The Gap-Moe Elf Sister Who Turns Clingy When Hungover
"Urk... hrrk..."
"Sigh... You all right? Here, have some water."
"Th-thanks... hic."
Glug. Glug.
"Pwah! Ugh..."
"I told you to take it easy."
"Sorry..."
The sun had long since passed its zenith and was sliding down the afternoon sky. Since morning I had been looking after Eilenna, who had drunk herself into a collapse.
Right up until she started making those strange noises over the tart, Iseria had been no different, so I figured it was just how elves were. The moment she started taking it with wine, she lost the thread entirely. Her eyes changed, and she began knocking the wine back the way people slam soju—one shot after another.
People have a habit of treating wine as a weak drink. They are completely wrong. Set beside distilled spirits like vodka or whiskey, of course it is milder. Within the family of fermented liquors, though, wine runs fairly high: ordinary bottles sit between twelve and fifteen percent, and fortified wine climbs as high as twenty-two. Korea's cheap diluted soju, the stuff everyone drinks, is sixteen percent, or twenty-one. Someone raised on that might well decide wine is gentle.
There is a catch. The size of the glass.
Fill a soju glass to the brim and you are lucky to clear sixty milliliters. A standard wine glass holds a hundred and fifty. Pour it the way you do at home, generous and unthinking, and three hundred milliliters goes down in a single swallow. A drink only one percent weaker than soju, served at roughly three times the volume, then slammed back one after another?
It would be stranger not to get drunk.
Lightweights. People weak to alcohol, whatever name you hang on them. Even someone who wasn't one of those would have had no choice but to go under.
"Lady Eilenna. Can you hold your liquor?"
"No... I'm weak."
"Oh, for— a lightweight. And you still managed to make wine?"
"Tastings are... only a little at a time... urk!"
Awake after some five hours, Eilenna was suffering through the hangover. Fermented liquor hits harder the next day than distilled spirits, and for someone who couldn't drink to go at it like that, of course her body was going to revolt. But still. If she knew she was weak to alcohol, why drink with no plan at all?
I had unintentionally burned the entire morning, and now the afternoon was going the same way. It was starting to grate. I asked her.
"You knew you couldn't hold your drink. Why go at it with no plan at all..."
"Sorry. Jinwoo, the tart you made was just too good..."
Kang Jinwoo! You again!
Once more, without fail, the fallout of my cooking. Even so, this time I could understand the binge a little.
Before she emptied the bottle, there had been the share I poured for myself. Eaten with the peach tart, it perfectly answered the regret I had felt last time—the lack of a proper pairing. The tart's three kicks. Bright lemon custard, fragrant herbal extract, sweet honey, all of it in exquisite balance. Especially that honey. If the tart was going to hold its own against Eilenna's wine, I had thought it needed a clinging sweetness to bind the whole thing into one, and the honey had carried out that duty and then some.
Eilenna had been making wine for a long time, and pairing it with fruit had been the best she could manage. For her, this peach tart would not have meant simply a snack that went well with wine. It was the fulfillment of a flavor she had never quite been satisfied with. A new horizon of taste, past the narrow world she had known. And the moment she felt, in her bones, the potential of her own wine—Eseriel.
I looked at her lying on the sofa under nothing but a thin blanket. Her stomach must have been killing her. Her face was pinched tight, and every so often she dry-heaved. When you are sick from drink, all you can do is replace fluids and lie still.
What I could do for her...
Hm. Honey water... and tomato soup?
Most people have felt for themselves how powerful honey water is when a hangover is bad. But tomato soup? Huh? It might seem like a dish pulled out of nowhere, but in Europe tomato soup is a common cure for the morning after. It sits where haejangguk, hangover soup, sits back home. See someone hunched over a bowl of the stuff at breakfast, looking like death, and you think, That one drank last night. Don't you? Europe was the same. There was even a bit of folk wisdom that anyone gulping tomato soup from the morning on had been dead drunk the night before.
"If you can sleep, just sleep. If you can't, at least keep your eyes closed."
"Mm. Sorry... You leaving now?"
"Well... I was about to."
"Okay. Ugh... hhk!"
"What? Why are you crying all of a sudden."
I had only told her to rest her eyes. She seemed to answer normally enough, then suddenly started sniffling, tears running down her face. Ah. I am a little weak to emotional situations like this.
Hic—
Sniff—
After crying for a while, Eilenna seemed to settle a little and opened her mouth.
"Hhk, sorry. I'm just... so pathetic. Hhk."
"Why? Nothing even happened."
"But... I'm an elf, you know. An elf who's lived so much longer than you, Jinwoo... and I know even less, and I can't even pace my drinking, and I'm the one being looked after..."
"Mm-hm. That part's true, yeah."
"Huuuk! And even so you made me a tart... and you praised my house. Thank youuu..."
By the end she couldn't even get the words out. Normally she walked around with her pride cranked all the way up, tall enough that the air around her was frankly intimidating. Now that her body was hurting, the recoil seemed to hit all the harder. Her speech had gone soft and mushy, like an eight-year-old burning up with fever.
This doesn't sit right.
She must have lived a long time as an elf. How bad did it have to get before she would show a face like this to a human? Nuardel, where fine cooking had been ruined. Eilenna, making high-quality wine here all alone—her loneliness came at me deep.
"Phew..."
"Huh. And now she's asleep again."
I had been sitting with the thought in silence, and Eilenna, worn out on her own, had slipped into a light sleep. That actually made things easier.
Better make it quick and go.
I wasn't going to stay here through the evening, and I still had to get back to the manor and train the apprentice elves. I went into the kitchen of Eilenna's house, spent about half an hour throwing together tomato soup and honey water, and left a note where she would see it the moment she woke.
Drink this when you wake up.
That ought to do.
A glance at the clock in the corner of the room put the time at roughly four in the afternoon. Even if I didn't rush, I would make it back for dinner. Careful not to wake her, I slipped out of the house. Somehow the day felt as if it had flown past. I didn't wander. I went straight back to the manor.
And that night, on the outskirts of Nuardel, at the brewery of House Liliendra, a female elf thrashed in shame, and a self-loathing scream rang out.
That Kang Jinwoo had no way of knowing any of it.
Two days after Arthur and Kailan realized Kang Jinwoo was missing, the 1st Squad of the Silbaerin Knights rode out of the city through a murmuring, unsettled crowd. Their destination was the place where Kang Jinwoo's restaurant stood: Kalian Forest.
In his heart, Kailan had wanted to launch a search the very day they noticed he was gone. Work that had to be handled first had piled up, though. And they needed about a day, just to be sure the man was truly missing. The scene made it plain that something had happened—but just in case. A day of investigation made the disappearance certain. They questioned people in the village closest to Kalian Forest and turned the ground around his restaurant inside out, and they found neither Kang Jinwoo nor the tiny elf who went around with him, Iseria.
Kailan concluded that Kang Jinwoo had been kidnapped, or was under a threat to his person on that order. Now that every urgent matter was cleared, he opened the Kang Jinwoo Search Operation together with the 1st Squad. Every face in the force was set cold and hard, a grimness that did not even compare to a Monster Wave. Equipment checked to the last strap, not a man excepted; Arthur, who had only recently finished the administrative registration of his promotion to Sword Expert; and the greatest fighting power of the Silbaerin duchy, Kailan himself, armed and with them. Proof enough of how deeply the honorary quartermaster named Kang Jinwoo had sunk into the Silbaerin Knights.
They widened the search far beyond the brief look they had taken last time. Their base was Kang Jinwoo's restaurant, Pyeonsik. They did not use the inside of the building. They only pitched tents in the yard.
"Reporting, sir. Within a ten-kilometer radius of the Honorary Quartermaster's restaurant, we found nothing."
"Hm... Is that so. I'm not doubting you, but you searched thoroughly?"
"Yes, sir! We combed it the way you'd hunt a rat, in measure of the grace the Quartermaster showed us! But..."
"Enough. You've worked hard. Tell the men to rest."
"Hail!"
Luke, platoon leader of the 1st Squad's 1st Platoon, delivered the report and stepped out of the tent. Kailan waited until he was well gone, then let out a long breath.
"Haa... This won't be easy."
"What even is this, all of a sudden... I only pray Lord Jinwoo is safe."
"You and I both."
Arthur, commander of the 1st Squad and joint commander of the search, looked at the map spread on the field table. The Kalian Mountain Range ran long to the east. Length alone would have been manageable, but the range was thick as well. As far as Kalian Forest the land was imperial territory, so they hunted magical beasts and patrolled on a regular round. Beyond that lay outside the Empire.
The imperial border sat roughly ten kilometers from Kalian Forest. Reach that line and the forest changed shape all at once. It was already a dim wood, packed with trees grown thick, and past the boundary a pale mist began to settle. Not only the mist—the forest's life grew larger, and more hostile. It was Nuardel, the country of the elves, warning them to come no closer. More precisely, it was a ward the World Tree exerted to keep the elves safe. Arthur and Kailan were not men who could fail to know that, and the knowledge only deepened the worry.
"The elf who was with Lord Jinwoo—Iseria—she vanished with him, didn't she? This is..."
"Yes. We found no trace of them in the city or the villages, so the sound judgment is that they went the other way. Toward Nuardel."
It was one of the choices he most wanted to avoid, and of course that was the one that proved right. But Kailan had already guessed as much.
Two days ago—the day he and Arthur had gone for janchi-guksu, those thin celebratory noodles, and realized Kang Jinwoo was gone. A ripple of mana, steady as rings spreading over a quiet lake. And then a point where the ripple broke, as if a rock had thrust up in its path. That place was none other than the room in the farthest corner of the restaurant's second floor. If a room had also been given to the elf named Iseria, then setting aside Kang Jinwoo's own room left one. On the bedding in that corner room there was a trace that ran against Kailan's mana.
From what he had once heard from his daughter, Ishilla, Kang Jinwoo did not keep lodgings. Right after the Wave he had been too busy to visit often, but he had gone once, and at that time no one had been staying at the restaurant. Kang Jinwoo, gone without warning. Someone who had begun lodging there not long before he vanished. And the elf who had been with him—Iseria as well. A young elf named Iseria did not seem likely to have kidnapped Kang Jinwoo on her own. And so the conclusion.
"The ones who took Kang Jinwoo would be the elf called Iseria, and other elves besides."
"Yes. So it seems. A human cannot pass unharmed through elven lands, and aside from a faint bloodstain on the floor there was no other sign of a struggle... She may well be an accomplice."
"This has gotten troublesome."
Even so, they could not give up. The black-haired easterner who had appeared in Silbaerin out of nowhere—Kang Jinwoo. That Arthur had broken through to a higher realm after eating the food he made was a secret known only to those who knew, and Kailan himself had felt a faint increase in his own strength. On top of that, the man had reformed the knights' entire mess. He had even turned that dreadful combat ration, hardtack, into something genuinely good. According to Calius, lately returned from the capital, the refined version of that hardtack—Barren Snowflower—was causing a sensation there as well. He had become someone this city could not do without.
And...
Janchi-guksu. I can't lose it.
He was the only man alive who could make Duke Kailan's one true pick.
"Tomorrow, at first light, we form an elite and depart."
"Sir? Depart for where?"
"Where do you think."
Duke Kailan smiled, a slow sharp grin. A chill crawled up Arthur's spine at the sight of it.
"They took our chef. They ought to pay for it, shouldn't they? Those elf bastards."
The man called the coldest wall of the Empire—Kailan. At words that were closer to a declaration, Arthur recalled the old epithet. The name the whole Empire feared, the name rumor said could stand even against a Sword Master.
The Mad Spear of the Frost, Kailan Silbaerin...
Silbaerin and Nuardel. The threadbare peace that had held between them for so long began to crack as the clouds of war gathered.