Gamble Scramble!

by Natsume Akatsuki

  “You sure are getting into this, Iris,” Aqua said. “I like your spunk. I’m going to show you something extra special tonight!”

  “Really? Thank you so much! I promise to work hard!”

  Iris and I weren’t the only ones in the kitchen. Aqua had joined us. And frankly, I was a little annoyed. Megumin I could ignore, but Aqua seemed intent on teaching our unworldly companions, Iris and Darkness, the strangest things while we were on this trip.

  Speaking of Megumin, who had used up all her magic, Darkness was keeping her company.

  Aqua peered into the refrigerator and pulled out an assortment of ingredients.

  “Tonight’s dinner is tuna-mayo rice!”

  She grinned broadly, hands on her hips.

  Was she insane?

  It was bad enough I had given the princess fried rice. We were going to pay for this later.

  “Another dish I’ve never heard of. Are all of Elder Brother’s acquaintances so knowledgeable?”

  “You don’t get to be an Arch-priest as great as I am without learning a thing or two, see? This is a nice, quick dish you can make when you’re in a hurry. That’s very important for adventurers, for whom even a second of inattention can be the difference between life and death, understand?”

  “I see! A meal for busy adventurers!”

  Aqua was hardly done with her absurd explanation before she had shredded the tuna and slapped it on the rice with some mayonnaise.

  “Finished!”

  “Very simple!”

  Not to sound like a broken record, but was she insane?

  She seemed to realize that maybe fish, rice, and condiments weren’t enough for a meal, because she was rooting around in the refrigerator…

  “I don’t think this’ll cut it by itself. I’ll make you some dry-seasoned rice and some egg-fried rice to go with it.”

  “Of course! I can’t wait!” Iris was looking at the tuna-mayo rice with keen interest and smiling enthusiastically.

  When I finished bringing everyone’s food to the table, I found the two “young ladies” once again examining their dinner, deeply intrigued.

  “Lalatina, did you know you can make this dish in the blink of an eye? It hardly takes a full minute to prepare.”

  “Is that true, Lady Iris? Hey, Kazuma, why didn’t you ever tell us there was such convenient food around? This stuff would be worth it for ease of preparation alone.”

  I think everyone but you already knows about it.

  “You can put soy sauce or salt or even hot sauce on your rice for a totally fresh experience,” Aqua said, pouring hot sauce on her food and then eating it as gracefully as if it was some hoity-toity gourmet thing.

  “…Aqua, I always took you for just a simple know-nothing, honestly. But I see now that appearances can be deceiving. Forgive me for being so shallow.” Darkness, who was eating her rice the same way—that is to say, like a noble—bowed her head.

  “You have a lot left to learn about the world. You and Iris are both sheltered young ladies, so it’s only natural. When the time comes, I’ll teach you all sorts of useful things, like how to get all the ice cream off the lid of an ice-cream cup.”

  Just knowing that seemed like something that would make an aristocrat mad at you. I wanted to cut in with a smart remark, but Iris and Darkness were looking at Aqua with such admiration that I didn’t want to spoil the moment.

  I, meanwhile, was eating my tuna-mayo rice with appropriate enjoyment, but Megumin was wolfing it down like it was a feast. I was starting to worry about what we would be served the next evening, but more to the point, the day after tomorrow, we would arrive in the capital of Elroad.

  It would be fine. Megumin would be cooking for only one night. And she wasn’t a terrible chef.

  Yeah, it would be just fine…

  6

  “It went that way, Iris! Try not to let it pinch your fingers!”

  “Got it—leave it to me! Oh, there’s another lobster between the rocks!”

  One more day till we reached Elroad.

  We had spotted a river as we traveled and took a short break there at Megumin’s insistence.

  “This lobster seems awfully small, Megumin. Are we really going to eat this? I think it’s still a baby. Oh! Ow-ow-owww…” Darkness was up to her thighs in the water, and now she was up to her finger in lobster claw. The weird note of happiness in her voice was totally typical, though.

  “That is not a baby lobster. We are not in the big, wide sea here but in a shallow river, so they won’t get any bigger than that. Oops, you’re not getting away! That makes four!” Megumin had flipped over a rock and grabbed what she found there.

  Yep:

  “Hey, Kazuma. There’s something I’d like to say…”

  “Well, don’t. Those are lobsters they’re catching. Just the kind of expensive feast fit for a princess. Okay?”

  We were busy catching crawfish.

  I should have been suspicious the moment Megumin said she wanted to make food from Crimson Magic Village. She’d lived her entire life in poverty. What would she know about fancy food?

  “Perhaps it’s the lack of human travel that has allowed these fish to grow so big! This will make for a fabulous dinner!”

  “Gosh, I’ve never gathered my own ingredients before! Who knew cooking could be so much fun?!”

  “M-Megumin, grab this thing for me! It’s got a hold on my toe…!”

  Our two sheltered girls really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Maybe they didn’t get to play in the water very much.

  Me, I simply watched the peaceful scene. “The royal attendants went to so much trouble to stock up our refrigerator. I’m gonna make sure their efforts don’t go to waste.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not getting away. One less person means the rest of us each have to eat more food.”

  Finally, the sun went down, and we started to settle in for the night.

  “Very well, Iris, are you ready? Now you shall see how I prepare a meal!”

  “Of course! I can’t wait!”

  Megumin, standing in front of a pile of crawfish, was almost vibrating with excitement. She was even more eager to cook than usual, desperate to show Iris what she could do. “Normally one would soak them in water all night to expunge the mud, but the river in which we caught these crawfish was exceedingly clean, and there was no mud. We can get started immediately.”

  “This is very educational!”

  And so Megumin went about teaching the young princess how to cook crawfish. I would have to have a word with Iris later so she didn’t go blabbing to anyone at the capital that this was the sort of thing she had learned on her trip.

  “Now, first we must remove the smell from the craw—er, lobsters. You simply need to submerge them in alcohol, such as… Ah yes, this will do.” Megumin pulled a bottle of wine out of the fridge and emptied it into a bowl—expensive wine that someone had been looking forward to drinking, but I pretended I hadn’t seen it. “Now we leave them for a few minutes until the stink is replaced by a fragrant aroma. We can do some other preparations while we wait…”

  Megumin directed things with all the grace you would expect of someone who had cared for her own little sister. Iris looked at her with genuine respect.

  “Whoops, I seem to have done it all myself. Well, this should be enough preparation. Next…”

  Megumin had been enjoying Iris’s admiring look so much that she had accidentally done everything herself. She quickly snapped back to taking cooking seriously. She started with crawfish soup, then grilled a few more of them, and then made a spicy sauce to go over the rest.

  When she was finished with this surprising display of domestic capability, Megumin exhaled in satisfaction. “Kazuma has been doing all the cooking lately. I wish you would all have some of my food from time to time. Here, Iris, at least help set the table.”

  “Oh, of course! I’m sorry—I just couldn’t take my eyes off you…”

  “Ah, well, I suppo
se I can forgive you for a fixation on your leader! Okay, I’ll set the table, too—you go wash your hands.”

  I had never seen this side of Megumin before.

  “Hey, what’s this ‘leader’ stuff?” I demanded.

  “…Nothing.”

  “This is fantastic. The richness of freshly caught lobster just fills the soup, making it savory and complex. And the slight touch of earthiness left in the meat perfectly complements the grilling; nothing to object to there. This is true mastery…!”

  Darkness was savoring her food, acting like the narrator on some cooking show. She was trying to sound like a gourmand, but I wanted to point out to her that she wasn’t eating lobster but the common crawfish.

  Iris, still on a high from the unfamiliar experience of catching her own ingredients, looked thrilled, too.

  Megumin, claiming that she had actually made too much, had gone to share some of the food with the Lizard Runners.

  …In other words, if I wanted to do something about this, now was my chance.

  “Say, Kazuma, for some reason I feel like having frogs today. I’m going to go cook up those frogs they left in the refrigerator, so here—you can have my crawfish.”

  “My dear departed grandpa died when he went out to check the fields one day and was attacked by a gang of crawfish. I haven’t been able to eat shellfish since. So please, Aqua, have my share.”

  …………

  “Do you think you can deceive the eyes of a goddess? I know your grandpa came rushing to the hospital when you almost got run over by that tractor! And anyway, you sure like our speckled crabs well enough!”

  “And what about you? So you just feel like having frogs, huh? That’s rich, coming from someone who almost got eaten by one!”

  We were right in the middle of our attempts to shove food onto each other’s plates when we felt a presence behind us.

  It was Megumin, back from feeding the lizards.

  “Hey now, if you have a complaint about my family’s treasured secret recipe, I shall hear it.”

  “Aw, it was just a joke. We’re happy to eat your food.”

  “Yeah, we were just horsing around. This shrimp looks great; maybe I’ll try some of this.”

  Aqua and I steeled ourselves to have some food. Why not? This wasn’t crawfish; it was lobster. And anyway, I’d been eating frogs since I got to this world. Why worry about some crawfish now? Plus, crawfish had originally been imported as food…

  “Whoa, these aren’t half-bad. Kazuma, give me yours. I brought some expensive wine to keep me company on this trip. I need something to eat with it, so leave me your crawfish.”

  ……

  As I watched Aqua head happily off to the kitchen to get her wine out of the refrigerator, I promptly popped a crawfish into my mouth.

  “…Huh, that’s pretty good. The shell is crisped exactly right. And it’s melted into the soup perfectly. No wonder your family values this recipe so highly. I’m sorry I made fun of your craw—I mean, lobsters.”

  “Oh, I just wanted to try calling something a treasured family recipe for once in my life. If you’re enjoying it, that’s what counts.”

  …I immediately regretted my attempt to be nice by praising Megumin’s cooking.

  From the kitchen, I could hear Aqua sobbing.

  7

  That night.

  Having to use an unfamiliar pillow always made it hard for me to sleep. The constant stress of our high-speed, lizard-based travel wore on my nerves enough that I was able to fall asleep pretty easily each night, but by the third day, it seemed I had gotten used to it.

  I got out of bed and went to the kitchen in search of water.

  “Freeze.”

  Thanks to my ability to see in the dark, I didn’t even need to turn on the kitchen lights as I went to the faucet and got a drink. I slugged it down and let out a breath…and that was when I felt something behind me.

  There was only one person I could think of who could see in the dark like I could: the one who had been reduced to tears by having her special wine used up…

  “Is that you, Elder Brother?”

  But I was wrong.

  In the darkness, illuminated only by the wisps of starlight that came in through the window, there was Iris standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Yeah, it’s me; it’s your elder brother. I wanted some water. I just can’t seem to get to sleep.”

  Iris let out a relieved breath when she heard my voice. “Um, I came to powder my nose, but it’s dark… Could you walk me back to my room?”

  She kept her eyes fixed on what she could see of my face, reaching out hesitantly to take my hand. I mean, sure, she could’ve simply turned on a light, but this was the girl who had spent her entire young life suppressing anything resembling a selfish urge. She was probably afraid to turn on a light lest she wake anyone up.

  “Sure, I’m on it. Elder Brother can take you to your room. If you’re feeling scared of the dark, I can even hop in bed with you.”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  ………

  I took Iris’s small, slender hand and walked out into the dark corridor. Iris was walking as quietly as she could, maybe so she wouldn’t wake anyone up. Creeping through the dark while everyone else slept, trying to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, it almost felt like we were doing something wrong.

  Suddenly, Iris squeezed my hand. I looked over at her. She seemed to feel the same way I did, like we had stumbled into a little prank while sneaking out for a midnight snack. “This reminds me of that time I came to your room one night so you could tell me stories about your past, Elder Brother.”

  “Oh, you mean when you showed up without getting Claire’s permission? She almost had my head the next day. She acted like I’d kidnapped you or something.”

  During my time in the capital, Iris had occasionally given Claire the slip and come to see me. It caused an uproar in the castle each time. Maybe that was the real number one reason I’d been barred from the city?

  Iris, smiling, interrupted my thoughts. “But you never acted like it was any trouble when I showed up. You just talked to me… I still remember, you know. Your story about the time you fought with the cross-bearing demon—I mean Santa Claus, the one you say shows up in your country and leaves despair in the stockings of all the single people.”

  Ahhh, my little sister was so smart. She remembered even the things I’d said half as a joke.

  “I haven’t forgotten. And I remember how you told me about the time in your life you spent battling day and night, until people dubbed you the MMO Monster.”

  Ahhh, my little sister was so naive. She bought my NEET stories hook, line, and sinker and still looked at me with utmost respect.

  …Actually, I was feeling pretty awful about that.

  My silence seemed to send the wrong message to Iris, who said anxiously, “I’m sorry. Did I make you homesick, talking about all that?”

  No, not at all. You just made me take a long, hard look at myself.

  But I couldn’t say that, so I simply smiled instead. “Nah, I was just feeling kind of sentimental. I really enjoyed those days.”

  I knew she couldn’t see my expression in the dark, but she could still tell I was smiling. She seemed relieved.

  “That’s good to hear. Um…”

  Before I knew it, we found ourselves standing at the door to her room. She let go of my hand and opened the door, then glanced my way for only a second.

  “Please, Elder Brother, I hope you’ll stay in my country forever. I’ll work hard to make our nation somewhere you’ll always want to be.”

  It was like she just knew somehow that something was going to take me far away. She smiled, but it seemed awfully sad.

  8

  Next morning.

  Aqua was almost beside herself knowing we would get to Elroad today. I was weirdly bothered by what Iris had said the night before, though, so when I climbed up on the driver’s bench beside D
arkness, I asked her about it.

  “Hey, Darkness, this trip is about seeing this little punk Iris is supposed to marry, right? We just say hi, and then we can go home, right?”

  Darkness looked at me in annoyance, then glanced surreptitiously at Iris, who was playing with Aqua and Megumin. “You really think this is just a meet and greet? If that was true, why on earth would we do it so secretly, and right when the Demon King’s attacks are ramping up? I’ll tell you why we’re going there: to beg Elroad for help.”

  Beg for help.

  “Like, we want them to send us big, bad adventurers or knights or something?”

  “No, every country around has already done that for us. We’re the only country that shares a border with the Demon King’s army, see? If we fall, the whole defensive line collapses, and the Demon King marches right into the soft underbelly of our neighboring nations. So they send us their best troops whenever they can.”

  Huh.

  “But this country we’re going to, Elroad—the knights there are pushovers the way only knights from a country built on gambling could be. Elroad provides us financial support instead of military support. They help substantially with defraying the costs of defense.”

  “Huh, okay. But what does that have to do with this trip?”

  “Remember when I said the Demon King’s attacks are getting worse? There’s a reason for that. Kazuma…I believe we’ve defeated too many of his generals.”

  …

  “What? He wants revenge for his minions?”

  “It’s not that. The Demon King’s army is starting to panic. Their generals were all but invincible until recently, and now they’re dropping like flies. So we’ve decided not only to firm up our defenses but also to try to make a positive attack. But believe it or not, Elroad is claiming a cash crunch and saying that not only can’t they afford to support an offensive but they even want to stop paying for our defense. His Majesty and the first prince are away doing battle, so Lady Iris is going there to negotiate.”

  “…Wow, okay.” I finally started to understand Iris’s comment from the previous night. She was afraid that if the military situation got worse, I might flee somewhere safer.