What would you do if one day a game you'd never seen before suddenly downloaded itself onto your phone, and a blood-red message on the screen warned that you'd die if you didn't play?
Mian Yi, a hardcore gaming addict, simply tears open the snack wrapper in her hand and declares: Play it!
After opening the game, she discovers:
What? You can customize your character's face? Customize it like crazy!
What? You can fight monsters and level up? Grind like mad!
What? You can awaken skills after leveling up? I'll play until dawn if that's what it takes!
After fighting monsters, cooking, fighting monsters, and cooking, Mian Yi grinds away for 48 hours straight. At last, the System displays a notification:
Congratulations! You have awakened a talent skill:
[Gluttony] (Growth Potential: SSS)
Ability description: 'Greed for wealth is gluttony; greed for food is gluttony.'
You are the embodiment of insatiable greed, a tyrant to the voracious. Desire is your sustenance, and the dark dregs of human nature will be drawn to you.
Congratulations! You have awakened a derivative skill:
[Whale Swallow] (Growth Potential: SSS)
Ability description: 'Fill the belly and gorge without limit.'
When a cursed spirit's health bar falls below 20%, you can activate this skill to devour it. The cursed spirit you devour will be stored as one of your abilities.
[Insatiable Feast] (Growth Potential: ???)
Ability description: 'Fall, revel, and indulge to your heart's content in this abundant feast.'
After using the skill 'Whale Swallow' a certain number of times, it can be upgraded to the ultimate skill, 'Insatiable Feast.' All creatures within its domain will become delicacies at the banquet table, unable to escape before being devoured.
Mian Yi, reading the skill descriptions: Am I not just completely invincible now?
*
After Okkotsu, Tokyo Jujutsu High welcomes another troublesome new student.
At first glance, she is petite and adorable, like a soft, sweet cotton candy that could be swallowed in one bite. She's the sort of girl who instantly inspires boundless affection.
She's just a little cold, a little neurotic, a little hot-tempered, and unable to speak. Cotton Candy-chan is practically perfect!
Only later do her classmates discover that she is nothing like she seems.
She is cold by nature, and no one has ever heard her say a single word.
She acts without the slightest logic, kicking open boxes and scavenging for equipment as soon as she enters a new environment.
She deals with cursed spirits with brutal cruelty, charging forward with her weapon to beat them to death as soon as she sees one.
After she brutally tortures a cursed spirit to death yet again, its scarlet blood splashes across the girl's cheek. She doesn't even notice, grinning as she hacks the cursed spirit into pieces with a single blow.
The supervisor assigned to observe her records this summary in a notebook:
Subject of observation: XXX Mian Yi. Her talent, physical skills, and cursed energy are already at the level of a Special Grade Sorcerer. Unable to speak due to past 'trauma.' Harbors a deep-seated hatred toward cursed spirits and similar entities. Pathological, obsessive, and unhinged, with a suspected lack of human empathy and signs of emotional detachment.
Threat Assessment: [Extremely Dangerous]
The people sent by the Jujutsu Association see her as a volatile hazard, while the teachers at the school think she has great talent but uses extreme methods. If no one pulls her back, she'll run straight to hell without looking back.
Even Inumaki, who is always dutifully assigned as her mission partner and actually cleans up her messes behind the scenes, earning them the nickname "the mute duo," thinks the same thing.
Until the day he accidentally encounters a Special Grade Cursed Spirit and suffers a backlash from a cursed speech technique used above his level, coughing up blood. She arrives late, a knife in hand.
The beautiful, frail girl, like a porcelain doll, reaches out with cold fingertips and gently touches the trembling snake-and-fang curse mark at the corner of his bloodied lips. For the first time, she speaks to him:
"Who hurt you? Was it that damn thing, "
In the next instant, a strange bronze-skinned beast with a human face and the body of a sheep rises imperiously. Within the black space that unfolds, a banquet table piled high with corpses is surrounded by the drifting sounds of strings and bamboo flutes, while spirits laugh and play. With a roar, the Special Grade Cursed Spirit is served on a platter. As it stares in terror, the beast opens its enormous, blood-filled maw, tears it apart, and swallows it whole.
The classmates watching nearby, and Inumaki himself, are too shocked to speak: ...You can talk?!
Mian Yi: ?
She'd just been busy grinding monsters and leveling up all this time, but somehow everyone else had suddenly decided she was a bloodthirsty cursed-spirit-killing maniac.
※ Reader's guide:
1. I edited the blurb a little. The pairing is still with Inumaki, and she's still a gourmet.
2. Early on, the heroine can't speak in the game. It's like those games where the protagonist has no voice actor and only makes little "mm" and "ah" sounds, but the other characters understand you just from your nods and hand gestures.
3. Later, the game will affect reality, and the heroine will be incredibly powerful.
4. Inumaki's tongue is so damn sexy, huff huff. This is a shameless fanfic. I'll start once I've paid off my current debts.
Written 2023.4.20
Theme: Good food can give people motivation to live and hope for growth.