Emperors War
/ Emperors War 103 Get Me Another Plate
Aker looked out and noticed among the piles of dirt was a sign that could barely be read as it was layered in mud and gunk. As Aker focused his eyes, he could clearly make out the words "The Fragile Fighters Squad" in hand written red paint. Above the Fragile Fighters Squad was Company D Home of the Fighting First Squad which was crossed out and barely visible.
Someone had clearly removed the original name of this group and hand replaced the name with Fragile Fighters which apparently caught on. Even the military recruiter half way around the world knew this place as Fragile Fighters and referenced them as such instead of by their real name of Fighting First.
After Aker saw the sign, he no longer had any doubt about it, they were absolutely in the wrong place, however in this case the wrong place was where they were supposed to be.
As the two of them stood there a group of five men were walking towards the shacks while laughing and chatting away.
"Hey you see those two kids over there, you think we've finally been assigned some puer nuntius?" The man's voice was filled with hope as he spoke.
"Impossible, everyone knows they would never assign puer nuntius to our squad, they would consider it a complete waste. Even the weakest and worst puer nuntius can still shovel horse manure, that is to say they always have some crap job for someone to do. Are you telling me they ran out of crap jobs at the other squads?" The man who answered back was a small undersized person. He was shorter than Aker who was admittedly very tall for his age. There wasn't much difference between a sixteen or seventeen-year-old boy and Aker. This man had fine straight hair that appeared to be dyed by the sky with its light blue hue. His bushy eyebrows were way too large to go with his small face and frame.
In fact, as Aker looked at the group of five, he noticed that they were all small and scrawny men. Their arms and legs all appeared as though they would break if they were to even lift a weapon, if you were to send these men into battle, they would only encourage the enemy to attack.
"Hahahahahahahahahaha" The group of five men laughed when they heard his words. They were all part of D Company or as everyone knows them the Fragile Fighters.
It all started about two years ago when someone had bribed their way into becoming the Company Commander of the D Company. He was a small and cowardly man and as such he focused on recruiting scrawny and small men to make himself feel bigger. During one especially brutal and decisive battle with the Fenlon Empire, after only a couple of minutes the Company Commander tucked tail and ran away leaving his squad to be run over and exposing the entire Division. Company D buckled so fast the entire Division didn't have time to react before the enemy was already attacking the command center.
It was a devastating blow to the Underground Empire on this planet and almost caused them to lose the entire campaign and force them to flee the planet. Thankfully the Division Commander had enough foresight to setup the current military installation which allowed the Division to fall back without being completely annihilated and saving a third of the Underground Empires land on this planet.
After that defeat and shameless display someone scribbled out the Company's name on that sign board and replaced it with the Fragile Fighters and the name had stuck ever since. Further the Division Commander who was still pissed about nearly losing the planet to the Fenlon Empire blamed the entire overwhelming defeat on the fighters from the Frail Fighters squad and as such they became the laughing stock of not just this planet but most of the Empire. Even the enemy Fenlon Empire's fighters would laugh and ask for the Frail Fighters to be put up front to fight against.
Any particularly weak and troubled fighters who joined in this Division would instantly be assigned to the Frail Fighters squad and essentially be relegated to minor work. The Frail Fighter squad had become the epitome and definition of weakness and failure for the current war.
The fighters and leaders of the Frail Fighters had given up any hope of earning military honors, battling and collecting spoils of war. This group now spent their time lounging around, causing trouble and drinking. The current Company Commander was doing the best he could but he was also on the verge of giving up.
"That's right we've been assigned to your Company as your puer nuntius, my name is Aker and this guy over here is named Leland." Aker answered bitterly as he introduced the two of them.
The five men were suddenly overwhelmed with delight as Aker confirmed their crazy guess that they had finally been assigned puer nuntius. For the last two years they had never had "errand boys" to do their odd jobs. For some of the fighters it wasn't the nicer living areas, or the great environment, the fighting and such that they were jealous of the other Companies for, no...it was that they had puer nuntius to take care of their cooking, cleaning and other chores.
"Hahahahahahaha...what a glorious day! You two must have pissed someone off to be assigned to this squad.... but I'm grateful that you did. To think our Frail Fighters squad can now boast that we also have someone to take care of us....." The smallest and weakest of the group called out, his voice wasn't mocking, he was truly overjoyed and happy.
The other four men laughed out joyously as well each not trying to hide their smile, they were truly enjoying happiness at someone else's misery.
"Come on what are you waiting for, it's almost dinner time. I can't wait to see what the two of you are going to make for us." The bushy brow man began walking towards the biggest of the shacks that made up the Fragile Fighters compound.
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When the rest of the Company heard that they had finally been assigned their very own puer nuntius there were cheers and celebration. Almost every fighter opened bottles of alcohol and began drinking, it was a joyous atmosphere.
Almost immediately fighters began tossing their dirty clothes at the two as well as yelling out for area's to be cleaned. Laughter and joy filled the air as a festive mood began to overwhelm the atmosphere.
Everyone was excited except for the two that were the cause of the celebration. Aker and Leland were left looking at each other, both of them could tell the other was questioning their decision to join the military.
"Dinner....Dinner....Dinner....Dinner.....Dinner....." A chant for dinner erupted as three hundred men bellowed out calling for the two to make a meal to go with the celebration.
Aker leaned over and asked Leland "Do you know how to cook?"
Leland who was confused as to what exactly was going on had a persona of being overwhelmed, he looked embarrassingly to Aker and answered, "I had to beg for food, I've never cooked a meal in my life."
"How about this then, I'll take care of the cooking and you take care of cleaning the clothes and common areas. If other work comes up, we will divide it up based on what we can do, what do you think?" As Aker thought about it, trying to cook for three hundred people would be a significant amount of work.
"That's a great plan, I can't say I'm the best at cleaning but at least I understand how to do it. Thanks so much for taking the hard task." Leland was sincere in his thanks. If he was forced to try and cook in the kitchen it would be devastating for the tools and the kitchen itself, who knew how large the fire would get before they could put it out, not to mention who could guess what black and failed dish he would try and serve.
With that the two split up, Aker headed for the kitchen, Leland headed for the washing area to start on the clothes and the three hundred fighters continued to drink.
Aker who walked into the kitchen was startled at the mess that he saw. The entire kitchen was even worse off than his reject station back in The Pit. Apparently, the cooks in The Pit had such high standards that even their reject station was above standard. A film of grease and dirt covered the entire room, it was clear that no one had been using the kitchen for at least a few months. The person or persons who used it previously didn't give a damn which was evident by the sad state of the pots, pans, stoves, ovens, and the nearly impregnable layer of grease and filth.
Reaching down into his boot Aker pulled out his knife and lightly scraped it along the thick grease left over everything. After seeing his knife barely leave a mark Aker had a sense for how tough it was.
Suddenly Aker walked to the edge of the stove, turned his knife on its side and then proceeded to scrape it along the top of the stove. As he did so the thick film of grease and gunk peeled off like someone using a knife to peel an apple.
Within minutes Aker had cleaned the top of the stove and was now using the same process to scrape out the oven and clean the counter and workstations. Within twenty minutes Aker had turned this filth cesspool into a semi workable room.
While Aker made the entire process seem simple if a normal person was to walk in and try and scrape off the layer of grease brick, they would have found it to be an impossible task. Aker was only able to clean and make quick work of the mess due to his overwhelming strength that allowed him to fight a Source Core fighter at the Metal level.
After spending an hour removing all of the grime and cleaning all of his cooking areas as well as his pots, pans, and utensils Aker began testing his equipment. After spending ten minutes in testing he had found that despite its disgusting state everything was in working order to include the fridge and freezers.
It appeared that despite the fact that they were not using the kitchen to cook and prepare their meals they were still storing their supplies in the freezer and fridges. The kitchen had two freezers, one that could be used for the current meal in the working area and a gigantic warehouse sized freezer that was on the other side of the kitchen. It was essentially a building attached to this kitchen that was turned into a freezer.
The refrigerator was exactly the same. It had an industrial sized refrigerator to work with in the cooking area and a massive fridge that sat directly beside the warehouse sized freezer.
After fully understanding his ingredients to include his meats, vegetables, spices and so on, Aker began moving ingredients from the warehouse sized freezer to the smaller kitchen freezer. Once he was done with that, he did the exact same thing with the refrigerated goods, moving them from the large refrigerator to the smaller one in the kitchen. In both cases while the kitchen freezer and refrigerator were smaller, both of them were still walk in and held enough food to feed the three hundred fighters.
Aker turned on the fires, broke out his knifes, put out his pans and began cooking. He minced and sliced his vegetables, the entire time he was unconsciously feeding them with nature particles as he prepared them.
Once he was done preparing all of his vegetables Aker decided to go with a simplistic meal for his first-time cooking here and wanted to do a chicken spaghetti with pepperoni's. He quickly cut up the meat that appeared to be closest to a chicken, honestly Aker wasn't one hundred percent sure what type of animal it was but it appeared to have the right texture and look.
After Aker finished cutting up the meat, he tossed it into some light frying grease as he sliced up the pressed meat to act as his pepperoni, it was close enough to pepperoni that it and the chicken like meat should blend. He then minced some tomatoes to create his base and added some herbs and spices. He boiled bucket after bucket of noodles, enough to feed three hundred weak and withered men.
Aker's movements in the kitchen were jaw dropping. He was simultaneously frying chicken, cutting and mincing vegetables and tomatoes, creating a sauce, pressing and cutting the pepperoni all the while he was still pushing nature particles into the meal.
His knife would silently and delicately mince the tomato, while his ear was listening to the sound of both the noodles and the chicken. The second before the noodles or the chicken were ready, he would drop his knife and switch out his chicken and noodles, they were both cooked to perfection.
Two and a half hours after Aker had walked into the kitchen, he was carrying out his first batch of Chicken and pepperoni spaghetti to the table.
As Aker walked out single handedly carrying a large drum filled with spaghetti, the entire celebration hit pause. Everyone watched as Aker walked up to the first table and set the drum down with a loud "thud".
All the people at the table stopped and looked into the drum, their confusion was evident because all of their brows creased at the same moment, it would appear to someone who didn't know better that these men had practiced this move countless times.
"Where's the meat?" Finally, one of the fighters couldn't contain himself as he called out.
"There's no meat? Why the hell would he bring something to the table that wasn't meat? We are fighters, a fighters got to have their energy, don't you know that!" Another man in the back screamed out.
"There is meat in it, in fact there are two types, as well as vegetables and tomatoes." Aker's voice was calm as he answered back. He had just spent a significant amount of effort getting this ready and these people were looking down on him, but he didn't show any hint of frustration or being upset. Aker could tell based on the mountains of grease in the kitchen that these men had been living on a diet of meat and beer.
"Take that crap back and bring us meat." One of the men finally called out.
"Meat....meat...meat...meat..." The chorus that had previously been chanting for dinner was now screaming for meat.
Aker simply stared at the group and didn't move, this carried on for a minute or two before one of the more senior fighters in the group finally stepped up and called out, "Fine let me try this slop, afterwards you can head back into the kitchen and cook a real man's meal."
That fighter, who of the weak men appeared to be one of the strongest, put a plate full on his dish, grabbed his fork and stabbed it in. He slowly raised it to his mouth as three hundred men watched him, waiting and anticipating his shout for meat.
This man who was weirdly proud of his muscles would be laughed out of any other Company, but because all of the men in this group were so skinny, he looked like a body builder when standing next to them. Because of his skewed perception he would wear unpleasantly tight cloths to try and emphasize his manliness and strength. This also made him one of the leading proponents of the "Meat is a man's food" group, so everyone already knew what was going to happen next.
He would try the food, spit it out and tell this kid to go do it right, after all "Meat is a man's food".
As the group watched the man take his first bite everyone was surprised to see his eyes go wide and a smile fill his face. Suddenly he was taking another bite and then another bite and within seconds the man had cleaned his plate and before he knew it, he was screaming out "Shit man get me another plate, hurry up, what are you waiting for!"
Chapter end
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