As it turned out, it wasn’t just one thing...
“Wait! Why are you mixing all those spices together?!”
“I’m making a new sauce.”
“But you’ve already mixed in a few dozen! The bowl’s overflowing!”
“Shut up. Just have a taste and see if it’s good.” “Mmm... GWAAH!”
Or...
“Wait. What are all these weeds doing here? They’ve still got dirt on them!” “There’s no plant that’s named ‘weed.’ Maybe one of them is edible. Let’s start by tossing them all into the blender.”
“Gyaah! Wait, why are you putting grass in there?”
“It’s a plant, too. Maybe it’ll go nicely. Here goes.”
“Grass doesn’t go nicely with anything! And wow, that smells awful... Hold on, did you shake the dirt off?”
“They say it’s fresher if the dirt’s still on it.”
“That’s how you tell if it’s fresh when you buy it!”
“I see. Then I’ll put this in some gelatin. But if I’m making a dessert, I should add something sweet. Do you prefer chocolate or cotton candy?”
Or...
“Do you know why everything you make always ends up becoming dark matter?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s because you mix it all together! If you mix a bunch of paint together, it all turns black! It’s probably the same thing! Please, try and make something more normal!”
“I can’t win Food Champion with normal food! What I need is something with impact!”
“You’re not a new celebrity trying to get people to remember you by making funny faces! You need a lot more than just impact.”
“...A theme song?”
“Are you a pro wrestler now?!”
Or...
No, this really was turning into a comedy sketch that had less and less to do with the culinary arts. Tsumiki’s cooking was so bad on such a fundamental level that I started to question what she was doing here at all.
“Aww, jeez! Just shut up already! I’m doing all of this by myself after all!” At last, she started to snap.
“...” I didn’t have the energy to say anything back, so I just collapsed into a chair.
An awful silence filled the kitchen.
“...I’m gonna go throw out the garbage,” Tsumiki said as she took a huge plate full of the black balls out the back door.
“...Hahh.” I sighed and ran my hands through my hair.
We had a week to go until Food Champion. I needed to find some way to bring this to a happy ending before then.
But I wasn’t any good at cooking either. There was no way I could whip up something that would win a professional competition. The same was probably true of Satsuki, Iris, and Harissa. And R wasn’t going to help me resolve any of the storylines I got myself into.
“...”
I needed to calm down and think things through. Tsumiki had always worked as a waitress at Nozomiya, but she had no practical cooking experience. As bad as she was at it, her parents probably stopped her when she tried.
The best cooks I knew were my dad and Satsuki. If I was going to ask one of them for help, it would probably be Satsuki. But even then, I couldn’t see her winning Food Champion.
In light of where we stood, however, having Satsuki teach Tsumiki to cook was likely the best option.
When I suggested that to Tsumiki, she had replied, “You really are stupid, aren’t you? I mean, if we had some famous dish the town was known for, like Utsunomiya gyoza or Sanuki udon, then maybe I could go with that. But this town doesn’t have anything like that! And we’re just a plain old cafeteria! If we do this any old way, we’ll never win! So we need to come up with something that nobody’s ever seen!”
She followed up by lobbing a pineapple at my head. It hurt. Now all I had to show for this was my bandaged face.
Still, there was some truth to what she said. Nozomiya didn’t have anything going for it. If she wanted to win, she needed to aim for a grand slam. That’s why she was breaking all the rules and trying to come up with new, bizarre ways of cooking. But it was a bad bet.
“I know how to defeat evil demon kings and mages... but this is just as hard in a different way, damn it.”
Even so, the weight of what hung in the balance was the same. If I didn’t do something, both Tsumiki and Nozomiya were going to meet with a bad end. It was my job to keep that from happening.
“But still... Cooking, huh?”
And not only did we need to win Food Champion, we needed to breathe life into Nozomiya. Maybe we could somehow use magic to trick the Food Champion judges into thinking her food was great. But even if that got customers to come back to the restaurant, if the food wasn’t any good, they’d just leave again.
“Now then, can you save this story, Rekka?” R asked mockingly as she lay down and flailed her legs in the air.
“Grr... It’s gonna be tough.”
“Oh, giving up already?”
“Cooking is all about practice, right? I don’t know... If we can’t come up with a special way to cook, maybe we should find some new ingredient that no one’s ever had. That’s all I can come up with.”
But where would you even find something like that? If Iris were around, maybe she could have gotten us something from another planet, but that didn’t help us now. If only there were some way to get in touch with her...
“By the way, isn’t Tsumiki taking her sweet time?”
“You’re right, actually...”
R and I looked out the back door.
Since she’d taken the whole tray, she was probably using the dumpster out back behind the store. She wouldn’t take that giant platter of dark matter too far.
But there’d been more than enough time to take care of that. Maybe she’d done something else when she’d stepped out. I was a little worried.
“I guess I’ll go take a look.”
“Probably a good idea.”
I stood up, and R swam along beside me as we went out the back door together.
The taste testing session must have gone on longer than I had thought. The sun had already set.
“Hm?” I found Tsumiki quickly.
She was kneeling down in the corner of the backyard, doing something quietly.
“...?”
Suspicious, I got closer to her.
“What are you doing?”
“Kyaaah! D-Don’t scare me like that!” Tsumiki dropped the shovel she was holding in surprise.
Why did she have a shovel?
“You weren’t planning on burying the dark matter you made in the ground, were you? That would pollute this area so badly that nothing would grow for centuries... Huh?” I looked down at where her hands had been only to see a mysterious hole.
A shovel and a hole.
There was nothing unusual about the combination, but there was nothing usual about this hole.
For starters, you couldn’t see the bottom. It was only about the size of a small dinner plate, so digging any deeper would mean sticking your arm into it. But there wasn’t any dirt on Tsumiki’s clothes.
Stranger still, the surface of the hole was pitch black. Even the deepest hole should let you see into it at least a little at the top.
And weirdest of all, little black tentacles of darkness crept from edges of the hole.
Conclusion: This was no normal hole.
“What... What is that hole?”
“It’s where I always throw away my garbage. Why?”
“No, no, no! I’m not asking what you do with it. It looks like a black hole or the entrance to the abyss to me!”
“Huh? Do you have fairy tales for brains?”
Ugh. Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy, but...
“No, seriously, what is that hole?!”
“I found it by chance when I was a kid. I tried to fill it with dirt, and I couldn’t, so normally I just put a cover on it and then hide it with dirt.”
“Why do you hide
it?”
“I told you before, right? This hole swallows everything, so it’s really handy. It’s small, so you don’t have to worry about falling in, either.”
...Ah. So she’d been throwing the dark matter down there, huh? Well, I guess she couldn’t let her parents see it when they got home from their meeting.
“Hey, are you sure you don’t at least want your dad to help?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Mom and Dad are trying really hard to keep me from worrying, so I’m pretending not to notice. Besides, I started this, so I have to do it myself...”
I sighed, but softly so that she wouldn’t hear me.
Maybe she was just headstrong. She seemed to think that once she’d gotten herself into something, she had to take responsibility for it. That was a generally a good thing, sure, but it could be taken too far.
She only seemed to think of me as a taste tester, and since she wouldn’t listen to my advice, I had no way of helping her. At this rate, it was going to be extremely difficult for me to help her achieve her goal.
I might’ve even said it was impossible. That was how grim things were looking.
“...”
“...”
Tsumiki and I stared at the mysterious hole for a while. As I looked at it in the starlight, it started to feel like I could fall down it forever...
“...” It was a scary thing to imagine.
I shook my head.
In front of me, Tsumiki was shaking her head, too. Maybe she’d been imagining the same thing I was.
Eventually she turned around and looked up at me.
“...Hey.”
“What?”
“Why did you agree to help me?”
Crouched down like she was, she looked smaller than usual. Almost like she’d gotten younger.
“Well, I... I just couldn’t leave you alone.”
Tsumiki was a heroine, but she was also just an ordinary girl. Since telling her about the Namidare bloodline would only make her think I was a weirdo, I decided not to mention it. But she looked surprised at my answer, then curled herself into a ball like she was hiding something she didn’t want me to see.
“...Tsumiki?”
“Sh-Shut up! I don’t know how you can say something so embarrassing with a straight face.” “...?” Had I said something embarrassing?
Tsumiki was the one who looked embarrassed. She’d gone red up to her ears. Was I imagining it? For a while after that, she’d just tell me to shut up whenever I said something, but then there was silence.
“You’re weird. You passed out eating my food, yet you still want to help me.” Tsumiki whispered as she buried her head in her knees.
“Sorry I’m weird... Wait.”
Wait a second. Did I hear what I thought I just heard?
“So you do remember me. You pretended like you didn’t!”
“Shut up. It was right after everyone else I fed had come to complain to me. So I just decided to pretend to forget.”
Come to think of it, I wasn’t the only victim, was I?
I understood not wanting to get yelled at, but couldn’t she have responded some other way? She was so obstinate.
“...Hey,” Tsumiki said again.
“What?”
“You think I can win the Food Champion tournament?”
“...”
“I-I’m not getting down or anything! I just want an impartial opinion, you know? Or a third-party opinion, or whatever.”
They were the same thing, but I didn’t correct her.
What was I supposed to say? To tell the truth, there was no way she could win. I was certain of it. There was no hope. But it didn’t seem like she was reaching for someone to comfort her.
What she wanted was a way to win. She wanted a plan.
“...” But I couldn’t give her the answer she wanted.
“I can’t cook, but I love this restaurant. I love the elderly folks who come here all the time, too. So I want to win, no matter how bad things look. I want to try and try and try all the way to the bitter end.”
Maybe she was steeling herself in the face of impossible odds, or maybe she just wanted someone to listen to her feelings...
Either way, I realized it again.
Even if there were no space empires, no other worlds, no mages, no meteors, and no demon kings, this “story” was still very important to her.
“Let’s do our best and make this new dish. I’ll help you.”
“I asked you before, but why are you being so supportive?”
She seemed suspicious again. But there was only one answer.
“Because I want to help you.”
“That again...?!”
“Hmm?”
Had I say something weird again? Tsumiki was taking deep breaths and trying to calm herself down. When she finally turned around a moment later, she stuck her finger right in my face, pointing at me with new-found composure.
“Hmph! You’re just a mouth to taste things for me. All you need to do is eat what I give you and tell me how you like it.”
“Right, right.”
Sheesh. She was really and truly stubborn. And I wished she wouldn’t blush so hard just to say thank you. It was embarrassing me.
Having collected herself, Tsumiki stood up and brushed herself off.
“We wasted a bunch of time. Let’s get back to work.”
“Right, whatever.”
“Show some enthusiasm!” she called, running off towards the back door.
“Hmm, for you, I guess that was a passing score.”
“For what?”
“I wish you could get to the point where you understood that.”
I didn’t know why R was grading me, but as I started to head back to the cafeteria...
“Rekka!”
“...Satsuki?”
Satsuki had said she wasn’t going to come today, but she showed up in a panic. And it wasn’t just her.
“Hey, who’s that?”
Satsuki was carrying a small girl on her back.
“I don’t know. I found her passed out on the mountain. I gave her some first aid, but she’s still not fully awake...”
“Then take her to a hospital.”
“I thought about doing that at first, but she might not be human.”
“What...?”
Satsuki wasn’t the type to joke at a time like this, so I took another look at the girl on her back.
She had a unique appearance. Her hair was white with a bit of green at the tips, and I could tell how marble-white her skin was, even in the darkness. She was wearing a cloth robe, but it was a little dirty.
She was so pale that she almost looked sickly, but it wasn’t enough for me to think she wasn’t human... Or at least that’s what I thought until she gave a weak moan and opened her eyes.
“!” Beneath her eyelids, I saw shining eyes. They flashed like a cat’s. They definitely weren’t normal.
“Help me... The Monster is...”
When I heard her quivering voice as she looked at me and begged for help... I knew I’d been caught up in another story.
Chapter 2: The Mole People and the Magical Girl
We laid the girl down in the guest room on the second floor of Nozomiya, and I had Satsuki make her some rice porridge. She seemed very weak, but some food and water went a long way to improving her pallid appearance.
“...Whew. Thank you, I appreciate it,” the girl said as she got up from her futon and bowed. The accessories she was wearing, which appeared to be made of stone, clinked together as she moved.
She seemed to be out of danger now. Sitting on either side of her, both Satsuki and I felt relieved.
“I’m glad you’re doing better,” Satsuki replied, smiling.
“Thank you. I dropped my light and my food on the way up... I figured it would be better to head for the surface instead of going back. That’s how I ended up like this.”
I blinked.
“Head for the surface?”
“Yes, actually. I’m from an underground village on a mission to the surface of the earth.”
“...”
Did that mean she was one of the mole people?
She gasped and looked down when she saw our expressions.
“I’m sorry. This must sound incredible, huh?” She bowed to us again.
“Umm...” I tried to say something, but was quickly stumped when I realized I didn’t know her name.
She introduced herself as Tetra Metra Retra, and when she turned to look at me, I could see her brown eyes. Evidently they only shone in the dark.
“Okay, Tetra. When you said ‘help me’ back there, what did you mean? You said something about a monster... Can you tell me more?”
It was just me, Satsuki, Tetra, and R in the room now. We were all well-versed in the fantastical, so we could listen without any prejudice.
But Tetra looked at us each in turn, a little skeptically.
“Okay, I don’t mind, but... I’m really going to tell you about a monster. So, um...”
“Well, we are just ordinary high school kids. We may not be able to help you, but... Come to think of it, did you have anyone you were planning to contact when you got here?”
“No. It’s out of our control now, so I came to the surface as a last resort...”
“I see. Then your ‘last resort’ is probably me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, you see...” I explained my lineage to Tetra.
“The bloodline of the Namidare...”
“Well, it might be hard to believe. But that’s why I think I probably have to help your story, too.”
“...I see.”
Just what you’d expect from a fantasy story with a monster. She accepted the story of the Namidare bloodline without question.
“I didn’t have anyone to turn to in the first place. Perhaps it was fate that brought me to you. If you would, please listen to my story.”
She told me how she was born in a village beneath the surface of the earth, Jizu Village. She told me how the village came to be, and about the seal that protected them from the Monster Who Defied God. And then she told me that the seal was about to break.
“A village of guardians below the earth, huh?”
I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse: Volume 2 Page 3