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Amy exhaled as she put down her tray. The restaurant was busy as usual. It couldn’t not be since it was the only one in the small frontier town. When Amy was about to check on a customer, the door to the place swung wide open, revealing a shirtless man with tattoos covering a large portion of his body. Standing next to him, there was a woman with a pair of wings growing out of her back. Amy put on her fake smile and nodded at the strange couple. “Table for two?”
“Table for three,” a feminine voice said, but rather than coming from the woman with the wings, it came from atop the man’s head. There was a fairy sitting up there.
“Sorry, for three. If you’ll follow me,” Amy said and led the way. It might’ve been her first time serving a woman with wings and a man with a fairy, but they certainly weren’t the weirdest people to have entered the restaurant. Thanks to reports of an evil beast in the woods nearby, more adventurers than usual were coming to eat here. Amy seated the strange people in a corner of the restaurant and asked, “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“This is my first time at a restaurant,” the bird woman said.
“Oh.” Amy figured the bird woman misspoke. It was hard to hear with all the chatter going on in the background. Perhaps it was the bird woman’s first time at this restaurant. “Would you like a list of the drinks we have?”
“No.” The bird woman shook her head. “I’d like one of everything.”
The man spoke up before Amy could say anything. “I want one of everything too.”
The fairy blinked and looked down to make eye contact with the man. “Are you sharing with me?”
“No.”
The fairy blinked again before raising her head towards Amy. “One of everything for me too.”
Amy nodded. With orders as simple as those, she didn’t have to write anything down. As for whether or not her manager would take those orders seriously…, it wasn’t her problem. “Three of everything, coming right up.”
***
Tafel’s stomach growled. It had been growling nonstop for the past hour. Walking through this desolate place used up a lot more energy than hiking anywhere else. She had to use her mana to keep the black mist at bay, constantly burning it away with her phoenix flames. If she didn’t, then it’d attack her. She had breathed it in earlier and almost fainted from nausea. She figured phoenix flames would keep the mist away because from the traces the two phoenixes had left behind, it seemed like they were doing fine.
There was another growling sound, and Tafel sighed. What was there to even eat? Another growl rang out, and Tafel’s brow furrowed. That sound hadn’t come from her stomach. She whirled around just in time to see a four-legged creature pounce towards her. Tafel leaned back, and a blue light shone from her horns. An icicle shot out of the ground, impaling the creature in midair from below. It let out a shriek, and its legs squirmed to no avail. Tafel examined the creature while frowning. It looked like a panther, but it had no distinct features: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Its fur seemed to be absorbing the light coming off of Tafel’s phoenix flames. Thanks to that, the creature seemed to be more like a silhouette than an actual object.
After a bit, the creature stopped moving, and Tafel’s horns stopped glowing. The black icicle disappeared, and the creature dropped to the ground. The demon squatted next to it while frowning. While she was adventuring in Fuselage, the mercenaries from Swirling Wind had taught her how to determine if something was edible or not. The surefire way of knowing was to package it as a gift and give it to a rival mercenary group member. If they were still around come next week, then the food was safe to eat. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anyone to feed this shadow creature to.
Tafel sighed and created a knife made out of ice with her magic. She cut apart the creature and frowned. Its blood was thick and viscous, and its meat was the same color as its fur. If she placed a slab of it on the ground, it’d be hard to tell it apart from a rock. Since there weren’t any defining features, how was she supposed to tell if it was edible or not? She cut off a piece of meat and held it over a floating ball of phoenix flames. The meat sizzled, and like a piece of warm ice cream, a black droplet fell off its surface. In fact, the whole slab was melting. Right when she was about to give up, a red color appeared underneath the coating of black, but it quickly turned brown from the heat.
“It’s edible?” Tafel’s eyes lit up. It seemed like whatever the black substance was, it was similar to the black mist in the air. Her phoenix flames could remove it. She continued roasting the slab of meat until all hints of darkness were gone. Then, she took a small bite. It didn’t taste like much, but since she didn’t have access to her seasonings, there wasn’t anything she could do about that. After taking the first bite, she didn’t eat any more. She’d wait a few hours first to see if there were any side effects.
Tafel cut off a sizable piece of meat from the creature’s corpse and raised Minerva’s feather. Rather than sitting and waiting, she would use her time to find Susan and Emile. If everything went well, she wouldn’t go hungry. Unfortunately, she still hadn’t found a source of drinking water, but she wasn’t worried. Even though Susan and Emile were phoenixes, that didn’t mean they didn’t have to drink water. As long as she followed their traces, she was bound to find some eventually—unless the two had collapsed from dehydration.