Izen's simple words hung in the air, a stark and ludicrous contrast to the scene of a legendary judge weeping before him.
"I'm just a chef. Waste nothing, you know?"
For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. Marrowe Pastiche stared, his mind a smoking crater where thirty years of culinary doctrine used to be. The other two judges on the panel exchanged panicked, bewildered glances. Protocol demanded they also taste the dishes.
Hesitantly, Judge Hino, a stern woman known for her precision, picked up her own spoon. Her hand trembled slightly. She took the smallest possible sample of the brown stew, as if it were poison.
She brought it to her lips.
Her reaction was less explosive than Marrowe's, but somehow more terrifying. Her eyes didn't widen; they unfocused. She simply stared into the middle distance, her face utterly blank, a single, silent tear escaping the corner of her eye. She had been mentally disconnected from the arena.
The third judge, a portly man named Brolin, followed suit. He took a bite, chewed once, and then slammed both of his hands down on the table.
BAM!
"Impossible!" he roared, his voice cracking. He pointed a shaking sausage of a finger at the plate. "The memory lattice is… it's fully unlocked! This isn't cooking! This is Residual Alchemy! That's a forbidden art!"
The term sent a ripple of confusion through the crowd, but in the VIP box, Nyelle Ardent flinched as if struck.
'Residual Alchemy?' she thought, the words tasting like myth and heresy on her tongue. 'The forbidden craft of cooking with an ingredient's soul? I thought that was just a scare tactic for first-years!'
Down on the floor, the Proctor, his face pale, knew he had to maintain order. "Judges, you must… you must also taste Chef Voltagrave's dish."
It was a formality. A cruel, agonizing formality.
With grim determination, the three judges turned their attention to Reign's beautiful, perfect, 'Electroseared Sun-Kissed Tomato with a Plasma Emulsion.'
Marrowe, looking like a man being led to his own execution, cleansed his palate and took a bite. Judge Hino, still looking vacant, did the same. Judge Brolin followed.
They chewed. They swallowed.
And their expressions were all the same.
Nothing.
Not disappointment. Not disgust. Just a profound, empty nothingness.
After the supernova of flavor from Izen's stew, Reign's masterpiece of Purity tasted of absolutely nothing at all. It was like eating beautifully arranged cardboard. The single, perfect note of the Sun-Kissed Tomato had been so completely overshadowed, so utterly annihilated, that their palates could no longer even register its existence.
It was the ultimate culinary insult. His god-tier dish had been rendered into ash on the tongue.
Reign watched their faces, and his aristocratic composure finally, violently, shattered. The polite smile vanished, replaced by a contorted mask of incandescent fury.
FZZZZT-CRACKLE!
The Plasma-Sear knife still clutched in his hand flared with unstable energy, spitting angry blue sparks.
The Head Proctor's voice was hollow as he announced the inevitable. The giant holographic scoreboard above the arena flickered.
REIGN VOLTAGRAVE: 0
IZEN LOXIDON: 3
"The winner of the duel, by a unanimous decision of three to zero… is Izen Loxidon!"
For a moment, the announcement was met with the same stunned silence. Then, the silence broke, not into applause, but into a chaotic roar of a hundred thousand questions.
"WHAT?!"
"How is that possible?!"
"Did the judges get bribed?!"
"What the hell is Residual Alchemy?!"
Ciela Vantablue, in the commentator's box, finally snapped out of her trance. Her eyes, wide with a manic, genius-level opportunism, gleamed. She grabbed her phone.
"Scrap the hashtag!" she yelled to her unseen moderator. "Change it! New stream title: 'The God of Garbage: I Witnessed A Miracle!' Go, go, go! We're not watching a clown, you guys! We're watching the birth of a legend!"
The livestream chat, which had been a waterfall of question marks, became a torrent of raw, unfiltered hype.
But Reign Voltagrave wasn't listening to any of it. He saw only one thing: the cheerful, vacant smile on the face of the boy in the cat apron. The boy who had just publicly executed his pride.
"CHEAT!" Reign screamed, his voice raw with fury. He strode forward, pointing his crackling knife at Izen. "You cheated! That… that thing you did is not cuisine! It's a parlor trick! A disgusting perversion!"
Izen looked at the enraged prince and then down at his now-empty plate. "But it tasted good, right?" he asked, with genuine curiosity.
The simple, honest question was like a gallon of gasoline on a raging fire.
"You dare mock me?!" Reign bellowed, taking another step forward. The academy guards tensed, ready to intervene. "My technique is the pinnacle of the Voltagrave lineage! My dish was Purity Incarnate! You… you cook with trash! You are nothing!"
Izen just looked at him, his head tilted. "But if I used trash and won," he said slowly, as if working out a simple math problem, "and you used the best and lost… what does that make you?"
Checkmate.
The air rushed out of Reign Voltagrave's lungs. The crowd gasped. The insult was so clean, so simple, so devastatingly logical, that it left no room for a comeback.
Reign's face turned a shade of purple Nyelle had never seen before. The plasma blade in his hand flared violently, now arcing with a full inch of raw, uncontrolled energy.
"This," Reign hissed, his voice dangerously low, "is not over. I will not allow a walking joke like you to stand on the same stage as me. I will expose you. I will crush you. I will wipe that stupid smile off your face and erase you from the culinary world."
He turned on his heel and stormed off the stage, leaving a trail of ozone and shattered pride in his wake.
Izen watched him go, a thoughtful expression on his face. He then turned to the judges, gave them a polite little bow, and started packing his tools back into his red metal box. The jackhammer went in with a heavy clunk.
He had won. He had broken a judge, humiliated a prince, and become the biggest mystery in the world of cuisine.
And as he shuffled off the stage in his mismatched clogs, all he could think was, 'I wonder what's for dinner tonight. Hopefully, there are some good leftovers.'