My Food Stall Serves SSS-Grade Delicacies!-Chapter 264: The Butcher’s Road

Greaves the Butcher had been walking for three days, and the mandoline had never been happier.

He could feel it through the oiled leather wrapping, through the canvas of his pack—a warmth that pulsed like a living heart. The tool that had served him with cold efficiency for seven years was suddenly eager. Almost playful.

It disturbed him. Not because he feared the mandoline—fear was an inefficient emotion—but because change implied variables he couldn’t control. And Greaves had built his entire life on control.

The eastern road wound through farmland giving way to forest. He’d passed two villages already, stopping only long enough to buy bread and dried meat. The innkeepers had tried to make conversation, curious about a lone traveler carrying a butcher’s pack. He’d given them nothing. Words were wasted effort.

But the mandoline. The mandoline wanted to talk.

Not in words—it had never spoken, never would—but in pulses of warmth and the way it pulled against his back, urging him forward. West. Always west. Toward something it recognized.

Toward family.

The word had appeared in his mind three nights ago, clear as if someone had whispered it in his ear. He’d dismissed it at first. Tools didn’t have families. They had makers, users, purposes. But the mandoline insisted, its warmth intensifying every time he thought the word.

Family. Siblings. Reunion.

"Efficient," Greaves muttered, adjusting the pack’s straps. If the mandoline wanted to find its maker’s other creations, there might be profit in it. Tools of the same quality, the same precision. He could expand his business, outfit all his shops with artifacts that never dulled, never failed.

The mandoline pulsed approval at his reasoning, but underneath it, Greaves felt something else. Something that had never been there before.

Joy.

He stopped walking.

Joy was inefficient. Joy was the emotion of people who wasted time on celebrations, on festivals, on gathering together for no productive purpose. Joy interfered with work.

But the mandoline was joyful. He could feel it bleeding through their connection, warm and bright and utterly foreign to everything the tool had been for seven years.

Greaves reached back and touched the wrapped mandoline through his pack. "What changed?" he asked it.

The warmth intensified. And in his mind, clear as crystal: Close. So close. Almost there.

He resumed walking, faster now. The mandoline’s joy was infectious—he could feel it creeping into his own chest, making his heartbeat quicken, making his usual measured pace feel too slow.

Three more hours of walking brought him to a crossroads. A weathered signpost pointed west: LUMERIA - 40 KM.

The mandoline flared. Red light seeped through the leather, through the canvas, painting his pack in shades of rust and blood.

Greaves unslung the pack and unwrapped the mandoline carefully. The metal was hot to the touch—not burning, but warm as flesh. The adjustable blades, which had always been cold steel, now glowed with internal light.

Beautiful. Terrifying. Alive.

"Show me," Greaves said.

The mandoline’s red glow intensified, and suddenly Greaves could feel what the tool felt. Not just warmth, not just direction—actual sensation. Like phantom limbs he’d never known he was missing.

To the west: four presences. Distinct, individual, each one a note in a chord he’d never heard before. Family. Siblings. Tools that shared the mandoline’s maker, its purpose, its—

One of them was closer than the others. Moving. Coming toward him.

The Blade.

Greaves didn’t know how he knew the name, but it was there in his mind, clear and certain. The Blade. The mandoline’s sibling. The one that cut with precision instead of uniform perfection. The one that had been patient where the mandoline was hungry. The one that had chosen teaching over efficiency.

The mandoline loved it.

The realization hit Greaves like a physical blow. Seven years of working with this tool, seven years of perfect obedient service, and he’d never felt even a flicker of preference from it. It had cut flesh the same as vegetables, bone the same as wood. Indifferent. Efficient.

But now—

Now it felt.

"How far?" Greaves asked.

The mandoline pulsed. Thirty kilometers. Twenty-five. Twenty. Getting closer every moment.

"And it’s coming to us?"

Another pulse. Affirmation. The Blade was moving east, toward them, drawn by the same recognition that drew the mandoline west.

Greaves rewrapped the tool carefully and shouldered his pack. Forty kilometers to Lumeria. Twenty to wherever the Blade was now. If he walked through the night, if he didn’t stop—

The mandoline pulsed faster.

Greaves smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who’d just realized his most valuable asset was about to become more valuable still.

"Let’s go meet your family," he said.

And he started running.

The Thornwood lived up to its name. Ancient oaks twisted between thickets of blackthorn, their branches creating a canopy so dense that the forest floor existed in permanent twilight. The path was narrow, barely wide enough for the food cart’s wheels.

Marron had been walking for six hours. The medicine in her chest—Sienna’s moonlight flower extract—still held, but she could feel it weakening. The cold barrier between her mind and the Blade’s call was thinning like ice in spring sun.

Behind her, the Wanderer’s Food Cart rolled with reluctant obedience. The wheels caught on roots and stones, requiring constant adjustment. The Eternal Copper Pot sat cold in its cradle. The Generous Ladle’s handle had lost its glow entirely. Even the Cart itself felt heavier than usual, its wood groaning with every turn.

They were afraid. Still.

Lucy rode in a new jar—Marcus had provided it before they left, along with supplies and a map marked with the fastest route through the Thornwood. The blue slime stayed pressed against the far side of the glass, as far from the wrapped Blade as the jar’s circumference allowed. She hadn’t glowed properly since the incident in the kitchen. Just a dim, grayish luminescence that spoke of shock and mistrust.

Aldric walked beside the cart, one hand on his pack, the other on the hilt of a knife he’d borrowed from Marcus’s guard. Not that a knife would help against what they were facing. But Marron understood the need to hold something, to feel prepared even when you knew you weren’t.

"Fifteen hours," Aldric said, checking the small clock he carried. "The medicine is halfway through its effectiveness."

"I know." Marron pressed her hand to her chest. The coldness was still there, but muted. Soon it would be gone entirely.

"We should rest. You haven’t slept in—"

"I can’t sleep." Her voice came out sharper than intended. "Every time I close my eyes, I see Lucy. I see myself smiling while I—" She swallowed hard. "I can’t."

The wrapped Blade sat in the cart’s storage compartment, triple-bound with leather straps and locked inside a wooden box Marcus had reinforced with iron bands. But even contained, even separated by wood and metal and cloth, Marron could feel it.

Humming.

Not the patient, teaching hum it usually made. This was different. Higher. Excited.

The Slicer was getting closer.

The System flickered to life in her vision:

[PROXIMITY ALERT] Distance to Slicer’s Wielder: 18 kilometers

Estimated Contact: 4-6 hours at current pace

Warning: Blade Resonance at 64% and rising Moonlight Medicine Efficacy: 42%

Marron dismissed the display with a thought, but the numbers stayed with her. Four to six hours. The medicine would fail before then.

"Aldric," she said quietly. "When the medicine runs out. When the joy comes back and I can’t—when I lose control—"

"We’ll figure something out."

"No." She stopped walking, turned to face him. "We won’t. You saw what happened. The Blade didn’t ask permission. It didn’t negotiate. It just took, and I couldn’t stop it." She held out her wrist, the one he’d grabbed. A bruise was already forming where his fingers had caught her mid-swing. "If you hadn’t been there, Lucy would be dead. And I would have done it while smiling."

Aldric’s jaw tightened. "So what do you want me to do?"

"When it happens again—not if, when—I need you to stop me. Whatever it takes."

"Marron—"

"Rope. Chains. Knock me unconscious if you have to." Her voice was steady despite the fear coursing through her. "I will not hurt anyone else because I was too proud to accept help."

"And if I can’t stop you? If the joy makes you strong enough to break free?"

The question hung between them like smoke.

"Then kill me," Marron said.

The forest seemed to hold its breath. Even the Cart’s wheels stopped creaking.

"What?" Aldric’s voice was barely a whisper.

"If I’m too far gone, if the Blade’s joy overrides everything and you can’t contain me—" She met his eyes. "I’d rather die than become what Edmund thinks I’ll become. I’d rather die than prove him right."

"I can’t—" Aldric’s hands were shaking. "Marron, I can’t do that. Don’t ask me to—"

"Then we turn around right now. We go back to Marcus’s estate, I surrender the Blade to Edmund, and we accept that the only way to stop the Slicer is to lock away every tool we find for the rest of time." She stepped closer. "Is that what you want? To prove that partnership is impossible, that tools and wielders can never face danger without becoming it?"

"I want you to live."

"So do I." Her voice softened. "But not at the cost of Lucy’s life. Not at the cost of whoever else the Blade decides to cut in its joy. There are worse things than dying, Aldric. And I’ve already felt one of them."

She turned back to the path, to the cart and the wrapped Blade pulsing with anticipation inside it.

"Four to six hours," she said. "Let’s make them count."

They walked on in silence. The Thornwood pressed close on either side, branches scratching against the cart’s canvas covering. Somewhere ahead, a butcher ran through the darkness with a mandoline that glowed red and sang with joy.

And in the cart, wrapped in leather and cloth and locked in iron-banded wood, the Precision Blade answered its sibling’s call.

Coming. Almost there. So close now.

The joy leaked through the medicine’s failing barrier like water through a crumbling dam. Marron felt it touch her mind—just a brush, just a whisper—and forced herself to keep walking.

Four to six hours.

She had to make them count.