True Knight Cuisine Made with a Knight's Wok—Full Plate Armor (1)
True Knight Cuisine Made with a Knight's Wok—Full Plate Armor (1)
I heated the purified and water-sanitized wok — formerly plate armor — over the fire.
Since it had no handle, I used mana to punch holes through the rim and rigged a makeshift one. To season it properly, I got it screaming hot and worked oil into the cast-iron surface.
Cubed onions, potatoes, and carrots sizzled in the oil.
The original plan had been direct-flame jeyuk bokkeum, but thanks to a certain food-waste bastard, all my remaining ingredients had been obliterated. So I pivoted on the spot.
The hastily improvised dinner menu: curry rice.
Or, depending on who you ask, curry over rice.
The kind of dish you've made at least once if you've ever been to a retreat, on a school trip, or to a campground.
The miracle convenience meal — as long as you have curry roux, even someone who can't cook can turn out a respectable single serving with zero stress.
And if you cook the meat separately? Even vegetarians can eat it. A genuine miracle of cuisine.
Curry originated in India, sure, but in its own way, this is Korean food now.
Why?
"Same reason kyeongyang-style donkatsu counts."
It's been localized plenty.
Indian curry and Korean curry aren't even the same thing anymore — completely different from preparation to how you eat it.
Tssssss!
The cubed vegetables simmered in the oil.
Whoosh!
I gripped the wok and tossed. The ingredients flew skyward, kissed the campfire flames, and ignited. Fire licked the vegetables directly, sparks dancing inside the wok.
A spectacular little fire show.
Shame there was no meat for it.
A curry without meat is an absurdity, but I couldn't force someone to eat meat they abstained from for religious reasons. So I planned to cook the meat separately.
Granted, the ideal method is to sear the meat first and use the rendered fat to fry the vegetables — that's how you build real depth. But.
"Nothing to be done about it."
I laid the pog tenderloin on a grill grate and cooked it off to the side.
The idea was to slice it and lay it over the curry rice when everything was ready.
"So I guess that makes it not curry rice but steak curry rice."
Not a bad concept for something thrown together on the fly.
Camp cooking demands exactly this kind of improvisation.
This wasn't going on the restaurant menu anyway. A little variation was fine.
While I worked, the knights I'd beaten senseless began stirring back to consciousness one by one.
"Wh-what is the meaning of this..."
The bound and restrained knights of Bellosa stared at me — at the man tossing ingredients into a seasoned wok that had, until very recently, been one of their breastplates.
"Awake now?"
"...You! You bastard! What have you done with my armor—"
"Armor? Where?"
Surely he wasn't talking about this wok.
"Calling a sacred cooking implement armor. I suppose that's what happens when you're food waste — absolutely no sense."
"Gaaaaargh! How dare you— my armor! To insult my armor is to insult me as a knight! I am Naiasin, knight of House Bellosa! To insult me is to insult all of Bellosa—"
"What honor does a heretic who tried to murder the Saintess think he has left to be insulted about?"
"What?"
"Did you think we didn't know? Or were you just hoping we wouldn't?"
I kept stir-frying the vegetables as I answered him.
"..."
"And whatever honor you had as a knight? It vanished the moment you lost to a cook wielding kitchen tools. A man who can't beat a cook has no business calling himself a knight."
"..."
The captured knights were a sorry sight.
Naiasin's face was half caved in where the wok had connected, swollen an angry red. The others each sported a matching lump squarely between the eyes. Stripped of their armor and weapons, trussed up in nothing but their underclothes, they couldn't even cover their own bodies.
When that realization hit them, every single face flushed crimson.
"You should be grateful I left you alive at all. Believe me, I wanted to kill the lot of you and erase the evidence."
"..."
Their gazes flicked to the Saintess standing beside me, her lips pressed tightly together. The look in their eyes said they already knew what I was going to ask.
"I've heard there were Holy Knights escorting the Saintess. What happened to them?"
"..."
Sizzle.
Silence clamped down on all of them, and the only sound cutting through it was the steady crackle of vegetables bubbling in oil.
A pleasant smell tickled my nose.
"That should do it."
I waited for their answer while I drizzled a little tomato sauce over the vegetables to brighten the flavor, then added a touch of sugar and soy sauce to round things out.
Gave the ingredients another kiss of flame for that smoky char.
Tssssss!
And poured in the water.
The knights still had nothing to say.
"Still not talking. Do you all genuinely want to die?"
"We will not speak. We are honorable knights who move on orders. No threats will make us yield."
The head knight — the food-waste specimen — delivered this declaration.
"Tch. Anyone who's honest with me here might get to live."
"Reinforcements will arrive soon, once they realize we haven't returned."
"You think a regular military unit is going to beat an opponent that twenty knights couldn't handle? Does that actually make sense to you?"
It was nonsense, of course.
"Lord Bellosa isn't a madman — he wouldn't have mobilized a large force. They're probably scattered, searching. You lot are the main unit, aren't you?"
"..."
If word had gotten out that the Saintess had been targeted for assassination, an official notice would have blanketed the empire by now.
The Saintess, the face of the Order — attacked.
But the empire was still quiet. Which meant she'd been reported missing under some pretext other than assault.
"They'd have listed her as missing, just like in the novel."
Lord Bellosa and a handful of allied nobles were running a coordinated operation to suppress the truth.
"Still, they can't exactly move openly."
Any suspicious behavior right now would mark them as suspects.
Which meant the squad my party had just handled was functionally the whole game.
I added the curry roux to the now-boiling water.
The key now: let it simmer on low heat for about twenty-five minutes so the curry fully infused the vegetables.
The whole cut of meat, nicely grilled on the grate, I set aside to rest.
I flipped a bowl over the meat to trap the heat.
The best I could manage with no real kitchen.
With the cooking done, I stood before the prisoners.
The wok — the very one Naiasin's face had helped shape — hung from my hand.
"Urk!"
Memory of the impact must have flashed through him. He flinched and glared at me.
"Don't think torture will open my mouth! I am a proud knight of Bellosa. No pain will—"
Clang!
"Ghurk!"
"Food waste, shut it."
I smacked the garbage disposal unit across the head with the wok. The other knights' necks retracted like startled turtles.
"We're escorting the Saintess to the capital. Lilyan has a teleport gate with a direct line. And Lilyan is a mayoral city, not a lord's domain — once the Saintess sets foot there, everything Lord Bellosa did gets reported to the Order."
"..."
"You think men who targeted the Saintess's life and killed Holy Knights will just walk away? You'll be branded heretics and dragged before the Inquisition. Everyone connected to this — and their families — gets investigated for demon worship."
Demon worshippers.
The punishments for that charge were so brutal that being torn limb from limb was considered the lightest sentence.
Did the reality of it finally land?
I looked at the knights, who'd begun trembling, and spoke.
"Wouldn't you at least want the indulgence of having repented before the Saintess herself?"
The knights exchanged glances. The youngest among them cracked first.
"W-we heard the advance unit lost track of the fleeing Holy Knights!"
Beside me, Amelia seized on the words.
"Is that true?"
"Yes. Outside the city, the Holy Knights scattered. Some fled into the mountains and forest and couldn't be located. A priestess with pink hair was among them, so pursuit continued."
"Mika was alive. The knights guarding Mika might still be alive as well. Oh, thank the Goddess."
Amelia clasped her hands together and prayed.
A holy radiance visibly enveloped her as she did.
That opened the floodgates.
"At the time, some of the Holy Knights who resisted in the forest were taken prisoner. They were captured to extract information on the Saintess's trail and the positions of the other knights."
"So they're not dead?"
"No. That is what I was told."
"Thank you."
Of course, there was no guarantee any of this was true.
But the story they all told in unison was:
— Some of the Holy Knights guarding the Saintess had escaped capture.
— Some of the prisoners were still alive.
...That was the account.
I saw the light of hope flicker back into Amelia's eyes.
Relief that not everyone had died because of her swept through her, and she pressed a hand to her chest.
"There are survivors still..."
"We likely don't have much time. We'll pick up the pace starting tomorrow morning."
"Yes. We will."
The curry had finished simmering sometime during the interrogation.
Thickened and glossy, it popped — blop! blop! — with heavy bubbles.
Golden, rich curry.
With chili powder worked in for a spicy kick, it gleamed.
I ladled the finished curry over the bowls of white rice I'd prepared while it was cooking.
Steam rose from fluffy white rice as the yellow curry, chunky with vegetables, flooded over it.
Then I took the rested meat and sliced it thin.
The tenderloin — deep brown on the outside, blushing pink within — glistened, holding its juices.
I fanned the slices out over the hot yellow curry rice and handed the plates to Andrea and Ivan.
"Whoa... that much meat!"
"Seizing a knight's armor and cooking with it... This can be interpreted not merely as taking spoils, but as claiming the knight's effort and his very soul as a knight. The enemy's possessions are not simply stolen — they are utilized. This too is an expression of chivalric principle. I learn something new every day."
"Boss, this is that curry you mentioned before, right? The smell is incredibly stimulating!"
The image of dark-brown steak laid over golden curry was honestly pretty impressive.
For something thrown together in a hurry, this was a success.
And for Amelia:
"Here you are."
"Sir Lucas, thank you."
I gave her the vegetable curry, no meat on top.
The flavor would be a little plain, but for someone whose faith required vegetarianism, this was the best meal I could offer.
"We need to eat well if we're moving fast tomorrow."
Amelia took the bowl and nodded.