CWD: OE ~ Nine

The cook read through the latest message, knowing for a fact that he was going to buy the upgrade.

Okay, Cook, it seems you have fallen in love with this little hammer of worthlessness, so we’ll give you a break. Upgrade it to Tier 1 for 5,000 credits. Not only will you double the flour produced with each strike, not unlike your HungryCry Knives, but the flour you make will be reinforced with valuable nutrients and minerals. That’s right, the grain will be armored, and so will you. Cooking with millet flour isn’t easy, and people will complain, but you’ll have thick skin. So thick, in fact, that all attacks against the person eating food from the resulting flour will have their damage reduced by 10%. You can bake with the slogan: Eat my bread to keep from being dead!

Note: There is a 25% chance that the upgrade will not work, and the Splatter Millet will explode. You’re going to have to take that chance if you want this to happen. Also, if you drop the hammer during the upgrade process, it will automatically fail. It might not explode, but you’ll be out the credits either way. Don’t wimp out, is what we’re basically saying.

Are you sure you’d like to upgrade the Splatter Millet to Tier 1?

Yes / No.

Nacho didn’t understand the stuff about people complaining about millet flour, but if he could bake something that could reduce the amount of damage people took from attacks, it would be worth it. They’d get both a boon to their stats, as well as less wounds. It was a no-brainer to him.

Best of all, Nacho had the credits to pay for it all himself. He had nineteen times the revenue needed thanks to his Feasting Feats ability. His steak sandwiches had been a big hit, and he hadn’t been forced to make individual sales. Even with a slight drop in total potential income, he had been able to bring in more during a single meal than he usually could over the course of two days.

Before Nacho chose ‘yes’, he pointed the Splatter Millet at the door. “You guys better get out of here. I’ve tied my fate to this tiny hammer, and there’s a twenty-five percent chance that it will explode in my hand.”

Brie saw he wasn’t kidding, as did Reuben. Neither looked too happy about bailing on their friend, but Nacho wasn’t budging. The Healer arched a brow at the cook, “I’ll be standing right outside the door. If it explodes, I can and will hug you from a distance.”

“Aren’t you the best.” Nacho waited until they were out of his kitchen, and then he started the upgrade. The Splatter Millet started to glow with heat in his hand. He wanted to put it on the counter, but if he did that the upgrade would be over. The hammer was changing, growing a bit bigger, and changing shape.

The glow and heat intensified until Nacho thought that the upgrade surely had failed, but then it started to dim and cool until it was just a little flat-headed kitchen hammer about the size of a meat tenderizer.

A new message appeared for the upgraded weapon:

The Splatter Millet

Tier 1 Weapon

Don’t go to the mill, use this ultimate tool of grain destruction, to gain quadruple the flour and leave behind a quarter of the mess. This grain-hating hammer will keep the fluffy white clouds to a minimum, so clean-up will be a snap!

Sounds too good to be true? But wait, there’s more! Any baked goods you create with millet flour will reduce the damage taken by the eater of the food by 10% while effects last. That’s right. More pain (if you speak French) means less pain! Good luck baking with the millet flour. You’ll need it!

With the light show over, Reuben and Brie inched their way back into the kitchen. “How did it go?”

Nacho waved the small, flat-headed hammer at them. “It’s expensive, not going to lie, but I’m also excited to use it. Not only will I get a ton of flour with each slam, but if you eat anything I cook with it, you’ll take less damage. I don’t get why the System keeps warning me about using the millet flour. Like it’s hard to have around or something. It’s just flour, right?”

“Like I have any idea about baking.” Brie narrowed her eyes as she considered the man. “To be fair, you do have a history of having a… shall we say ‘steep learning curve’ when you start baking new things.”

Nacho winced at the memory of their first few days in the Juxtaposition. “Ouch, Brie. Why must you hurt me so?”

Reuben came over and waved away the sting. “Let’s see you use the thing. You spent all this money, and I want to see you in your kitchen, doing battle against the most monstrous of grains—the evil millet, scourge of your local bulk food bins.”

Nacho pulled the red and yellow sacks from his Storage Slot one at a time, handing them to Reuben, who laid them on the floor. Brie cleared his main counter and wiped up some of the food remnants. The cook selected a bag to heft onto the table and sprinkled out a few cups of millet grain.

Raising the hammer high, he smashed the Splatter Millet down on the grains. There was a little puff of yellowish cloud, but mostly it was just flour that spilled from the grains, easily a cup if not two. He slammed more millet, *pow, pow, pow*, until his counter was covered in the yellow flour. It was easy to brush the flour into a big metal container, which he marked with ‘Special: Ten Percent Damage reduction’!

As he breezed through the tough grain, Nacho found that he was happy with the purchase, though he knew he’d be even happier when he made his millet-flour donuts and people started eating them before combat.

Brie seemed far less pleased than the cook. “You spent five grand on the hammer, which is fine… but we need to invest in our fourth skill slots, maybe even buy a fifth for you, Nacho. I’ve been looking in the Store, and I’ve found a few things. There’s this ‘Yell’ ability that stuns my opponents. Something like that can make a fight easy, or give me a moment to escape.”

“We should wait for the Skills Box,” Nacho tried to deflect, “Just be patient.”

“Says the guy with all four of his Skill Slots filled,” Brie didn’t try to hide the troubled look on her face. “Look, I get your point, but I’m also concerned. I don’t want to die in this world, and I especially don’t want you two to die. Having more, and better, skills will help me feel a lot more comfortable.”

Reuben pulled Brie close. He had some yellow flour on his nose, which made him look goofy. Brie reached up and brushed it off. He practically radiated positivity. “Don’t worry. Let’s do some leveling today. Since we’re spending money, let’s get ourselves to level fifteen. That will increase our Fitness, give us more Health Points, and a better Health Regen.”

Brie shook her head. “We’ll need to talk with the council first about expenditures and such. I think once they eat Nacho’s donuts, they’ll come around. Frankly, we really have put off building the market apartments for too long. Let’s have people eating donuts, and then make our case.”

“Good call. I think that'll be the most effective way to get people on our side of things.” Reuben squeezed his wife but looked at Nacho. “Depending on how good those donuts are, of course. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Nacho had planned to get started right away, but he didn’t have the chance. Gustav and Gary came in, along with one of their new recruits, an excitable warrior named Simon Spear. His real last name wasn’t spear, but it had become a kind of nickname. He’d bought a magic spear, and had both a defensive ability to spin the spear to avoid getting attacked, as well as a hurl ability—which was where the magic spear really shone. He could throw the spear, and get it back as soon as it impacted something.

Simon was a definite go-getter, probably because he didn’t sleep much, talked fast, and fought furiously. He was roughly Nacho’s age, if a little younger, but had the temperament of a toddler on energy drinks. “Nacho! Hey, Nacho! We have beef. Like a lot of beef. Tons of beef. Outside. The GG’s and I brought up a bunch—we quartered it, like you showed us. Look… we want tacos. I know you might have some other plan for it, but we haven’t had tacos since we came here, and since we brought the meat-”

Gustav lifted a hand and shook the spearman aggressively. “Easy, Simon. Go easy on Nacho.”

The elder of the Gs, Gustav had given up fighting baldness and just shaved his head. He was only thirty, a former high school football coach, and surprisingly chill. Gary, on the other hand, had a certain… intensity. He’d embraced his long hair, and kept it back in a ponytail. Gary had played professional football for a while before blowing out his knee, then he’d gotten into sports medicine. While Gary wasn’t a Healer per-se, he did provide his Ghost Pepper Brigade some important basic medical services.

Gustav had a Motivation skill, given his ability to get teenagers to actually practice and show up to games, and he fought with a two-handed claymore. His sword was almost as big as Kala’s black blade, and it was coupled with a devastating Worldshaker Slash ability that used up the vast majority of his Hunger Points and Mana; but could oftentimes end a fight with a single blow.

“I love the sound of that!” Reuben clapped his hands. “Yes! Nacho! Tacos. It’s been too long. I’ll help with the tortillas. Good thinking, Simon.”

“Did you fight plants, Reuben? We heard you fought ‘millet’, and we have no idea what that means!” Simon was practically shouting in enthusiasm, and when Reuben explained to him, the spearman went on a tear about fighting fruits and vegetables. The end result was that he decided that he’d rather fight them than eat them. His friends had to physically block him from running off on his own to test his mettle against the nearest foliage.

Nacho went with Gustav and Gary to take stock of the haunches they’d pulled off Steer Clears. The quarters must’ve a hundred pounds each, but Nacho didn’t pause to start counting. If they wanted tacos, he’d have to get work processing the Putrid Mana out of the meat; the timer had already begun. He called into the kitchen, “Reuben and Brie. If you can clear off the flour on my counter, that’d help a lot. I’m going to bring in the meat and get started.”

Nacho hoped against hope he’d be able to get every last credit for the Steer Clear. In the end, he went through one full quarter and part of another. He didn’t get a full nineteen rounds, only sixteen before it dissolved, but that was still three hundred and fifty-two credits. Thanks to his knives, one hundred and twenty-five pounds of meat turned into one hundred eighty-seven and a half pounds… which Feasting Feats transformed into three thousand, five hundred, sixty-two and a half pounds.

Not everyone ate their allotted pound, but at the end of the day, he sold one thousand eight hundred and eighty meals across Tortilla Flats, Armor Mountain Central, and Jalapeno town. People were still getting used to the idea that Nacho could cook far more than they could eat, and he was happy beyond words to be able to provide.

At the end of the night, Nacho and his friends had a ton of cash on hand to use for their skills, to level themselves, or to buy something from the Store. Nacho was also thinking of saving up for an actual room of his own, a little place outside of the kitchen. He didn’t mind sleeping on his shelf, but he had been thinking more and more that a place on the market might be fun. Or he could build a tower right outside his kitchen—that would cut down on his walking time.

The massive windfall highlighted something important. Brie had been correct. They needed to start investing in themselves, and heavily. If he had been less of a spendthrift, he could have purchased Feasting Feats months ago, and would be far beyond his current power level at this moment.

The bottom line was that with his cooking income, he needed to be more flexible when it came to actually shopping and leveling. It wouldn’t do him any good to die with a bunch of credits to his name. Better to spend them and increase his skills, than to hoard them for no reason. On his way to bed, he promised Brie that they were going to do a ton of shopping the next day.

Nacho awoke at first light to get started on his donuts, finally ready to find out what the cryptic warning the system had given him about millet flour meant.