Several streets later, after stopping to snag some meat on a stick while the stall owner wasn’t looking, the experiment found the alley from which the miasma had originated. It would have been fairly easy to distinguish from all the other random passageways through the city by the fact the entire place was covered in blood. Similarly, the human was covered in blood.

“Meat stick?” it offers, holding out the thin plank of wood stabbed through ovals of unidentified, and possibly unidentifiable, potentially edible material. Deciding against awkwardly holding it for however long it’d take for the human to take it, it lets go of the stick, leans back on its staff, and floats the meat to hover in front of the bloody face.

Rather than take the food, the human just continued sitting on a crate, slowly dripping.

“I guess you have plenty here already,” it says, gesturing at the chunks of also unidentifiable meat strewn around the blood. “This one is cooked though. Probably. Food tends to taste better after it’s had heat applied to it at some point along it’s journey to the stomach.”

Thinking a moment, it makes the critical error of judgement of deciding to continue speaking. “Unless it’s one of those things where specific bacteria are being cultured to cause a reaction. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one type of cheese where you leave the milk rotting forever, and it just gets worse and worse over time, except the people who eat it say that it gets better over time. Like wine. That just gets stuffed in a bottle and turned every once in a while. Fermentation, followed by additional rot. People collect those things, and keep them in a climate controlled basement to keep it from getting hot. Depending on the technological level of this place, maybe not even milk gets heated. That’d mean purely cold-generated ice cream, and ice cream is delicious. One the other hand, that’s mostly a factor of the sugar that gets stuffed into it. Sugar isn’t exactly a heat-intensive product in the first place either. It’s just a plant, and then it gets separated out into the good bits and the parts you don’t eat. As far as I know off of absolutely nothing anyway. I think sugar can also be distilled from trees by stabbing it and then just boiling the water out of the blood, but that’d be heat-based sugar. Also called molasses or something? There’s syrup, molasses is the thicker stuff, and then sugar is just the tiny particles supported in the liquid. Maybe that’s how all sugar is made, just running water through a giant mashed up pile of plants until it’s a thick syrup and then rendering it back down once it’s past the shrunken husk. That would disqualify any of the sugar-based products from the ‘heat adverse’ category of foods. Cheese is still in the running, I think. Everything else would need to use actual cooking somewhere along the supply chain though.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Staring directly at it the entire time, the human continues not saying anything.

“Other than plants, but those are barely worth calling food. Here, have the meat. It’s ethically sourced because you aren’t eating it alive out in the wild,” it concludes, pointing its walking stick toward the human’s face.

In response, the human wipes the wet blood away from their face, which was a good choice before trying to eat delicious meat chunks. Adding uncooked blood to already cooked meat was never a good sauce choice. It usually just made the meat overly salty.

“I got robbed,” the human says, a line of actual water washing away some of the red on their head from the eye down. “They took the helmet and arm, before monsters spawned and drove them away.”

That explained the fact that they weren’t wearing the armor. Why they hadn’t just used the… Oh right, the arm wasn’t physically connected to the helmet, so it wouldn’t have the automated targeting system enabled. It probably should have set that up earlier.

“That’s not good, but you know what won’t get the helmet back? Being hungry.”

It wasn’t as though the tech was an incredibly intuitive piece of equipment. Anyone trying to use its armor, or worse, trying to figure out how to use it, were far more likely to have it murder them in ironic ways than they were to get it to do anything useful. Finding the helmet was the important part, since the arm was just a matter of time once trajectory calculation was once again in the cards. As soon as someone hit one of the many fire buttons on that thing, there’d be an explosion and an epicenter to calculate where the item got blasted off to.

Grabbing the stick from its hand, the human looked at the meat for a few moments, before ripping the chunks violently off the wood.

“They didn’t fight back,” they say, mouth full of mystery meat. “I just killed them all without getting a scratch.”

“More than killed,” the experiment flatters, “completely disassembled.”

“Monsters aren’t supposed to be real, or have so much blood.”

“You’d be surprised at how many things end up being real after you kill them, and even before that. Also at how much blood tends to be in them.”

“Why are you even keeping me around?”

“You have pockets, and I need stuff picked up. Come on, I found some shiny things.”

With that, the experiment walks back out of the alley, toward where that sparkly bit was up on a roof. Hopefully the human’d be done with the meat before they passed the stall it had stolen it from.