The lead investor, a notoriously stoic German financier named Frau Greta Schmidt, whose company was rumored to have once successfully foreclosed on a sovereign nation, stared at the Scrambled Progenitor. It was, by all objective measures, a culinary absurdity. It was a lumpy, purple-ish, chaotic pile on a plate that cost more than her first car. It was an insult to the very concept of haute cuisine. Yet, there was something about it… an alluring, rustic, and profoundly honest aroma of wine, bacon, and mushrooms that defied the sterile perfection of the room. It was a smell from a different world, a world with dirt and laughter and flawed, happy people. With a shrug of Teutonic pragmatism that had terrified boardrooms across Europe, she took a bite.
Her brain, a magnificent organ conditioned by a lifetime of Michelin stars, minimalist plating, and food that looked more like architecture than sustenance, prepared for confusion. It braced for a technical failure. What it received, instead, was a wave of pure, unadulterated, weaponized comfort. The rich, wine-infused egg, the savory bits of chicken that had somehow survived the scrambling, the earthy notes of the mushroom—it wasn't elegant, but it was deeply, profoundly delicious. It tasted like a Sunday afternoon in a farmhouse she'd never been to. It tasted like a memory she didn't possess but now desperately wanted. A flicker of a smile, a thing so rare on her face it was nearly an endangered species, graced her lips. She took another, larger bite.
Next to her, a Japanese tech billionaire named Masaru Tanaka (no relation to Kenji's disciple), a man who had subsisted on nutrient shakes and bio-hacked supplements for a decade in his quest to live to be 200, took a bite of his own. His eyes, usually half-closed in a state of bored, tech-infused nirvana, went wide. He stared at the plate. He looked at the fork. He looked back at the plate. He took another, larger bite. A single, perfect tear welled up and rolled down his cheek. He put down his fork, his hands trembling slightly, and began to weep silently, not from sadness, but from the sudden, violent resurrection of a forgotten memory of a meal his grandmother used to make before his family had gotten rich and replaced her cooking with private chefs and nutritionists.
All across the vast, silent room, the same scene was unfolding in a hundred different ways. The investors weren't being drugged into a state of placid compliance; they were being sledgehammered with genuine, messy, human emotion. They weren't tasting a business proposal; they were tasting passion. They were tasting a story. A stuffy British lord, who had been complaining about the lack of clotted cream, took a bite of Tanaka's beet splatter soup (which had been served as the first course) and was heard to exclaim, "Good heavens! It's scandalously invigorating! It tastes of the earth and… and rebellion!" An Italian fashion heiress, after tasting Kaito's "conceptual carpaccio," declared it a work of "primal minimalism" and began sketching a new line of clothing inspired by the "tragic beauty of the raw tuna."
The spell was breaking everywhere. The most dramatic effect was on the staff. The waiters, Ayame's perfectly conditioned students, moved like elegant automatons, serving the food. But they could smell it. They could see the joyous, emotional, human reactions of the diners. One of them, a tall young man named Kenji remembered as Iwata—Ren's soulless opponent from the grudge match—was clearing a plate when his thumb accidentally brushed against a remnant of the Scrambled Progenitor. Absently, he licked his thumb.
He froze mid-step. His tray tilted precariously. His face, for the last year a perfect mask of placid neutrality, contorted in confusion. His programming was screaming Error. Impurity detected. Purge emotional response. But the flavor… the rich, savory, flawed, delicious flavor… was screaming something else. It was screaming Life. He stumbled, dropping the entire tray of empty plates with a deafening crash that echoed through the silent hall. It was the first unplanned, imperfect sound of the entire evening. And it was beautiful.
Chef Ayame watched from the stage, her serene smile beginning to look like it was carved from melting wax. This was not the reaction she had anticipated. This was the opposite of the reaction she had engineered. There was no placid contemplation, no enlightened calm. There was only loud, enthusiastic chewing. There was weeping. There was a British lord asking for a second helping of the floor-soup. And now there was her second-best student, her model of compliance, standing amidst a pile of shattered porcelain with a look of dawning horror and wonder on his face, as if he had just woken from a long dream.
Her composure finally, irrevocably, shattered. She scanned the room, her eyes like a hawk's searching for the fox in her pristine henhouse. Her gaze swept past the investors, past her broken student, past the guards who were now looking confused and hungry. And then she saw him.
Kenji.
He wasn't hiding. He wasn't celebrating. He was just standing in the shadows by a service entrance, his arms crossed, watching the scene unfold. His expression was not one of triumph. It was one of weary, almost sad, resignation. He looked like a man who had set a fire and was now simply watching it burn, knowing he could never control the flames.
Their eyes met across the vast room. In that single, frozen moment, a universe of unspoken understanding passed between them. She saw him not as a student, not as a fool, but as the agent of chaos he truly was, the inexplicable, unpredictable variable that had broken her perfect equation. He saw her not as a simple villain, but as a true believer whose perfect, sterile heaven had just been invaded by the glorious, messy, unpredictable taste of what it meant to be human.
She hadn't been outmaneuvered by a corporate rival or a master spy. She had been defeated by a fraud. Her perfect system, her empire of control, her life's work… had been brought down by a ridiculous, world-weary man and his army of chaotic children serving scrambled eggs at a black-tie gala. The sheer, unadulterated, soul-crushing absurdity of it was a greater blow than any physical attack could ever be. She felt the foundations of her own perfect world begin to crumble.