The Elf Enlightenment Movement (4)
The elves began to eat, and I put my own share of the pizza in my mouth.
Crunch. Crunch.
A crust that shattered crisp and then pulled chewy, cheese thick and lush, and the bright acidity of tomato sauce binding the two—finished, at the last, by the clean, refreshing fragrance of basil. I shouldn't be the one to say it, but it was an exemplary Italian pizza through and through. The fantastic synergy of nothing but flour, tomato, and cheese dragged the words out of you whether you liked it or not: That's all that went into this, and it's this good?
That was one of the great hallmarks of Italian cooking. In a Mediterranean climate overflowing with seasonal ingredients at their peak, you didn't need to use many things at all. The ingredients themselves were already delicious.
Wait. Isn't this exactly the elves?
It was. When I'd first heard about elven food culture, I really had thought it a cursed society with nothing in it but fools. But after buying ingredients at the market and turning the matter over, I came to understand that they had circumstances of their own.
Before I cook, if an ingredient is new to me, or if its flavor swings wildly, I always taste it first. Take salt. You have to know how salty it is before you can season with any precision. In today's case, it had been the tomato. Before making the pizza, I'd taken a bite: a dense, concentrated flavor unlike Korean cultivars, much closer to an Italian tomato. Honestly, Korean tomatoes leave something to be desired in the kitchen. A tomato is already a watery vegetable, and the Korean ones are far more dilute, their taste thin. Italian tomatoes, by contrast, aren't watery at all. Every flavor and aroma runs deep.
Good enough to eat raw, at this level. Set against the thought of ruining them with half-hearted cooking, they were deeply satisfying just as they were.
And this, too, must be the grace of the World Tree.
The ordinary path of culinary progress went like this: too hard to eat raw, so you cook it, and the result isn't much, but it's better than eating it plain. Repeat that long enough, and skill accumulates by degrees. The elves, though, had been handed a cheat code—the World Tree, a broken map only the room host could spawn. Supreme produce, wrought by the World Tree's tremendous vitality. And ironically, ingredients of that quality had stopped the development of Nuardel's cuisine dead.
From their point of view, they had tried. They seared, they stir-fried, they boiled, and it tasted worse than eating the thing raw. So they grew passive about cooking, and at last they arrived at the present. They had their reasons. That was why I'd thought of pizza—and, beyond it, the simple methods peculiar to the Mediterranean. The two situations resembled each other in so many ways that the elves would adapt more easily than they would to any other style of cooking. And the person who would serve as the cornerstone of that plan was Elioren.
I munched my pizza with one hand and watched him. At last he rose from his seat and came toward me.
“Um, Sir Jinwoo?”
“Yes?”
“Might there... be more? Pizza.”
There it is. He came!
His manner had been so indifferent the whole time that I'd been quietly anxious, but the pizza had clearly suited him. From the way he'd been eating, he'd been practically inhaling it, without a thought for the eyes around him.
“Haa... World Tree, Sir Jinwoo. Thank you, for bestowing a dish like this upon us,” Veila breathed.
“This dish, at the very least... I acknowledge you,” said Seiran.
“It's so good! Kidnapping—no, wait. Bringing you here was seriously the right call!” Iseria crowed.
That last part was a little strange...
Iseria's words snagged on me, but the other elves had already fallen to the pizza. They didn't notice in the slightest that Elioren had abandoned his dignity. I faced him as he asked for a refill. He had eaten so happily that a faint stain of red tomato sauce and crumbs of crust lingered at the corner of his mouth. The corners of his lips drew a pleased arc, and yet, somehow, his eyes alone were a little cold.
Eyes like that... I've seen them in a documentary.
Those documentaries that trek into the remote corners of the world and observe animals. The look you see so often when they're filming a predator. A cold, lucid gaze, fixed on prey. A beautiful elder with silver-streaked platinum hair looking at me like that was honestly a little frightening. It felt as if I had become the prey. And that was despite it obviously being a look meant for the pizza.
“I made plenty extra. Please, eat as much as you like.”
“Thank you. To think that in my old age I would be moved by food like this. I never dreamed of it.”
A ceaseless baptism of formal, extravagant praise. Perhaps because he was a learned man, it pleased me more than compliments from anyone else.
“Thank you for the kind words. Here's some more.”
“You have my thanks. This is truly...”
“A flavor one would wish to eat every day, if one could.”
Having taken the refill, Elioren murmured that last part on the heels of his thanks. His voice had gone unusually quiet, and I didn't quite catch it. I asked him again.
“Sorry? What did you say?”
“Ah, it's nothing. I'll enjoy this.”
Well, nothing important.
It mustn't have mattered much; he brushed past it and returned to his seat. Whatever it was, it seemed to have been something good. I resumed demolishing the pizza I had briefly set aside.
A chill prickled over my skin.
What—what was that?
A cold shiver rose over my whole body at once, and my hand stopped. What was that, all of a sudden? Had someone turned on the air conditioning? Of course that was impossible, and yet, for just a moment, the illusion that the temperature had dropped that far was that strong. Iseria, Seiran, and Veila were still grinning away over their pizza as if nothing at all were wrong. And Elioren.
Must have been my imagination.
I'd heated up a little while cooking. Cooling off was no bad thing. In high spirits, I finished every last bit of my share.
Elioren was deeply moved.
How many decades had it been since he had forgotten his surroundings entirely and lost himself in something? And not in scholarship, or magic, or the tempering of martial skill... in a meal. To concentrate this deeply on eating, of all things, which he had always regarded as utterly ordinary. He looked at the plate, pitifully empty, and thought.
Kang Jinwoo. That man is the real thing.
Even he, an elf past three hundred, had lost his composure and surrendered his body to instinct. What, then, of Iseria, more than two hundred years his junior? She was a child who had never been able to resist novelty and fun, and now she had met a man so far beyond ordinary measure.
Perhaps it was a mercy that it ended at kidnapping.
Iseria was not quiet by nature, but her heart was soft, and she was not the sort to lead with violence. It was fortunate her daughter's temperament was what it was. Had it been some other elf, unable to restrain youthful blood... he might never have entered Nuardel with his body intact. Elves, living as they did across long years, held harmony with nature and peace as great virtues. But there were also elves of the opposite bent, who spent their whole lives in pursuit of amusement.
Elioren counted it a blessing that Kang Jinwoo had come to Nuardel unharmed. And at the same time, he found that he could understand the hearts of Iseria, Veila, and Seiran, who had taken him.
He lifted the lightened plate and started for the kitchen. More precisely, toward Kang Jinwoo, eating pizza alone there. He was not putting force into his steps, and yet the soles of his shoes drew a sound thick with pressure. In recent decades, he could not recall a time he had found himself so difficult to govern. The unrest of his feelings seemed to be leaking out through the tips of his feet.
“Um, Sir Jinwoo?”
“Yes?”
“Might there... be more? Pizza.”
A single sentence, offered with care, lest the quarry startle and flee. The bearing of a predator hunting herbivores in patience.
“I made plenty extra. Please, eat as much as you like.”
“Thank you. To think that in my old age I would be moved by food like this. I never dreamed of it.”
Kang Jinwoo answered the request and brought out more pizza he had kept hot. But Elioren's gaze passed the pizza in those hands and fixed upon Kang Jinwoo himself. His skill was genius, and delicate—and yet he did not notice a look like this? Plainly pleased by the praise, Kang Jinwoo prepared the pizza. And that praise was no lie, nor a politely measured compliment. It was admiration carrying his true heart. It was only that even a splendid tribute may have a second face.
“Thank you for the kind words. Here's some more.”
“You have my thanks. This is truly...”
Kang Jinwoo answered him and held out the pizza, and Elioren offered his thanks in pure gratitude. A Margherita, just heated in the oven, still steaming. Before that rapturous, fragrant sight, Elioren's composure collapsed all at once.
His true mind, escaped before he could call it back. Elioren concealed his dismay as far as he was able and dropped his voice.
“Sorry? What did you say?”
“Ah, it's nothing. I'll enjoy this.”
Fortunately, Kang Jinwoo had not heard him properly. In truth, even if he had, the words were not so strange. They only meant the food was delicious enough to want every day. But the elf before Kang Jinwoo's eyes—Elioren Sildiel—possessed the power to make that wish real by force. Kang Jinwoo did not know this, and so he would have taken it as ordinary praise of the highest order.
No. That must not be.
Whatever else he was, was he not the head of House Sildiel, a man possessed of both reason and intellect? He could not bind him by immoral means.
Then... I shall have to receive him with the utmost devotion.
So that the man himself would turn his heart, and remain in Nuardel for a long time. Elioren resolved to prepare a sweet gift. A gift so sweet that the instant it was eaten, the body would be ruined for satisfaction by anything else.
Crisp.
Yes. Just like the hot Margherita pizza he was biting into even now.
A clear spring day.
Back from the capital after a week, Arthur went into the knights' quarters to shake off the fatigue of the road.
Ugh. I'm exhausted.
During the last Monster Wave, Kang Jinwoo's curry had let him break through to the realm of Sword Expert. Because of that, Arthur had been required to visit the capital and register the rank anew. Out of worry over a fraudulent evaluation, the process was exacting in the extreme. They measured his physical ability, then the quantity of his mana and his control of it, and finally the heart of the trial: an examination by the sword.
People sometimes called a Sword Expert “a commoner who failed to reach Master.” That was entirely wrong. Sword Expert was itself a realm that demanded considerable effort, and set against the strength of an ordinary knight, the difference was heaven and earth. A single well-trained Expert could turn the tide of a battle, and so the trial that judged the qualification had to carry a fitting gravity.
Arthur's opponent in the examination match was a knight of First Princess Kariel's personal guard. Setting aside Balthazar Zeke, the only Sword Master, who had vanished from sight, the man stood, in name and in fact, among the strong. However strictly an examination was conducted, one did not ordinarily take a fighter of that caliber as a sparring partner.
But this match had come about because—of all people—Ishilla, the young lady of Silbaerin then studying at the Imperial Academy, happened to be Kariel's friend; and of all people, that same Ishilla had carried word of Arthur's promotion exam to Kariel; and of all people, the day of the exam was a holiday at the Imperial Academy.
And so a bored Kariel had dropped into the examination hall on a whim, and Arthur had been forced to put on a tearful, humiliating shitshow against the princess's loyal blade.
Behold! Allow me to demonstrate!
Fortunately, Arthur's heartrending performance caught the princess's interest, and he was able to finish the administrative registration and return in one piece.
Today I am absolutely not going anywhere. I'm resting.
Firm in that resolve, Arthur threw himself onto the soft bed.
And then—knock, knock, knock. A knock rang through Arthur's room, and with it a familiar voice.
“It's me, Kailan. I'll step in for a moment.”
“Y-Your Grace?”
Arthur, who had only just managed to lie down, scrambled back to his feet. In the same moment, Duke Kailan came into the room. He spoke as easily as he might to a friend from the neighborhood.
“Arthur, you've worked hard. Let's go eat some of Jinwoo's cooking for once. It's been ages since I went, too.”
“Ah... yes, sir. I'll get ready at once.”
The problem was that only Kailan was permitted to be at ease. But what could he do? When they said jump, he jumped. Even so, it was not an entirely unwelcome proposal. Kang Jinwoo's food stood well above even the meals of the imperial capital, and it had been a long time since he'd tasted it.
Kailan and Arthur rode for the Kalian Forest. Their destination, of course, was Kang Jinwoo's restaurant.
“The thought of janchi-guksu after all this time has me excited!”
“Ahaha...”
Arthur answered him vaguely. He himself had wanted something other than those thin banquet noodles.
And so they arrived before the restaurant door. Today, though, for some reason, there was no sign of anyone. If a person were inside, some small sound ought to have reached them, and yet there was not even the ordinary clatter of dishes. They had come during business hours, so it ought to be fine, Arthur told himself, and opened the door.
“Sir Jinwoo, are you in?”
What greeted Kailan and Arthur was the dark interior of the restaurant. At the plainly wrong state of the place, Arthur's nerves drew faintly taut.
“Sir Jinwoo... what is this?”
Going farther in, a cluttered table came into view. Four chairs pulled out at careless angles, never properly put back. On the table sat plates that looked as if they had been left for days. He brushed a finger lightly across one, and a glossy film of oil came away on it. Kang Jinwoo, who prized hygiene and cleanliness, was not the sort of man to leave a thing like this. Arthur met Kailan's eyes. Kailan, too, had sensed how strange the situation was, and nodded.
A moment ago they had been customers. Now they were the knights of Silbaerin. If something had happened to the order's honorary provisioner, it was their duty to give aid. Arthur and Kailan searched the dining hall and the kitchen respectively.
And they found it.
“Your Grace, there's a faint bloodstain on the floor by this table...”
“In the kitchen as well. Footprints I'd put at about three people, leading out to the backyard.”
The kitchen door toward the backyard was not even locked. It stood open. Every one of those signs pointed to a single thing. Arthur muttered the conclusion, stricken.