When Seiya saw the face lifted toward him, he froze for a moment. It was Minezaki, the woman who had come storming in more than a week ago, demanding that Seiya and Soma stop operating.
Though only a week had passed, Minezaki looked far more haggard than before.
If not for the still unfathomably deep cleavage, Seiya might not even have recognized her as that big thunder onee-san who had once carried herself like a Queen.
"What happened to you? How did you end up like this after barely more than a week?
Didn't I only keep a small fraction of the money you transferred to me before, then send all the rest back?"
The bet between Seiya and Minezaki had been that if Seiya won, Minezaki would pay him an amount equivalent to the land transfer fee as payment for the food he had served.
In an ordinary world, such an agreement would have been highly unreasonable. But in this culinary world, such agreements even carried legal force.
That was because in this world, it was not unusual at all for a delicious custom-made dish to carry an astronomical price tag.
Sometimes, even if you had money, graduates such as those from the Elite Ten Council might not give you the honor of cooking for you.
Seiya had made that bet with Minezaki only because the restaurant's funds were tight, and he needed money to buy ingredients to reopen.
But after Minezaki transferred a sum with a long string of zeroes into his account, Seiya returned most of it afterward.
He felt that although he had put some thought into his ordinary "Scallion-Exploded Vegetarian Beef," it was not so valuable that it warranted such an outrageous price.
The 200,000 yen he had kept despite his conscience was already practically