The Vote Ranking War (1)

"Alright! You take a troll like the one you see here, and you grill it just like this!"

Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. The troll roast was coming along beautifully, and every eye in the audience was locked on the pan.

That was a fairly serious audience. Cooking a monster on stream had, it seemed, drawn people in by the hundreds of thousands.

And then there was the new feature that had unlocked on day three.

Chat. A function handed out at random to a thousand viewers, letting them talk about whatever they were watching in real time. Thanks to it, anyone who tried to farm sympathy with a lie could get publicly buried the moment someone who knew the truth typed in the window — and the whole thing was already exerting a serious influence on how rankers behaved.

Of course, there was no way to moderate any of it, which meant brawls like this one simply ran until they burned out. And because the chatters' identities were never shown, the whole circus only got uglier.

"Easy, easy. Everyone settle down. They're telling the truth — I make these myself and sell them through the Auction House. This dish, and every other monster dish I cook, goes up on the Auction House."

Even that did nothing. The two who'd started swinging at each other showed no sign of cooling off.

Do actual streamers put up with this?

I had been live for all of a few minutes and it was already this exhausting. The fact that professional broadcasters endured this for a living suddenly struck me as genuinely impressive. Sure, there was money in it — but starting a job like this for the money alone did not seem like it would do anyone's mental health any favors.

Nobody else looked remotely interested in climbing into that particular fight. I ignored the two of them the same way and kept the stream moving. I was not about to sideline seven hundred thousand people for a pair of idiots.

"Alright. The troll roast is done."

It had come together fast.

The troll roast arranged itself in a neat, handsome spread across the face of my shield. The audience started visibly swallowing.

The dish looked exquisite. It was monster meat, yes, but I could personally guarantee the flavor was extraordinary. And then the eating show began.

Chomp. Chomp.

White Dragon started inhaling the troll meat I had prepared like a creature possessed. I had laid out dozens of portions; he tore into them without pause and finished the entire spread in what felt like a single breath. He had already completed his first-stage evolution and changed shape again, and he looked reasonably like a dragon now instead of a loach, which only made the chat burn hotter.

White Dragon did not care in the slightest what they typed about him. He had troll meat to finish. If nothing else, the gluttony deserved some respect.

This should be enough, right?

The reaction so far felt solid. I had shown them enough of the cooking, and I still had the Rank 2 title attached to my name. That ought to put me somewhere safe in the vote.

Then someone decided to put a spike in that thought.

Cooking a monster was, to be fair, a long way from classical cuisine. Maybe that was all this was. The people casting votes to claw their way free of the Calamity had every reason to take the question seriously.

And that one comment turned out to be enough of a spark.

The rest of the chat started to sway. If this vote was not a popularity contest — if it was about choosing the person the Floor of Cooking actually needed — then Baek Joongwon was a reasonable answer.

I had watched his footage too. His class was Chef, full stop. His combat ability was, frankly, not much. But the dishes he made were outstanding in both flavor and effect. Everything I cooked was specialized for monsters. A man like him could work with every ingredient there was, monsters included.

This narrative is getting ugly.

Seven hundred thousand people were sitting in my stream, and the conversation was drifting toward voting for Baek Joongwon. I did not like that at all.

Was this on purpose?

Someone had dropped that topic here deliberately — a way to check me and push Baek Joongwon through at the same time.

I need to do something.

If I let this keep running, I had a bad feeling my ranking in this vote would slip instead of holding. I needed something new.

"Haha. Everyone! Forget the troll roast — how about we go hunt a Harpy this time? Aren't you curious about fried Harpy?"

The word Harpy hit the chat like a match.

One word — Harpy — and every last mention of Baek Joongwon vanished from the window. It made sense. From the first days of this disaster, Harpies had been the high-level monsters that owned the sky. Even now, with time passed, almost nobody seriously considered hunting one, and the number of people who had lost friends or family to them was beyond counting. Announce that you were going after a Harpy — and not just to kill it, but to cook it — and this was exactly the reaction you got.

"I'm serious. I've been dying to know what fried Harpy tastes like."

Frying was one of the new cooking skills that had come with becoming a Gourmet Predator. Ever since the days of eating fried chicken, I had wondered what one of those things would taste like dropped in hot oil. And today, it seemed, was the day I would find out.

On the way here to hunt the troll, I had already spotted where the Harpies nested. I turned and headed straight for it.

Tch. I really didn't want to show a hunt if I could help it.

I had no idea whether Gong Jin-sa had figured me out or not. Either way, he was not the only one. People who knew about the Fruit were very possibly already taking aim at me. I had wanted to stream while showing as little of what I could actually do as possible. Apparently that was not going to be easy.

I doubted I was alone in that. Most of the others probably had no desire to put everything they had on camera either. Unique traits, private abilities, the way they hunted a given monster, hidden items — rankers were sitting on plenty they did not want to share.

But what choice was there? Hide it all and you would never crack the top seven. So most people went live and bled their secrets onto the screen. Viewers learned how to hunt more efficiently, how to use items, and pieces of information they had never known existed. I could not say whether the Planet Manager had built the event for exactly that reason. I could say the rankers themselves were having a miserable time of it.

Kyaaaaak!

A little deeper in from where I had taken the troll, a single Harpy came into view. They moved in flocks of five to eight, which meant that even if only one was showing itself, I had to assume several more were close.

Rank 1: Kang Ha-seong. Even I had to admit that man was not human. I had caught a scrap of his footage yesterday — him casually soloing a level 60 monster, looking almost bored — and I could not even begin to guess what his actual level was.

That one first.

The chat lit up the instant Ursula took shape, everyone trying to place the thing that looked so much like an octopus.

"Ursula. Handle that Harpy."

"Hmm~ consider it done."

On my order, the summoned Ursula slapped her many legs against the ground and launched herself straight at the Harpy.

Kyaaaaak!

The Harpy saw her coming, flared those razored talons, and dove. A bad hit from those foreclaws would take a body apart. Ursula did not seem to consider that a problem.

Whoosh!

She simply wound her legs around the Harpy as it came ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in — and then—

CRACK-CRUNCH! CRACK!

The monster people were so afraid of died with every bone in its body crushed in Ursula's grip.

The moment a single Harpy went down, the chat detonated. Plenty of it was awe. Just as much of it was old, raw revenge, burning for anything with wings and talons.

And once that first one died, its flock came boiling out of the sky after it. I did not even need to step in. Ursula handled the lot of them by herself.

She's incredible.

I had never imagined a Named Monster would hit this hard.

Harpy corpses piled across the ground. I picked one up and looked straight into the camera.

"Alright. Time to start the fried Harpy!"

Fry!

Birds, after all, were always best fried.