[Joint Course Meal Filled with the Radiant Courage of an Intermediate Chef and War Cook]
[War]
It was obvious, if anything was.
Convincing them that they had to eat the dishes was the job of Howard, the chef of Gyeonggi Province.
I was only here as a supporter, nothing more.
The actions needed for the people here to survive were something they had to accomplish themselves.
Only then would this experience become a driving force that could keep them alive even after I left this place.
But.
‘Helping with the cooking is fine, isn’t it?’
When it came to just making the dishes they’d be eating then,
there was nothing at all wrong with a chef from another region doing it.
‘...Come to think of it.’
And
this was something I hadn’t known either.
‘This is actually the first time I’ve cooked together with another [Chef].’
That was true even when Howard and I had been trading lessons.
We each cooked our own dishes and gave each other advice while watching.
We’d never actually made food together.
And so,
there was something I learned for the first time this time.
[This is a collaborative dish created by two or more chefs joining their strength!]
[The Skills of both chefs are applied simultaneously.]
Cooperation between chefs...
turned out to be far more incredible than I’d imagined.
[Main Chef – Shin Youngjun]
The base itself was no different from the food I always made.
If anything, the only real difference was that we’d hastily completed the kitchen setup and used carefully selected monster meats.
‘Compared to what I made back in Gangwon Province, it’s shabby.’
Because stacking stats via [Absolute Palate] was no longer possible,
the base dishes didn’t reach the level of what I’d made in Gangwon.
However.
[Assistant Chef – Howard Jin]
Once you added Howard’s cooking on top of that,
the story changed a bit.
Unlike me,
this guy was a truly pure non-combat production-type chef.
[The leading chef raises the assistant chef’s abilities.]
[All of the assistant chef’s stats receive additional adjustments under the influence of the leading chef.]
[List of effects applied to the dish]
[Skill – Perfect Grilling]
[Skill – Ingredient Management]
[Trait – Taste Enhancement]
[Trait – Western Cuisine Specialization]
[Trait – Nutrition Enhancement]
[Trait......]
[...]
Those pure cooking Skills,
further strengthened under my influence...
“Holy shit.”
were pouring effects into the dishes
beyond anything I’d imagined.
“Uuurp...”
The humans who finished eating.
Their muscles swelled up rapidly,
and their eyes turned into those of savage beasts.
“Hunting stray specters is the perfect bit of post-meal exercise!”
Their momentum
was explosive, like they could cut down tens, hundreds,
even thousands of enemies alone.
‘I’m not kidding, it really feels like they’re going to explode any moment...’
Watching that, I shouted.
“General Jo Beomseok!”
“Y-yes!?”
“Give the order!”
Those words, which he’d been so terribly unwilling to heed not long ago.
Maybe because of that experience back then,
even though General Jo Beomseok wore an expression that said he didn’t really understand the situation, he reflexively gave the order at my words.
“All forces... advance!!!”
And.
That was all it took.
“KIIIIIEEEEEEEEK!!!”
“Kneel... before united strength!!!”
BABABABABANG!
As the Expedition Force kicked off the ground and charged,
the vast earth of Gyeonggi Province shook, and the frost settled over the land began to shatter.
*****
‘Now that I think about it, it was the same for the other production Jobs.’
Whenever they made some kind of equipment—
[Joint Work Filled with the Devotion of an Intermediate Tailor, Intermediate Blacksmith, and Intermediate Combat Engineer]
Even though they were all capable of making extraordinary items on their own,
the items they made always came out of that kind of cooperation.
I only understood the reason
after I saw this spectacle.
“SCREEECH!!!”
WHAM!
An Awakener let out a shriek and kicked off the ground.
Holding a huge greatsword, he leaped high into the sky and spun at incredible speed in midair like a top.
CRUNCH!!!
The monstrous kinetic energy generated by that spin
transferred straight into the greatsword and slammed into a huge monster’s forehead.
-GRRK...!
The massive monster let out only a short death rattle
before collapsing onto the ground.
“Kahaha!!! Where’s the next one!”
Even after taking down his enemy, he still seemed to be overflowing with power
as he flew toward another monster.
And—
“Is that all you’ve got, you insect-like things!”
“So weak, you’re so damn weak...!”
That kind of scene
was unfolding across the entire city at once.
‘The effect... is way too much.’
This was exactly
why other production-type Awakeners went out of their way to cooperate when making equipment.
‘Because it’s... overwhelmingly efficient!’
It was the same as with combat-type Awakeners.
The more Awakeners ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) you gathered, the more the synergies from different Jobs pushed their combat power to overwhelming heights.
When production Jobs with different Traits gathered together,
each person’s weak points could be minimized by having someone strong in that area take charge,
and their strengths overlapped and were maximized.
Even though my own cooking ability was weaker than it had been back in Gangwon,
the dish born out of that process
was radiating a force stronger than anything I’d ever made.
*****
“W-what in the world is that!”
Even though he’d given the order himself, General Jo Beomseok couldn’t believe the scene in front of him,
and he started running after the soldiers who’d burst out of formation.
“General, you should eat quickly too!”
“I-is it really okay for me to eat that? That... that doesn’t look... normal...!”
“It only looks that way, it’s still normal!”
I passed him a dish as I spoke.
“Their momentum overflowed a bit and the battle kicked off, but... we were about to depart anyway, so I don’t see any real problem.”
“T-that’s true.”
“From here on, your role is crucial, General.”
Last time, he hadn’t been able to show his abilities,
but originally, large-scale battles for this Expedition Force had Jo Beomseok at their core.
“For advice, you should proceed with the operation itself exactly as you planned previously... but you need to calculate that our side’s strength has doubled since then.”
“Doubled, you say.”
“That’s a conservative estimate. It could be more than that.”
Right.
Even I only said it had doubled as a rough guess.
‘Even I can’t properly grasp the impact of this insane dish on the Expedition Force right now.’
It wasn’t just because the quality of the joint dish was high.
That wasn’t the only reason.
‘It’s been a very long time since the people here last had a proper meal.’
Since their environment made it even harder to get food than in Gangwon,
all they’d been eating was oatmeal gruel, dried fruit, and pork fat scraps.
In other words—
‘Their palates have bottomed out...!’
Just like the Pope of Dasmur, whose palate was so refined that my dishes didn’t work on him,
and like the great divinity Morzan, who had never eaten proper food even once and whose rank was so high that my dishes worked overwhelmingly on him,
food depends not only on the dish itself,
but its effect also changes depending on the eater’s palate.
The already-powerful dish’s effect
would have hit them with overwhelming efficiency.
‘...When General Jo told me about the existence of a traitor and I hadn’t yet discovered who it was.’
I wasn’t confident I could find the traitor.
Which was why I’d come up with a method that would work even if there was a traitor.
‘And that’s this.’
A full-power dish
aimed at people whose palates had hit rock bottom.
“...I don’t know what’s going on, exactly.”
Once he’d finished eating,
General Jo Beomseok’s gaze similarly changed into that of a long-starved beast.
“But commanding soldiers this strong is an honor for a commander...!”
“...Ha ha, you’re right.”
“All forces, butcher the enemy!!!”
[Combat Order – Butcher]
[Cut, tear, smash, and butcher the enemy.]
A buff spreading wide across the battlefield.
Watching that, I thought about it.
The reason I hadn’t killed Lieutenant Kim and had tried to use him in the unit instead.
‘Food buffs increase fixed stat values... and a commander’s buffs add percentage-based stats on top of those increased values.’
Fixed buffs and percent buffs.
These two types of buffs are maximized when they’re used together.
‘Each one of them now fights like a hundred.’
Even people so ordinary they never stood out at all before
were now exuding a ferocity that overwhelmed what used to be called the elites.
Literally,
they were beginning to butcher the enemy.
*****
Once Jo Beomseok’s command truly got underway
and the Expedition Force began to massacre the enemy—
“A-amazing. How can they have that kind of strength...”
Han Iseo, watching the scene, murmured in shock.
To be sure,
even from my perspective, the effect was absurd.
“But you know they can’t win with just that, right.”
I shifted my gaze away from the battlefield
and turned to Han Iseo as I spoke.
“...Yes. I know.”
She nodded with a tense expression.
Out of everyone here,
the only ones who could see it were her and me.
“Those monsters don’t just disappear because you kill them, do they.”
“No.”
To our eyes, the eyes of Han Iseo and me,
it was visible.
A battlefield where a one-sided slaughter was underway.
The monsters dying there
looked, at a glance, like they were truly losing their lives,
but—
[Frozen Soul, Belsnickel Lower Sentry]
-It hurts, it hurts...
whenever a monster lost its life,
energies emerged from its body.
[Frozen Soul, Belsnickel Lower Knight]
-Scatter around the area. There should be temporary bodies hidden nearby, so take those bodies and return to the battlefield!
Right.
Our current superiority was clearly a boon,
but if you asked whether the tide of victory had turned to our side, that wasn’t true.
‘In the end, their true bodies are those spirit-forms, not the monsters’ flesh.’
The cause of the extreme weather that had swept over Gyeonggi Province
was also that those spirit-forms had an ability that lowered the surrounding temperature just by existing.
Just sweeping away the monsters in front of us wouldn’t be enough.
They’d find new flesh somehow and come back to threaten Gyeonggi again.
‘We have to find a way to eliminate those spirit-forms.’
Han Iseo and I both had the ability to strike spirits,
but to flip that around, at present, that meant only two people could do such a thing.
It was obviously impossible for two non-combatants to handle the souls of that many monsters.
So.
“Just like you said, I’ve prepared everything.”
Preparing countermeasures for that
was only natural.
Han Iseo’s face was tight with tension.
When she moved aside, what appeared behind her was—
“I’ve never conducted a ritual on this scale before, but...”
a massive Offering Table.
Looking at that Offering Table, I thought.
‘Back when I first met Han Iseo... there was an Offering Table behind her too.’
She had wrapped herself in darkness as if trying to hide it,
but the moment she used a Skill on me back then—
FSSSHHH...
I’d clearly witnessed
the fruit laid out on that Offering Table losing its vitality.
After that,
I’d asked Han Iseo a separate question about it.
The answer I’d heard then had been simple.
‘The Great Spirits are certainly great... but at the same time, they have the limitation of being spirits. In the spirit realm it’s another story, but aside from spirits with special abilities, it’s not easy for them to intervene in the affairs of the living.’
‘So?’
‘So I have to prepare that Offering Table to borrow their power. There are two meanings to it.’
One was—
‘It’s a ritual where we show our sincerity to the dead by offering them the food of the living.’
A kind of payment.
Only if that payment satisfied them would the spirits grant her request.
The second was...
‘It’s like a sacrifice that lets them interfere with this world.’
Just as a person has to eat in order to work,
by offering them food of the living,
they can exert as much power as is contained in that offering.
Depending on the payment laid on that Offering Table, the number of spirits she can handle increases,
and depending on the sacrifices placed on that Offering Table, the amount of power those spirits can exert changes.
‘The difference from the old holiday Offering Tables is that the things you put up as sacrifices all disappear. Since we never had enough to eat ourselves, we couldn’t offer much.’
When I’d asked if we couldn’t just offer monster meat instead,
she’d told me that what was important to that ritual was also how important the sacrifice was to the person offering it.
Back then, monster meat, which held no value whatsoever to Han Iseo, couldn’t even be placed on the Offering Table.
“Depending on the sacrifice you offer, the power they can exert changes... huh.”
But.
Now it was different.
What lay upon the Offering Table now was...
[Holiday Offering Table Full Course Filled with the Lifeblood of an Intermediate Chef and War Cook]
[Borgon Skewers]
[Ice Worm Meat Pancakes]
[Panteron Meat Soup]
[...]
[...]
“I’ve never even set a table like this for my own ancestors.”
Literally,
dishes so lavish the table legs looked ready to break.
“How is it.”
“...!”
“Will this be enough to satisfy them?”
And...
around that Offering Table,
“...I didn’t think this many would come.”
countless massive,
hazy forms were gathering.
