Choosing the Festival Special Menu (3)
A pink liquid so sweet it bordered on the suspicious—sweet enough that a single mouthful tipped over into pure bliss.
It eased fatigue and swelled one's mana besides, and the addiction ran so deep that some of the students had even begun to show withdrawal.
A soft rush of mana.
"Ugh... hrrk..."
"No magic over the holiday. Focus only on slowly refilling what you've burned off. Next."
"Thank you..."
For the students hit hardest, Ermia had come to the academy dormitory even though it was a day off.
Fortunately, everyone showing symptoms belonged to the Magic department, so there was no need to comb the entire student body. She read through the list of affected students the Magic professors had compiled and adjusted their mana by hand, one after another.
The headmaster herself, coming in on a holiday.
She was not the sort to revel in her authority, but even so, this felt like rather too little dignity for the office. Still, what choice did she have? Among the professors, she was the only one who could handle another person's mana with any real skill. Great power came with great responsibility.
Thinking that, she found herself picturing the black-haired brat who had caused the whole mess. In the long run it was a good thing—it would do the students' bodies and mana a genuine kindness. He was selling the effects of a high-grade elixir at a price that defied all sense. He was clearly doing them a favor. And yet, perhaps because of Kang Jinwoo's faintly insolent attitude, Ermia found herself inexplicably annoyed.
"My strength is draining away... No..."
"What do you mean, no. Get inside and sleep."
"Hiek."
Once she had cleared the last student's mana overload, Ermia headed straight for the dormitory entrance without wasting another moment. It was a day when even the dorm supervisors had stayed home, save for a skeleton crew, and the two who remained offered her a greeting.
"Headmaster, thank you for your trouble, even on a holiday."
"It's nothing. It couldn't be helped. If any student still feels unwell after their mana has settled, contact me at once."
"Understood. Please get home safely."
Ermia was just reaching for the dormitory's broad front door.
"Without that Milk Peach, I'm nothing!!"
"Then you especially shouldn't be drinking Milk Peach."
Into her ears came the voice of a young student deep in withdrawal, and another voice she had been hearing an awful lot of late—one far too familiar. She recognized its owner at once and threw the door open.
The latch clanked.
"Oh, Lady Ermia. There you are at last."
"Waaah! My Milk Peach..."
"Kang Jinwoo, and Student Ishilla? What are you doing here?"
Ishilla was throwing a tantrum like a child begging an uncle for a toy. Kang Jinwoo held her off easily with one hand, and the moment Ermia appeared he greeted her as if he had come for her from the very start—perfectly natural.
Strike while the iron is hot, they say. The thought had barely crossed my mind before I was heading for the academy, off to see Ermia, who I had a feeling would be working even on a holiday. I hadn't heard anything in particular. It was pure instinct.
Ermia was a little... no. She was the type so absurdly competent that the work never stopped coming. And that instinct hit dead center.
Going straight to the headmaster's office felt a bit rude, so I checked with the administration office first, and they told me she would be working at the student dormitory today. I had permission to do business on academy grounds, but that didn't mean I could stroll into the student dorms whenever I liked. So I went only as far as the area near the building and waited for her to come out.
While I waited, a bright voice called to me.
"Master? What are you doing here?"
"Oh, Ishilla. Hey."
The owner of the voice was Ishilla herself, arms full of dessert bread, as if she had just stepped out into the city for a bit. Right—Arthur had come all the way to the capital to escort her, hadn't he? The thought reminded me, so I passed it along.
"Come to think of it, Sir Arthur arrived earlier. Did you hear?"
"Ah, I got a letter from Father saying he'd send an escort... so Sir Arthur came, then."
"What's with that reaction? You don't like it?"
"It's not that. It's just... Sir Arthur isn't any fun. He's like a block of wood, and even when I try to talk to him, all I get is 'Ah, yes. Is that so?' over and over."
"Hmm. Is he?"
Fair enough. They'd be stuck in a carriage together for days, and a boredom crisis was no small matter. But was Arthur really that dull? When he was with me he cracked jokes, and sometimes he did downright bizarre things—like the time the curry pushed him through to Sword Expert and he hugged me hard enough to nearly break me. Well. Ishilla was his superior's daughter, and the gap in status was huge, so he probably found her harder to deal with.
"No, no, answer my question too!"
"Ah, sorry. I was waiting for the headmaster. There's something I need to talk to her about regarding the festival."
"Something about the festival...? Don't tell me you're breaking your promise and shutting the stall down before it starts?"
"I, Kang Jinwoo, am a man who will break a promise if there's a knife at his throat, but otherwise I generally try to keep them."
"That was a very long qualifier..."
But if a robber held a knife to me and ordered me to break a promise, what else could I do? Lives would be on the line. Surely the other party would nod and go, Well... that couldn't be helped.
I picked the thread back up.
"Actually, I want to make the stall a bit bigger for the festival. That's why I came."
"Oh, really? Then that's a relief... Oh, right. Milk Peach has been tasting a little different lately. I'm right, aren't I?"
"Ah, no? The taste is the same. The taste."
"Something must have changed! Can't you change it back to the original Milk Peach?"
No—that original taste was exactly why sales had nearly been shut down. I fell into step with Ishilla as she headed for the dorms and explained.
"There are adult circumstances, you see. Dig too deep and you'll get hurt."
"Hmm... I'm a duke's daughter. You think you can hurt me?"
"Pulling rank, are we. Selfish brat. So you're fine with the stall going under?"
"Hmph. A lion gives its all even when hunting a rabbit."
Ishilla trotted out a classical metaphor and, with the hand not holding dessert, struck a little rawr of a pose. Looking at her like this, duke's daughter or not, she was just a student acting her age. I didn't yield an inch, even to the lioness impression.
"Still, it can't be helped. What we have now is delicious too. Drink it long enough and you'll get used to it."
"Ugh, without that Milk Peach, I'm nothing!!"
"Then you especially shouldn't be drinking Milk Peach."
"Hey! Hey!"
Swish, swish—Ishilla batted at me lightly with cat paws. I blocked the play with one hand and looked ahead.
Somewhere in the middle of our back-and-forth, we had reached the dormitory's front door. I hadn't meant to come this far, but I'd wandered over without noticing while we talked. No one had stopped me, but it still felt a little awkward. I stood there in an uneasy half-crouch, staring at the door, and right on cue the solid thing began to open. Ishilla was still whining beside me, so I stretched my arm out fully and held her back.
The person who appeared was exactly who I had been waiting for.
"Oh, Lady Ermia. There you are at last."
"Waaah! My Milk Peach..."
"Kang Jinwoo, and Student Ishilla? What are you doing here?"
It was Ermia, the woman who held final approval over Arcadia Academy. Faced with the headmaster, Ishilla flustered badly.
"Ah, I was—um. I was just going into the dorm..."
"I see. You're not feeling unwell, are you?"
"No, no! I'm fine. I'll head in first. Master, see you later...!"
"Yeah, yeah. Rest up over the holiday."
Even the daughter of a great duke had to fold before the headmaster's presence. With one noisy person gone, the conversation went abruptly quiet. I told Ermia why I had come.
"So, I came to ask about the stall space for the festival."
"Sorry, but I came in to look after the students, not to handle other business."
"Wow. I didn't even break the contract, and out of the goodness of my heart I changed the Milk Peach recipe..."
"Uk."
"I sold the students a drink practically on the level of an elixir, dirt cheap..."
"Uuuuk..."
The moment I started pressing, calm and steady, Ermia was driven straight onto the back foot. She bit her lower lip, then spoke with the look of someone who had been convinced.
"Haa. Fine. What is it? Just so you know, the other departments are all off today, so we can't go through the formal process. Understand that."
"Of course. A word from you is more than enough, Lady Ermia."
"In that case... go on."
"Would it be possible to change my stall area for the festival? As wide a space as possible."
"It's possible, but the good spots are probably all taken."
Well, the festival was only two weeks away. It made sense they would have been claimed already. Even so, location wasn't a big problem for me. With the item I had in mind, I could overcome a bad spot with a wide-ranging assault of smell.
"And would it be all right if I sold some beer?"
"Sure. You can sell whatever you like—ah. You're not planning to sell food with some weird effect again, are you...?"
"Don't worry. I'll restrain myself as much as I can."
"Is 'I won't do it at all' not even an option...?"
Ermia wore an expression of profound annoyance. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn't be entirely without an effect. More unfortunately still, even I—the one using Mana Market—didn't know what that effect would be. But as I had told her, this time I intended to hold back as much as I could. The menu I had in mind didn't even require special ingredients. Fresh meat, and a clean charcoal fire. Add the skill of a man who always ended up on tong duty whenever friends went out for grilled meat, and it would be enough.
"When you open on festival day, come eat, Lady Ermia. It'll be on the house."
"Honestly. You're probably the only person alive who treats the empire's greatest archmage this casually. I'll take the thought, gratefully."
"Thank you. Then I'll be off!"
"Nngh. Right. I should clock out too..."
Ermia stretched her short arms and legs out long and worked the stiffness from them. I gave her a brief farewell and left the academy. The sun was already sinking low. My next stop, I decided, would be better visited after it had fully gone down.
"Why do I feel like I keep seeing you. Hm?"
"Well... we did meet this morning, actually. Boss."
"Jinwoo, what's the best thing here?"
"All we've got is beer, elf lady."
"Ah, then I'll have a beer as well, please. Proprietor."
"...And unlike this morning, you've even brought two friends with you."
The street had settled into full dark. I had come to the pub with Arthur and Eilenna, who had been enjoying their day off at the mansion—the pub of Brunok, the proprietor I had traded beer recipes with.
We had only exchanged names that morning while drawing up the contract, and each of us had been startled by the other's. Brunok had gaped at mine—in all his life he had never heard a name like that—and I had been just as surprised that a man built short and thick as a dwarf also carried a name packed to the brim with dwarf energy.
It had been only a day since a whole crowd of customers followed the smell of Curry Wurst through the door. Only a day, and yet the old desolation of Brunok's pub was nowhere to be found. People talked and drank noisily at their own tables, a beer in one hand and a fork in the other, laughing as they ate. Every table had at least one plate of Curry Wurst. The place was fairly full, and since we had come to talk to Brunok, we took seats at the bar.
Tok, tok, tok—he set three beers down in front of us, one for each. We didn't order Curry Wurst. Arthur had already had it for lunch, and Eilenna didn't care for meat. The two of them stared at the pure gold in their cups with open wonder.
"Whoa... this is beer? Humans actually managed to brew beer this good? This is dwarf-level skill."
"It really is remarkable. I've never seen a beer that looks this crisp."
"Haha. You've both got an eye. Comes from having a chef for a friend, does it?"
In this era, making lager instead of ale was a fairly pioneering thing to do. I had worried Eilenna and Arthur might not recognize its worth. That worry, it seemed, had been unfounded. Eilenna had spent years brewing wine, so that much I could grant, but Arthur had only ever drunk ordinary beer. The look of it ought to have been unfamiliar to him.
"Well, your cooking is hardly ordinary either, Jinwoo. Watching it must have sharpened my eye."
"True enough. That kid's cooking made both my eyes fly open. Makes sense."
"Save the embarrassing talk and let's drink first."
"Yes! I want to try it right away!"
Thunk—four wooden cups, Brunok's included, knocked together in the air. And all four of us immediately poured our entire attention into a single beer, without another word.
Gulp, gulp.
On a weekday you drank it as the reward for the day. On a holiday, it was the last piece set into a fantastic one. That thrilling pleasure of driving cold carbonation straight down the throat—truly, a taste that never got old, no matter when you drank it.
"Kaaaah! Delicious today too, Boss."
"Whew. Tastes even better when more people are drinking it."
"Pwah! It's got that fermented-yeast aroma like wine, but the crispness is overwhelming. This has a charm all its own!"
"Urk. Cough, cough! The carbonation—kek—is stronger than I thought. Completely different from ale..."
Arthur, the biggest of us and yet somehow the most delicate, caught it wrong and coughed without pause. Right. The air of a stolid knight who had only ever trained, in every sense of the word. Throats wetted, I brought out the matter I had prepared.
"Boss. By the way, are you setting up a stall at this festival?"
"Mm. Thinking about it. Got the recipe from you, too. Why?"
"If you're all right with it, I was wondering if we might collaborate."
"Collaborate? Collaborate how?"
"I do the food, you do the beer. We run them together out of one stall. Like a spacious outdoor terrace restaurant."
Hearing me out, Brunok let out a long hmm. He had the recipe, but two weeks was nowhere near enough time to get a business ready on it. He had only ever sold beer, so he would need to buy cooking equipment, and his own proficiency mattered too.
"Same as before—I'll decide after I hear it. What food are you making?"
"Right, Jinwoo. I'm curious too."
"Somehow the mood says I ought to be curious as well. What is it, Jinwoo?"
The three of them, sipping beer at the bar, turned their eyes on me as one. Before I opened my mouth, I wet my tongue with beer one more time. Then I told them the devilish menu that would seize the academy festival entire.
"The dish this time is... charcoal-grilled chicken skewers. With beer on the side. Just thinking about it is enough to kill you, right?"
"Hmm... not really."
"Ah... this one is a little—well. It's a bit much, Jinwoo."
"But I can't eat meat..."
"Eh."
And yet the bold declaration I had thought of as my trump card, for some reason, did not seem to land with them as anything particularly appealing.
Since I had come to this other world and started cooking, this was the first time I had been given such a cold reception.