Chapter 4.1 (1/2)

Chapter 4 Part 1「Eesh…」

Haruna muttered inadvertently as she faced the very unpleasant situation in front of her.

「Azuma-kun…? This is a little too…」

「It’s all right. Despite their looks, they ain’t that aggressive. They won’t make a move unless we trip their web.」

「Okay, that’s not the problem though…」

With a futile interjection, Haruna looked up once more with disgust.

「Eek…」

「Oh, Toudou-san. You keep goin’ that way, you’ll trip the web.」

「What? For real? Where?」

「Right there.」

「That was too close…」

Startled by the web a step away, Haruna scurried away. She reevaluated her situation, and ended up speechless.

「Err…」

「What’s wrong?」

Picking up on the difference in her tone from her disgusted groans earlier, Hiroshi asked.

「I made eye contact…」

「No problem. These types don’t pick their targets from visual cues.」

「It doesn’t matter if it’s going to attack me or not. It’s already ridiculously disgusting…」

「You say that…」

「I didn’t know spiders could be so repulsive when they’re big…」

Masterfully ignoring Haruna’s comment, Hiroshi gripped his weapon-slash-excavation-tool hand axe. His expression made it clear that his current state of mind consisted entirely of how to efficiently collect materials, and how to efficiently remove what’s standing in the way for him to do that. Frankly put, he couldn’t give a rat’s rear end about how Haruna felt.

At the very moment, they were witnessing a giant hornet caught in the spider’s web being encapsulated into a feeding cocoon. They had wandered into a cluster of Giant Spiders, each as large as a grown man. It was a half-day’s journey, with the traversing speed of adventurers, through the woodlands from where they encountered the Berserker Bear on the first day.

「…How did we get here…?」

In the absurdly jarring situation of confusion, Haruna couldn’t help but avert her eyes from reality and into a flashback.

***

It all happened two nights ago, when Haruna said:

「I kind of want another outfit…」

「An outfit, huh…」

「Mm-hm. One of them’s stained with curry and oil… And it won’t come out.」

「All right. You wanna get one for workin’ at the shop?」

「I could, but looking at our sales, it seems a little frivolous.」

A month had passed since the Venomous Wolf fiasco. Hiroshi and Haruna had established a rather reliable livelihood. The biggest change in their lives was that they had rented a room, at the lowest pit of the market in Wulls (so small that they didn’t understand how it could be legally described as a two bedroom flat).

Staying at the inn for an extended period of time would have just been too expensive. Besides, developing seasonings in an inn seemed rather futile. It wasn’t too encouraging when they had no opportunity to use the seasonings they had created. Even if they wanted the inn to use them, they couldn’t make enough for the entire kitchen. So, with a rather side-tracked motivation to contribute, they decided to rent a small room as soon as they could.

In other news, for additional income, they opened a food stand to run in down times in between taking on requests. Their best sellers were curry bread and corn dogs. This doubled as recycling the curry powder they made too much of, and sharing their new seasonings.

Occasionally, they had been selling some bison (or other wild animal) meat they had hunted during one of their quests, fried on a skewer. The steak sauce and ketchup they had brewed were coming in handy. They sold the curry bread at 35 Tirol a piece, which seemed close to a rip-off, but it had recently been selling hot as their signature dish. Sometimes, they nearly forgot if their real occupations were adventurers not food stand owners.

「Right. The best day we had on the stand was 100 Chrones when we worked the entire day.」

「Taking out the cost of the ingredients and the registration fee for the stand, our profit was 50 Chrones, tops.」

Still, as a side hustle, these adventurers were doing quite well with their food stand. Normally, even after a full day, a food stand in the city would only sell about 70 Chrones. They were coming to terms with how lucky they were to make 20,000 Chrones in their first two days in the city.

One of the reasons why their food stand was booming was their implementation of a never-before-seen cooking method of coating food and frying them in oil. While the concept of frying food wasn’t unheard of, consumable oil that remained in liquid form for a sustainable time was a rare commodity, and it was only in the past few years, that enough liquid cooking oil to dip entire pieces of food in had become readily accessible in the market. This was true for the entirety of this world, even outside of Farland, and in any country, “cooking with oil” meant cooking with animal fat or butter. While there was a form of lard-like fat, not much of it was produced until recently, which didn’t encourage the development of fried food, either.

Of course, there were many cooks and food stand owners who tried to copy-cat them, but fried food had rarely been seen before, even on a noble’s dinner table. Therefore, there were barely any cookware that had been developed for frying food (like the wok, for example). While it seemed that it would be popularized one day as word of mouth spread, it looked like fried food wouldn’t hit the table of an average family for a long time. That being said, the desire for delicious food transcends time periods and dimensions. Fried food may become a staple of anyone’s diet in, say, a half a year.