Honorary Mess Officer of the Knight Order (4)
Once everyone had been served, I stayed to watch them eat. A guest's face, their gestures, what they left on the plate—watch those closely and running a restaurant got a great deal easier, and a field kitchen was no different. Were they uncomfortable while they ate? Was there something they all avoided? How much came back uneaten?
Not one of them left a scrap.
Maybe my instincts were still stuck in the modern world. I'd blended the spices to be as inoffensive as I could manage, and even so I'd expected a few people to hesitate. The knights proved me wrong. They scraped their trays clean with their spoons, then mopped up the last smear of curry sauce with bread.
At that rate, they wouldn't even need the washing up done.
Watching the mess, I caught Arthur shoveling curry down just as desperately. He never ate like a man starved when he came to the restaurant. Did curry simply suit him better than noodles? Had he been forcing down banquet noodles all this time just because his superior ordered them? Next time he showed up, I'd at least put something else in front of him.
Arthur finished, drew a long breath, and lifted his head. Our eyes met, so I spoke.
"The meal seems to have agreed with you."
"Yes. It was excellent. I can hardly believe it was made from the same ingredients as yesterday. Were there spices among the provisions?"
"No. I brought those in myself."
"They must have cost a fortune..."
The moment I told him where the curry came from, Arthur trailed off, worried. By medieval standards, spices really were ruinously expensive. Not for me. I could get them with a click, and unlike the other ingredients they didn't have to be hauled in by the tens of kilograms, so they were no burden. Once the Monster Wave ended I wouldn't be able to keep making it, but if I could feed them well until then, that was enough. Skimp on the defense budget, and the country goes under.
"It's all right. I don't intend to bill anyone. Please, just enjoy it."
"I... how can a man show such devotion to the realm? Thank you."
Arthur gave his thanks with a face tight and full, as if the words had overwhelmed him. Luke, seated beside him, and the other knights looked much the same.
"Thank you for the meal!"
"Thank you for the meal, Mess Officer, sir!"
Trays scraped clean, and the thanks came out in a roar. It put me in a good mood. A full stomach really did teach a man his manners, and made him easier on the eyes besides. Food mattered.
Then an urgent report crashed through the warmth of the kitchen like a bucket of cold water.
"E-emergency! Mid-rank monsters are attacking! Reinforcements!"
"Weren't they supposed to show up the day after tomorrow? They're here now?"
"Yes, sir! They appeared without warning, and the line is in danger!"
The messenger spilled the situation out in a rush, and the knights who had just finished eating shot to their feet. True to a squad leader, Arthur was the first one out of the kitchen.
Even the low-rank monsters they'd fought by day had left men wounded. Mid-rank beasts at night would not stop at wounds.
Damn it. Of all times...!
The troops who had only just come off the field hadn't had time to rest before being thrown back in. One meal, and then the battlefield again. There was no way they could fight at full strength.
Arthur donned his armor with that worry still riding him—and found the plate lighter than usual. It felt like a morning after a full night's sleep, armoring up to go on duty. Nothing about the sensation matched a body that had fought all day.
Uneasy at the mismatch, he looked around at the other soldiers.
"Huh? My sword got lighter."
"Mine too. Isn't the armor lighter?"
Every man on the day shift felt the same lift. Strange as it was, something else mattered more just then, and they knew it. They strapped on their gear at once and threw themselves onto the defensive line.
Bwooo—!
A horn blared to announce the reinforcements, and battle cries poured out after it. Well-trained soldiers split toward the lines they'd been assigned, and Arthur made for the command tent.
When he stepped inside, Duke Kailan Silbaerin—answering the Monster Wave day and night without rest—and his adjutant, Ellak, were there to meet him.
"You're here. How are the day-shift men? I'm uneasy. They've had no proper rest, and still they had to come out."
"Yes, sir. I understand the concern, but their condition isn't as bad as we feared. No... if anything, they look well."
Ellak had been worried for the morale of men denied their rest, and the answer that came back from Arthur was unexpectedly bright. Out of habit he stroked his mustache and studied the knight more closely.
Arthur had plainly spent the whole day in combat, yet he held himself at rigid attention, his gaze unwavering, the presence rolling off his mana lively and sharp. He was not a man to shade a report while watching a superior's mood, and the state Ellak saw with his own eyes matched the report. A small mercy in the middle of misfortune. Ellak let out a short breath of a laugh.
"A relief, in that case. The acting mess officer's cooking, is it?"
"I believe so, sir!"
Arthur answered the half-joke in perfect earnest. A meal was not a potion. Eating did not put vigor and strength back into a man on the spot, and a squad leader who was an aura user could hardly fail to know that. And yet here he was, this serious. Ellak decided the man must simply have eaten very, very well.
"Well... in any case, add your strength to the center of the line. I'm told the ogres are massed there."
"By your command!"
Even among mid-rank monsters, the danger was not all the same. The ones confirmed on the field were ogres, horned bears, and ice wolves. Horned bears and ice wolves were something ordinary knights could meet if they held formation. Ogres were another matter. In size, strength, and defense they far outstripped any beast-shaped monster, and without an aura user's sword aura there was no piercing that tough hide or cutting through the muscle beneath. The line needed, at minimum, a knight who could manifest aura and shape it into sword aura.
Arthur took the order and went straight for the center.
On the way he passed soldiers locked in fierce fighting. Some of them had been eating beside him only moments ago, and next to the night shift—men who had rested properly before being sent in—their movements were plainly different.
Shhk—!
A regular knight swung not to sever, only to land a wound, and took an ice wolf's head clean off. It was the sword of the same soldier who had been happily eating curry in the kitchen a short while ago.
"Huh? Why did that cut so clean?"
"You cut it, didn't you!"
The blade had simply followed the same path he'd swung until he was sick of it. The result was not the same. Startled by a strength that had changed under him, the soldier adapted in a breath and began to swing with real skill.
Everyone who ate the curry got stronger.
That was the conclusion Arthur reached. Not only the knight who had just dropped the ice wolf—every knight who had eaten Kang Jinwoo's food had grown stronger. What stood out above the rest was the fighting power of the 1st Squad.
"Ghk—help!"
"Haaaaah!"
Shhk—!
A knight from another squad barely held a horned bear's claws on a cross guard and cried for aid, and a knight of the 1st Squad sheared the beast's foreleg off in a single stroke.
"Hah... I thought I was dead!"
"Focus! Drive them like this!"
The knight order divided itself into squads so orders would travel cleanly in duels, subjugations, and reconnaissance. Holding off a Monster Wave was different. Then they ignored squad lines and built their ranks by weapon and by numbers. In the chaos of everyone fighting mixed together, the knights of the 1st Squad cut through in every direction and killed monsters as they went.
Why was only the 1st Squad so clearly this strong?
The banquet noodles, last time?
He could think of no other variable. The whole order shared the same training, the same meals, the same place to rest.
I... didn't feel any great difference in my strength.
Since the reconnaissance in the Kalian Forest, Arthur had eaten Kang Jinwoo's food every time he accompanied Duke Kailan. By that logic his own strength ought to have grown as well. His sword was the same as ever.
He stopped thinking about it. Losing himself in questions in the middle of a battle could get not only him killed, but the men beside him.
"It's Sir Arthur!"
"Squad Leader! You're here!"
"Yes!"
The moment he reached the center of the line, Arthur drew and cut the monsters down. The movements looked much like his usual ones, but the man making them felt a faint, nagging wrongness.
What is this? My sword and my mana both feel empty.
An ogre's frame dwarfed a man's, so a frontal clash was rarely the answer. The usual method was to attack the lower body, collapse its balance, and only then land the killing blow. Arthur carried it out like a machine.
Shhk—!
"Uwooooooh!"
The ogre strained to catch movements that flowed like water, and could not. Arthur slipped clear again and again, striking the joints of its legs. When the strength went out of them and the beast dropped to one knee, he shut down its thrashing piece by piece and took the head.
Thud—!
The huge body crashed facedown onto the ground.
It was only one ogre among many, but a surge of elation rose in Arthur that he could not put into words.
My realm... it rose!
The other knights had eaten Kang Jinwoo's food far fewer times than he had, and still grown stronger, because they had so much more room to grow. They had never reached the realm of an aura user, so even a little of that food produced a dramatic effect. Arthur, though, was a fully matured aura user. However much time passed, he had never broken through from sword aura into the next realm, Sword Force—and because his training never stopped, his mana had packed itself down inside him, layer upon pressed layer.
The trigger that carried a man past a realm might be a duel staked on his life, an insight caught in ordinary days, or an elixir and herbs steeped in pure mana.
That sound I heard while eating the curry... that was the moment I crossed over.
Once he recognized the rise, he turned his senses inward, toward the vessel within. It was not empty. The opposite: the vessel had grown so vast that the mana he'd held before amounted to almost nothing, and so it had felt hollow.
Fwoosh—!
Arthur shut his eyes, gripped his sword tight, and released his mana.
In that same instant, every mid-rank monster threatening the troops at the center turned to look.
"Ngh... huh?"
"Grrrr..."
"Now!"
"Guhk—!"
The beasts had sensed a powerful mana by instinct and gone on guard. Thanks to Arthur's release, a knight locked in a contest of strength caught his breath, and another seized the moment to take the head of a monster whose attention had fixed on Arthur.
His swelling mana leapt, all at once, into his sword.
Fwoooosh—!
From the crossguard to the very tip of the edge, a keen Sword Force blazed silver.
Not only the monsters—the knights still fighting lost themselves, staring at Arthur's Sword Force.
That night, half the Monster Wave that had struck Silbaerin was annihilated.