The clink of metal against a white porcelain plate shattered the suffocating silence.
The sound was soft, barely audible, yet inside this dead-silent test kitchen, it rang out like a sledgehammer striking an executioner’s altar.
Shinomiya Kojiro sat with a straight back in his judge’s chair.
His thin-framed glasses reflected the fluorescent lights, concealing the icy glint in his eyes.
Before him, a plate containing a slice of vegetable terrine seemed to lose its luster under the chef’s stare.
He set his fork down with a slow, highly deliberate motion.
There was no explosive anger.
No shouting.
Only an absolute calmness that was far more terrifying than any storm.
Across the table, Tadokoro Megumi stood rigidly.
The girl’s face was as white as a sheet of paper.
Her fingers were interlaced tightly, trembling so violently that her knuckles turned white.
The air around her felt as though it had been sucked dry, making it difficult for her to draw a breath.
Shinomiya’s lips parted slowly.
His voice was flat, devoid of a single shred of empathy.
“You fail.
Please pack your belongings and leave Totsuki.”
The air in the room felt as if it had frozen solid.
A minor apocalypse had just been delivered in one simple sentence.
A few hours before that moment of ruin…
9:00 AM.
The spring sun shone brightly.
Its light reflected off the marble floor of the corridor, creating an ironic illusion of peace for the students walking upon it.
The second day of the training camp officially began.
Emiya Shirou walked with a steady rhythm, his shoulders relaxed, his breathing even.
Thanks to his recovery at the Recette Heaven facility last night, he felt he was in peak condition.
To his right, Yukihira Soma stretched both arms upward, yawning widely without caring about the strange looks from other students.
“Haaah…
this hotel mattress really makes me want to sleep until noon.
What a shame we have to go back to fighting with pots and pans.”
“Soma-kun, not so loud!
What if an instructor hears you,” Megumi reprimanded in a panic.
The girl’s face was deathly pale, her fingers wringing together nervously.
“Calm down, Megumi,” Shirou said gently, his deep voice carrying a soothing resonance.
“Wasting your energy panicking before the assignment is even given—will only mess up your work rhythm later.
Take a deep breath.”
Megumi took a long breath, trying to follow Shirou’s advice.
“Y-Yes, you’re right, Shirou-kun.
I have to focus.
I managed to get through the first day, I can definitely get through today.”
The three of them turned the corner of the corridor and stepped into the classroom designated on their schedule.
The room was a large-scale industrial kitchen with dozens of gleaming stainless-steel workstations.
Over thirty students had gathered there, standing anxiously behind their respective tables.
Shirou took a spot at one of the middle workstations, with Soma and Megumi at adjacent stations.
As soon as they set down their knife kits, the sliding doors at the front of the room opened.
The room’s temperature felt as though it plummeted several degrees in a matter of seconds.
The rhythmic, precise footsteps of leather shoes echoed on the ceramic floor.
A tall man with faded pink hair strode in.
His white chef’s uniform bore not a single crease or stain, ironed with an obsessive perfection.
Thin-framed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, framing a pair of eyes that looked at all the students in the room as if looking at a row of pebbles on the street.
Shinomiya Kojiro.
The Magician of Legumes.
The first Japanese chef to win the Pluspol award in Paris.
Shirou narrowed his eyes slightly, observing the pink-haired man.
From his incredibly upright posture, his uncreased uniform, and the way his eyes swept the room, Shirou could immediately assess the character of the chef before them.
This man was an authoritarian perfectionist, someone who held absolute control over his kitchen and would not tolerate even the slightest mistake.
“Good morning,” Shinomiya’s voice broke the silence.
His tone was smooth and calm.
“I am a Totsuki graduate of the 79th Generation…
Shinomiya Kojiro.
From this second forward, this room is my kitchen.
And in my kitchen, my orders are absolute.”
Panicked whispers instantly erupted among the students in the back rows, like a beehive that had just been hit by a rock.
“Damn it…
we got Chef Shinomiya,” a student whispered in a hushed voice.
Cold sweat visibly trickled down his temple.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me?!
I heard from the kids in other dorms that he expelled over thirty students in his class yesterday!” his friend replied in a panic.
Shinomiya tapped his index finger against the steel podium desk in front of him.
That soft tap somehow sounded louder than all the whispers, instantly plunging the room back into silence.
“Your assignment today is very simple,” Shinomiya continued, ignoring the thick fear emanating in the air.
“You will cook a menu of my choosing.
The staff has already distributed the recette at your respective stations.
You’ve read it, haven’t you?”
Shirou looked down, staring at a thick piece of paper placed face-down on his workstation.
He flipped it over.
His eyes quickly scanned the string of precise instructions, rigid gram measurements, and boiling times calculated down to the second.
A nerve on Shirou’s temple twitched slightly.
Inside his brain, he began to work, constructing a three-dimensional model of the dish based on the text on the paper.
“This is…” Soma muttered beside Shirou, his eyes narrowing as he read the recipe.
“He’s telling us to cook Chef Shinomiya’s own recipe…” muttered another random student, this time his voice sounding like a desperate whine.
“The Nine Vegetable Terrine…”
Nine Vegetable Terrine.
In the culinary world, this dish was a classic French masterpiece demanding high-level technical perfection.
It wasn’t simply a matter of chopping vegetables and mixing them together.
Nine different types of vegetables—green asparagus, carrots, yellow bell peppers, cabbage, zucchini, and others—had to be processed separately.
Each vegetable possessed a different boiling point, blanching time, and water content.
The vegetables then had to be arranged neatly in layers, like a stained-glass mosaic, inside a long terrine mold.
To bind them together, gelée was used—a savory aspic or jelly made from clear cabbage broth.
If one vegetable was boiled ten seconds too long, its texture would turn mushy and destroy the integrity of the terrine when sliced.
If the gelée broth wasn’t seasoned with absolute precision, the flavors would clash and become a disaster on the tongue.
This was a dish that purely tested technique, cleanliness, and absolute calculation.
“I picked the easiest one from my stack of recettes,” Shinomiya said, adjusting his glasses with his middle finger.
A faint, condescending smile played on his lips.
“Or…
do you feel this is too childish?
Do you want me to give you a harder recipe?”
Silence.
Not a single student dared to breathe too loudly, let alone answer such an insane challenge.
“Damn it…
that arrogant bastard…” cursed a student in the front row, his voice suppressed so low it was barely audible.
The veins on his neck bulged.
“I really want to punch that face of his…”
Shirou remained silent, staring at the recipe in his hand.
This recipe was indeed a masterpiece, without a doubt.
But to Shirou, whose cooking memories spanned across space, time, and battlefields, this recipe was a blueprint he could read as clearly as reading the anatomy of a sword.
He already knew exactly the sequence of work: heat the water, prepare an ice bath, process the root vegetables first, followed by the leafy greens.
“There is one more thing,” Shinomiya’s voice cut through the air again, sweeping away all whispers of rebellion.
“For this assignment, you are not permitted to form teams.
This is an individual evaluation.
You will cook this dish entirely on your own from start to finish.”
Megumi swallowed hard.
Her face instantly paled seeing just how dense and complex the processing instructions were on that single sheet of recipe paper.
Processing nine different types of vegetables alone with a very limited amount of time was a logistical nightmare.
“Sharing information, discussing, or helping other students is strictly prohibited,” Shinomiya threatened, his eyes sweeping the entire room, staring down the students one by one as if they were defendants in a courtroom.
“If I see anyone talking to each other about how to cut or boiling times, I will expel both of you that very second.”
He pointed toward the back of the room.
“You may each select your own ingredients from the storage room behind the kitchen.
Everything has been prepared there,” Shinomiya glanced at the large wall clock ticking above the kitchen entrance.
“And, a little piece of advice from me.
Starting now…
assume that everyone standing in this room, even the friend standing next to you, is an enemy trying to kill your career.”
Shirou furrowed his brow.
That last sentence was clearly not just a rhetorical figure of speech.
His sharp instincts immediately picked up on an anomaly.
Why would Shinomiya, a perfectionist, tell them to fight over ingredients?
If the provided ingredients were of uniform quality, there would be no need for the instruction to treat the others as ‘enemies’ when gathering supplies.
There was only one logical conclusion.
He didn’t provide enough prime quality ingredients for everyone, Shirou thought to himself.
This isn’t just a test of cooking technique.
It’s a test of meticulousness in selecting ingredients, adaptation, and desperation.
“Your time limit is three hours,” Shinomiya announced, lowering his hand to his side.
His eyes glinted sharply behind his lenses.
“Well then…
begin.”
That word became the trigger.
“Hurry!
The vegetables!” “Get out of my way, damn it!”
In a fraction of a second, the previously tense kitchen turned into a chaotic battlefield.
Thirty students sprinted simultaneously toward the storage room door.
Panicked shouts, crude curses, and the squeak of shoes squealing against the floor blended into a deafening uproar.
They pushed each other, elbowed shoulders, and pulled at each other’s uniform collars just to be the first inside the room.
Soma chuckled softly, quickly adjusting his apron.
“Well, well, what extraordinary enthusiasm.
I can’t afford to be left behind then!” Soma immediately sprinted after the mob, nimbly weaving through the gaps between the students.
Megumi gasped, confusion and panic taking over.
“W-Wait!
Please don’t push!
I-I have to get cabbage too—kyaa!” Megumi nearly tripped when a stocky student roughly shoved her shoulder while running toward the door.
The girl was tossed around in the current of human panic, dragged toward the ingredient room without any plan whatsoever.
Shirou stood completely still in his spot.
He didn’t join the sprint.
He didn’t join the pushing.
His golden-brown eyes stared straight through the crowd, monitoring their movements.
Across the room, Shinomiya Kojiro propped his chin on one hand, watching the chaos with a faint, condescending smile.
And Tadokoro Megumi, with her blinding panic, was walking straight into the perfectionist chef’s snare.
“Like my work?