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The Orichalcum Chef is in a week, and you have barely had time to prepare.
After you were victorious in the competition two years ago, you tried not to let it get to your head too much. You knew you could achieve such things anyways—you don’t need a trophy to tell you that. Even still, it’s nice having people flock to you to taste your award-winning cooking more often, so it’s hard not to let it inflate your ego just a little.
However, the award made you almost… too popular. You had been a wandering chef for quite some time before settling down, so it wasn’t like you'd been famous across the land. Only after you’d established Primula Julian were you fit to start making a name for yourself, and the Orichalcum Chef certainly blew it up to unimaginable size. Hinomotoans, Grastaeans, Taiwu—just to name a few—all visit your restaurant with high expectations and leave with even higher ones. Your cooking prowess certainly isn’t without merit, but it is precisely that merit that has landed you in a bit of hot pasta water.
You can’t get anything done.
Owning Primula Julian isn’t the only job you have. Your blade serves His Highness Prince Euden, as you had promised to him for helping you win the Orichalcum Chef (the speed at which he vaporized those enemies for ingredients was, quite honestly, staggering). If he needs your deft bladework for a task, you’d gut yourself like a fish for declining. You know better.
Not only that, but you have your own personal goals you want to reach. There are dishes you want to cook, techniques you want to learn, and people you want to meet. These goals need to be realized someday, you know, because you’d promised as much to Princess Primia. The blue bow that always stays on the hilt of your sword is a testament to that.
The issue here is that you hardly have the time to do all three. When the Prince comes to your restaurant urging you to assist him with a giant fire mushroom monster terrorizing a village, you almost respond with a resounding ‘yes’ before you remember that you are in the middle of a lunch rush. You know you can trust the staff to function on their own, but you are also currently testing a new method of flambéing fish that you hope will be faster than your previous. The customers are flowing in, you are sweating from the heat of the fire you press yourself to, and Prince Euden’s voice tells you this cannot wait.
Hence, zero time for anything else. This includes preparing for the Orichalcum Chef.
You have been so busy that, may the cooking gods forgive you, you’d forgotten about the competition altogether. Being up to your neck in work gives you little brainspace to consider anything else, to be fair to yourself, but it isn’t ideal that you haven’t even been able to prep your good cooking utensils. Now, with only a week to get everything ready before the big day, you aren’t entirely sure this is going to work the way you hoped it would.
Mirthfully, Mitsuba has been a faithful sous chef—the minute you told her you needed things done, she snapped right into efficiency mode. So far, she’s taken your good knives to get sharpened and purchased that new wok you wanted, and she’s now scurrying to make sure that the updated schedule to Primula Julian (including shorter hours and limited seating capacity) is sent out to all the employees. Really, you can’t ask for better with her—after all of this is over, you’ll be looking into ways you can possibly begin to pay her back for this.
Meanwhile, you have completely and utterly locked yourself in the kitchen. You take breaks for water and a bit of air, sure, but you otherwise do not move from your spot. You are fairly certain that, once all of this is over, you will be unable to smell anything but cooking meat and pastry for the next week. It’s a lucky thing that the Halidom is near overrun with gluttons who jump at the chance to have professionally made cooking at almost any time of the day, so you don’t need to worry about cleanup or food waste.
There is one thing you do need to worry about. It’s annoying, red, never ceases to annoy you, starts with a ‘p’ and ends with an ‘o’ (yes, you have already made that joke in your head countless times), and currently spluttering at the load of steam that has just blown into his face upon angrily swinging the doors to the kitchen open.
“Blurgh—koff--! Argh, you charlatan! You buffoon! The great Picaro could have died from smoke inhalation, you know!!” (Ye gods, it speaks. There went your good mood) Picaro howls, flapping his hands about to try and clear some of the steam away. You merely roll your eyes and gruff at him that it’s steam, not smoke, and much as you wished he’d die anyways, it wouldn’t be from breathing evaporated water. Picaro, being the idiot he is, doesn’t know what to say in response. He huffs in a desperate attempt to have the last word. You shake your head and keep cooking.
Picaro pretends for all of five seconds to not be interested in what you’re making before dashing over to get a look. You attempt to bump him out of the way, but that only earns you a snarl from him before he returns to his spot. What a child.
“Not that I care what you’re making, because I don’t, but…” Picaro isn’t sure how to end his sentence, because the only proper way one can is by then asking, “what are you making?” which defeats the entire façade he’s putting up that he doesn’t care. You don’t want to enable idiocy, but it’s either that or remain silent and watch him kick his pea brain into overdrive to figure out a way to ask and not ask what you’re making at the same time. You sigh and tell him you are making Crêpes Suzette, and if he could kindly screw off while you are busy, that would be much appreciated. Picaro takes offense, as he typically does to everything you say, and stamps his feet. “No! The great Picaro shall not be moving a muscle from this spot! You should be thankful I’ve decided to grace you with my presence this evening!”
What a nuisance as always. You ignore him and continue flipping your crêpes. This pisses Picaro off since you are no longer paying attention to him, so he decides that now he wants to practice for the Orichalcum Chef, since that was totally what he was coming into the kitchen for in the first place. He bangs some pots and pans around, and you are this close to freezing his feet to the floor when he finally sets a pan down on the stove and turns the heat on. He oils it, watches it crackle for a bit as it heats, then huffily strolls to the freezer to get a cut of meat (courtesy of the hunting parties, who have kindly offered their services to you during your time of need. Coming here was a fantastic idea, after all). The situation seems fine for a bit until Picaro emerges with a beautiful cut of T-bone steak (already unnerving given his track record with cooking) and slaps it right on the heated stove.
This is already a monumental disaster.
The panic of putting such an expensive cut of meat directly from the freezer to the stove hits you like a carriage, and you immediately shove Picaro out of the way and remove the steak with tongs. You ask him urgently how stupid he thinks he is as you launch into a lecture about how one must always take meat out to defrost before being cooked, lest the cut not cook evenly. Picaro looks about ready to kill you, but there’s an almost curious glint in his eye, like he’s planning to remember this for later. Inwardly, you almost celebrate—if this oaf remembers one thing that will make his cooking less wasteful, it will be an enormous victory for you.
You don’t have much time to waste on the idiot, however—you still have your crêpes to make, and fast. If you miss one thing, you’ll need to start again, which you despise doing when you’re on such a tight crunch to practice. You’ve been working in this kitchen near nonstop for days, and it’s taken a visible toll on you—so visible, in fact, that even the troll working next to you notices. He looks up from his steak sitting on a cutting board to give you a cross between a glare and an inquisitive stare (with just a pinch of concern—but since the both of you hate one another, you both choose not to acknowledge that bit).
“Have you been sleeping? You look worse than you normally do, which, if you ask Picaro for his opinion, he will say that you usually look more dreadful than soggy Brussels sprouts!”
You tell the peanut gallery to can it before you julienne him clean, but surprisingly, your very real threat does not shut him up.
“Urk—I mean… no! Not a chance! You shall not silence me while I am speaking!” He’s definitely putting up a front—you can see sweat beginning to drip down the back of his neck. It reassures you to know he’s still scared of you. “You listen here, you… you affront to chefs everywhere! Every good cook knows when to take a break. Even if the Orichalcum Chef were tomorrow, I would not let myself waste away in the kitchen like this!”
You roll your eyes and scoff, telling Picaro he wouldn’t slave away in a kitchen because he’s lazy. Picaro chokes and looks at you with as much malice as a sweaty, clammy thing like him can do while you give him the evilest eye you can.
“It isn’t because I am lazy! You ignorant little…” He trails off to compose himself before giving you a… collected, firm stare. You’re almost taken aback by it—this isn’t normally a face Picaro would ever wear. “Ever since you, ugh… defeated me at the Orichalcum Chef two years ago, I vowed to improve on my underhanded methods. Even still, I’m not so stupid as to just cheat. How on earth am I supposed to win, cheating or no, if I can barely stand? At this rate, you’re going to pass out in the kitchen and lose outright, you idiot!”
…
Quite honestly, you’re speechless. You didn’t know Picaro had it in him to be so… genuine. This must be the smartest thing he’s said to date. You say such, which flusters Picaro. “W-well! I’m only saying it because I want real competition this year from you! I can’t do that if you faint from overworking yourself!”
Picaro stumbles over himself trying to explain away his consideration, but you don’t need to hear it. You know why he came now—he was concerned about you. You’ve locked yourself away without breaks for days, which is enough to concern anyone, but Picaro was the only one with the guts to say anything. How kind of him, really.
Of course, you still hate him, but… maybe just a bit less right now.
With that being said, you haven’t the time to dwell on that. You need to finish these crêpes so you can take a well-earned break.
And maybe, just maybe, when you do finish and go to sit down and enjoy some homemade ice cream, you see a passing smile on that bastard Picaro’s face.