Chapter 11

“Took you long enough to get here!” My sister shouted from my kitchen. “What, did you take a sightseeing trip to the next country over?”

“No, dear sister of mine. Probably the fact that we had to stop to buy ingredients was part of the reason.”

Yes, if being a pain in the ass that came to visit unexpectedly wasn’t bad enough, my sister demanded that we stop at a grocery store to buy food. Specifically, fresh ingredients. On top of all the cosplay clothes we had, Mana and I were now carrying an entire car trunk’s worth of stuff.

I really can’t wait to off-load all this stuff, geez.

Thankfully, I wasn’t so cruel as to leave my sister outside for a whole hour, so after she hung up the phone in my face, I called her back to tell her the combination lock so she could get inside the apartment.

An apartment that I now barely recognized.

“You… What the hell did you do in here?!”

“I tied things up, duh. No way I can work around this dump.”

The apartment was, shall we say, clean. No, that’s not the right word. It was sanitized. A slight floral and chemical smell hung in the air, despite the window being open. Everything was tidied and organized, but in that distinct way that made you uncomfortable for having someone organize your things without your consent. Mind you, it’s not like I never cleaned my apartment, and with Mana around now, the menace that was her long hair forced me to vacuum at least twice as frequently.

That wasn’t the issue.

“Everything is out of order!” I screamed. “Who gave you permission to mess with my stuff?”

“I’m doing you a favor, Juwon. This type of work would cost you a pretty penny if you hired someone, so be grateful I did it for free,” Sunhi retorted. “And besides, now that you’re living with someone else, you can’t possibly think things were fine, right? Both your clothes were all mixed together! What sort of living conditions are those?”

Yeah, right. Little does she know Mana is even more of a slob than I am.

I sighed. No matter what, I knew my sister’s heart was in the right place.

“Let’s put that aside for now. So what do you need all this stuff for?” I said as I deposited the bags of fresh ingredients we had just bought.

“Simple, Juwon. I’m teaching Mana how to cook.”

I could feel my head getting dizzy.

“You what?”

⬡⬢⬡⬢⬡

“Oh, so this is how you hold a knife! I was wondering how you would do it!”

“No, not like that! You’ll cut yourself!”

I was observing the women wrangling in the kitchen—and no, not because I thought that was their place or some other outdated notion; if anyone here thought that, it was Sunhi. Simply, my sister had shoved me aside when I tried to offer them help. “This is for Mana,” she said, and told me to go do something else. But it’s not like I could focus on drawing in these conditions, with both of them speaking with the volume cranked up to eleven, so I ended up half playing a game and half watching them. And they were serious! They had both put on aprons and everything.

But, huh… as you’d expect, things weren’t going well.

“These are unevenly chopped… this is no way to present food!”

“Ahh, what’s the matter? They are all going into the broth, right? No one will see them!”

“That’s not the point! Sure, for this dish it doesn’t matter, but the point is teaching you how to do things properly!”

Sunhi’s great first cooking lesson was for soup. Just simple vegetable cream soup. It was the kind of cooking that barely counted as cooking; even I could do it. And yet, unsurprisingly, Mana was struggling a lot with even the most basic of instructions. I’d kept her far, far away from knives and the stove all this time precisely because the risks of something going terribly wrong were just about 100%.

But somehow, her tenacity surpassed anything I could ever have considered.

“Okay, so the broth is boiling now, so it’s time to add—”

“Hmm, crunchy!” Mana said as she reached into the pack of pasta and shoved it straight into her mouth. “This is great stuff!”

“Don’t eat raw pasta! For god’s sake…”

Sunhi took a glance at me, then dragged herself away from Mana, still crunching away with bits of pasta in her mouth.

“Juwon! This is unbelievable!” She said, whispering but still as angry as she possibly could be. “Where the hell did you find her?!”

“I told you, on that ramen machine.”

“No, that can’t be true. This girl is completely clueless about anything. She’s like a little kid. She can’t use a knife properly; she eats uncooked food… I can’t begin to imagine what sort of upbringing she had. It’s like she appeared in the world without any concept of common sense. Is she a feral child or something?!”

I mean, that isn’t too far off the truth.

“W-Well… I mean…”

“Look,” Sunhi said, apparently having calmed herself down. “I’m not one to get in between a couple like this, normally,” she began. “But this sure looks fishy. You’re not…” She paused, as if she didn’t want me to hear the next words. “No, you might be a loser, but you’re not that kind of loser.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll be frank, then,” she said. “You’re not exploiting her, right?”

“What?! Of course—”

But my words got stuck in my throat. I wasn’t exploiting Mana in the way my sister was thinking about. Obviously not. But in certain ways, it’s not like I wasn’t using her. Even if she was on board with it, I was using her miraculous existence and her exceptional good looks to promote my account.

Is it really okay for things to continue like this?

“That’s a suspicious pause if I ever heard one,” Sunhi said.

“No! It’s not anything like you’re thinking.”

“Right…”

Sunhi stomped away, back to Mana, who had apparently gotten bored with eating raw pasta.

“Mana, right? Let’s go out. Just the two of us.”

“Huh? O-Okay, sure, but what about the soup? It’s not ready yet, right?”

“Juwon can take care of it.”

“W-well… sure, I can do that,” I replied.

“Great. You’re… dressed reasonably well, so take off your apron and let’s go.”

Before I could even understand what was happening, the two of them bolted outside, leaving me alone with all that soup filling my apartment with the smell of vegetables.

Great, now I feel left out.

What the hell was my sister thinking? Mana was a walking disaster way beyond anything she could comprehend. Leaving the two of them alone was bound to go wrong. I was sure of it.

So I formulated a plan.

That soup… it’s probably done already, right?

The pasta would cook even with just the leftover heat from the broth. So I didn’t need to stay around taking care of it or anything.

That’s it! I’m so following them!