Chapter 74 - Common Sense for Academy Festivals (4)
10 min read ·
Arm straight. Eyes and target aligned.
Breathe in, let half of it out. Hold.
Control the recoil and trembling, slowly squeeze the trigger. Fire.
BANG!!
BANG, BANG-BANG!!
Target acquisition, aim, fire—all in a fraction of a second. Gauging the pistol's performance, Ivan punched holes through twelve targets almost simultaneously.
“Wait, sir, you're actually taking this seriously...?”
“Thank you for the use of it.”
“No, uh...”
If a friendly armory (shooting booth) stood near one's protectees, checking its weapons' performance and zero was basic common sense. It was a potential source of armaments should an unforeseen incident occur.
Ivan accepted an enormous stuffed animal as first prize from a bewildered Dmitry and handed it to Isabelle.
“Amazing!” Murmur, murmur. “Incredible!” Chatter, chatter. He heard something along those lines, but let it wash over him. Hitting targets within five meters hardly warranted praise.
“Next.”
“Huh... You're actually enjoying yourself, aren't you, mister...?”
Isabelle's eyes lit up, and she clenched her fists.
“Aaall right! Then let's conquer this whole festival today!”
She nodded eagerly and led the way.
Ivan, too, was pleased with how things were going. Learning the booths' locations and characteristics—and, if possible, wearing these youngsters out as much as he could—would facilitate his escort mission.
* * *
Splitting a pumpkin with a wooden sword while blindfolded...?
Hmm. Wasn't this a Japanese custom? Ivan was confused.
“Here, put this on and start four paces back!”
“Mm.”
He tied on the blindfold the booth operator confidently handed him and gauged the wooden sword's weight. An ordinary specimen.
Naturally, splitting a pumpkin with a wooden sword was beyond a beginner's capabilities. Though a pumpkin looked hard on the outside, its hollow interior absorbed impacts.
Shattering it with a wooden sword this light required a blow to precisely the right spot. Doing it blindfolded was twice as difficult.
An experienced swordsman could judge the direction they were moving with their eyes closed, but aligning a sword stroke to within centimeters and delivering it required advanced technique beyond mere repetitive practice.
CRACK!
Ivan removed his blindfold and handed the operator the wooden sword, vegetable juice dripping from it.
After receiving praise for a record-time, single-strike success and another useless large stuffed animal, which he passed to Esidisi this time, he turned his head impassively.
“Next.”
“This guy is seriously having the time of his life!!”
For some reason, Isabelle seemed tremendously excited.
* * *
A traditional game of scooping up small fish with an oil-paper scoop.
This booth tested fine fingertip sensitivity and the sort of finesse useful in survival techniques and disarming traps.
“Next.”
Throwing darts at a roulette wheel.
A comprehensive assessment of dynamic visual acuity, reaction speed, and throwing technique. Classifiable under assassination skills.
“Next.”
A traditional game of tossing small balls through hoops.
Throwing small explosives was the most basic of basics, so Ivan achieved a lead so vast that even Harry Xotter catching the golden winged ball would not have been enough to win.
“Next.”
* * *
That day, Isabelle, Esidisi, and Elpihera received armfuls of stuffed animals, lollipops, blankets, fishbowls, and the like.
It was still the morning of the festival, barely two hours into their reconnaissance.
* * *
This was surprisingly fun.
When Isabelle had first imagined going to the festival with this lunatic, she hadn't expected anything like this.
She'd assumed he would trail behind her like a doll, offering nothing but maddening grunts of “Mm.” She hadn't imagined he would take enjoying the festival so seriously.
“Hehe. Thanks, mister.”
“Mm.”
She wasn't the only recipient, of course, but Ivan had generously distributed all the spoils of his sweep through the stalls among his party members.
Isabelle hugged her enormous stuffed brown bear (Krasilof's national animal) and beamed. What did it matter if she let someone else take a turn? She'd practically had him to herself all morning.
“Right, we've played house long enough, haven't we? Let's get something to eat! Oh, don't take that out! A proper meal!”
Grinning, Esidisi took Ivan's arm and strode ahead.
“Anything you'd like, Uncle? Something to suit your tastes, hmm... Meat? How about meat?”
“Whatever you like.”
As they headed toward the street of food and drink stalls, Ivan shook his head slowly. Street food was all much the same anyway.
They threw together cheap ingredients and overpowering spices, then served up greasy dishes with atrocious nutritional balance.
Dissatisfied as he was, he couldn't deny a certain pride, too. After all, this abundance of goods and these lively streets would have been almost unimaginable a mere four years ago.
“Wow, there are so many people...”
Esidisi leaned against Ivan's chest and whispered. It was around lunchtime, and the street lined with stalls was excessively crowded.
The savory aroma of grilling meat filled the air. Ivan lightly wrapped an arm around Esidisi, who was pressing firmly against him, shielding her as he surveyed their surroundings.
Never mind what to eat—finding somewhere to sit was the first problem.
“Oh, Booooss!!!”
Just then, a piercing voice rang out from far away. Ivan looked toward it and found a familiar face, hopping up and down and waving.
It was Eugene.
“Boss! Over here! Here! Wow! Am I glad to see you!”
“...?”
“Hurry over! We're doomed without you!!”
Indeed, the stall Eugene stood at exuded a solitary desolation amid the bustling commercial district. Astonishingly, it had not a single customer.
The reason soon became apparent. Whenever passersby approached their booth, they pinched their noses and hurried away.
Sure enough, a strangely familiar yet peculiar stench was wafting from the stall.
“Urgh, is that pickled herring...?”
“No.”
Ivan looked at Eugene, his gaze wavering.
Eugene, Oswald behind him, and Yuri, too.
All of them were watching him with confident... and warm eyes.
Come on over. You know that smell, don't you?
Ah, yes.
That's right.
That's right. That was how it smelled.
Ivan barely managed to open his parched mouth and answer.
“It's... kimchi.”
“...? You know this dish?”
“Of... course.”
“Riiight... Hmm. Well, if it's something you like, Uncle, let's try it!”
From the smell, it seemed to be some sort of fermented, salted dish. Wasn't that a Droan specialty?
Sure enough, Isabelle from Thilles and Elpihera from Kallion already wore frozen expressions.
Esidisi smiled triumphantly and led Ivan to the stall.
* * *
“How on earth did you make it?”
“Salted fish, vegetables, salt, and chili powder. Mix those in the right order, and surprisingly enough, you get kimchi!”
“... Remarkable...”
Ivan was genuinely impressed. Of all the masterpieces he'd created by mobilizing the full might of his sharp, twenty-first-century intellect, weren't nutrition bars about the only ones that remained useful?
So it took three Koreans together to think of making their own kimchi.
In fact, the basic idea wasn't strange. Preserving vegetables in salt and spices was common in Krasilof, too. (Pickled carrots and mushrooms were made this way.)
But adding fermented fish paste for seasoning and letting the salted vegetables oxidize... Well, that amounted to letting food rot, making it a somewhat unusual cooking method.
His gaze trembling, Ivan looked down at the heaping plate of red-coated cabbage.
“Um, Uncle. Uh... You're going to eat that?”
“...”
Esidisi stole anxious glances at him, but Ivan's “chopsticks” never stopped.
Chopsticks.
It had been so long since he'd held a pair that he fumbled a few times, but that sensation—the feeling that the emotions of those long-ago days were returning—sent a small shiver through him.
CRUNCH.
The unfermented lettuce broke apart crisply, scattering droplets of vegetable juice mixed with chili powder. Isabelle recoiled in a fit.
Then, cautiously, slowly, Ivan put a piece of kimchi into his mouth for the first time in thirty years.
CRUNCH, CRUNCH.
The Kim Seonwoo within him abruptly awoke and shrieked (he caught as much as, 'This shit isn't kimchi...!'), but Ivan quickly composed himself. Unlike that narrow-minded modern man with his finicky palate, Ivan was an exceptionally tolerant and generous person.
Besides, all he wanted was to savor this moment's emotions to the fullest.
With the reverence of a monk practicing his devotions.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
“Do you have anything else?”
“Everything we could manage is ready and waiting, Boss. Hehehe...”
Eugene rubbed his hands together with an oily smile.
“Kimchi stew, stir-fried kimchi, tofu and kimchi. What would you like first, sir?”
“Tofu...? You have tofu, too?”
“We don't know how to make tofu, so we found the closest substitute we could. It looks identical. Why don't you start with that?”
At Eugene's signal, Oswald brought over a large dish with an anxious expression.
With exaggerated ceremony, Eugene set it respectfully on the table and announced,
“Our fine-dining masterpiece: stir-fried kimchi with feta.”
“Oh... Oooh...”
A pure-white block, a neat rectangular prism with a few misshapen spots. Beneath it lay a generous bed of stir-fried cabbage.
With a little imagination, it was the very image of tofu and kimchi!
“Feta?”
“Yes, feta cheese. A traditional sheep's-milk cheese. The flavor is, uh... Leaving that aside, the appearance and texture really are identical.”
“Oh...”
Impressed, Ivan picked up his chopsticks. Sure enough, despite its firmness, the way it crumbled under pressure wasn't all that different from old tofu.
He topped it with a piece of stir-fried lettuce and took a bite. Salt burst across his mouth.
Feta was one of the most extraordinarily salty cheeses in existence. And kimchi was, fundamentally, a type of salted vegetable. The synergy between them produced something that, frankly, could not be called fit for human consumption.
But Ivan didn't care. Flavor wasn't what mattered.
CRACK!!
Mana raced through his nerves. With a surgeon's precision, without the slightest margin of error, he severed his sense of taste.
He induced a nervous-system overload and channeled all the rampaging mana into touch. His sense of touch was now sensitive enough to predict an impending attack from the direction his fine body hairs stirred.
Bringing all those skills to bear, he slowly closed his molars.
CRUNCH.
What people commonly called “texture” while chewing was a complex harmony of taste and touch. Having abandoned taste, he could claim only half of it, but that was fine. His superhuman sense of touch now allowed him to feel every detail of the ingredients against his tongue, molars, and gums.
The result of that beautiful combination was this.
A chunk of cheese with a texture strikingly similar to hard, dried tofu, and an appearance to match.
Cabbage kimchi, stained red and still crunchy from insufficient fermentation, so ineptly stir-fried that it hadn't even wilted.
As he enclosed the two in his mouth and pressed them beneath his molars, savoring the crisp resistance of the vegetable stems and the soft crumbling of the cheese...
What did flavor matter? This was the sensation of home. And Ivan's extraordinarily developed synesthesia had, naturally, been honed to the point where touch could evoke taste.
“Boss... Boss? Are you crying?”
“... Excel...lent.”
Amid the three aghast Possessors, a terrified Isabelle, Elpihera, who had spat out her entire first bite, and Esidisi, who was pinching her nose and forcing down one piece at a time,
Ivan shed a single tear.
* * *
“You there, student.”
“Yes, sir!!”
A man chewing stir-fried meat beckoned to the stall's server.
The server hurried over with a bright smile for this customer, who was paying suspiciously large sums of money.
“Do you see the man sitting at that booth over there?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Could you deliver this to him?”
“Pardon? Uh... I just have to hand it over?”
“If you would. This is for your trouble.”
“Oh, my!! You shouldn't have! Yes, sir! I'll be right back!”
After bowing several times, the server headed toward the bizarre stall with the dreadful smell. Toward the oddball who sat with several companions, alone in shoveling down food, at a booth that hadn't attracted a single customer all morning.
Unable to contain their curiosity, the server opened the note on the way. It contained nothing but seemingly meaningless numbers written in a haphazard order.
What was this, some sort of assignment?
With that thoroughly university-student thought, the server handed the note to the man.
The man stared blankly at it, then suddenly seized the server by the scruff of the neck and growled.
“Who sent this?”
Oblivious to the kimchi stew that had spilled with a crash (it contained no kimchi, nor was it a stew), Ivan glared at the dumbfounded young student.
No one sat where the frightened student pointed.
“Sir.”