PoV Daniel
"What in the world were you doing scaring them like that!" I shouted at her.
She did not respond. She just stared at me while hiding behind a flipped over table. She didn't react when she saw the portal, she got scared only when she saw Nassus coming out of it.
"Can you explain yourself?" Nassus asked.
"A-a-are those... his kids?" She asked while stealing some glances at Nassus. She was probably trying to figure out his mood.
"No, they're not." I answered.
"Then why?"
"We're currently taking care of them. I won't go into details. " I briefly explained.
"That's bullshit! It's true that they're cursed, but that-" Nassus stopped her from speaking further by stomping the ground and breaking part of the floor.
"Anyway, that's not the reason I stayed here. Do you have anything else to ask before we get to the main topic of today?" I asked.
" I guess not if you keep using this stuff." I said this while picking up a couple of glass bottles of wine.
"Can you do me a favor, Daniel?" She asked while prostrating herself.
"It depends. I can easily lend you money or someone to help you clean this house and maybe even start working on yourself, but if it involves you coming back to us... Then no, I can't. " I answered with honesty.
"Please, Daniel, it was just a one-time mistake. I can-" she said after smashing her head against the ground, destroying the wooden floor, and burying her face beneath the ground.
"Do you ever get tired of lying?" I asked her.
She immediately raised her head with a look of surprise stamped on her face, terrified even.
"Hyung told me all the details long ago." I added.
"You're not going to believe him over me, right? We've also known each other for a long time-"
"Did you know that today Hollis and Areus tried to kill Hyung?" I kept speaking, I wanted to see how she would react to that information, whether she really cared about Hyung or not.
She suddenly got quiet.
"Thankfully, Chris was too occupied with his mission; otherwise... the outcome would've been drastically different; who knows... Maybe he did kill him a bunch of times and rewind time. We will never know." I added.
Nassus then stopped me by putting his hand on my shoulder.
"Sorry, I just got off on the wrong tangent. What I wanted to say is, in case me and Nassus are occupied, will you really be able to take on the three of them alone?"
She didn't respond right away.
'Is she not afraid of them? Or is she prideful enough to think that she can realistically beat someone who can literally control the flow of time.'
"I doubt they will ever harm me." She stated this while looking me in the eyes.
'As I thought, she is too prideful. After all, she's a dragon. I should've expected that.'
"Is that so?"
"Chris, of all people, should know that making my father angry is the last thing you want on your wishlist." She explained while lowering her head.
"Oh, so it's not an overconfidence created by her own power. That's surprising coming from her since she's the second strongest in the golden army.'
"Ah, who's your father then?" I asked.
"Secret! Although it's probably obvious to guess. "
'Whatever, I didn't come here for this. I have wasted enough time now.'
"I think it's time to discuss the really important topics."
Nassus then created a seat out of crystallized mana for me, so I sat there.
"We gave you ten years to think about what you have done and improve upon yourself." This time, the one speaking was Nassus.
"You gave me? You kicked me out of the group!" She got up in an instant.
"Since you only got worse rather than improving,"
"If you refer to this, it happened only this week!" She was pointing at the empty beer and wine bottles.
"No, we're also talking about your daily use of various drugs, your frequent visits to the many brothels, the fact that you're seen drunk by the citizens on a daily basis, and the fact that you've killed every person you've slept with. Let's not forget about all the men you forced to sleep with you only to kill them afterwards." He quickly put her back in her place, using his power to make her kneel.
"Were you spying on me?"
"Why are you surprised? Do you seriously believe we would trust you after what you've done?"
"For fuck's sake, I've cheated once, it's not like I killed-"
"First of all, you didn't cheat just once. Second, if you just let Kane do his thing, the situation wouldn't have escalated to this point. Many swordmasters died that day. The city was covered in flames, god dammit! " I intervened.
"You can't blame that on me." She shouted back.
"Yes, yes, I can. Kane is not the type of guy that would normally do such a thing."
"Yet he did."
"Anyway, it has been decided that you'll soon be joining a breeding program for dragons as well as getting some therapy for your...whatever issue is going on up there." Nassus intervened.
"What? You can't do this to me!"
"Orders from the Dragon Council. You have a couple of weeks to pack up your things and go. Just like you wanted, now you don't have to fight anymore. You can finally enjoy your life with your only duty being to lay eggs for the army." He quickly broke the news to her before heading back towards the portal.
"Why are you doing this?" She asked us with a broken voice.
"It was Hyung who requested this. I'm only the messenger. I don't necessarily agree with his decision, but I can see why he would make it." He replied.
"I'M NOT LIKE THOSE DRAGONS! I HAVEN'T LOST MY KNIGHT NOR HAVE I-"
"You don't have a knight anymore. Kane doesn't even know you exist. Your relationship with your knight has deteriorated so much that he was willing to kill himself just to be free from you. You're a failure, just like your mother and all the dragons you always criticized. I hope that at least your kids will not suffer the same fate. " Said Nassus.
She did not respond. She remained silent, biting her lips to the point of making them bleed while trying to suppress her murderous intent.
I pinched Nassus's hand to reprimand him for his cruel words.
"I think we finished saying what needed to be said. I'll send you the coordinates of the breeding center in a couple of hours, and... I'm sorry everything ended this way." I said this while also getting up and heading towards the portal.
PoV Forren
'Yesterday I failed at the BBQ, but today I will redeem myself.'
So I took some chicken breast and started cutting it into thin slices. Then I seasoned them with some salt. In the meantime, the pan had heated up quite nicely, so I poured in some oil. I cracked two eggs and made sure they were properly mixed before throwing in the thin slices of chicken breasts, then I covered the meat with bread crumbs and started to stir fry them.
Halfway through the cooking process, I poured in some vinegar just to give it a little more taste. Then I realized I didn't cook enough for everybody, so while I was making some more of those stir-fried chickens, I started washing up the rice and peeling some of the potatoes.
"You really like cooking, huh?" said Satsui.
"Yes, this kitchen is amazing. It has everything I need and some more." I responded while putting the recently cleaned rice in a pot with some water.
I then put the rice on to boil.
'Then there are tomatoes.'
I took out a wooden cutting board and started chopping lots of shallots.
"Can I help with anything?" asked Satsui while checking out what I was chopping.
"Can you put some more water on the boil? I need it for the potatoes, then you can start working on the vegetables." I asked him.
As soon as I mentioned the vegetables, he made a funny expression. He was clearly disgusted by the mere thought of eating broccoli. Yesterday, Folarin tried to cook a vegan dinner. Tsuitame was kind enough to finish his plate; Satsui, not so much. He despised the dinner Folarin had made and glared at her for the rest of the night.
'Looking at their appearance, I doubt eating vegetables for once will cause any harm, but we should probably feed them a lot more meat, just in case. Folarin was a bit too insensible.'
"Today for dinner, I'm going to be making stuffed peppers." I told him to cheer him up.
"What's that?"
"It's a really sweet vegetable, stuffed with mainly meat and some other ingredients to make the meat tastier."
"Do we have to eat vegetables?" He asked.
"Not really, but I would recommend you eat it. It's very sweet, and it'll boost the flavor of the meat." I had never really eaten them before; I was just repeating the words of the chef I took the recipe from.
"What about now?"
"I might use them to make an even tastier tomato sauce."
"Are they really that good?"
"Well, in theory, they should be."
"What about the fried meat? By the time you finish preparing all this stuff, it's going to be cold. "
"You can serve it as a snack if you want."
He took the smallest piece for himself to give it a try. Trying to read his face was usually more difficult than trying to read a human face, but this one was easy to read. Maybe it was because he started wagging his tail or the way he was happily moving his ears left and right, but it was clear that he loved it.
He prepared all the plates, and he gave himself the biggest portion; then he delivered the rest of the plates directly to their own rooms.
'The recipe said to use wine... Why did I use vinegar? I hope they like it.'
I was silently cursing myself for thinking of changing the original recipe that my master had put so much love and effort into making.
'No time for silly sentimentalism; time to put this to good use.'
Then I took another pan from the infinite storage (It's not actually infinite, but whenever you take out something, a new copy of it magically appears in the same place). This time it was the biggest I could afford to take and put it on the stove to heat up.
Immediately after, I ran to get both tomatoes and peppers from the storage.
The storage was located beneath the house and was divided into many sections. Each section was accessible only through a teleportation device . Yesterday I had just learned that tomatoes were fruits, and, as I was looking around, I also found peppers in the fruit section. I took out mostly the red and yellow ones, disregarding the green ones because Satsui might not like the color.
'Any strong color might scare him. That's why it's best to choose the ones that already blend in.'
As I was returning to the portal, a sudden thought passed through my head.
'Six days left, then we're going to get thrown back into the wild. I'm going to miss this lifestyle.'
followed by:
'Shit! I forgot the rice was still boiling!'
I ran as fast as I could back, and, thankfully, the rice was still fine.
So I put out the fire and then put my focus on the sauce.
I cut the peppers into thin slices and made sure they were properly cleaned, then took a bunch of carrots from the fridge and cut them into tiny cubes. Then, at last, I put a bit more oil than necessary into the heated pan.
While the oil was heating up, I took a certain mix of spices that the master recommended, put in the chopped shallots, the sliced peppers, the carrots, and the tomatoes, and only then did I pour the mix in.
A part of me also wanted to put some minced meat in there, but that would've been overkill.
'Maybe... how about maybe not? Let's not stray away from the master's recipe anymore.'
I put a lid over the pan.
'You shall stop me in case I try to add something.'
I then summoned the tablet and started browsing through the recipes that the master was kind enough to show.
The ones I was curious about were mainly the ones that involved the use of flour, but they all seemed a bit too long for my tastes.
Let's take bread, for example. It seemed as if I needed to let it rest for a couple of hours after every step. A bit too excessive for just a loaf of bread.
The hamburger was weird. The piece of meat had to be hand-made and seemed a bit too complicated for just a sandwich. There were percentages for the amounts of various types of meat that had to be present. The sauce that was on the bun was also a bit over the top since I counted at least four different types of sauces used. The buns also took almost half a day to make.
'That's crazy.'
But in the back of my mind, I was also thinking.
'I bet that tastes so good that everything else will taste like shit in comparison.'
I had already promised myself to cook the stuffed peppers for dinner, but now my mind was in doubt.
If I took all the evening off for myself, I might be able to make one of those crazy recipes.
There were so many interesting dishes. There was the pizza, which was rather easy to make and highly customizable; the tamales, which also seemed very tasty; the steamed dumplings; the burger; and many more. (Although most of what I just listed doesn't take half a day to make.)
'I should just choose a dessert to add later on. Maybe I can make a cake.''
I chose a tiramisu, mainly because it was so easy to make and didn't take much time.
Once the tomato sauce was done, I poured all the rice in and started mixing while also preparing the coffee for the tiramisu.
Once I turned back, I noticed that everyone had come to check on what I was doing, or rather, I was too focused to notice them arriving.
"Satsui, can you serve them? I need to grab a few other ingredients for the dessert."
"Yeah, no problem."
'No, I shouldn't focus too much on useless things. I still need to train a lot. In comparison to those two, my magic control is still mediocre.'