Chef continued to stare at the options available to him, head swimming with questions as he ignored his previous options.

Chef/Poison

…

Chef/Pastry

Sous Chef/Baker

First of all, what is a pastry? But more importantly, who is Sous and why would I be their chef?

This was quite the pickle. On the one hand, everything else that had been offered to him was something he’d seen before. But on the other, what did these two even mean? He could go to town and ask them, but he was a little nervous. Something about killing one of them and immediately asking for help seemed wrong. So Chef decided he would do the same thing he did last time.

Dragging the corpse back up the hill, he began removing the shiny parts and pulled out his knife. It was time to eat.

If any of the people from town saw him at work here, they’d surely do whatever they could to distance themselves from him. It was one thing to cooperate with something you knew ate your kind, but it was something else entirely to cooperate with a creature you’ve seen butcher and eat a child. It was unlikely that the tried and true argument of ‘self defense’ would hold up while his teeth were still stained red.

By the time morning came, Chef had made an incredible discovery. The shiny parts of the human were actually metal! He baked some more bricks and extended the oven, using the human’s breast plate as a grill. Now he was cooking with fire. Literally!

Using everything he’d learned in the past few weeks, Chef decided to bake the greatest pie he’d ever seen. He used honey, nut oil, and vanilla grounds, the black powder he hadn’t identified yet, along with plenty of flour. He still didn’t have milk or eggs, but using Rise still allowed him to make a decent dough. By doing so he ended up with something that definitively wasn’t a pie. The result was fluffier than before, poofing up to a larger size but lightly fried. It was something akin to a donut but more closely resembling a beignet with all the open space inside.

He had decided to avoid the weird thing that happened with Chief, instead baking the bread before adding in the heart. Cutting open his creation, he carefully stuffed it before closing it lovingly. Of course, that left it quite cold in the center of this warm doughy goodness, so he threw it back in the oven for just a few minutes.

What he pulled out pulsed and quietly groaned at him as he looked at it. Blood slowly seeped out from the oversized ball of fried dough, and the ground seemed to writhe whenever the liquid reached it.

Chef stared at his creation for a while, waiting for it to stop moving. It didn’t, though it did try to wriggle out of his hands.

“No sense letting you go cold, then.”

The blend of sweet and savory combined with something indescribable filled his mouth, causing him to smile. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

*Ping*

Congratulations! You have acquired the Monster title!

Congratulations! You have killed and eaten a child! You are forever marked as the enemy of mankind!

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Congratulations! You have gained access to additional Class Evolutions!

Maybe he should have asked them some questions after all. There was a small chance that they’d like him even less now and all of this had been for nothing. Oh well, couldn’t hurt to try. Worst case scenario, he’d just kill and eat them if they attacked him.

Maybe I should bring some goop with me, just in case…

----------------------------------------

The middle-aged man sat behind his beautiful wooden desk, leaning back just slowly enough for the loud creaking to cause a visible wince from his guest. The nice receptionist wearing green frills was wringing her hands awkwardly, obviously waiting to be dismissed. Unfortunately for her, the guild master was in the mood for some slight tormenting after receiving the bad news.

Mr. Wallace’s kid died on one of their missions. So far he was just missing, but the letter was a lot more strongly worded than that. The guild master once again looked between the sheafs of parchment on his desk, comparing the information within.

Deren used to be an adventurer back before gaining this bureaucratic position. Between him and his teammates at the time, they’d learned some fairly critical things. One that he kept as close to his chest as he could was the secret behind the Intuit skill. He told people that it was based on total numbers, an aggregate if you will, but there was a hidden component in reality. If the testing they’d done could be trusted, the result was most influenced by Hutzpah.

Now normally this wouldn’t matter all that much. Few things or people had a Hutzpah worth talking about since it was mostly worthless, but there were exceptions. Merchants, politicians, and con men had a tendency to have a disproportionately high Hutzpah, making them frequently overestimated.

It was a balancing act to keep information like this hidden. If everyone knew how it worked, they’d underestimate people and creatures on an assumed stat number. But if no one knew how it worked, then scammers could run rampant by bluffing through everything. In the end, it was guild masters like him that had to bridge this gap. He’d looked at the mission and warned the woman in front of him that no one should be allowed to take it unless they were considerably stronger than Fresk. The boy wasn’t, not in any way that mattered. An advanced class had done more for the kid’s ego than it had for his power. The number wasn’t all that mattered.

Another kid deceived into thinking he was strong just because of levels. They hadn’t learned yet how big of a difference stats made simply because they didn’t have many.

Everyone started with the same class and stats that could go as high as ten, twenty for health, mana, and stamina. After that though, stats were limited by level and increased mainly by eating or taking potions. So a level twenty of any class could never have more than twenty Gusto and forty Health. Of course, if you were fifty years old, your stats would almost all match your level so long as you ate more than bread day in and day out, but being a high level made that harder. Getting all of your stats to max at level twenty was dramatically easier than at level forty.

Deren was willing to bet that the kid didn’t have a single non primary stat higher than sixty, despite being nearly level one hundred. Fifteen years of eating, most of which were spent below level ten, simply wasn’t enough time. Not unless they regularly visited the apothecary, but a guard captain couldn’t afford that plus the fancy gear that kid hauled around. No, even sixty might have been too high for him, primary stats like health and stamina excluded.

All of that would have been fine if his assessment of the creature had been correct. He’d thought, based on the reports, that the monster was a deceiver. Hutzpah was an ultimately useless stat in combat, so anything sufficiently higher level than it should have been more than its equal. Hells, stats primarily increased based on class and secondarily based on the food consumed. Meaning that if it had high Hutzpah, it was even more likely that it’s other stats were pitiful.

And yet, the kid is dead and the monster isn’t.

Deren read the last few sentences from the letter again before he ripped up the notice then and there.

‘I am not the requester for the mission in question, but I ask you to cancel the notice nonetheless. I will not have any more children’s lives be on my hands. I hope you feel the same.’

Deren couldn’t help but wonder, thinking back on the once bright-eyed boy that quested here years ago. Are they really all that different? Dying to the monster and losing who you are to it?

Shaking his head, he went to hand the letter back when halfway through the motion he stopped, sighing as he stood.

“I’ll take the news to the captain myself.”

The woman couldn’t hold back her sigh of relief as he left the office, letter in hand. He’d tormented her enough. His misery had only just begun.