The First Legendary Beast Master

Once they were back in the apartment, Lotus mad a grabby hands gesture towards Karl. "Turn over the good meat. There are plenty of cooking implements in this apartment, and I want to make us something. I will put a proper stew on for dinner as well, as we're not going to be going anywhere, so it will have time to simmer."

"Don't go saying anything that will raise flags. We want to actually get through a meal without major interruptions here." Dana laughed.

Lotus stuck out her tongue at the mage, and took out a slow cooker, then frowned and looked around the kitchen again.

"All of this is for bachelors or newlyweds. None of the pots and utensils are large enough for our whole group." She realized.

"If the travel utensils aren't suitable for use on the stove, you can send the ingredients down to the main kitchen and tell them what you want. That should work well enough. They might not be nature clerics, but they are professional chefs. I'm sure that they have most of the spices that you want them to use." Karl suggested.

"Oh, that's a great idea. There's a directory on the phone here. Dial 0 for the concierge and...

Hello, can I get a kitchen worker up to Monarch Karl's unit? I would like to have dinner prepared with some of the Royal Rank ingredients that we brought back, but the kitchen isn't stocked for as large of a group as we are expecting.

Yes. That would be wonderful, thank you."

Then she turned to give everyone a thumbs up.

"Done and done. They will be here in ten minutes to collect the special ingredients, and they will have the meal ready for whatever time we pick. I also got them to bring up a cart full of snacks for while we wait." She explained.

"Who knew that Lotus was secretly organized?" Tessa joked.

"When it's about food, I am excellent at organization. There is nothing more natural than not wanting to miss a meal."

As promised, the snacks soon arrived, and Karl loaded a large roast on the cart for the kitchen, and then a second one in case someone else had a special event.

Even in a building like this, high-ranking beast meat was not easy to get, so if they could incorporate a little of the boar meat into their menu meals for the next few days, it would buy Karl a lot of goodwill with the other residents.

He had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to need that soon once the beasts started to settle in. With their skills, it would be nearly impossible to keep them out of an apartment if they wanted to enter, and restraint was not a word commonly found in their vocabulary.

"Do you have a large amount of that meat available? We might be interested in making regular purchases. Assuming you can maintain it at this level of freshness, that is." The chef suggested.

"Food doesn't go bad in System storage, so it will remain that fresh indefinitely. I have a limited amount of the Royal Rank, but I can spare at least a tonne of Commander Rank boar meat." Karl agreed.

Lotus giggled, while Dana silently mouthed the words 'Hawk, you glutton' towards Karl, knowing that the bird could see her.

Each of the boars weighed more than that, even deboned and prepared for cooking. But the bones were valuable as well. Not just as a resource, but to render down to make soup stock.

There was one in the roast today, and Hawk would not mourn the loss of the bones. They were too crunchy and tasteless.

That gave Karl plenty of time to finish the messages before their lunch was ready, so he could send the responses with the delivery worker and relax for a while before the kids arrived.

However, the time that they got to themselves before the kids arrived turned out to be even less than Karl had expected. They had only just finished eating lunch when the phone rang to inform them that their new trainees were on the way up with an old friend.

That sounded promising, and Karl wondered who they had sent. He was hoping for one of the Mackenzie brothers, or perhaps one of his teachers from the Academy.

However, the long beard and deeply stoned eyes that smiled back at Karl from the other side of the door were none of those people.

"Doctor Skittles, welcome. I don't know how you got assigned to escort the trainees here, but it's good to see you again." Karl greeted the Nature Priest from the wounded veterans' hospital.

"I had hoped that name wouldn't stick. But I was the one in charge of ensuring the selected trainees were mentally suited to the task at hand. I know that your team isn't for the faint of heart, and if you release an aura of killing intent, it might break the will of many of the youngsters.

We wouldn't want that, and I suspect that you wouldn't appreciate having someone pee on your floor in terror." The old doctor joked.

There were five children behind him, though Karl felt a bit odd thinking that. They were only really three years younger than he was, a year from undergoing the awakening injection themselves. They did look determined, so at least someone had warned them about what was coming.

But more than that, they looked awestruck. The building was extremely luxurious, and the room was filled with people more powerful than anyone they were likely to have met so far in their lives.

"I should inform you that this experiment will be treated as an actual scientific experiment, and not just a game. There will be someone monitoring your progress while you are in the Capital, and the participants have been selected to have no connection to any of you." Doctor Skittles added.

"Well, that's not out of the realm of expectations. I thought that we would have to make daily reports, but if they're going to have someone watching us train, then we can skip that step.

Will you be the one today?" Karl replied.

"Indeed. There shouldn't be too much to report today, it's just a meet and greet." He shrugged.

Karl took out a handful of jewellery and smiled at him. "Oh, I wouldn't count on that. It's a shame that I couldn't learn Randomize to cast on them, but I think that there is a chance one or two of them might be able to awaken their Class by equipping a System imbued item."