Ch.209Side Story: Cooking? – 6

I opened my eyes when night was beginning to greet me with its “did you sleep well.” In the sky, the moon hung instead of the sun, and stars replaced clouds. Outside the window, darkness had settled.

“Ugh.”

As I tried to sit up, a wave of lethargy overwhelmed my entire body, forcing me back down. There wasn’t much pain, but I couldn’t muster any strength—even wiggling a finger was difficult.

Feeling the soft sensation against the back of my head, I tried to recall why I had lost consciousness in the first place.

I remembered Charlotte and Olivia having a showdown that destroyed the kitchen, then Charlotte fixing it on my orders and placing a silver-domed dish before me. I remembered opening it and smelling the spices.

I lost control of my body after that. The moment I visually confirmed what was on the plate, my consciousness cut off and I collapsed onto the table. I couldn’t remember what dish had been placed on the plate.

I was certain I had seen it with my own eyes, but strangely, I couldn’t recall it at all. It felt as if that specific memory had been completely removed and thrown away.

‘…Was Charlotte the culprit?’

Considering the situation, I could only conclude it was because of the dish Charlotte had served. Otherwise, why would I have lost consciousness immediately after seeing the food?

“Have you awakened, my god?”

“Christine?”

Startled by Christine’s voice suddenly coming from directly above me, I tried to sit up but failed and slumped back down. Christine straightened my body and gently patted my head.

“Your body has not yet fully recovered. Please do not strain yourself by moving.”

“…What happened?”

I was incredibly curious about many things.

Why had I collapsed? What happened after I fell? Where had the others gone? Why was Christine alone taking care of me? Everything was shrouded in questions.

Especially puzzling was the fact that only Christine was by my side. The three others I knew would never have allowed Christine to stay alone with me.

And Christine wouldn’t normally be calmly stroking my head with a smile of deep emotion. She should have been raging, threatening to kill Charlotte the moment I collapsed.

“I can explain everything. What would you like to hear first?”

“Everything from after I collapsed.”

“If that is your divine will.”

Christine adjusted her thighs. If her previous position had been precariously supporting my head, now she had properly placed my head on her lap.

Of course, due to her considerable chest size, our faces weren’t visible to each other. My vision was filled with the abundant maternal symbol wrapped in black nun’s clothing.

Her delicate hands came together before her chest. Holy white energy emanated from her clasped hands. Her chest was gently pressed against her arms. A mixture of white and yellow light enveloped both Christine and me.

Then, despite my vision being filled with her chest, I could somehow see Christine’s face beyond it. It wasn’t that her body had become transparent—we simply became able to see each other’s faces.

“…?”

Ignoring my bewildered expression, Christine began her explanation.

“First, my god, you lost consciousness and collapsed after opening that plate of waste created by that infidel woman.”

“I know that much. My consciousness cut off after that. Why did it happen? Did Olivia actually put poison in the food?”

“No. It was merely that the infidel’s greed was too excessive.”

“Excessive greed?”

“Yes, my god.”

Excessive greed, huh.

Charlotte was certainly a woman capable of that and more. I knew her personality better than anyone. It would have been fortunate if she had merely been greedy.

But somehow, the “excessive greed” mentioned here didn’t seem to be that kind of greed.

“Continue explaining.”

“She had the audacity to contain an entire world on a single plate. My god could not withstand such heretical excess, and thus lost consciousness.”

“Wait. What do you mean by ‘containing a world’?”

“I mean exactly what I said, my god.”

Containing a world on a plate? And that being the literal meaning? Christine’s explanation was becoming increasingly far-fetched.

I would have dismissed it as nonsense if the speaker hadn’t been Christine and the subject hadn’t been Charlotte. Conversely, I believed it precisely because it was Christine speaking about Charlotte.

“She overlapped every dish that exists in this world onto that single plate. Thus, when you tried to comprehend its existence, your cognitive abilities overloaded and you fainted. Had you not lost consciousness, it wouldn’t have been strange if your brain had melted the moment you recognized the overlapping states.”

Listening to the explanation gave me an indescribably strange feeling. Overlapping the states of dishes onto a single plate?

I was about to ask if such a thing was even possible, but realized it would be a pointless question. My own experience was proof enough.

Moreover, Christine was far from the type to lie about something like this.

“Alright, I understand. So Charlotte did it again. But where are the other three besides you?”

“They must be somewhere, my god.”

“What does that mean?”

“The only value of importance to me is serving my god. What concern is it of mine where those infidels and heretics are or what they’re doing? I am here, right now, serving my god.”

An ominous feeling shot down my spine. There was no way Charlotte, Olivia, or Serena would leave this situation as it was. They would have been trying to kill each other by any means necessary.

Would the other three have allowed Christine to place my head on her lap like this? I could bet everything I had that they absolutely would not.

I hurriedly tried to sit up, bumped my face against the underside of Christine’s chest once, and fell back onto her lap. I momentarily forgot what position I was in since I could see her face instead of her chest.

“Your body has not yet fully recovered, my god. Please continue to rest as you are.”

My mind was already too anxious to rest. I had no idea what the other three might be doing. I couldn’t just lie here like this. I channeled mana and used a recovery spell.

As a green light swept over my entire body, the lethargy that had enveloped me instantly disappeared. I sat up again. This time, Christine obligingly moved her upper body aside.

I was in a small cottage. It had an extremely simple structure, similar to the single-room design Olivia had once drawn up when she suggested we live together.

Without hesitation, I opened the door.

“First, I need to find the others—”

I saw Charlotte standing nonchalantly in front of the door.

Charlotte was manipulating mana by moving her fingers this way and that. When our eyes met, she greeted me without changing her expression.

“You’re awake, my dear. I was just about to finish my work.”

“Work? What work?”

“The creation of the world.”

“I see.”

She spoke about creating a world so naturally, as if she were talking about breathing, that at first I just accepted it with a “that’s nice.” It was only a moment later that I realized something was wrong.

“No, wait. The creation of the world?”

“I mean to create a new world solely for you and me. Isn’t that obvious? Fortunately, that woman has just emerged from her corner, so I can kill her now and finish my work. How convenient.”

Her blood-red eyes turned toward Christine standing behind me. Christine was also glaring at Charlotte with narrowed yellow eyes.

“You dare to bring the divine body into that pathetically insignificant world? My god has already found eternal peace in my world, yet you think you can bring the divine into your filthy creation? A world created by a mere heretic has not even a shred of value—disappear as you are.”

At Christine’s words about “my world,” I looked back at the cottage I had just been in. I realized that the cottage was made of holy power and was essentially a world of its own.

To summarize:

Christine had carried my unconscious body and constructed her own world with holy power, secluding us inside it, while Charlotte was outside creating her own world and consuming the surrounding space.

My head started to ache intensely at the thought of this absurdly large-scale battle. It seemed that while I was briefly unconscious with no one to stop their rampage, they had been fighting using unlimited power.

Suddenly, an ominous thought crossed my mind—a possibility I didn’t want to acknowledge but had to.

Where on earth were Serena and Olivia?

“…”

Before I could even shudder at this ominous possibility, I saw a portion of Charlotte’s world being sliced apart and disappearing into nothingness from the corner of my vision.

It wasn’t far from here.

“I’ll save you right now, my lord. Please wait just a moment.”

And then, trampling on the vanishing space beyond the sliced world, Serena appeared wielding Wind Shear, with blue mana surging around her. Her eyes were filled with tremendous killing intent.

The space sliced by Wind Shear, as if rejecting its will to exist, melted away into mere fragments, never to return to its original form.

“Have you all finally lost your minds? Huh? You dare try to take my Abel? Does that mean I can kill you? Right? Is that it? Should I just kill everyone?”

From the opposite direction, Olivia was approaching, devouring Charlotte’s world with black mana. The collision of different spaces caused the world itself to shake.

A catastrophe occurred as time distorted everywhere, mixing past and future. Events that had already happened repeated themselves, while events that hadn’t yet occurred unfolded before our eyes.

The urgent matter now was to stop this fight somehow. Understanding the situation could come later.

Then, my thunderous shout rang out.

In the end, the cooking competition came to an ambiguous conclusion.

I sided with Serena and Olivia, who had at least produced something that could be called normal food, while Christine and Charlotte refused evaluation on the grounds that what they made was too ambiguous to be called cooking.

The key point was that I didn’t rank them.

If I had assigned rankings, they would have tried to tear each other down using that as an excuse. So I simply distinguished between those who had presented something that could be called food and those who hadn’t.

I made sure they couldn’t think there was any ranking involved. My prediction proved accurate—the four argued about the definition of cooking but not about rankings.

However, my worries were deepening regardless.

‘I should start considering methods soon.’

As Olivia and Charlotte had said, the time was gradually approaching when I would need to show those four how I intended to take responsibility for them.

I also thought that perhaps after doing so, they might fight a little less. I wasn’t hoping for them to stop fighting entirely—even a slight reduction in frequency would be a blessing.

‘It has to be all four of them together. Whether it’s possible or not. No, if it’s impossible, I need to make it possible by whatever means necessary.’

The solution to my worries came from a most unexpected person.