The next morning, the muddy lawn in front of the Hearthline Guild looked like a landfill.
Dozens of standard-issue academy trash cans, collected from outside the general student dormitories under the cover of pre-dawn darkness, stood in neat rows. Grit Hark and his Titan Tools crew, along with a few bewildered-looking members from other allied guilds, had done the collecting. They now stood with their arms crossed, looking at the assembled refuse with a mixture of disgust and morbid curiosity.
The air was thick with the sour, unpleasant smell of common garbage.
"Okay, Izen, we got 'em," Grit rumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Now what? I feel like we're one step away from getting arrested for sanitation violations."
Kael and Elara looked equally queasy. This felt different from using kitchen scraps. Kitchen scraps were still food, just undervalued. This was… trash. Real, actual, thrown-in-a-bin trash. Half-eaten bags of chips, crumpled instant noodle cups, empty soda cans, greasy pizza boxes.
"This is our new supply chain," Izen announced, unfazed by the smell. He donned a pair of heavy-duty rubber gloves and an even frillier, plastic-coated apron over his usual one. "Today's lesson: Culinary Archaeology. Every piece of trash tells a story."
He walked to the first bin, which had been collected from outside the freshman arts dorm. He tipped it over onto a large, clean tarp.
"Observe," he said, like a professor beginning a lecture. He pointed a gloved finger at a collection of empty, brightly-colored energy drink cans. "The arts students pull all-nighters. They consume huge amounts of caffeine and sugar. Their meals are quick and cheap." He picked up a crumpled wrapper. "'Salty-Spicy Hyper-Noodle, Extra Ghost Chili Flavoring.'"
He held it up for everyone to see. "Inside this wrapper is a faint dusting of the seasoning powder. By itself, it is nothing. But collected from a hundred wrappers…" He dropped it into a designated bucket labeled 'SPICE'.
He then picked up an empty, family-sized bag of potato chips. He tore it fully open. "Most people think the bag is empty," he said, "but the bottom is coated in starch and flavor crystals." He used a small brush to sweep the precious, savory dust into the 'SPICE' bucket.
Next, he picked up a greasy, folded pizza box. "This is a treasure," he declared. Kael groaned.
"Look." Izen pointed at the greasy spot in the middle. "This is not just grease. It's rendered pork fat from pepperoni, olive oil, and tomato essence, all soaked into the cardboard."
He took out a small, specialized heat gun from his toolbox and aimed it at the cardboard. With a gentle whoosh, he heated the spot, and the solidified oils began to liquefy. He then used a scraper to carefully collect the drops of intensely flavored, orange-red oil into a small jar labeled 'FAT'.
"The crusts!" Elara suddenly said, her eyes widening as she started to understand. "People always leave the crusts!"
"Exactly!" Izen beamed. "Untouched, perfectly good bread, considered worthless." He gathered the dozens of discarded pizza crusts and placed them in a bucket labeled 'CARBOHYDRATES'.
The other students watched, stunned into silence. Izen was not just picking through trash. He was systematically deconstructing it, harvesting micro-ingredients with the precision of a surgeon. The seasoning dust from instant ramen packets. The dregs of milk and sugar from empty cereal boxes. The residual syrup from the bottom of soda cans.
It was insane. It was disgusting. It was genius.
Slowly, hesitantly at first, the others started to join in. Grit Hark, with a look of profound disbelief on his face, found himself in charge of scraping the congealed cheese from the inside of pizza boxes. Kael and Elara began systematically harvesting bread crusts and the leftover rice from discarded sushi containers.
For hours, the Hearthline Guild and their allies became a highly efficient trash-processing facility. It was smelly, messy, humbling work. But as the buckets labeled 'FAT', 'SPICE', 'SUGAR', and 'CARBOHYDRATES' slowly began to fill up, a new kind of hope started to dawn.
Meanwhile, Nyelle Ardent was on her way to her morning wok practice, her face set in a scowl. She'd heard the rumors of Voltagrave's supply-line attack and had felt a reluctant pang of sympathy for the clown. She was heading to Hearthline to… well, she wasn't sure what. Offer her condolences? Mock him for his inevitable failure? Her feelings were a confusing mess.
As she rounded the corner, she stopped dead in her tracks, her jaw dropping.
She saw the mountain of trash. She saw a dozen students, including the brutish Grit Hark, hunched over, diligently sorting through garbage. And in the middle of it all, orchestrating the entire mad symphony, was Izen.
He was holding up an empty fried chicken bucket to the sunlight, peering inside. "The crumbs at the bottom!" he shouted with the excitement of a gold miner finding a nugget. "This is the 'eleven secret herbs and spices'! Get it all!"
Nyelle stood there, hidden by a line of trees, and she didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
'He's not just the God of Leftovers,' she thought, a dizzying sense of awe washing over her. 'He's the God of actual, literal garbage. This isn't cuisine anymore. It's some kind of survivalist voodoo.'
The sheer, indomitable, creative insanity of it was breathtaking. Voltagrave had cut off his supply of kitchen scraps, thinking he had checkmated the king. But Izen hadn't even been playing on the same board. He had just moved to a different universe where the rules of what constituted an "ingredient" no longer applied.
Nyelle turned around and walked away, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across her face. "You wanted a war, Voltagrave," she whispered to the wind. "You have no idea who you're fighting."
Back at the Hearthline Guild, the work was finally done. The trash had been re-bagged for proper disposal. The tarp was clean. But on the long kitchen table sat the fruits of their labor.
Jars of rendered, flavor-infused fats. Bowls of complex, salty, spicy powder blends. A huge mound of bread crusts and other salvaged carbs. Buckets of fruit peels and vegetable ends from students' half-eaten lunches.
Izen stood before it all, wiping his gloves on his apron.
"What…" Grit said, staring at the bizarre pantry they had created. "What do we even make with all this?"
Izen picked up a handful of the mixed seasoning powder and took a sniff. His eyes lit up.
"Tonight," he announced to his tired, smelly, but newly hopeful army, "the night-shift workers of the city will dine like kings."
"We will serve them deep-fried, twice-baked, savory bread sticks, seasoned with a thirty-two-spice blend, and served with a sweet and sour dipping sauce made from recovered fruit sugars and vegetable essences."
He looked at them all, his smile radiant with a creator's joy.
"We will call it: 'The Treasure of the Common Man.'"