still within its shelf life or expiration date...”
But,
those words didn’t last long.
“RAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!”
“!?”
As expected from someone who used to be a hotshot chef.
He’d immediately given the textbook definition of oil.
“D-Did I say something wrong?”
“No. It’s a model answer.”
“What kind of bullshit is this Senior...!”
“Up until not long ago.”
If he’d said it in the era before Doomsday,
it would’ve obviously been correct.
But,
“that’s not true anymore.”
“...Huh?”
“From the start, we can’t even get oil at a supermarket anymore. Are you going to calculate shelf life and expiration dates by yourself when they’re not even written anywhere?”
“Well... no.”
The environment of the past and the present had changed too much.
“So memorize this.”
I,
after smashing the old, worn-out preconceptions he had,
“Animal oil... is in its optimal state when it’s in liquid form!”
“...Huh?”
decided to shove
a new preconception into that space.
“So what kind of bullshit is that...”
“I don’t have time to make you understand, so we’re doing this by rote.”
And for good reason.
There was one ability I’d had my eye on from the start.
[Ingredient Management]
[Properly speaking, a chef is not a Job that ends just because they can cook well!]
[Thorough management of ingredients is another virtue of an excellent chef.]
[Your obsession with serving only the best ingredients to your guests has manifested as a Trait.]
If I had it,
it would be an outrageous Skill that would be more effective than anything else.
Unfortunately, it’s a power I can’t have.
But it doesn’t matter who uses it.
[Ingredients that go through a chef’s management are maintained in the state the chef considers optimal.]
[Ingredients that have been managed do not suffer any negative effects from the passage of time, and even when external factors intervene, any damage to their state is slowed to an extreme degree.]
“Shut up and memorize it!”
“Ah, I get it, just stop...!”
“Animal oil is in its optimal state when it’s in liquid form!”
It was time
to put this guy to use.
