Kou Has a Five-Second Flashback
“Tomorrow’s your birthday, isn’t it, Kou?”
“My birthday?” Renge brought the subject up out of nowhere, and I glanced over at the nearby calendar. It was August 24th, which would imply that the 25th was my birthday. “Is it...?”
“It is! By the way, mine is May 2nd.”
“I know. You forced me to celebrate it with you.”
“Oh, good! If you remember, then ‘forcing’ you to celebrate it was worth all the effort!”
“Augh, ow, ow!” Renge grinned as she pinched my cheek as hard as she could. Apparently she hadn’t taken kindly to me using the word “forced.”
I’d become a lot more sensitive to pain since arriving in this world. It was so hard to move my body around that it felt like I was constantly carrying a pack full of weights, and I tired out in a fraction of the time I used to. I couldn’t say for sure if I’d been weakened or if my body was adapting to suit the peaceful world I’d found myself in, but either way, the effects were very noticeable.
“That hurt...”
“Hee hee! You pushed your luck a bit too far.” Renge chuckled as she released me, and I slumped to the floor. I really didn’t find it funny, for the record. Renge was still young enough that you could call her a “girl” without sounding condescending, and yet she was somehow strong enough to crush an apple one-handed. Freaky. “Now then, Kou—this will be your first birthday since you joined my household, so I’ve done a lot of thinking about how best to celebrate it!”
I hesitated. “If this is going to get messy, I don’t wanna.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I have no intention of going overboard! For one thing, only an absolute imbecile would think about going outside in this miserable heat.”
I paused once more. “Haven’t you spent every single day since summer vacation started lazing around at home? This feels like an excuse—don’t you think you should, y’know, go outside every once in a while? This indoor lifestyle you’ve got going can’t be healthy.”
“AAAAHHHHH! I can’t hear you, I can’t hear youuu!” Renge plugged her ears and put on an extremely unconvincing not-listening act. It seemed she was perfectly aware of how slovenly she’d been recently. As it just so happened, she was in full sloth mode at that very moment, lying facedown on the sofa and moving as little as possible.
“Kou, you’re going to be a really boring person when you grow up if you’re always this obsessed with logic and sound arguments.”
“Am I?”
“Throwing in a joke every once in a while makes you look like a deeper and more well-rounded person, probably!”
“‘Probably’?”
“The ‘probably’ there was me throwing a joke in. See? Just like that!” Oh, okay, I think I get it. Good to know. Renge was certainly a lazy slob, but she had moments in which she was extremely levelheaded and reliable. Maybe that balance between her reliable side and her ridiculous side was what made her a well-rounded person.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Well, now I feel a little guilty... Meh, it’ll probably be fine. Anyway, back to your birthday!”
“Right, sure.”
“We’ll spend all day lazing around and watching one of my favorite anime! How’s that sound?!”
“It sounds like the same thing we do every day.” My personal circumstances being what they were, it was decided that I wouldn’t attend middle school at all. I spent almost every day in Renge’s house, and she’d made a habit of forcing me to watch “anime”—a form of video-based storytelling that she was apparently obsessed with. She was attending school on a day-to-day basis, of course, but ever since summer vacation started she’d taken up permanent residence at home. Her plan for my birthday really was exactly the same as our daily routine.
“And on top of that, I’ll serve you a hand-cooked meal packed absolutely full with my love!”
“With your ‘love’...?”
Love. It wasn’t a word that put me in the best of moods, to say the least, but I knew the love she meant was a familial one. I mean, probably—not like I could read her mind. In any case, I thought back on it and realized that this would probably be my first time experiencing her cooking. Her house had servants... I mean, butlers and maids who would prepare all the meals, generally speaking.
“Do you even know how to cook?”
“But of course!” She poked her head up from the sofa just enough to shoot me a self-satisfied smirk. Seeing her so absolutely full of unreserved self-confidence made me feel like I couldn’t trust her at all. Funny how that works. “The world of cooking is a world of instinct! In other words, it’s a world in which a multitalented, beautiful genius like myself naturally excels! My cooking is so exceptional, it’s made numerous people howl with joy in the past!”
“Has it...?” Renge was supposedly known as a genius in the outside world. If she was that confident, I really didn’t have any reason to doubt her...and yet, somehow, I remained unconvinced. My own “instincts” I’d honed over the course of my life up to that point—the self-preservation ones, that is—were blaring their warning sirens at full volume, telling me that something was wrong.
“Have you decided what you’re going to cook?”
“I’ll leave it up to instinct!”
I paused. “What about, like, a theme? Like, Japanese food? Western food? Meat dishes?”
“I’ll leave that up to instinct too!”
“...”
I decided not to think about it.
The next day, I walked into the kitchen to find Renge surrounded by a massive pile of ingredients she’d ordered from an online supermarket. Her father, Gouki, had said something about having very important business to attend to at work and left early in the morning after wishing me both a “happy birthday!” and a “best of luck.”
“All right, Kou, watch and learn! This is how you handle a cooking knife!”
“Right,” I said, a bit skeptical. I didn’t know much at all about cooking, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about all this.
There are plenty of perfectly valid ingredients out there that have bright, vivid colorations that prompt an instinctual “that’s poison” reaction, and those that produce an absolutely gut-wrenching stench. “Cooking” as a field could be described as the practice of putting together ingredients like that and making them edible.
Even with all that said, when you look at something that should by all appearances be inedible and think about eating it, there’s always a moment where your stomach tries to punish you for that decision in advance. That is precisely what I was experiencing.
“R-Renge? Are you planning on using all of that stuff?”
“Why, of course! Every ingredient on this table is a delicacy, special-ordered both domestically and from overseas!”
“D-Delicacies, huh? Don’t those, y’know, need to be prepared in some special, specific way to make them turn out right?”
“That’s where my intuition and instincts come in. After all, the very first people to ever try eating all of these ingredients had no idea how to prepare them either! Just think of me as one of those culinary pioneers.”
I was getting really worried. “Umm, I don’t think you should make light of the thousands of years our predecessors spent accumulating cooking experience...”
“‘Fools learn from experience, but the wise learn from history,’ is it? There’s truth to that, I’ll admit.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. Super high-class ingredients like those are in a lot higher demand than supply lines can keep up with, hiking the cost way up. People with the technical skills to properly prepare them are few and far between too, so the price of that expertise gets tacked on as well. I had no doubt that there were at least a few of those hyper-specialized ingredients in Renge’s pile, and not even a genius like her could prepare them by winging it through instinct alone.
“But don’t people also say that anything’s edible if you cook it for long enough?”
“Who the hell says that?!”
“By the way, I haven’t stocked any poisonous ingredients this time. No pufferfish here! Be sure to try this at home, kids!”
“That means you knew this was a bad idea! This was premeditated, wasn’t it?!” Renge started chucking every single one of the high-grade ingredients she’d procured into a stockpot. She looked like a character right out of a fairy tale—specifically like an old, withered witch deep in the dark, scary woods, cackling as she stirred her evil magic potion.
“S-Sebas-san...” I reflexively muttered the name of one of the butlers who worked in Renge’s house. The only person who could possibly bring the situation under control was the one who’d been hired specifically to work under Renge: Sebas-san, aka Sebastian. I grabbed the phone that was installed in the living room and hit the speed dial. My call was answered after a single ring. “Hello?! Is this Sebas-san?!”
“Kou-kun,” a woman’s voice replied after a pause. Her actual name was Seba Sumiko. Renge had taken to calling her “Sebas” in spite of the fact that she was a woman, though, and the name sorta stuck. She was one of the very few people who could smoothly cope with Renge’s unreasonable demands and was just an incredibly capable woman all around. In spite of that, she replied with a somber, dreary tone that suggested she’d given up on just about everything. “Happy birthday...”
“Huh? Ah, err, thanks.”
“I would have preferred to offer my congratulations in person, but the young mistress insisted that the two of you would spend the day alone together and wouldn’t permit it.”
“D-Did she...? But, umm, you should know that things are looking really, really bad over here right now...”
“Yes... I’m well aware. Painfully aware. I’ve partaken of her cooking before.” Somehow, I was getting an incredibly clear image of Sebas-san gazing out into the distance, glassy-eyed and defeated.
“I think she said something about her food making people ‘howl with joy’...?”
“Yes... We howled; that’s certainly true. Though I would characterize them as more akin to agonized death-wails, frankly.”
“...”
“As such, I must admit that I was relieved to learn that she chose you as her only target this time around. You have my sincerest apologies, but I absolutely refuse to go anywhere near that house today.”
“W-Wait! If she’s done this to people before, then surely somebody could’ve stopped her by now?! Couldn’t you have told her that if she never gets better at cooking, she should just stop trying...?”
“Kou-kun,” Sebas-san began, sounding incredibly calm and gentle, “this is just how it has to be with cheftastrophes.”
“Chef...tastrophes...?”
“Individuals who are catastrophically bad at cooking... Or, rather, individuals who are prodigiously talented at cooking meals that could only be described as catastrophic. Those people are known as cheftastrophes. In a cheftastrophe’s hands, the most highly prized and officially certified A-5 wagyu steak on the market could be transformed into literal garbage that is so offensive in appearance and odor, not even flies would touch it—and they’d need nothing more than a stovetop and their own innate ‘talent’ to do so.”
“‘L-Literal garbage’...?”
“It would not be an exaggeration to say that their talent for cataclysm is a fundamental aspect of their very being, and the young mistress’s skill in the kitchen is very much of that nature. She fulfills all of the conditions required to qualify for the title.”
“Is there anything I can do to stop her?”
“There is not,” she declared bluntly and definitively. In other words, I was stuck. There was no way out. “If I may be so audacious as to offer a word of advice, I’d urge you to hold strong, and endure as well as you can.”
The true weight of her father’s “best of luck” was finally starting to bear down on me. From the sound of things, he and Sebas-san had both fallen victim to Renge’s cooking in the past.
“One last thing,” she added. “You must compliment her without reservation. Whatever she makes, be absolutely sure to tell her it was delicious.”
I paused, thoroughly confused. “Huh?”
“I cannot overstate how vitally important this is. Praise her. Tell her it was good. Do you understand?”
“Wait, what? Sebas-san, I’m not sure I—”
“Kou?” Renge called out from behind me. “It’s ready!”
“It would seem we’re out of time. I wish you the best of luck, Kou-kun.” She hung up, leaving me with the same words Gouki-san had.
“Kou? Were you on the phone?” Suddenly, the foreboding sense of doom I’d been feeling made total sense. The most dangerous enemies are the ones you think are your friends—especially when they themselves are unaware of how much of a threat to you they really are. Renge’s proud, confident smile drove that truth into my mind with uncomfortable clarity. “It’s time to eat! I made plenty, so feel free to ask for seconds!”
“G-Great...”
The table looked like a particularly creative impressionist artist’s paint palette. It was packed end-to-end with vividly colored dishes of all shapes and sizes. I gulped reflexively as she led me by the hand towards it. The whole table had an incredibly intimidating aura that only grew in intensity as I approached it. Even the steam that wafted up from her cooking looked colorful, which definitely wasn’t a good sign.
“Kou?”
“Wh-What...?”
“Happy birthday. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were born and that you’re here with me today.” Her words were warm and genuine, in theory. In practice, I could only hear them as a pronouncement of my death sentence.
What followed serves as conclusive proof of my own lack of willpower. I can only remember up to the point where she said, “Okay, eat up!” and I picked up my spoon. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch, watching TV while Renge leaned up against me. We’d sat down to eat at midday, but somehow, the sky outside was already tinged with the red glow of sunset.
“It’s already evening, isn’t it...?” Renge muttered to herself. I didn’t think she’d realized that I was awake. “I’m so sorry about today, Kou.”
“Huh?” She apologized? Why? I couldn’t remember anything that had happened between our meal and that moment, so I was left at a loss.
“You didn’t like my cooking, right? I was really happy that you ate it all anyway, but I could tell...” She continued her monologue with incredible timing, and suddenly, I was wide awake. I ate that stuff? All of it?! And apparently I let the fact that I thought it was nasty slip during my unconscious feeding frenzy too! “I’m not giving up here, though, I swear! My mother always told me that the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach! I’ll cook for you every day until I figure out what sort of food you like, I promise!”
Her courageous proclamation made my blood run cold. I finally understood Sebas-san’s advice, but it was too late. I’d already provoked Renge’s stubborn streak.
From then on, Renge forced me to eat a wide variety of foods that she personally prepared every single day. Like, literally, every single day. At first I’d consistently pass out, but as I grew used to her cooking, I gradually developed the ability to remain conscious, which was hellish in its own right. In fact, I speculated that if they served food in Hell, it would probably be just about as pungent and noxious as the crap she produced.
I was powerless against her cooking and had no choice but to give in. In other words, I was forced to follow Sebas-san’s advice and lie to her. I said it was good. Her cooking binge had been motivated entirely by her competitive nature, so she stopped force-feeding me the moment I gave in. Of course, the pain I felt in the pit of my stomach whenever she proudly bragged about how I “love her cooking” and how she’d “save it for special occasions” so I “won’t get bored of it” was intense, to say the least.
It wasn’t a guilty sort of stomach pain, to be clear. I didn’t feel the slightest shred of guilt about lying to her—I was the victim, no question about it. I wasn’t alone in that opinion either. I knew for a fact that any of the other victims of her cooking would back me up. No, there was just one clear source of my discomfort: the fear that I’d once again end up the guinea pig for her demonic test kitchen. That fear was enough to keep a strained, artificial smile permanently plastered across my face.
