Chapter 83: That Was Far Too Big to Be Called a Customer (3) "Unlike how you look, you seem quite strong for a human."
The dragon's huge eyes moved up and down as they scanned Jinseo.
Cold sweat trickled down his temples under an overwhelming pressure that refused comparison with any monster he had met before.
Even so, with the dragon's attention fixed on him, Jinseo's head was filled with only one thought: get even one more person to evacuate.
He clasped his hands behind his back, then waved, signaling Painfolt and Fedora to move farther away.
The two hesitated, but at his desperate gestures, they had no choice but to retreat.
"And the dish you made is even more excellent. Good. Bring me food that will satisfy me."
"Y-yes, yes!"
Jinseo went into the Additional Trailer, took out fresh ingredients, then hurried into the kitchen.
The shock left the kitchen in total disarray, so making bunsik right away was impossible.
When Jinseo started cleaning in a rush, Jason and Aston—who had been sitting on the ground in fear—came to their senses late and got up.
"You two aren't hurt anywhere, right?"
"Ah... Yes, I'm fine."
"Hyung! Hyung, are you okay? J-just standing in front of a dragon, I feel like I'm going to pass out."
"Honestly, I'm not okay. But I don't have a choice."
With hands trembling, Jinseo shoveled the overturned bunsik into a trash bag.
He was scared too.
If the dragon hadn't taken an interest in bunsik, if the plate had flipped and the tteok-twi-sun got mangled beyond eating...
He couldn't shake the tension because the worst-case scenario he barely avoided kept resurfacing in his mind.
"I can do this alone, so you two should stay as far away as you can."
Since making bunsik was something he could handle by himself anyway, Jinseo told them to run because he didn't want anyone else getting dragged into it.
But Jason and Aston refused his consideration, helped clean up, and threw themselves into preparing bunsik.
{—Analysis of the unknown entity, Dragon, is complete.—}
{Physical Rank: SSS}
{At present, detailed analysis beyond this lifeform's physical rank and emotions is impossible. More detailed analysis becomes possible only after a certain amount of time has passed.—}
{—The lifeform's anger has significantly subsided.—}
SSS rank?
Jinseo almost dropped the ladle in shock, barely managing to keep hold of it.
But only after seeing the final message—its anger had subsided—did he feel even a little relief.
Maybe it was because the rank was so overwhelmingly high.
The fear vanished instead.
Fine. If it's come to this, I'll just make bunsik properly the way the dragon wants. When else would I ever get to sell bunsik to a dragon?
Now that he found his composure, Jinseo's hands no longer shook.
Meanwhile, perhaps bored of watching Jinseo prepare bunsik, the dragon tapped the ground with its enormous claw.
"Strong human, my patience is not that long."
"Then how about you drink this first?"
Jinseo took out a 500 ml plastic bottle of cola and set it on the counter seat.
The dragon brought its face close to the counter seat, blinked at the bottle, and stared.
"That looks like a ridiculously insufficient amount to wet the throat of a body this large..."
"Then, well... can't you transform into a human form?"
If it was a dragon the way Jinseo understood them, it should be able to freely transform into any being with an ability called polymorph.
At his cautious suggestion, the dragon lifted its face and fell into thought.
"Hm. That would feel a bit stifling, but... fine. It can't be helped."
Paaaat.
A fierce light covered the area.
A moment later, the dragon—now transformed into the body of a young human woman—reached her right hand behind her neck and flicked her long-grown hair up.
"This should do it, yes?"
The grand, resonant voice changed into the thin voice typical of a woman.
But even if only her appearance changed, the crushing presence remained the same.
"P-polymorph..."
One of the magics that was absolutely impossible with a human's mana...
Watching a spell that perfectly transformed into another lifeform, Painfolt forgot even his fear and stared at the dragon as if piercing through her.
The dragon in human form seemed to feel his reverent gaze. With a snort of laughter, she walked to the counter seat.
"But how do you drink this?"
She picked up the cola bottle and tilted her head.
"Ah, you shouldn't shake it. Then it all turns into foam. When you open it, you twist it like this."
"Is that so? Still, the color is rather unsettling. It isn't poison, is it?"
Cola's black color tended to make first-timers wary.
It was the same for her, even as a dragon.
"Is there really any poison that would work on a dragon?"
"That's true."
"Also, there are a lot of eyes here, so could you please put on some clothes?"
Even as he spoke with her, Jinseo kept turning his gaze away as much as he could.
Her long, red hair that fell to her ankles covered the crucial parts with perfect precision, but that didn't change the fact that she was dressed embarrassingly.
"You are making more than one or two requests. Do you groom yourself before an ant?"
"With you dressed like that, it's hard for me to focus on cooking. Please."
"Tch. Then it can't be helped."
She raised her right hand, then realized she was holding the cola bottle, so she raised her left hand instead.
Then mana rising from beneath the ground shone and gathered around her.
"Ah, ah..."
Watching her absorb the surrounding mana and manifest it into a tangible object—quickly and precisely at that—Painfolt couldn't stop himself from marveling again.
"This should do it, yes?"
Wearing a red dress the same color as her hair and pupils, she shrugged as if to show it off.
By this world's standards, and even by modern Korea's standards, it still revealed too much... but it was better than being naked, so Jinseo nodded.
"Then may I drink this strange beverage?"
"Yes."
Chiiik.
She twisted the cap off and tipped the bottle to her mouth.
"...!"
At a sensation she never anticipated, she slowly closed her eyes and froze in place like stone.
But only for a moment.
Her eyes flew open as she tasted the sweetness that blended with the intense carbonation for the first time.
"A-amazing!"
{—Hidden Quest: 'Satisfy the supreme being, Dragon' has been completed.—}
{—Congratulations! You have achieved an accomplishment.—}
{—Accomplishment: Welcoming a being of a certain physical rank (SSS rank or higher) as a customer.—}
There was a hidden quest? And it even cleared an accomplishment? I haven't even served proper bunsik yet... Huh? It even got registered as a preferred food?
With messages filling his status window, Jinseo struggled to keep his mind straight.
With the dragon's appearance—something no one predicted—Falstead Castle was swallowed in tension.
Ground split with jagged cracks, and tables and folding chairs scattered across it.
Guards who couldn't bring themselves to approach the food truck held their position in front of the castle.
Customers who barely escaped the fear of death, yet couldn't muster the nerve to run far away, gathered beside the food truck.
Oswald arrived with the knight order after receiving the report late...
And Julien, who came in a hurry by teleportation magic.
With everyone unable to relax, only two people kept talking as if the surrounding atmosphere meant nothing.
"How truly mysterious. You called it bunsik, yes? I've never tasted cooking like this."
"Even for you, Charlotte?"
"I, who lived through an eternal span of thousands of years, never imagined I would have an entirely new experience in the realm of taste."
The dragon—whose original name was too long for humans to say and asked to be called "Charlotte" for short—praised every bunsik Jinseo put out.
She especially seemed to like cola, enough for it to be designated as a preferred food.
Carbonated drinks did pair best with bunsik, but I never imagined it would satisfy a dragon. I should bow to the cola manufacturer or something.
Even now, Jinseo silently thanked KoX Cola headquarters, which had to be producing cola concentrate with full effort at this very moment, and took fried squid out of the fryer.
"Still, I nearly made a huge mistake. I almost could have missed out on such a rare experience."
"Still, I understand why you got angry. If I was sleeping soundly in my room and a bunch of strangers barged in and tried to steal what I had... I wouldn't let it go either."
Trespassing was treated as a harsher crime in other countries, even if not in Korea.
Bad enough that getting shot left you with nothing to say.
Jinseo didn't know whether the Doren Kingdom counted as one of those other countries, but he treated it as if it did and continued.
"Yes, that's what I'm saying! To say it again, back then..."
With Jinseo echoing her, Charlotte got excited and started explaining in detail without anyone even asking what happened.
According to her, she woke from sleep recently, looked around with bleary eyes, and saw small insignificant creatures lurking about.
Creatures that normally fled at even the smallest movement of her pupils acted strangely this time. Instead of running, they only kept searching around.
So she tried to give them a little scare, and they launched an attack.
On a dragon, of all things.
"Roughly three months? Maybe four months ago, I think I was awake..."
"Isn't that too long to call it 'recent'?"
"I lived for thousands of years. That's a blink of an eye. Isn't it?"
"When you put it that way, that's true. You weren't injured anywhere, right?"
"Come on. Who would dare injure me? For a human, it was like a mosquito bite. No, far less than that? Anyway, they were insolent."
"That's a relief. Still, taking it out on us, who had nothing to do with it, was a bit..."
"Ah, that..."
At Jinseo's point, Charlotte scratched the back of her head, awkward.
"Was it basically like this? You ignored a mosquito buzzing right in front of you, and it sucked your blood and ran off."
"That's it!"
"In that situation, you naturally chase the mosquito, and the moment you find it again, you clap your hands to smash it."
"Y-yes! Exactly!"
"But you know... from the mosquito's point of view, it's practically a natural disaster. Your clapping. And we were kind mosquitoes that didn't harm you. Whether mosquitoes can be kind is questionable, but anyway, that's the idea."
"Grrn... that's also true."
She couldn't refute him, only scratching her head.
Listening from behind, Jason and Aston felt like their blood was drying up.
Jinseo's logic wasn't wrong, but he looked dangerously bold, laying out arguments so confidently in front of a dragon.
But Jinseo didn't keep talking with her out of blind fearlessness.
Setting aside how much she liked bunsik and cola, Charlotte didn't feel like a villain like Marquis Horus...
{—The lifeform feels ashamed of its own actions.—}
Based on the emotional analysis from AI, Jinseo judged her to be someone he could reason with.
If the other party was an ordinary human, he would have been extremely reluctant to read emotions at all...
But with the situation as it was, he had no choice.
"To be honest, from the start, I wasn't going to chase the ones who invaded my lair. I only recently woke up, so I closed my eyes thinking I would just go back to sleep, but the more I thought about it, the more my blood boiled."
"That did happen sometimes."
"So when I opened my eyes properly, those creatures already ran away. So I had no choice but to follow the traces of mana they left behind and teleport here."
"Do you remember the face of the human who invaded your lair, Charlotte?"
"It wasn't just one or two."
"Was one of them someone with a face like this?"
On a hunch, Jinseo described, as best as he could remember, the appearance of the human he suspected as the strongest culprit.
"Ah, hold on!"
Charlotte stood up, opened her mouth, and turned her head to the side.
Fwoosh.
A very thin breath brushed over the ground, drawing a black line.
"There. Look and confirm."
"Yes, understood."
Jinseo stepped down from the food truck and studied the portrait Charlotte drew with her breath.
Painfolt and Fedora approached him, and later Oswald and Julien joined as well.
Then everyone fell silent.
Because the portrait's subject looked exactly like Marquis Horus, who vanished for nearly a month.
"I didn't think he was this insane. Charging into a dragon's lair—does he have any sanity?"
Oswald, who stood opposed to Marquis Horus, felt more dumbfounded than angry.
He even felt ashamed that he fought someone like this for so long.
"Ah, that..."
Julien pulled back from Charlotte, who resumed eating bunsik, and beckoned someone else over.
"What is it?"
"Well, the thing is, there were cases where people invaded Charlotte's lair."
"What?"
When Jinseo raised his voice in shock, Julien urgently pressed his right index finger to his lips.
"Strictly speaking, it wasn't the deepest inner part where Charlotte stayed. It was more like the entrance to the lair, or going a bit inside. That happened fairly often. I heard it was usually hot-blooded young adventurers who did that."
< That Was Far Too Big to Be Called a Customer (3) > End
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