Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 17: Human Soup

The heat sank an inch into the meat and sizzled to death.

Problem was the meat’s density being too thick. Ezra tried focusing tighter on a smaller area, tried spreading wider across the whole slab.

Ember Arts and Palate Arts was feeding him instructions his hands couldn’t follow.

Lower temperature, longer duration, rest the fibers, rotate the heat. Simple as long as he allowed the passives to do its job.

But that was the second problem.

He knew exactly what to do and couldn’t do any of it.

> SP: 100/205

The surface browned but didn’t count for shit. The brown was there, but beneath that was all flesh still. The rest? Patches of sear that looked more like sunburn than cooking.

> SP: 55/205

Ezra kept pushing anyway. The brown deepened in spots but the interior stayed cold and raw. Stubborn as all hell.

His palms were shaking and his wrists ached from holding output he didn’t have.

’A little hotter Ez, don’t think just let it flow.

Fuck.’

> SP: 5/205

> SP: 0/205

’No good.’

His hands dropped off the slab. He lasted ten seconds, maybe fifteen. Every point of SP he had, gone.

Even then, he learned something new about his SP.

’Blow it all at once and I’m a dead battery until it fills back up. Spread it out and I can keep going, but the heat caps at the same shitty ceiling either way.’

The slab sat there with a crust a quarter-inch deep and nothing underneath.

Cut it open and it’d be purple from edge to edge.

Rare.

At best.

’All I did was give this meaty thing a glorified sunburn. I’m cooked.’

The Patriarch stepped forward, its oval body sizing up the seared meat that Ezra failed terribly to cook. It sniffed the surface once, and bit into the seared edge with teeth too big for its skull.

It chewed once, twice, then dug its claws into the meat.

Then its eyes rolled into the back of its head.

"OSSA!"

The tribe hit the slab before the Patriarch’s bark finished echoing. The royal guard tore in first. The rest swarmed seconds later, teeth and claws ripping strips, shoving meat into mouths, fighting each other for position.

Every single one of them was losing their mind over it. Howling between bites, even clawing at each other for the seared parts.

One of the burned trio had climbed on top of the slab and was eating downward like a woodpecker.

’What the fuck is going on...’

"They tend to eat off bones and lick cartilage at the ends," said a voice behind him.

Ezra damn near left his body.

The bird girl was propped on her right elbow at the edge of the spring, both eyes open. Green and flat, she watched the feeding frenzy like watching roaches fight over a crumb.

"How long have you—"

"Long enough." She lowered herself back down, her gaze stuck on his ass. "You’re still naked?"

"So are you."

She opened her mouth to say something back and closed it again when she looked up. The sun had dropped behind the horizon while they’d been unconscious and carried to this Ossalaka settlement.

It was evening, or close to it. Two of the moons were visible now, the yellow and the blue one.

The frenzy stopped like someone pulled a plug. One second the Ossalaka were tearing meat and the next every single one of them had gone still.

Their snouts to the ground, slimy paws flat on the stone.

The Patriarch barked once and the tribe moved:

Stone slabs dragged over the entry gaps. Pups herded to the center. Fires stamped out, every flame, every ember even.

The bowl went black.

Then Ezra felt it—a low pulse through the stone under his feet.

Something heavy moving out in the sand.

’We’re a fucking dish on a platter.’

"They’re scared," said the bird girl, feeling the hole that Ezra had plugged the same morning.

She was awake now, actually awake, and her green eyes were aimed at the darkness past the boulders.

"Yeah, no shit they’re scared. What about it?"

"I can speak Jackalyn. The root dialect. I’ve heard it in outer settlements before."

"You speak jackal?!"

"They’re terrified of something in the desert." She didn’t even acknowledge that. "They call it the Gleaming Beast of the Dunes."

’Gleaming Beast of the Dunes. Sounds like a cologne brand.’

The ground shook again.

Closer this time.

The spring sloshed over the edge and soaked Ezra’s knee.

Pebbles bounced off the bowl walls and a pup near the center started shaking so hard its teeth rattled.

Its mother clamped both paws around its snout without looking down, like she’d done it every night for a month.

"How long?" Ezra asked.

"Ask them yourself."

"They don’t talk to me. I just cook for them."

"They worship you. There’s a difference."

’So I’m a chef, a deity, and a hostage. What a fucking resume.’

The Patriarch barked at Ezra, short and clipped and aimed directly at him and nowhere near the bird girl.

"He wants to know if the fire-man can kill the beast," she translated.

"Tell him I’m not a—"

The Patriarch barked again, longer this time, and waved the staff at the bird girl like it was shooing a fly off its dinner plate.

"He doesn’t want to hear from me." Her jaw did something complicated. "He’s asking you."

’Patriarchal jackals. The one time she’s useful and they won’t let her talk. Unbelievable.

At least I was right about one thing. The ugly thing really had it out for her.’

Ezra looked at the Patriarch. "How long has this thing been coming?"

She translated, and hearing three ossa’s followed by a click of her tongue come out of an actual human woman’s mouth was something Ezra would remember for the rest of his probably short life.

The Patriarch’s yellow eyes went wide enough that the skull helmet shifted on its head. It tapped the staff twice and the entire tribe stood up like someone had yanked them by invisible strings.

What happened next was the strangest thing Ezra had seen since arriving in this world, and considering he’d been seduced by a spider and worshipped by jackals, that was saying something.

The Ossalaka formed a circle around the spring. The Patriarch planted its staff at center stage and barked out a rhythm and the tribe answered in a chant that Ezra could feel vibrating through the stone floor and into the bones of his feet. "Ossa, ossa, ossa." Over and over.

Then they started moving.

Three of the bigger Ossalaka dropped to all fours and circled the spring in a slow rolling crawl, their spines curving up and down through the dust like they were doing the worm at a middle school dance. They were imitating something swimming through sand and doing a disturbingly good job of it.

’I’m watching a nature documentary performed by shin-height furries and I can’t even leave a bad review.’

"They’re showing you," the bird girl said.

One of the swimmers broke off and rammed its head straight into the boulder wall hard enough that the sound bounced around the entire bowl. It backed up and did it again, and the other two joined in, taking turns cracking their skulls against stone in a sequence that made Ezra’s own head hurt just watching.

The rest of the tribe dropped into their cowering positions on cue, paws over heads, pups dragged to center, the exact same drill Ezra had watched them do for real ten minutes ago except this time it was rehearsed down to the last whimper.

A bedtime story told in body language, passed down so their pups would know what to do when the sun goes down and something starts hitting the walls.

The swimmers stopped and the chanting cut off and the Patriarch planted its staff and let the silence fill in the rest.

"Thirty days," the bird girl translated. "One full moon cycle. It started when the green moon was where it is now."

"Well fuck," Ezra muttered. He found an overturned urn and sat while he thought.

The ground pulsed again, distant and moving west. The beast was still circling out there somewhere in sand they couldn’t see. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

> Objective: Befriend the Ossalaka tribe

> Reward: 1,250 Frontier Tokens

> Failure: Human soup

’I need those tokens. I need Level 5. I need the Market open. And this entire tribe is going to keep cowering behind rocks every night until that thing either breaks through or leaves.

I mean, it hasn’t left in thirty days.’

The bird girl scoffed at his crunched face.

"Ezra, I can help."

His brain stalled.

"You know my fucking name?"

"You said it ten times while I was dragging you up a cliff." She hadn’t moved from the spring, same position and same green eyes catching what little the moons were giving. "You talk in your sleep too."

He opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again.

’This is not fucking fair. She saw me naked, and now she knows my name! Well, technically I’ve seen her naked now, but that doesn’t even count.’

"What’s your name?"

"Neve." She said it slow, like she already knew it’d go through one ear and out the other.

"Neh-vay?"

She was almost right.

"You stupid idiot."

The ground pulsed again, closer this time.

Ezra looked at the Patriarch, then at the tribe pressed flat against stone doing what they’d done every night for thirty nights, and at the pup still shaking under its mother’s paws.

Then at the bird girl, Neve.

She was propped against a rock with a destroyed shoulder and both eyes open and an offer sitting between them that he didn’t fully understand yet.

"Neve, what can you do?"