Let the Academy Festival Begin! (1)
Creeeak—
In the dim of night, I pushed open the door of Brunok's pub.
The drunks inside were roaring with laughter, voices piled on voices. The moment I stepped through, every eye swung to me, and Brunok called out with a wicked grin.
"Well, look who showed up! The black-haired lover boy!"
"Gyaaaaaah!!!"
The howl tore out of me before I could swallow it.
"Hey, is that the guy? The one who confessed today out in front of the Adventurers' Guild—and to an elf, at that?"
"Guts on him. That's the busiest stretch in the whole city!"
Stop. Please, just stop.
I had no idea how word could travel this fast, but I hadn't been back at the mansion an hour before every last employee of the company had come by to get a word in. Didn't know you had it in you. More of a man than you look! I had heard variations until I was sick of them. And here, sure enough, the rumor about me had already spread wall to wall.
Are we sure this is actually a medieval fantasy? This is Truman Show nonsense. Night didn't fall—somebody killed the lights and drew the blackout curtains. There isn't even a phone, and gossip still moves faster than the army gets anything done.
"Sir Jinwoo, um... is it true? You and Lady Ailenna, really?"
"No—then why is Sir Arthur the only one who doesn't know?"
Arthur's face said it plainly: Why would that be true? I genuinely have no idea. For this one moment, the man's legendary talent for swallowing a whole meal of cluelessness was a comfort.
If everyone reacted like that, I could have let it pass. Most of them, though, were teasing us outright. Ailenna and I ducked our heads and went to sit at the bar. Arthur trailed after us, muttering under his breath, while the cheerful needling around us never let up.
"Really? Is it really true?"
"Uuuugh, this is so embarrassing..."
"Me too..."
"Haha! What's all the fuss? I've been wondering when the two of you would get together."
Brunok set a beer down in front of each of us as he said it. Ruri had been the same, and now Brunok was too. I hadn't noticed a thing—had it really been that obvious?
"Was it that bad? You'd barely even seen us together."
"Oh, come off it. One look and you know. Even with a drink in her hand, she couldn't peel her eyes off you."
"Hmm... Was that true, Ailenna?"
"No—I mean, yes, it is, but—eep!"
Gulp—
Whatever Ailenna had meant to say lost its way and scattered in the air. Shame and delight had tangled in her until she didn't know what to do with herself, so she simply seized the beer in front of her and drank. The drunks watching our table whooped, delighted.
"Well, I'll be! The elf lady's got some fire!"
"Right? Talk like this needs a drink in it!"
"Boss! Put it on my tab, and send a round over to the happy couple!"
"Pwaaah!"
In the end, Ailenna killed an entire great mug of beer in one go.
They were teasing the two of us, yes. Even so, some wicked part of me wanted to poke at her a little. Her reactions were just too good.
"Ailenna. Back when you first saw Ishilla and went on guard... that wasn't jealousy, was it? Because she was being so warm with me?"
"......"
"Haha! So the elf lady's got a secretly cute side."
"And earlier, when Ruri came out with that weird comment, you got jealous and snapped—"
Crrrack—
The wooden beer mug collapsed in Ailenna's fist, crushed into the exact shape of her grip.
Brunok and I, who had been smirking at her side, froze with our mouths half open. The drunks who had been cackling at us shut theirs, every one of them, all at once. Silence poured through the room as if someone had hit a mute button. Ailenna opened her mouth, perfectly calm.
"Jinwoo."
"Y-yeah?"
"We'll talk at home."
"Ah."
She was smiling as she said it. I could not, for the life of me, understand why I was incapable of smiling back.
"Ha, ahaha! Anyway, Jinwoo. You didn't just drop by to loaf around, did you? Those chicken skewers you mentioned before?"
"R-right! That's what I came to talk about. Nearly forgot!"
Brunok's lifeline, lowered at the perfect moment. I grabbed it with both hands.
At first I hadn't known how long the chicken-skewer research would take, so I had set aside a week and told them to come find me at the mansion. But, well... today's market survey may have gone up in smoke, and still I already had plenty of data, and I had more or less found the flavor. There was no need to drag things out and make them trek all the way to the house.
"Is there still fire in the brazier?"
"Always is. Want me to scoop you some?"
"Yes. I'll borrow the backyard."
I took a small brazier of charcoal and stepped out back. Ailenna and Arthur had nothing left to do in the shop, so they followed me. Good timing.
She was my lover now, yes—but she was also a colleague I worked with, either way. I would be the one doing the grilling, but it wouldn't hurt for each of us to understand the other's work.
"The meat skewers are already prepped, so all that's left is the fire. The breed is Haudan."
"Haudan? That's the chicken's name?"
"Yeah. I tried this and that, and this bird had the deepest meaty aroma of the lot."
Only recently had chicken-skewer omakase, and fine-dining rooms that put chicken at the center of the plate, begun to appear here and there. Older houses, though—and the grand restaurants with long histories—still balked at using chicken as a main. Set beside pork, beef, duck, or lamb, its savor was simply too faint.
That meaty aroma was a different thing entirely from gaminess, and it varied wildly from animal to animal, each one stubbornly itself. Of them all, chicken carried the palest, most ordinary savor. A great strength when it came to versatility, and a weakness in a kitchen that meant to let every single ingredient speak. Which is exactly why I went looking for a chicken with a strong savor.
In practice, the restaurants that did put chicken on the menu almost always preferred a heritage bird with a deep, assertive aroma. I had chosen the breed called Haudan for the same reason—to draw out as much of that charm as I could. People in this world even welcomed a touch of gaminess with magnanimous appetites, so the stronger the savor, the better.
These past few days I had grilled nothing but chicken skewers, over and over, until the skill felt nearly maxed out. My hands moved without hesitation.
"If you crowd them up against the coals to cook them fast, they turn tough. You have to turn them gently, little by little. Finishing them takes longer than you'd think."
"Heeh... is that so."
"Does it truly make so great a difference?"
"Sir Arthur, after you've stood watch on the wall tower, why do you take the stairs down? Jumping would be faster."
"Ah."
Arthur, who knew next to nothing about cooking, understood at once.
I kept the skewers turning, diligent, until every face had cooked to a beautiful gold.
Sssizzle—!
Fat rendered from the chicken skin dripped onto the charcoal and sent up a delicious smoke. Now and then you meet people who blacken meat on purpose, mistaking soot for the taste of the fire. That was never it. True fire-flavor happens when the meat's juices and fat fall onto the hot face of the charcoal, flash into vapor, and the smoke washes back over the meat. It is not something you make by stupidly dumping fat into the coals and raising flame instead of heat.
So this is what a properly done charcoal grill—or a charcoal skewer—actually is. A color no frying pan could ever produce. Because the meat hangs in the air, the surface never goes soggy with oil or moisture; it turns a crackling gold. And still the inside, kissed by the far-infrared heat of the coals, stays lush, heavy with juice.
At last, the ultimate yakitori was finished. Arthur stared at that beautiful shape, startled, and swallowed hard.
"Sir Arthur. Does a chicken skewer still look like nothing much to you?"
"Th-this is a meat skewer? Then what in the world have I been eating until now..."
"Strictly speaking, a chicken skewer. I couldn't grill any meat but chicken like this."
Mm. That was the truth.
Skill aside entirely, you could never reach this quality by roasting some wild beast over a campfire just to survive. There was a reason most cultures built their skewers around chicken. The Middle East had its kebabs and its shashlik, of course, but without the proper tools and ingredients those dishes struggled to taste like themselves, and they took an absurd amount of time. All things considered, chicken was the meat best suited to a skewer—and in a medieval world where protein itself was scarce, no one had dared imagine wasting precious chicken on something as humble as skewers.
"Brunok needs some too. Let's take them in and pass them around, one each. I'll save yours, Sir Arthur."
"Haha, you have my thanks, Jinwoo."
"Uuugh... I'm hungry too, Jinwoo."
"Ailenna, I'll make you something even better when we get home."
"Really? Yay!"
In truth, beating a chicken skewer was not easy. She looked lovely when she was happy, but... even a simple pasta, I decided, I would make with all the care I had.
Creeeak—
I came back into the pub with a mountain of chicken skewers in my arms. Brunok, nursing a beer at the bar for lack of orders, and the drunks who had gone quiet after Ailenna's mug performance, all looked at me at once. More precisely, not at me. At the chicken skewers in my hands.
"J-Jinwoo. Is that the meat skewer you were talking about? No—chicken skewer? What is this violent smell..."
"It's cutting straight through the Curry Wurst?"
"Kyaah... Never had it, but that smells like it'd kill you dead with a beer."
The pub stirred just as hard as it had when they were teasing Ailenna and me. I planted myself in the middle of the room.
"Everyone, try one! If it's good, come back for the Academy Festival!"
"Ha! The chef's got a real sense of showmanship! That confession in the middle of the street was no accident!"
"You don't get one."
"Ah. Sorry."
Thump, thump, rush—
The moment I called a free tasting, the customers came at me like a swarm of bees. They had never eaten it, but instinct knew. That chicken skewer, with a cold beer, was nothing short of death.
Chomp, chomp—
The man who grabbed a skewer first bit into the chicken in one great tear.
"Huuuerk!!"
"Wh-what??"
Thud, thud—!
He let out a single strangled cry and bolted for his own table. What? Had it caught in his throat? At the sight of him, plainly not all right, the racket of the free tasting died on the spot.
He didn't care. Like a madman, he searched for something with blind urgency, and when he reached his table, what he seized was—
Beer?
He clutched the mug like the water of life and poured it down his throat as fast as he could, like a man for whom a moment's delay would be a disaster.
"Hey, you eat something wrong? You all right?"
"Uuugh... gllrk!"
"Huh?"
"Khaaaaa!!!! This is sex!!!"
"What."
I thought it was the usual scripted circus. Then I thought it was a real fight. In the end, it was the circus after all—only with a performance so good it had fooled every last one of us. An all-time bait reaction. The effect was tremendous.
The chicken skewers vanished from my hands in a flash, gone like sparks. The pub's roar disappeared without a trace, and all that remained was the sound of chewy meat between teeth and the bright music of throats working.
Brunok, too, held a skewer of chicken thigh, eyes closed, savoring it.
"Now I understand why he threw that fit."
"Right? Worth the week you waited?"
"Not even on that level. So. You want to sell this alongside my beer?"
"Yes. What do you think?"
Glug, glug, glug—!
Instead of answering, Brunok drained beer after beer. Only when he had tipped the mug straight up and not another drop would run did he go on.
"Khh. This... wasn't a deal for you to be offering me."
"Sorry? What do you mean?"
"I'm begging you. Let me sell my beer with it."
Thud—
Brunok slammed the heavy mug down on the table. That impact led the way, and the same noise answered from tables all over the pub.
"Hgk, khaaap! Tuhuk...!"
"Dyu..."
"Ukkiyaaaaat...!!"
When people eat something truly delicious, they lose language. They lose it even harder not over some rarefied luxury, but over food on the same level as what they already know—except it blindsides them, delicious on a scale that feels like a blow to the back of the head. That is the food a crowd goes wild for. A three-star Michelin plate leaves you speechless in the sense of, Whoa, I don't even know what this is, but it's good. Food like this drags out a different awe entirely: Whoa... holy shit, how did they do that? Because the meat skewers they had grilled for themselves had certainly never tasted like this.
"The festival starts in three days. You've got enough beer, right?"
"Obviously. I've got it stacked in the cellar at home, not just here."
"Good. Then let's start getting ready to sell together tomorrow."
Proving a single yakitori had taken a truly long time. But because of that, a dish had been born that I could call ultimate anywhere, without shame.
Academy Festival—I am going to break you.
Sorry to the other merchants, but they would be wise to clear out early.
"Th-this chicken skewer is s—? I want to with Jinwoo, too..."
"Hey, hey, hey."
Ailenna, when they said it was hot enough to kill you, they were not talking about us.
The sewers of Belegrad reeked, foul stench and the smell of rot shaking the air. In that place, packed with nothing but filthy rats and vermin, some group waited in held breath for its hour.
"Humans. They smell. Above. Many."
"Wanna eat wanna eat wanna eat."
"Kirrk. Kreeeek."
From monsters that handled language like a blunt tool, to madmen possessed by cannibal hunger, to magic beasts that seemed to lack even reason—dangerous lives that did not look as if they could be controlled at all. But when something in a black robe lifted a hand and signaled them to stop, movement and voices ceased as one.
In the black robe's hand was an orb of pure jet. Every malice in the world seemed condensed inside it, and the dreadful creatures fixed their stares upon it until the stares might have bored through.
The black robe spoke, low.
"In three days, we will drain every drop of blood from these loathsome humans and offer it up to the Great One. Thus shall we become the first spark of a glorious resurrection."
They needed no candles to light the dark. They had lived too long in the deep shadow of humankind, and pitch-blackness was the more comfortable of the two.
"At the same time, we will smash the stronghold of those arrogant bluebloods. We take the weakest first, the youngest humans, and make certain offerings of them."
The black robe's face was empty. More precisely, thick black smoke billowed up and took the place of a head.
"With our strength at its most complete, we will kill the strongest mage. Imagine it. A mere human, strutting about on faith in magic, until your claws split the belly and the fool scrabbles to gather the spilling entrails."
"Ki, kieeeeek!!!! Kerrrr!!"
"Wanna eat wanna eat gonna eat gonna eat gonna eat gonna eat."
Shaaaa—
The monsters, worked into a frenzy, could not hold their cries. The black robe breathed out a thin stream of the same black smoke that was its head, and soothed them.
"In the end, we will drag the name of Belegrad through the mud. And..."
"We will pull Maria down from that sky and hurl her into the eternal abyss."
A declaration packed tight with the certainty that it would surely come to pass. The black robe's voice spread, vivid, through the sewer.