Danbi's Kitchen Fury
“Come out~~~~!!!!! Someone get over here, you bastards~~~~!!!!”
Danbi began thrashing about like a madwoman.
Danae and I clutched each other’s hands and huddled in the corner, overwhelmed by her ferocious aura.
I kept my mouth shut about how she looked exactly like an enraged monkey pounding on its cage at the zoo. Survival meant watching what I said.
What on earth had set her off like this?
“D-did the stress of being locked up finally push her over the edge…?”
“She’s always been ferocious~… Maybe she really snapped. What if she takes it out on us because she can’t get at the bandits~?”
I shuddered, picturing Danbi mounting and beating someone senseless.
While we trembled helplessly, a thuggish bandit with a nasty expression approached.
“Hah, what the hell… Why the sudden rampage?”
The visor on his head looked unnecessarily stylish. I half-expected lasers to shoot out of the lenses.
“What’s your problem, magical girl? You wanna die? Huh? You little shi—”
Crash!
Danbi kicked the bars with all her strength. Even though her bare foot split open and bled, she didn’t flinch.
“You’re the one who wants to die, yeah?”
“……No….”
The bandit who had been trying to intimidate her shrank back, cowed by the terrifying tone in her voice.
He began glancing at her nervously.
“Um… Why are you so angry….”
Crash!
“Eek?!”
When Danbi slammed her fist against the bars, the bandit flinched and stepped back.
She glared at him with eyes that looked ready to flash with killing intent.
“…………Cooking.”
“Huh?”
“Let me cook, you goddamn bastards!! Send me to the kitchen, you pieces of shit!!!!”
The bandit looked bewildered.
So did we.
He peered at us through his visor as if asking what she meant, and we stared back, equally lost.
In that awkward silence, Danbi roared, burning with fury.
“I can’t forgive this! Using such good ingredients and cooking them like garbage is an insult to the ingredients themselves! How could anyone forgive that!!!!”
“Ah, so our cooking doesn’t suit your taste….”
“Shut up! You call that cooking?! It’s dog food!”
“Guh.”
“It’s such a waste of ingredients… If the food was just bad, I could forgive it… We’re prisoners, so I’m not expecting luxury… But when I see glistening, high-quality meat and perfectly fresh vegetables right in front of me—ingredients that could be used in so many ways—and all you do is eat them raw or grilled or whatever, that’s an insult to the ingredients, you bastards!!! Get me out of here right now! Take me to the kitchen!!!!!!”
Ah. So that was it.
Now that I thought about it, Danbi had been a culinary arts student at a hotel school and a total cooking maniac who had kept feeding us back at Danae’s Castle.
Even right after we fell onto this planet, when she bought ingredients from the Point Shop and cooked, she always turned them into top-tier dishes with her careful touch.
The bandits apparently had access to good ingredients but no skilled cooks, so their menu had been painfully repetitive.
“C-cooking… But you’re prisoners….”
“Who said anything about escaping?! Put a damn leash on me if you’re worried! I can’t stand this anymore! I can’t watch good ingredients go to waste, so either take me to the kitchen or stab me in the throat!!!”
Her defiant roar echoed through the dungeon until the bandit finally tucked his tail and fled.
Even after he disappeared, Danbi kept pounding on the bars like she was possessed.
Danae and I shivered, terrified we might become the next targets of her rage.
* * *
Clink, clank!
“Mero-mero. If you’re going to cook, that’s fine by me, mero-mero. A slave cooking isn’t strange at all, mero-mero.”
……What a weird way of speaking.
Heavy chains rattled from the restraints binding her wrists. Danbi was being dragged along by the end of those chains.
At least she wasn’t naked. She wore nothing but a ragged scrap of cloth that had been tossed into the cell, but somehow that made her look even more indecent than if she’d been bare…
More importantly, why had they bothered putting stockings on her over those rags? That seemed like an excessively perverted fetish.
‘Anyway.’
As she was led away, Danbi’s eyes darted around, scanning her surroundings.
‘I managed to get out of the cell… but the layout is ridiculously complicated.’
Her outburst had been nothing more than an excuse to leave the cell. Though wasting ingredients really did bother her too.
Whatever purpose this cave had been built for, its structure was insanely complex.
They hadn’t gone far, yet the path twisted up and down, left and right, with walls that curved just enough to destroy any sense of direction.
‘Even if I got out of the cell, escaping would still be impossible….’
“……Eek?!”
“Mero-mero~.”
While she was lost in thought, one of the bandit lackeys who had been walking beside her suddenly reached under the ragged cloth and began groping her rear.
The lewd hand kneading her firm buttocks made Danbi shudder involuntarily.
“G-get off…! I’ll kill you…!”
“Go ahead and try, mero-mero. You don’t seem to understand your position.”
The lackey yanked hard on the chain connected to her restraints, sending her sprawling to the floor.
When Danbi tried to get up, teeth gritted, he tripped her again with his leg.
Even under her furious glare, the creep just kept smirking.
“You bastard…!”
“Mero-mero~ Come on, let’s go. Kitchen. At this rate we’ll be here all day.”
“Ugh…!”
She staggered to her feet and kept moving forward.
Enduring the lackey’s harassment and petty torment, Danbi finally reached the kitchen.
* * *
“Danbi seems to be planning on scouting an escape route on her own~ We can’t just sit around either~★”
“……Huh? Danbi is?”
“What, did you actually think she was just throwing a tantrum over the food~? Kei, you’re so naïve~.”
Danae’s finger brushed across my cheek.
The touch felt strangely sensual, sending a shiver down my spine.
Let’s sort through the situation.
We were locked in the bandits’ prison. The bars were made of some special metal that neither of us could break or open in our current state. There were no hidden passages or gaps either.
The bandit lackeys came by regularly to use us like onaholes or sex dolls before leaving, and at night their leader Tutu would call one of us out to enjoy until morning.
They were having their fill of fresh captives for now, but Tutu seemed to plan on selling us as merchandise in the city once he got bored.
We needed to escape before that happened….
“Honestly, getting out of the cell itself shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
We met each other’s eyes and nodded.
After several days of captivity, we had already considered every possible method.
After comparing notes, it became clear that while Danae and I had different ideas, escaping the cell itself wouldn’t be difficult.
But getting out of the cell and escaping the hideout were two different things.
More importantly, there was the problem of what came after.
“We have no idea where we originally were or where this hideout even is~.”
“Do they have any maps?”
“You think anyone in Mekrak carries around paper maps~? Everything’s probably digitized, and only the owner could use it~.”
“So we can’t just steal one….”
If this were Earth, we could have stolen a smartphone and checked the map or used navigation.
But the residents of Mekrak could project holograms anytime, anywhere, without any special device, and access whatever data they wanted.
Truly cutting-edge technology.
I didn’t understand the principle, but the future everyone dreamed of was right here.
“In that case, maybe getting sold wouldn’t be so bad….”
That was my opinion.
It was also what I had been thinking during the days we had been held here.
Tutu and the other bandits were the first aliens we had encountered after crossing over to Mekrak.
I had worried that the natives might be even more violent or stronger, but after observing them, they were no different from the ones we had seen on Earth.
They weren’t unbeatable, and their personalities were soft.
If we were sold as merchandise and became slaves, there would still be opportunities to escape, and it would be better than dealing with the bandits… or so I thought when I suggested it.
“That is absolutely NOT happening!!”
Danae vehemently objected with a serious expression.
“Listen, Kei. If we get sold as merchandise, we’ll definitely end up with nobles!”
“Well… so what?”
“It’s not ‘so what’… Nobles are extremely dangerous, and one of the reasons is because ‘this’ is different.”
Danae tapped her own head with her finger.
“Your head’s weird? You mean they’re crazy?”
“No, they’re normal.”
“……Then what’s the problem?”
“The fact that they’re normal is the problem. Do you think it’s normal for bandits to be that airheaded? Have all the aliens you’ve met so far actually fit the villain role?”
The bandits who treated their prisoners to the finest beds and meals.
The aliens who appeared on Earth to do lewd things to women and extract magic power, yet still had that airheaded quality about them.
They were all perverts, but I had never seen them do anything truly cruel.
They were trash who deserved to be called villains, but something about them always felt lacking.
“The aliens of Mekrak store their souls—or rather, their minds—as data in a place called the Bank. You know that, right?”
“Yeah… I think Cookie mentioned it. That’s why they can keep coming back even if you kill them.”
It was like collecting souls and just swapping out bodies.
“I don’t know the details either,” Danae continued, “but when they digitize their minds, they must have done something shady. Something like a Moral Code or a Killing Restriction.”
“?!”
“That’s probably why the aliens seem so airheaded. They’ve blocked certain actions and twisted their mental tendencies… I heard that from Lupin once.”
Lupin. That unpleasant masked alien who called himself a phantom thief.
I didn’t want to trust anything he said, but… maybe.
As someone who had seen countless aliens by now, it made perfect sense. So that was why.
But what did that have to do with our current situation?
“It matters.”
Danae spoke firmly.
“The nobles aren’t data-registered. That’s why they have no limits on what they’ll do. And more than anything, they’re strong. …We’d be in serious trouble, wouldn’t we?”
“Ah….”
Right. Falling into their hands would mean risking our lives.
Conversely, as long as we avoided them, our lives wouldn’t be in danger no matter what happened.
For now, I decided to summarize.
“So waiting quietly until we’re sold is off the table.”
“But escaping the cell right now isn’t realistic either~ What if we escape and end up dying of thirst in the desert~.”
“If they’re going to sell us as merchandise, they’ll have to take us to the city, right?”
“So we’ll get a chance to go outside?”
Our eyes met.
The conclusion was simple.
“——We wait to be transported to the city as merchandise.”
“——Then escape during the transport.”
Our opinions aligned. We high-fived with a satisfying clap.
