## Chapter 251 – The Beach Butcher
An intense stimulation wrapped around my tongue and simultaneously struck my brain!
Chew. Chew. Chew, chew, chew and chew again! I couldn’t stop chewing!
“Kat, spit it out! Disgusting, disgusting!”
Wienia grabbed my head and started shaking it!
But I didn’t stop!
“Argh! You crazy bastard, spit it out!”
The savory oiliness spread wide in my mouth, as if forming a film, stimulating my tongue. The crushed juices moistened my throat as they went down—I swallowed.
—Gulp.
“…Kat?”
Claudia looked down at me with an uneasy gaze.
“Delicious.”
“Huh?”
“I said it’s delicious.”
Delicious.
“Woo. Woo—ooooooo!!!!!!”
I couldn’t think about anything else anymore.
It had been years since I’d eaten raw fish. I immediately started dismantling the merman’s flesh, carving out the meat. Red-fleshed fish! It tasted like fatty tuna!
“Deliciousss!!! I said it’s delicioussss!!!!”
I could taste a bit of blood, but my tongue, stimulated after so long, didn’t care at all. This umami! This oily flavor! This firm flesh! I shoved a chunk of the thigh meat I’d carved out straight into my mouth and chewed it like pizza.
“…Delicious?”
Wienia said with a frown.
“Delicious! So delicious! It’s the taste of home!”
“Oh, right, Kat was from a nomadic tribe, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah! In my hometown, we used to eat fish raw! This is exactly that taste!”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about… I don’t get you, Kat.”
Despite their protests, I focused on dismantling the flesh of the dead mermen. Freshly caught, live raw fish! You can’t buy this even with money!
“I’ll eat all the wicked mermen and get rid of them!”
Excited, I indiscriminately consumed the mermen.
—Thump!
At that moment, a merman who had been pretending to be dead suddenly rose up and was seen scooting backward on his butt.
…This bastard dares to play dead?
I slowly approached him, smacking my lips as I chewed on the merman flesh in my mouth.
—Screeeeeech! Screeeeeech!!
Looking at him, his legs were crushed.
That’s probably why he couldn’t stand.
—Screeeeeeeeeeeech!!!
As I approached, he spewed out ominous, incomprehensible deep-sea language in an extremely threatening tone, cursing at me.
“…There’s fear in his eyes.”
His eyes, which didn’t even have eyelids, didn’t seem to have any focus, but I could feel a deep fear in them.
“Fear is the best spice.”
The emotion I felt was ‘appetite.’
What flavor would he have?
“Become my nourishment!”
—Screeeeeeeeeeeeeech!!!!!
I stabbed my knife straight into the inside of his maw and severed his life. His arms, which had been flailing wildly in resistance, soon drooped down.
Fresh… live raw fish!
I carved out his flesh on the spot and ate it.
The weak are eaten!
“This is the food chain! In the face of humans, the absolutely superior lords of all creation, you guys are just prey! I, Kim Kat, will personally bestow upon you lowly mermen the opportunity to become my flesh and blood!”
That was the law of the jungle!
“Rejoice in my mercy! Mermen! Rejoice in becoming my nourishment, mermen!”
—Kroooooooo!!
By devouring a warrior I had hunted directly, I fully accepted his power as my own! I roared like that for a long time, hacking the mermen who had become corpses!
And I ate!
“N-No! You! The mermen…!”
At that moment, the merchants approached me.
They looked very surprised.
Is there a problem?
“You know how to eat! Were you a sea person too!”
He said with admiration!
“Hell yeah, of course! There’s nothing more delicious than raw fish!”
“Bring the plates!”
As expected, they were sea men!
It seemed that there was a culture of eating raw fish in this world too! Seafood merchants holding knives rushed over and began to dismantle the mermen busily.
“Wow! Eating the flesh of these mermen raw is a taste that only we sea people know! I didn’t know that an outsider like you would know the taste!”
The merchant, smiling brightly, sliced off the flesh from the merman’s arm and ate it as it was.
“W-What the hell is this… Am I the weird one, Kat?”
“Kat, is it really delicious?”
Wienia and Claudia were truly in a state of confusion.
In fact, as far as I knew, there wasn’t really a concept of eating something raw. For them, eating the flesh of fish that hadn’t been cooked would come across as a bizarre custom.
“It’s really too delicious, you guys. But this is a cultural difference, so it might feel a little strange. It might not suit your tastes. So I wouldn’t recommend eating it.”
I explained to them as rationally as possible.
Cultural differences are originally a sensitive issue.
Ah!
Chojang! Soy sauce! Wasabi!
Why isn’t there any!!
As I continued to eat the merman sashimi, that thought consumed me.
“Seeing everyone eating it, I guess it’s something you can eat. But I’m not eating it. Sis. You’re not thinking of eating it, are you? I’m really going to go crazy if even you do that.”
“Kat says it’s delicious, so I kind of want to try it… But I don’t want to put it in my mouth…”
“That’s what it means to not want to eat something. Let’s go rest.”
“Okay…”
The two women went over there and sat down on a box.
I, on the other hand, was just happy and ate the mermen with the merchants.
“You! You know the taste, but your knife skills are a bit clumsy! Stay still! I’ll slice it all up for you!”
“Woo-hoo! Thank you!”
We moved the relatively intact mermen corpses inside the barricade. After moving them, it was just a piece of cake. The merchant, who had dismembered the corpses in an instant, began to carve out the flesh of the mermen at an invisible speed.
He wasn’t doing it for the first time.
It seemed that mermen were considered a delicacy among sailors.
Soon, the red flesh of the mermen was packed tightly on pure white plates.
“Here! Eat up! Oh, and there’s a special sauce from this region, would you like to try it?”
“Of course I have to try it! Thank you!”
“No need to thank us! It’s more thankful that you saved us!”
He sprinkled the sauce he had taken out on the merman sashimi.
I wonder what it will taste like!
I picked up a thickly sliced piece of meat with the fork I had received and shoved it into my mouth… The sauce is salty! At the same time, I could feel a pungent spiciness! It wasn’t quite as good as soy sauce and wasabi, but it was good just to feel like it was!
“How is it!”
“It’s so good! This sauce is amazing! It’s salty and spicy!”
“Haha! That’s the best for merman flesh!”
“You know your stuff!”
I devoured all the sashimi like a starving ghost. I was going crazy because of the savory, oily taste that filled my mouth.
Still not enough..!
“We should treat you to a meal! Bring your companions!”
“No way! Really!”
“It’s only natural for our benefactor!”
I went to call Wienia and Claudia, who were resting over there. The two of them were sitting and looking out at the sea, as if they were bored.
“Kat, did you eat it all? You just went crazy… We’re not even on your mind, are we?”
Wienia grumbled.
“No. The merchants over there said they’ll treat us to a meal as a thank you. Not raw stuff, but proper food. Let’s go eat. It’ll be delicious.”
“…Then I guess we can go.”
“I can eat that.”
They hadn’t eaten anything much except for chewing on dry rations in the morning, so they seemed to be hungry. Because of the mermen, the restaurants and everything were all messed up.
And so, I went inside the seafood market with them.
The merchants even made a place for us. As expected, doing good deeds is a good thing. I killed all the mermen, made money, and ate delicious food, what a happy thing it was?
We waited until the menu came out.
It took a little while, but it wasn’t that boring because I was just happy to see them cooking.
“Please, try it!”
The merchant began to bring out plates with food on them.
“Oh, oh…! Thank you! I’ll enjoy the meal!”
“Don’t just say it, eat it quickly! It’s grilled merman!”
What was on the plate was seasoned grilled merman. It seemed that they had carved out the flesh, sprinkled it with seasoning on the spot, and grilled it with fire and smoke. The fact that it was boneless was a plus.
“Merman…”
Wienia frowned again at the word merman. I sliced it myself and put it in her mouth for her, who was wondering whether to eat it or not. Wienia, who reluctantly tasted it, widened her eyes.
“…It’s good?”
“Right?”
There was no way that seasoned boneless grilled fish wouldn’t be delicious.
“Where, me too.”
Claudia also picked up a piece and, like Wienia, widened her eyes and said it was delicious. That was only natural. Didn’t we eat grilled fish at the night market too? Even if it was a merman, it wouldn’t be much different from a fish.
And these merchants were people who made a living by eating fish.
Each of them had their own secret cooking methods.
And so, we unintentionally filled our stomachs at the seafood market, which had become a merman slaughterhouse. The merchants expressed their deep gratitude for saving their market and lives from the mermen’s attack.
“Thank you so much! If it weren’t for you, the market would have been completely destroyed!”
“Hehe, the mermen came in, but we have to help each other out.”
I said goodbye to them and came out to organize the mermen’s heads.
“Ugh, I’m full. Mermen are pretty delicious too.”
“I can’t believe it. Eating mermen.”
“It’s okay if you ate it deliciously.”
Anyway, I slaughtered more than 20 mermen, roughly calculated.
Most of them were killed by Claudia, though.
I used the rope I had brought to make holes in the mermen’s jaws and strung them together like dried fish. I could just drag them to the reward exchange like this.
I killed 38 mermen in just one day.
I got a huge sum of 11 silver and 40 coppers.
As expected, war makes money.
If I do this for a few more days, I think I can recover about half of the travel expenses.
—Drag.
The three of us divided up the strung mermen heads and dragged them back up the way we had come. The reward exchange was up there. I don’t know if the exchanger will do his job properly in this chaos.
—Screaaaaak!
There were mermen attacks in the middle of the climb. They were the ones who had invaded through the waterways and sewers. I didn’t eat them because I was full, I just killed them. Killing these guys was a piece of cake for me, Kim Kat, who had already eaten mermen.
“Kat. Let’s string that up and go too.”
“No need to say it twice.”
I strung this up and went up too.
After climbing for a long time, I could see the Adventurer’s Guild.
Attention was focused on us. We were skilled people who were massacring mermen and returning. It was natural for attention to be focused on us. Perhaps feeling a sense of intimidation, all the people who had been gathered like a swarm of bees cleared the way.
All of them were people who had at most one or two heads.
“My goodness. How many is that? Is the war over?”
When I took the heads to the counter, a middle-aged man who appeared to be a clerk wearing a monocle asked us in surprise.
“They’re still swarming in like bees. This is just a small part. If the soldiers burst like this, they might come all the way up here.”
I don’t know what the mermen’s purpose is, but they seemed to be advancing with a longing for something. As if there was something very important beyond this ridge.
There’s nothing beyond this except the city.
Could it be that they’re trying to rescue their comrades who are being held in the night market or the aquarium?
That’s an unrealistic imagination.
“I see… the situation is more serious than I thought. Anyway, I’ll give you the reward. But it seems that the number of mermen is more than I thought. You should know that the reward money may be exhausted. Check the guild every morning.”
“Huh? The reward money is running out?”
“The budget is not unlimited.”
I should be careful.
It seemed that they had released a certain amount of budget for the merman extermination cost. If that is all exhausted, the mermen will have to be repelled purely by the soldiers… It looks a bit dangerous.
They’ll do well on their own.
That’s their job.
“Here’s 12 silver for the reward.”
“Yes. That’s accurate. Thank you for your hard work.”
I received the reward and came outside.
Claudia and Wienia were waiting.
“Hehe, I made a lot of money.”
“That’s good?”
12 silver…
Wouldn’t it be a complete win if I bought merman sashimi with this?
When I said that, Wienia grabbed my neck and shook it, telling me not to talk nonsense.
