Meanwhile, as the lord of the Skyte region and the hunters were worrying themselves sick, the people they were rushing to rescue were preparing dinner.
And their tent was huge. All the maids doing the cooking, the guards standing watch, the participating students, the king, the prince, all the attending knights, and every other person present kept stealing glances at the Stewart family’s tent. They’d deliberately chosen to put their ridiculously massive tent as close to the forest as possible. It was such a full-scale deal that one wouldn’t have imagined it was made for camping, and it only took them about an hour to set up. They connected one part to a carriage, then put it together with nothing more than thin supports and cloth. Nobody could take their eyes off of the Stewarts as they effortlessly finished it. Could a tent really stand with such narrow supports? Surely, it would break, right? There was no way it could support the weight of such a large cloth. At first, the spectators were all watching with worry, but that worry slowly became surprise as it all started coming together.
For one thing, the boys with the spear and the bow that the Stewarts had brought as their guards were just spacing out the whole time, not carrying any of the supports. It was Count Stewart himself and his son, George, doing all the work. Dr. Arven Stewart, one of the greatest minds in the kingdom, was dutifully drawing water for them. It was odd...they could’ve sworn they saw a claw-foot bathtub. For a tent.
Lastly, the count’s wife and the girl were happily cooking in front of the tent. Terrifyingly, there had been a powerful smell coming from the pot that the spectators had never smelled before.
“Hee hee. Y’know, when Joshua gave us all this powder to keep monsters away because he couldn’t come with us on the field trip, I was thinking we didn’t need to be so superstitious, but...” The girl smiled as she stirred the pot. She’d been putting all sorts of colorful powders in there, and nobody could even begin to imagine what she might be brewing in it.
“Is the Stewart family’s dinner like...okay?”
“Normally a noble wouldn’t be cooking, would she? And that smell is so... I mean, it’s probably something untoward, don’t you think?”
“Y-You sure someone shouldn’t stop them? I mean, they’ve been boiling those vegetables and monster meat in there for a while now!”
“Oh, no! Lady Emma’s putting it in her mouth!”
While the foreign powder Joshua had gotten them was one most people in the kingdom would never have heard of, it was one the Tanaka family was quite familiar with.
“I didn’t think this anti-monster powder would’ve been turmeric, cumin, coriander, red peppers, oregano, paprika, and all those other good spices! Joshua really saved us a bunch, huh?” Emma, the curry master of the evening, was grinning ear to ear.
Melsa was now cooking some roc meat she’d seasoned separately. She was using different seasonings than the ones Joshua had given them.
“Lady Melsa, I really appreciate your help,” Francesca said, nervously bowing to Melsa. “Mother told me I should bring this along because it’s good for me, but I really didn’t think I’d be able to eat it all myself.” One of the lands the Delacours owned was rich in dairy farming, so they were exporting dairy products nearly once a month.
“Why, you’ve saved us a great deal too, Lady Delacour. I didn’t think we’d hunt down such a large roc, but I’ll be using this for marinating. It’ll make the meat much more tender.” The lovely scent rising from the meat brought a smile to Melsa’s face.
“L-Look at Count Stewart’s wife... I think she just put anti-monster powder on that monster meat...”
“That wasn’t just putting a little on there either... She pretty much doused it...”
“And that stuff Lady Francesca brought... I mean, you’re just supposed to eat that as is, aren’t you? And they just poured so much of it on there... Someone stop them! This hellish kitchen nightmare is too much! Something awful is going to happen here! Isn’t there some maid we could call? Isn’t there a single maid in the Stewart family who would be in charge of all this?!”
All the commotion around them was being directed at the Stewarts, but the family themselves were all too focused on the tent and cooking to even notice. While everyone else was trembling with fear, the noblewomen finished their hellish cooking, and so began their dinner from hell.