Chapter 97: The Boy Kadabi and the Start of the Finals
Chapter 97: The Boy Kadabi and the Start of the Finals
“...”
The soft, fluffy bun, the fresh and crisp vegetables, the sauces mingled with rich cheese, and finally the fatty meat patty with a smoky flavor all came together into a harmonious taste the more he chewed.
“It’s… delicious.”
Ras was almost moved. In truth, though, it was not only because the hamburger tasted good. It was also because the joy of seeing a memory recreated was mixed in.
“Miss Secretary, please try one too.”
Dina made another one in the meantime and offered it to Ella.
Ella met Ras’s eyes as if asking for permission, and Ras nodded because he needed to hear someone else’s opinion besides his own.
He also wanted to let her taste this hamburger.
“Huh? It’s really good. It feels completely different from a sandwich.”
Fortunately, Ella also widened her eyes and showed clear approval. Dina made one for herself, tried it, and nodded as well.
“It’s much better than I expected. It’s a very simple dish, but...”
“Right?”
Ras glanced at Dina’s expression and used polite speech with Ella.
These days, the company people seemed to have roughly noticed, so he was starting to wonder if there was any point in hiding it this way. Still, he felt conscious of acting too close to his female secretary in front of someone who had only just joined.
After their relationship deepened, it somehow felt even more embarrassing.
“Can this sauce be made in large quantities? As I mentioned before, I’m thinking of opening stores beside every Arcade Game Land branch nationwide.”
“Yes. It isn’t a particularly difficult sauce. It just needs to be made according to the recipe.”
Ras asked many other questions carefully as well.
Could an unskilled person with no cooking experience make the same flavor simply by assembling it in order? Could the patty-cooking conditions be clearly standardized so that if someone grilled it exactly according to a timer, the same quality would come out? He clarified exactly what direction this food was meant to pursue.
Dina, who had come from a high-end restaurant background, looked a little reluctant.
But she did not answer carelessly.
She had pride in her career, but she was not the type to look down on common people’s food as vulgar. To begin with, she herself was not particularly wealthy, and the food she made for her children at home was different from what she used to make in restaurants.
She also decided that even if they compromised slightly on taste, it would not be bad if making it cheaper allowed more people to eat it. In any case, she had to follow the direction her employer was aiming for.
Based on the recipe he received from Dina, Ras worked with the engineer he had hired for the fast-food business team to design the workflow and tools.
“First, the patties will need to be grilled several at a time.”
The engineer was a large man in his early thirties named Azban. Fortunately, he seemed capable, because he did not stumble and immediately focused on the task.
“Yes. That’s right. The patty is the only part with a slightly longer cooking time, after all.”
Even though Dina had created as simple a recipe as possible, grilling still required a minimum amount of time. Azban decided to overcome the difference between the patty’s cooking time and the cooking time of the other ingredients by grilling many patties at once.
Here, the difference between a cook’s thinking and an engineer’s thinking became visible.
In Dina’s case, she suggested using several cooks for the patties, but Azban immediately thought of a tool that could grill many patties at once.
Naturally, Ras adopted Azban’s idea.
Food made with care was certainly nice, but this was food meant to be made under time-attack conditions. Moreover, everyone cooking it would be an ordinary, untrained worker, so even if they focused on a single patty, it would not mean much.
Ras also mentioned a tool he remembered seeing in a documentary or somewhere, one that dispensed exactly the fixed amount of two sauces at the same time, and Azban implemented it without much difficulty.
Azban also devised other tools that could reduce cooking time as much as possible. Of course, he also designed the kitchen workflow.
Even if the system divided labor so that the cooks did only their own tasks without walking back and forth, or rather, precisely because of that, this kind of design was even more important. As the food moved in one direction, it had to be assembled step by step into a hamburger. If the order became tangled, speed would drop.
Dina and Azban also exchanged opinions and created employee training manuals.
After all, the employees would need to know the recipe as well as how to use the workflow and tools designed by Azban before everything could function properly.
In this way, Ras prepared the hamburger shop as thoroughly as he could.
During that time, he also decided the shop’s name.
There were many candidates: Metaria, Game Burger, Ras Burger, Arcade Burger, Burger Emperor, and many others. He included every name that came to mind as a candidate.
With his head becoming complicated, Ras thought about the origins of actual hamburger franchise names, then decided to keep it simple.
Something like McDonald’s was just the founder’s name, but it became incredibly successful, didn’t it?
That did not mean he planned to call it Epek Ras. He decided on Quick & Fun Burger.
He used “Quick” to mean fast, and “Fun” both because it was connected to Arcade Game Land and because it carried the double meaning of being delicious.
“Yeah. I don’t think it’s bad.”
Ella did not look especially amazed, but she nodded anyway, so it did not seem strange. That was enough. Ras finalized it and decided to make a signboard. For that too, he decided to find and entrust someone fairly well known in the industry.
As he thought about the store’s interior and watched Dina and Azban teach the employees, the day of the Tetris 2 Tournament finals quickly approached.
For the venue, they rented Rica Stadium, which was more than twice the size of the previous indoor gymnasium. The cost was more than double as well, but Ras decided to believe the effect would be that much greater. Unlike last time, he had also placed many advertisements here and there.
On the day of the finals, the orphan boy Kadabi looked up at the enormous stadium exterior and placed a hand over his pounding chest.
From the moment he left his hometown by train, everything felt like a dream. The gigantic buildings he had seen after arriving in the capital, the enormous crowds, and even the hotel room he stayed in last night still did not feel real.
In truth, things like the first-class train ticket and hotel voucher had felt wasteful even while he used them. If there had been something like an internet marketplace the way there was on Earth, Kadabi would have sold them instead of using them. In this world, there was no suitable way to dispose of them, so he merely used them.
Of course, he had asked whether the ticket office and hotel could refund them.
But Ras and Arcade Game Land’s Management Team had blocked that. If a participant refunded them and failed to attend the tournament, it would be extremely troublesome for the organizers.
At least he saved the transportation fee to the venue and did not use it. The distance made walking impossible, but he took a bus instead. The capital’s chaos left him dazed, but he somehow managed to reach the hotel without getting lost.
In any case, this huge cylindrical cement building was a place he had occasionally seen on TV, and the thought that he would compete here made every hair on his body stand on end.
It felt good.
He did not know his parents’ faces.
By the time he had memories, he was already at an orphanage, and because he hated being beaten and hated being hungry, he ran away to the streets.
After entering an Orphan Gang by chance, he learned the rules of the streets, how to beg, how to shine shoes, and so on.
But he did not stay there long either.
After being badly beaten in a brawl with another Orphan Gang, he ran away again.
Then he lived alone on the streets. He tried working at a factory, ran errands, and shined shoes.
He endured only by thinking that someday he would become an adult, that he would survive and become an adult.
But every day was so hard.
Amid that, the only joy he discovered was electronic games.
A street orphan without protection could not do much even if he saved money, and if he was unlucky, it would only be taken from him. Kadabi sometimes spent his leftover money there.
But since it was absolutely not easy money, he could not enjoy games lightly like other children. He studied and studied them as he played.
And when he defeated others with the skill he built that way, the boy felt joy.
Even though he had nothing, he felt that when it came to this game alone, others could not look down on him.
That made him even more absorbed, and that game had led him here.
Kadabi clenched his teeth.
Perhaps this was the only chance given to him by God.
The boy resolved that he would never lose and would not let this chance slip away.
With his eyes wide open, he passed through the entrance crowded with people and entered the stadium. He was briefly dazed by the suddenly widened space, then was startled by the view that entered his eyes.
No, it was not only Kadabi. Everyone who came there reacted the same way.
The sight of a stadium far larger than imagined and the people filling it was something shocking that instantly shattered the small idea of a little game festival that they had held before arriving.
Rica Stadium was a fairly large venue with a capacity of eight thousand people. Of course, it could not compare to major sports stadiums, but it was still a facility that had hosted quite a few well-known events.
The fact that more than half the seats in such a large stadium were filled meant that, despite its lacking status and public perception, this tournament had already gained considerable influence.
Some kind of pre-event was already underway in the stadium.
Four huge screens in the center faced the audience in all directions, and beneath them, they showed an enlarged image of the host, who was busily talking.
In truth, seeing the players themselves or the matches directly would have been better than watching screens like this. However, because the game screen was so small, this was an unavoidable choice if they wanted everyone in the stadium to see.
Still, since the screens hung in the air, the audience could at least make out the players below them, so the sense of being there would be enough.
<The opening performance celebrating the First Tetris 2 Tournament will begin shortly.>
Ras had brought in slightly more famous singers than the previous tournament.
The advertising effect of the previous tournament had been fairly large, and the response to this tournament was considerable, so the Management Team also had high expectations and did not strongly oppose increasing the investment.
Still, bringing in truly major singers was impossible. Honestly, even Ras, who had ordered them to look into it, shook his head after seeing the cost.
Even so, he hoped that once game tournaments grew bigger in the future, they would be able to invite superstars too.
“Waaaaah!!!”
Unlike Ras’s slight regret, the audience went wild because a singer who had appeared quite often on TV was coming out.
This Elf singer named Olivia had a lively appearance and fairly good singing ability, earning her a good reputation. She was not top-tier yet, but she had quite a few fans.
Some among those cheering in the audience were probably her fans as well.
After the opening that began with the singer’s sweet voice ended, the tournament began in earnest.
For the host, they brought back Delmongu, the Gnome comedian who had received a good response last time.
“The tournament begins now!!”
He shouted to the audience with great fuss.
He had already liked games to begin with, and supposedly after hosting last time, he became even more absorbed in them, but Ras did not know whether that was just a line or the truth.
Still, judging from how he talked about various games and quoted articles from Gamers, even if he was not genuinely interested in games, he had clearly put in enough effort.
Am I thinking too cynically?
In any case, the screen changed, and the players’ entrances began to appear.
“Waaaah!!!”
From the fact that names of the players could be heard along with cheers from parts of the audience, it seemed their acquaintances had come to support them.
If this were a professional league, they might be fans, but this was still an amateur tournament.