abcnovels
Volume 5 - Ch 2.13
Volume 5 - Ch 2.13
Translator: DarkHeartedAlchemist Editor: Weasalopes
And once the three Needlewoods are dealt with, I can easily switch back to the Water Magic and dispatching the remaining NT Ant with Water Balls. It is quite a bit of tedious work, but it is certainly better than trying to use only Water Magic that the Needlewoods are resistant to, which would just be a needless waste of my MP.
In the Labyrinth of Quratar the setting is such that the eighth floor was the place where Needlewoods were the native monsters, and the ninth floor is the place where NT Ants are the native monsters, so naturally the probability of NT Ants appearing as the mobs that we are going to have to break through is going to be much higher than any other monsters.
And since NT Ants can poison us with every attack they are going to make, then dealing with them first is the highest priority on our to-do list whenever they appear as part of the group of monsters that we are currently facing. Thankfully, since they are weak to Water Magic, all that it takes to defeat a single NT Ant are three shots of my Water BallSpell, so most of the time I am capable of defeating them without even allowing them to close in on our location enough for them to get into the melee range, so with the way that things stand, it is very unlikely that any one of us is going to get poisoned by the NT Ants anytime soon.
Now that we are on the ninth level, the level of the Needlewoods went up from Lv.8 to Lv.9, which means that they have more HP and that the battles with them are going to last a little bit longer than the ones on the eighth floor and that more spells is going to be needed to bring each individual one down, but since the overall number of battles is lower than the number of battles that we had to go through on the eighth floor, I am actually using fewer spells than I was anticipating to be using, which is good from the standpoint of the conservation of my MP.
It took us a few battles to adjust to the changes in comparison to the previous floor we have been on, but now I feel that we can fight in quite a smooth way here on the ninth floor. We then wandered around the ninth floor of Quratars Labyrinth until the sunrise, and after we returned back home from the Labyrinth, it was just the perfect time for us to cook breakfast. And the dish on todays menu was yakisoba.
Okay, maybe not the genuine Japanese yakisoba, but rather the closest thing to yakisoba that I could have prepared with fried macaroni, sauces, meat and some vegetables that were cut in as smallest pieces as possible. The process of making it was not ac complicated as you might think.
We just fried Rabbit Meat and the vegetables with olive oil, add in some boiled short pasta, sprinkled it all with a bit of the cooking wine and then fried it all while adding just a little bit of fish sauce as a finishing touch before finally taste-testing the entire thing. I have already made tha dish before for our dinner on one particular evening so I was pretty confident in the outcome, and sure enough, I was definitely not disappointed with how it turned out in the end.
Taste-wise, it was pretty good, and not a single ingredient tasted like it was out of place or not in harmony with the others. Oh, and by the way, this world has not only short pasta, but also the long variant that is typically used in making spaghetti, but there is one problem with it: I do not know how it happened or why it is like that, but for whatever reason, this world has no forks in it, so in order to eat this makeshift Yakisoba, Sherry and Roxanne were skillfully using a combination of wooden knives and forks.
As for myself, I do not have to worry about how I am going to eat because I bought a pair of chopsticks for myself, but then I began to wonder: if I made a classic yakisoba with long pasta, how would Sherry and Roxanne go about eating it?
Would they just start grabbing the pasta and everything else with their bare hands then shove all of that into their mouths unceremoniously? Meat and vegetable can always be eaten by stabbing them with a knife, but eating hot, fried pasta is definitely not something that I would have liked to see Sherry and Roxanne doing, and that is exactly why I decided to go with short pasta instead of the long one: so that we could avoid the bare hands pasta eating scenario. Short pasta is ideal for this kind of world without forks, because it can be easily scooped with a spoon.
We divided the house chores in the following way: I was in charge of cooking breakfast, Roxanne was doing laundry and Sherry was doing some minor cleaning around the entire house.
This world is not a technologically advanced one, so there is no washing machines or vacuum cleaners, which makes the housework a pretty burdensome and time-consuming series of activities, so right now making breakfast, which is comparatively easy when paired up with cleaning and doing laundry is the best kind of dream job for me because I still get to be useful around the house without overexerting myself too much. And now that everything was done and ready, I brought my yaki macaroni to the table for all of us to enjoy.
When I got to the living room, Roxanne and Sherry were already there, and I could see that the scent of the spicy fish sauce that I used for this dish was already causing their mouths to water.
Did I make you wait long?
No, we just got here after finishing our chores for the time being.
Apparently I caught them in the middle of something, because Sherry was siting on a chair while Roxanne was holding her hair from behind.
And what is that which she is holding in her hand? Is that.. the brush that she bought during her day off? In any case, the sight of the two of them just sitting there, getting along with one another was quite a relaxing one.. but I could not shake off the feeling that something was missing from this harmonious picture.
Thank you very much for combing my hair for me, Miss Roxanne. I really appreciate it.
Do not mention it, Sherry. Doing this is a pleasure, because your hair are so rich and glossy and feel really nice to the touch.
When Roxanne was done with combing Sherrys hair, she put away her brush and sat down at the breakfast table while sitting right across from me so that we could see each other face-to-face.
Well then, are you girls ready to eat?
Yes, time to dig in!
We then dug in into the food that I have distributed equally on our plates so that no one would feel like he got too much or not enough. That fried yaki macaroni of mine did not taste bad, but at the same time I could clearly feel that there was something missing from this dish, something that I had trouble pinpointing exactly. Maybe it is because of the short pasta that I used instead of the regular long pasta? No, I feel like the problem is not with pasta, but something else entirely. And they are probably seasonings, like blue seaweed or red ginger, which I had no way of obtaining at the current moment, because none of the Quratars shop offered it or anything that could have been used as a possible replacement.
As a result, the dish that I have prepared tasted like only something that was half-ready to me, affecting my experience of eating this thing in a negative way, but since blue seaweed and red ginger are very specific products even in my old world, then I guess there is no point brooding over it for to long and simply accept that this is just how things are and that they simply cannot be helped sometimes, and there is just nothing that I could have done to change that state of being.
However, the most important thing to me right now is the fact that both Sherry and Roxanne are stuffing their faces with it while looking incredibly satisfied and puffing out their cheeks because of all the pasta and sauce that they were trying to shove into their mouths all at once, which was the best possible review of my dish that I could have gotten.