Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 802: The Field Kitchen

Ainen took inventory at the sixteenth hour, and what he found made the decision for him.

Kayla was unconscious and would stay that way for hours. Emma’s light was gone entirely. Almond couldn’t stand without help. Jian’s ribs had cracked properly at the Ashfall Basin and hadn’t stopped getting worse since. Forty-three wounded, two of them critical, and a healer who couldn’t heal anyone until someone healed her first.

And six days left.

"We don’t have a healer," he said into the sector link. "So I’m going to be the healer."

"You’re a cook," Marcus said.

"I’ve been telling all of you for a year that those are the same job. Nobody listens." Ainen was already moving. "I need harvesting crews on every gate. Anything that dies from now on, I want parts of it brought to the center. Organs, glands, marrow, sap, ichor, whatever it’s got. Don’t sort it. Just bring it."

"You want us to cook the monsters," Noah said slowly.

"I want you to kill the monsters. I’ll handle the rest."

He set up in the sector’s center, on the flattest stretch of ground still standing, and what he built there was not a camp kitchen.

Cellar Aged came first, and the deck did something nobody outside the family had ever properly seen it do at scale. Ainen laid out four wide stone slabs, and the air above each one went strange, time thickening, a year’s worth of aging compressed into the space of an hour. Anything that needed to sit and develop could sit and develop while he worked on something else.

Spiceweave came second, threading the whole setup with reading-lines that let him taste every ingredient’s true nature before it ever touched heat. That mattered more here than it ever had in an ordinary kitchen. Half of what was about to arrive on his slabs would be actively poisonous, and the half that wasn’t would be lying about it.

Feast Golem came third, and it didn’t fight. It worked. Six arms of compressed spice and hardened dough, grinding, pressing, separating, moving with the mindless competence of a thing built by someone who had run kitchens under pressure his entire life. It had absorbed cannon fire at the Thunderdome and a ship’s worth of falling bodies at the Hundred Towers, and now it was breaking down organ meat, and it did not appear to consider this a demotion.

The first harvest arrived within twenty minutes. Noah and Natalia dragged in the carcass of one of the stained-glass fliers, and Ainen was on it before they’d finished dropping it.

"Wing membrane," he said, cutting fast and precise, hands moving before either of them had caught their breath. "This whole thing flies on stored tension. That’s not muscle, that’s a battery. Boil it down and it’s pure stamina."

"You’re joking," Natalia said.

"I have never once joked about ingredients." He held up a strip of the membrane against the sick orange light, checking its grain. "Look at that. It’s holding charge even dead. Whoever built these things built them well. Bring me every one you kill."

Natalia looked at the strip, then at Ainen, then at the growing setup around him.

"You’ve been planning this," she said.

"I’ve been planning this since hour six," Ainen said. "I just needed everyone else to get tired enough to let me."

The first pot went on at the seventeenth hour.

He built it out of flier-membrane, marrow from one of the grey soldiers, and something he cut out of the segmented serpent Almond had killed at the western gate, a gland the size of a fist that Spiceweave told him carried the creature’s whole capacity for reassembling itself.

"That’s the one," he muttered, turning it over. "That’s regeneration in a bottle, if I can talk it out of being a monster first."

Flashforged Cleaver handled the prep. What would have taken an hour of careful reduction took him eleven minutes, every cut and sear collapsing into the instant it needed to happen rather than the minute it should have taken.

The Grand Table handled the rest. It had never cared that a crab shell wasn’t food, and it didn’t care now that a serpent’s regeneration gland wasn’t either. It found the form inside the thing that could be broken down, prepared, and remade into something a person could actually eat.

The smell hit the sector center at the seventeenth hour and forty minutes, and three separate people on the link asked what it was before Ainen had finished the first batch.

"Dinner," he said. "Eat it or don’t, but the ones who eat it are going to feel considerably better than the ones who don’t."

Jian was first, mostly because Kira physically walked him there.

He ate half a bowl, sitting on an overturned crate with one hand pressed to his side, and then stopped moving entirely.

"What," he said.

"Ribs?" Ainen asked, not looking up from the second pot.

Jian pressed harder against his own side, experimentally, and then harder still.

"They don’t hurt."

"They’re not fixed," Ainen said. "The bone’s still cracked. But the serpent gland’s telling your body to knit faster than it would on its own, and the flier membrane’s covering the exhaustion, and the soldier marrow’s doing something to the pain that I’d have to look up properly to explain. Eat the rest. Don’t fight anything for two hours if you can help it."

"I can’t promise that."

"Nobody can. Eat it anyway."

Forty-three wounded came through over the next ninety minutes. So did everyone else. Ainen never stopped moving, and the pots never emptied, because the harvest crews never stopped delivering.

The attack came at the nineteenth hour, and it came directly at him.

Something had worked out, somewhere in whatever intelligence was directing this, that the sector’s center had become worth hitting. A push came up through the southern ravine, bypassing two positions entirely, thirty of the wire-furred flood-creatures moving fast and low toward the one place in the whole Gutwrack Span where the wounded were lying helpless.

Marcus’s warning came through with eleven seconds to spare.

Ainen did not stop cooking.

He turned, one hand still working the second pot, and put his free hand out toward the ravine mouth.

Saltbound Covenant caught the first eight of them mid-charge, and eight creatures that had accepted nothing and been offered nothing found themselves bound anyway, because Ainen had spent the last two hours seasoning the entire perimeter of his own kitchen with offerings nobody had thought to look at twice.

"Rule of the table," he said. "You came to where I’m feeding people. That makes you a guest whether you wanted to be or not."

The eight bound creatures could not bring harm to their host. They stopped mid-stride, confused, and the twenty-two behind them ran directly into the back of them.

Then Flashforged Cleaver came off his belt, and Ainen went through the pile-up without ever fully leaving his own cooking fire.

He killed nineteen in under forty seconds, and he did it while stirring.

Noah arrived at the tail end of it and stopped dead at the sight.

Ainen stood in the middle of a semicircle of dead flood-creatures, blade in one hand, ladle in the other, apron soaked black to the knee, and the second pot had not burned.

"Bring those to the slabs," Ainen said, gesturing with the ladle at the corpses. "Wire-fur renders down into something I can use for the critical cases. Waste not."

"You killed nineteen monsters and you’re harvesting them."

"I killed nineteen monsters that walked into my kitchen uninvited," Ainen said. "The least they can do is contribute."

By the twenty-second hour, the sector had changed shape.

Almond stood on his own, which he hadn’t done in seven hours. Emma’s light had come back, not to full, but back, flickering gold between her fingers for the first time since the Ashfall Basin.

Kayla woke at the twenty-first hour, and Julian had a bowl waiting before her eyes had fully focused.

"What is it," she asked hoarsely.

"You don’t want to know," Julian said.

"I do, actually."

"Serpent gland, flier membrane, soldier marrow, something out of a wire-fur that Ainen described as ’the interesting part,’ and about nine things I couldn’t identify."

Kayla looked at the bowl for a long moment.

Then she ate all of it.

"That’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted," she said, "and I want you to know I’m choosing not to think about it."

"That’s how most people handle it," Ainen called from across the camp.

Rudra found him at the twenty-third hour, still cooking, still not having slept.

"Sector performance updated," Rudra said. "We’re second now. Ahead of kingdoms ranked fifty places above us."

"Good."

"Marcus thinks it’s because our wounded recovery rate is running about four times faster than anyone else’s in this event." Rudra studied him. "You’ve done more for this sector in seven hours than any of the rest of us did in fifteen."

"I’ve done the thing I’m for," Ainen said, and finally, briefly, stopped stirring. "Everyone else spent a year learning how to kill better. I spent it learning how to keep people going. Turns out the second one matters more on day one of six."

"How long can you keep this up?"

Ainen went back to the pot.

"Ask me on day six," he said.

Behind him, the harvest crews brought in the next load, and the gates kept opening, and the Grand Table turned another monster into something that would put a Regalon back on their feet.