“All right! Let’s get moving!”
“““Yeah!”””
With the preparations complete, the townspeople headed out into the streets, pulling carts and wagons behind them as the parade began. At the same time, cheers erupted from the crowds lining the roads. As for me, however, my attention was fixed on something else entirely.
“Come on, keep them moving!”
“Take this one too!”
There had been a lot of vegetables piled up as offerings. Large quantities of vegetables that had been offered on the altar were now being carried away into the food stalls.
And suddenly, I had a very bad feeling about this.
I should ask the person most likely to give me a straight answer.
“Emilia-sama, the vegetables from the altar are being taken to the stalls…”
“Oh, those? Well, the report to the gods is finished now. Since they’re considered blessed offerings, everyone decided it would be good fortune to share them and eat them together.”
I nodded. Yes, I understood the reasoning behind it. But that only answered half of what I wanted to know. Sharing the offerings among everyone made perfect sense. I had no issue with that part.
The real question was why they were being taken to the food stalls in the first place.
“Because you’re the one who’s going to cook them, of course.”
Emilia-sama looked at me with a bright smile, as though what she had just said were the most obvious thing in the world. I could only stare back at her with a blank expression, my gaze shifting repeatedly between her and the food stalls.
“E-Emilia-sama…. are you serious?”
“Completely serious.”
Her smile never wavered.
And then someone decided to make matters even worse.
“People of the town! Today, you shall have the chance to taste the cooking of the Lightning Chef!”
“““““Woooooooh!”””””
To my utter horror, the Margrave had whipped the gathered townsfolk into a frenzy. And for some reason, he was looking straight at me with an unbearably smug grin. He even threw in a thumbs-up for good measure. Ah… if circumstances allowed it, I would have loved nothing more than to punch the Margrave square in the face.
Unfortunately, the townspeople had already begun lining up in front of the stalls. At this point, there was no way I could say, “Sorry, I’m not cooking.”
“Shun-san, we’ll have some free time for a while.”
“The preparations for tomorrow’s outfits are already finished.”
“We’ll be gathering again this evening, so until then, we can help.”
Casey-san and Telma-san stepped forward with reassuring smiles, clearly intending to lend a hand.
It seemed that, whether I liked it or not, I was about to spend the Harvest Festival standing behind a food stall and cooking for an entire town. And judging from the excited crowd already forming a queue, this was going to be a very long day.
I accepted Sue and the others’ kind offer and went inside the stall.
Ao and Toria-san were going to help with the grilling, so I asked Sue and the others to just focus on chopping vegetables.
Damn, I thought there were strangely few vegetables when I was setting up the stall this morning. Thinking about it now, I should have seen this coming. Feeling a little down, I started preparing the okonomiyaki.
This is translated by Yume Neiji. Kindly read at yumeneijiworks.com
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