A bunch of the students who had gathered around screamed at the gory sight.
“Don’t give up! We’ve still got time!”
“Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine...” While the students were averting their eyes from the ghastly scene, Melsa began carving the bird with practiced movements. “Seventy!”
“All right!”
The family was all lined up in a row, passing the carved meat one after another from Emma, to William, to Arven, to George, to Leonard, to the pot like they were in a water relay.
“Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five...”
“This is the last of it!”
Once they’d put the last of the meat in the pot, Leonard used fire tongs to grab the stones from Emma’s cooking fire (he’d been heating them for their bath later) and put them into the pot. The heated rocks made the water steam up, and everyone looked at Emma.
“Ninety-seven!”
At that, everyone gave a celebratory shout.
“We made it!”
“We sure did!”
“Thank goodness!”
The whole family sat down, as though all the tension holding their bodies up had finally let go.
“Did what?!” The king, who had forgotten that his life was in danger just moments ago, asked what all the participants of the field trip wanted to know.
“Your Majesty, this is a monster known as a roc,” Melsa answered the king’s bewildered question as she wiped the blood splatter off her cheek.
“What?! That was a monster?!” The king and all the people around him were shocked by Melsa’s response, but with a bird that size, it would have been a lot stranger if it weren’t a monster.
“Yes. A roc is a very large bird. It can easily snatch up a human for food, so they’re extremely dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” It seemed to the king that they’d shot it down with no trouble at all.
Melsa was about to continue her explanation, but William hurriedly picked it up for her. “Well, about that! Rocs have been spotted taking their prey all the way up into the air, then dropping them over and over again until they’re ground up into a meat that’s easier for them to eat.” It would have been more than suspicious for a count’s wife to talk about humans getting turned into mincemeat. Kinda late to be trying to keep up appearances for her now, given that she was just chopping up a bird like it was nothing, William thought with a forced smile.
“How awful... I had no idea such a monster existed...”
“Y-Yes. Rocs tend to fly extremely high in the sky when they’re hunting for prey, so it’s normally next to impossible to notice them up there,” the Monster Studies professor elaborated. Those massive birds generally flew so high, they were nothing more than a speck to the naked eye. It was practically impossible for a normal human to see one, so the professor was looking at Emma, the one who’d spotted it, in utter disbelief.
“I’ve got really good eyesight, Professor!” Emma giggled with such ladylike mannerisms (learned from Hilda) that nobody ever would have believed she’d been madly plucking feathers moments ago. It was such a perfect smile that everyone wondered if maybe what they’d seen had been nothing more than an illusion.
“Um... If I may ask, why were you counting like that earlier, Emma?” Prince Edward asked, as it was one of the things bugging him about all this. It was already a tense situation, so slowly counting like that had only increased everyone’s anxieties.
“Oh, good question, Your Highness! You have to cut and soak the meat of a roc in over sixty degree water within 120 seconds of slaying it!” Emma had been smiling, but she was deathly serious about this answer.
One could never rest easy after killing a monster. Some would explode if you didn’t take care of them, or turn into poison gas, or lay eggs after death. Edward had learned about all the difficult-to-dispose-of monsters in Monster Studies, so he was on guard at Emma’s response.
The Monster Studies professor looked confused. “Huh? But...you shouldn’t have to do anything after you kill a roc...”
“What? How could you say that, Professor?!” William raised his voice in disbelief.
“Yeah, how could you?! Rocs are a race against time! Even I know that!” George was shaking his head, wondering if his teacher was out of his mind.
“But most people would be too exhausted to even move after defeating a roc! What was that bowmanship?! You’re a researcher, Dr. Arven! How were you able to fell a giant roc with a single arrow?! I’ve never even heard of any arrows that could reach a roc circling that high up!” the Hunting Techniques professor cried. Even if you were supposed to use projectiles to take down a flying monster, the professor couldn’t possibly tell his students to imitate what Arven had just done.
“Huh? I mean, Emma told me to take it down with those big, sparkly eyes of hers. Of course I was gonna put some muscle into it!” Arven said, wondering what the problem was. Leonard was nodding along, agreeing wholeheartedly.
“Ngh... What in the world is going on with that family?!”
“W-Well... There was a chance that the king or the prince could have been snatched up by a roc just now. We should think of this as a good thing.” As the Hunting Techniques professor fell to his knees, the Monster Studies professor put his hand on his shoulder to comfort him. Thinking would only make it worse. Even if it generally would take all one’s energy to take down a roc, the people of the border had far more experience, and they might have needed to be far more particular about how to hunt and handle monsters—perhaps in ways even the instructors were unfamiliar with. When he thought that he’d get the chance to see such special methods, it made the twenty some-odd years he’d been studying monsters all the more worth it.
“Emma Stewart! Why is it that your family is so particular about this 120 seconds?!” If he knew this, he could become an even greater Monster Studies instructor. Wolfgang Garriano was starting to feel rather good about this turn of events, until...
“Because it won’t taste as good if you take any longer.” Emma’s answer was...far beyond anything he could have imagined.
“What.”
“If you don’t cut up a roc and put it in over sixty-degree water within a hundred and twenty seconds, it doesn’t taste as good!” Emma explained, and the whole family nodded along.
“What?!”
As always, the most important thing the Stewarts cared about on a monster hunt was whether they could eat it and whether it would taste good.