Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 206: 207 | A Food-Adjacent War Crime [PS BONUS]

The Morning Person trait woke Jordan at exactly 6:41 AM.

Not with an alarm. Not with a jolt. Just a clean, easy rise to consciousness like someone had gently turned the brightness up on reality until his eyes opened on their own. His brain came online in stages: warm sheets, cold air on his nose, the amber morning light pouring through the factory windows in long horizontal bars that painted the far wall of the loft in stripes of gold.

Something was missing.

Jordan’s left arm lay flat against cool sheets. The space beside him held an indent in the pillow and a faint impression in the mattress and absolutely zero Kumiko. The strawberry-printed underwear that had landed somewhere near the dresser was gone. The henley she’d pulled back on after their shower was gone. The girl who’d been pressed against his chest like a barnacle with abandonment issues for the past four and a half hours was gone.

The absence registered as wrong before his conscious mind caught up to why.

Then the smell hit him.

Something was burning downstairs.

Not the slow acrid burn of an electrical fire or the sharp chemical stink of plastic on a hot surface. This was organic. Food-adjacent. The unmistakable odor of eggs being subjected to conditions their creator never intended, mixed with something darker and more sinister that Jordan’s nose flagged as either scorched bread or a war crime.

A crash came from the kitchen. Metal on concrete. Then a high, panicked voice:

"Aaaah! No no no no no, come back, come BACK, why are you doing this to me, I was being so gentle with you!"

Jordan sat up.

His body registered the morning in layers. First came the low, pleasant burn radiating from his lower back, the kind that spread when he shifted his weight on the mattress. Then his abs, tight and sore from hours of tension he hadn’t known he was carrying until Kumiko had wrapped her legs around him and turned basic anatomy into an endurance sport. The claw marks across his ribs stung when he twisted to look at them, four parallel scratches where her fingernails had raked his skin during the part of the night when her brain had stopped giving her hands instructions and her hands had just started doing whatever they wanted.

He counted the marks now in the morning light. Four crescent-shaped indentations pressed into the meat below his ribcage, already fading from angry red to a softer pink. The bite mark on his collarbone had bloomed into a proper bruise overnight, purple with a yellow-green corona spreading outward like a watercolor stain.

She’d marked him. Claimed territory on his skin the same way Chloe had two nights ago.

The comparison sat in his chest for a second before another crash rattled up from the kitchen, followed by the distinct metallic ring of a spatula bouncing off concrete.

"Stay! Stay in the pan! This is a PAN, this is where EGGS GO, why do you hate me!"

Jordan grabbed the basketball shorts draped over his desk chair and pulled them on in two efficient movements. The hardwood bit cold against the soles of his feet when he stood. He crossed to the top of the stairs and looked down into the disaster zone that used to be his kitchen.

Kumiko Yamanaka stood in front of his stove wearing only his grey henley and her strawberry underwear, no socks, her bare feet leaving small damp prints on the concrete where she’d apparently been pacing. Her hair hung loose and wild around her shoulders in a black curtain that she kept pushing out of her face with the back of her wrist because both her hands were occupied. The left held a spatula at arm’s length like a sword she wasn’t sure how to swing. The right gripped the handle of a frying pan that was producing smoke at a volume that suggested the eggs inside had moved past the cooking stage and entered the cremation phase.

She had not noticed him yet.

The kitchen island between them held a battlefield of debris: a carton of eggs with three missing and one cracked directly onto the counter in a puddle of yolk, a bread bag torn open from the wrong end with four slices scattered across the surface, a stick of butter still in its wrapper with a single gouge taken out of the top as if she’d attacked it with a spoon, and a coffee mug full of what appeared to be hot water with no actual coffee in it.

The toaster sat on the far counter with two slices of bread jammed into a single slot at an angle that guaranteed neither would toast evenly. The toaster light was not on. She hadn’t plugged it in.

"Okay," Kumiko said to the frying pan, her voice carrying the tone of someone negotiating with a hostage taker. "Okay, we’re going to flip now. We discussed this. I watched the video three times and the lady said just... a gentle wrist motion... like... like calligraphy..."

She flicked her wrist.

The egg, which had fused to the pan’s surface through a combination of inadequate butter and excessive heat, tore in half. One portion launched sideways off the edge of the pan and landed on the stovetop with a wet slap. The other remained welded to the nonstick surface that had clearly given up on being nonstick several minutes ago.

"NO!" Kumiko wailed, jabbing at the remains with the spatula. "You were supposed to be an omelet! I TOLD you you were going to be an omelet! The video said three eggs and I used three eggs and I added salt like it SAID and I..."

She trailed off and stared at the counter where the third egg sat in its puddle of raw yolk.

"...I used two eggs. I used two eggs and the shell is... where did the shell go?"

Jordan watched her lean over the pan and squint into the smoking ruins.

"Oh no. Oh no no no no no."