The afternoon encampment was deserted.
Most of the available troops must have gone beyond the walls for battle, because from the distant north came the occasional sounds of fighting.
In the encampment, noncombat personnel were busy with their own tasks.
The medical unit was checking the remaining quantities of supplies or tending to the wounded.
The soldiers in charge of provisions were busily moving combat supplies.
Not that there was any question where I was going.
“Where’s the mess kitchen?”
“This way.”
I headed for the mess kitchen under the guidance of a ration soldier.
The mess kitchen did not serve lunch separately, preparing only breakfast and dinner.
“Maybe it’s because of the wave, but there really aren’t any soldiers around. At this rate, I can’t tell what’s lacking… If it’s all right, could I take a look at the kitchen storehouse?”
“Yes. It’s not meal prep time right now anyway, so it’s fine.”
The kitchen storehouse located inside the cooking area was as bare as the meager supplies suggested.
On the shelves of the storehouse was a list of today’s foodstuffs.
They must have been recording ingredients brought in and taken out each day, then later tallying them against the supply warehouse.
But with no digital system, and an administrative method like this that looked extremely easy to damage or manipulate, there were plenty of holes.
Today’s list had small grains like barley, wheat kernels, and beans, several kinds of root vegetables, and the five sacks of flour I had brought them.
Five sacks of flour. Still, that was 100 kilograms, so if they made flatbread or pasta to put into stew, it should be enough to cover a day’s worth of mouths without any problem.
‘Just looking at this, it seems fine…’
But documents could be manipulated as much as anyone liked.
Even in the Korean military, people often changed guard duty however they wanted, contrary to the operation orders, and slacked off while on duty. I doubted things would be different here.
As I looked around the mess kitchen, I found a small pot.
Without hesitation, I opened the lid.
And I was appalled by its contents.
“Wh-what is this?”
“Ah, that’s this morning’s meal. Looks like there’s a little left. Would you like some?”
“Oh my god…”
“Pardon?”
Leaving the bewildered ration soldier behind, I sank into despair.
What the hell was this? Had I been shot up with about a thousand doses of Wegovy without realizing it?
Of course that couldn’t be the case, so it was reasonable to conclude that my current loss of appetite had been caused solely by this substance.
Barley, wheat, and various grains, half-crushed as if someone had chewed them up and spat them out.
Those grains had fused with some pale, murky liquid of unknown origin that gave off a faint purple tinge.
“This is all they eat? No bread or anything?”
“Bread only comes out in the morning, and even then, there isn’t much of it. What can you do? The farmers must be having a hard time too, with the wave suddenly breaking out.”
The ration soldier gave a bitter smile as if it couldn’t be helped. No, that’s something that can be helped.
The moment I raided the scene, evidence came pouring out.
There wasn’t a single chunk of the root vegetables written on today’s foodstuffs list in the porridge, and instead of at least tearing off some flour dumplings for them, they’d cut even that in half?
‘Even if the world changes, there’s always some bastard messing around with food.’
A rage stemming from deep in my chest. No, perhaps from genetic material embedded in my DNA.
A people who could endure everything else, but could not endure bullshit when it came to meals.
At the anger boiling up in me as a native Korean, my head grew hot.
“Kk… kkeuk…! Kkik!”
“Wh-what’s wrong, Jinwoo? Calm down!”
Seeing me clench my teeth and hold back my anger, Iseria was startled and tried to calm me down.
Hoo… I was furious to the top of my head, but I barely managed to endure it.
If I rashly caused a disturbance here, all this effort would go to waste.
I composed myself and said to the ration soldier,
“Would it be all right if I had dinner here in the mess kitchen tonight? I’ll donate more ingredients.”
“Oh, of course. What you’ve already given us is more than enough… Thank you.”
No matter the branch, if you were a soldier, you inevitably hid away supplies or civilian goods.
That was the same no matter where you looked in military organizations across the world, past or present, and it probably would be the same in the future.
It was an action carried out on the level of instinct, like a squirrel burying acorns in the ground.
So I could understand, to some extent, the order’s mess officer stashing goods away.
Yes. To “some extent,” that is.
This embezzlement had gone far beyond the line.
The cooks and ration soldiers must have noticed a little too. But what power did they have?
Given the nature of an extremely closed organization like the military, succeeding as a whistleblower and realizing justice was exceedingly difficult.
That was why external institutions like 1303 existed.
‘I’ll become 1303.’
While waiting until dinnertime, I asked Iseria to detect mana.
The flour I had created contained my mana, so if she traced it backward, we should be able to find the mess officer’s shady storehouse.
“I found it. It’s not that far. Are we going now?”
“No. We don’t need to go right away.”
According to Iseria, my mana could be sensed inside the building of the knight order’s encampment.
The mess officer probably worked over there too, so maybe he had hidden it somewhere like an office.
However, there was still one last thing I had to confirm.
That was why I had said I would eat dinner at the knight order’s cafeteria.
Time passed, and before I knew it, it was late afternoon. In the kitchen, they were busily cooking for the evening meal.
The mess officer, who hadn’t shown so much as the tip of his nose earlier, was also in the center of the kitchen, watching the cooks.
Soon, soldiers began entering the mess kitchen one by one, and in time with that, the cooks moved the finished food to the serving line.
What I wanted to check was precisely that meal.
Roughly three hundred to four hundred mouths to feed, and the foodstuffs list I had seen earlier.
I had lived my life with cooking, and I also had some experience with large-scale cooking and cafeteria meals.
Which meant I could estimate it on sight.
Whether that food had truly been made using all those ingredients, and whether its quality matched the number of people it was meant to feed.
Iseria and I went to the very back of the long serving line.
The soldiers looked at us as if wondering, “Who are these people?” but soon lost interest.
After returning from a hard battle, the only thing visible to their eyes would be food.
“Ah, give me just a little more. There aren’t even many chunks in it…”
“I’m sorry, there are a lot of people behind you too…”
“Ugh… isn’t this a bit much?”
“We just have to eat it. What else can we do?”
Complaints burst from the mouths of the soldiers receiving food, and from those who had already received theirs and sat down.
Glancing at their trays, I could roughly guess the situation.
The Anger inside my heart was slowly lifting its head.
At last, my turn came.
I held out my tray to the cook.
Splatter—
One ladleful of some tastelessly flowing liquid, whether it was porridge, stew, or whatever the hell it was.
As expected, the quality of the food was abysmal.
Carrots or potatoes, which had definitely been on the ingredient list, were nowhere to be found no matter how hard you looked, and a few flour dumplings the size of a finger joint floated in it.
Snap—
The instant I recognized that, the thread-thin strand of my patience finally broke.
I set the food I had been served down on a table.
Iseria must have naturally assumed I was going to sit down, because she had half-lowered herself into a chair, only to panic when she saw me head straight for the kitchen.
“Hey, where are you going?”
I didn’t answer Iseria and strode forward.
Rather than saying I didn’t answer, it would be more accurate to say I didn’t hear her.
Iseria belatedly chased after me, but she was too slow.
Having already entered the kitchen, I glared at the mess officer and stood in front of him.
The mess officer looked at me and spoke with an incredulous expression.
“What are you? Who said you could just barge in here!”
“Do you eat properly?”
“What?”
“Have you eaten?”, “Let’s grab a meal sometime,” “Even a dog isn’t bothered while it’s eating.”
A people who lived by meals and died by meals.
I fired off the national rule of greeting in the Republic of Korea.
“I have eaten.”
“Oh yeah…?”
At the mess officer’s reply, a sneer formed on my face.
Seeing my ridicule, the mess officer’s face turned red and purple as he opened his mouth.
But my anger exploded first.
“Of course you have, you pig bastard!!!!”
“Wh-what? Who do you think you’re talking to—!”
The mess officer, suddenly struck by a case of defamation by statement of fact, tried to raise his voice, but I did not hand over the right to speak.
“Hey, you bastard. Did you think I brought that flour here so a thieving son of a bitch like you could line your pockets with it, huh?”
“Flour…? No way?”
“Yeah. That no way is me, you bastard!!”
The loud curses ringing out from the open kitchen.
And the speakers were a black-haired man no one had seen before and the mess officer, who had never had a very good reputation to begin with.
Even if ordinary low-ranking soldiers had fought like that, it would have been an amusing spectacle, but this had become a show several times more stimulating.
Every gaze in the mess kitchen focused on me and the mess officer.
Feeling all the interested looks from the soldiers, I continued.
“I’ve brought 400 kilograms of flour so far—no, 600 kilograms as of today. Does it make any sense for the food to be at this level? Sure, it can taste bad. But at the very least, you shouldn’t be lying about the amount of ingredients!!”
As if he had grasped what I was talking about, the mess officer’s momentum weakened a little.
“No, I didn’t lie…”
“What do you mean, you didn’t lie!!! You served out a rat’s tail’s worth this morning too, and from what I hear, it’s not like this happened only once!!”
In truth, I hadn’t heard anything. I had simply assumed that a bastard like this must have been doing it all along.
But maybe I had luckily hit the mark, because the mess officer clamped his mouth shut like a mute who had eaten honey.
The soldiers listening to my shouting began to murmur.
“Come to think of it, the meals have been pretty bad lately.”
“Right. I enlisted because I thought they’d at least give us proper bread, but I’ve been eating worse than when I was farming.”
“Wh-what are you all doing!! Why aren’t you dragging this mad black-haired bastard out!! What is this behavior toward a soldier protecting the city!!”
When public opinion began flowing in an unfavorable direction, the mess officer shouted not at me but at the soldiers, but it was useless.
The murmuring against the mess officer grew louder and louder, and fueled by that, my excitement reached its peak as well.
I grabbed the collar of the mess officer’s uniform, which looked like it was about to burst, and shouted,
“Would you look at this traitorous bastard, the worst under heaven?!”
“Keuk! How dare you, a mere commoner!! Let go!!”
“J-Jinwoo! Calm down!”
“Let me go, Iseria! A bastard like this, I’ll really just…”
Iseria, who had been watching me anxiously from the side, tried to stop me when I grabbed the mess officer by the collar.
Maybe she thought this had gone a bit too far.
Well, after all, I was a commoner, and the mess officer, rotten as he was, was still a soldier. There was room for danger.
“Everyone, stop!!”
Just as the conflict reached its peak, someone rushed into the kitchen with a booming voice.
It was none other than the knight order’s 1st Platoon Leader, Arthur.
“What on earth is going on, Sir Jinwoo? Mess officer!”
“Arthur! You came at the right time! This crazy traitorous bastard is ginppai-ing the knight order’s food!!”
“Pardon? Ginppai? What does that mean… Are you saying he embezzled it?”
“That’s right, embezzlement!! Isn’t this guy basically a spy? You’re a monster stooge, aren’t you!”
“N-no, that’s not true. 1st Platoon Leader! How could I…”
Arthur struggled to grasp the situation as he listened to my heavily agitated words.
The mess officer tried by any means to cut me off, but instead, he was only stopped by Arthur, whose expression had turned cold.
It seemed the mess officer’s usual reputation really had been bad.
“Sir Jinwoo. It’s not that I don’t believe you, but do you have evidence? If all of this turns out to be nothing but suspicion, and the mess officer is innocent, this will not be a situation we can simply let pass.”
“R-right! You’re trying to make me out to be a criminal without any evidence?”
“Evidence, evidence is great! Arthur, look here at the daily foodstuffs list.”
I showed Arthur the foodstuffs list I had found in the storehouse earlier.
“Barley and wheat, various grains, and five sacks of flour… What about it?”
“Arthur. Look at this morning’s menu and the meal being served now. Does this food look like it was made from the ingredients written here?”
Hearing my words, Arthur looked at the porridge with its meager contents, served as the evening meal.
Arthur muttered to himself, “Hm… certainly…”
"Frame-up!! This is a frame-up! What do you know about mass catering? Can you prove it wasn’t made with these ingredients?!"
"Enough. Mess officer. Master Jinu is a master of the culinary world from the East. Did you think he wouldn’t know?"
"M-Master? Of cooking?"
At the words “cooking master” from Arthur’s mouth, the hall stirred.
Until now, not a single person had ever been appointed a cooking master in the Empire, so it was only natural that it came as a great shock.
Riding the momentum, I laid out all the evidence and testimony. Of course, I dressed up the part about my ability with lies.
"I understand what you are saying, Master Jinu. I don’t know why you tried to donate in secret, but... you left the flour beside the warehouse in the dead of night, and the mess officer diverted it somewhere other than the supply warehouse. Along with the flour you had donated before that. Is that correct?"
"Yes. Exactly!"
"That much can be proven by looking into the ration soldiers who were on duty these past few days and the documents. What I find questionable is where and how he intended to divert that amount of flour. The mess officer may look like this, but he is an officer who has handled provisions for our knight order for a long time. For someone like him to try to embezzle hundreds of kilograms of flour, which would be difficult even to move..."
At Arthur’s point, the mess officer, who had been silent, brightened and said,
"R-Right! I’m not an idiot. Why would I steal such a huge amount?! I truly have been wronged, First Squad Leader!!"
"We’ll know once we check. Iseria?"
"Honestly. So that’s why you told me to find it in advance?"
At the mess officer’s wailing, I immediately called Iseria and headed outside.
Of course, I told Arthur and the mess officer to follow as well.
At first, the mess officer looked puzzled, unable to tell where we were going, but as my steps drew closer and closer to the knight order’s garrison, he became visibly anxious.
Once we entered the garrison, I continued following Iseria, who was leading the way.
By now, we had drawn every bit of attention there was to draw, so a considerable number of soldiers were watching our movements.
Before long, we arrived at the mess officer’s office, the room at the very end of the garrison building.
"It’s here. The stolen goods are inside this room."
"Thank you, Iseria."
"H-Hmph! Whatever!"
Leaving Iseria behind as she slipped, without fail, into tsundere mode, I said to Arthur,
"Sir Arthur. The flour I donated, along with the goods the mess officer embezzled, are hidden here. Please permit a search."
"Lie!! This is a lie! Where in this tiny room could anyone hide that many goods?!"
"Search it, Master Jinu."
The mess officer screamed at the top of his lungs, but when Arthur glared at him with a menacing air, he finally shut his mouth.
The office did not look very large from the outside, perhaps twenty-six to thirty-three square meters.
I searched every corner of the office for the goods.
Thud—
Thud—
Thunk—
Wait, thunk?
At that moment, an unnatural footstep reached my ears.
Clearly, when I walked over the other parts, they sounded solid inside.
Thunk—
Only this part sounded hollow.
Arthur, watching me, realized it as well and ordered the soldiers who had followed us in.
"Pull up that floorboard."
"Yes, sir!"
At Arthur’s command, the soldiers took up their tools and pried up the flooring.
And what was revealed beneath it was...
An underground room the size of the kitchen storeroom in the mess hall, and a tunnel leading in the direction beyond the castle wall.
And filling that room were my flour and all sorts of ingredients. The knight order’s supplies.
With the whole truth exposed, Arthur said,
"Seize that man, the mess officer!!"
"N-No!!!"
The death cry of a man blinded by greed echoed through the garrison.