Chương 40: The Taste of Defeat

When Chris returned to the second-floor contestant lounge, a hero's welcome met him.

"Chris! What did Vane say to you?" Sarah rushed up first to ask, her face full of curiosity.

"Nothing, just chatting." Chris answered vaguely. He could hardly say Vane had called him a hero.

"I knew it! He's definitely taken a liking to you!" Jack hollered from the side. The way he looked at Chris now was the way you'd look at an idol.

"What did I say — a guy who can make a Pittsburgh steak like that is no ordinary person!" The team crowded around him, chattering, excitedly going over every hair-raising moment of the night. Chris smiled and indulged them, but his eyes drifted, without his meaning them to, down below. The kitchen on the first floor was brightly lit, but the mood there was a world apart from upstairs.

The Red Team had changed out of their honor-symbol whites into gray T-shirts, and like a swarm of silent worker ants, they cleaned the battlefield. They wiped the stainless-steel counters, washed the mountain of pots and pans, scrubbed the grease-slicked floor. No one spoke. In the whole kitchen there was only running water, clanging metal, and the scrape of brushes on the floor. Chris's gaze fell on the Red Team captain, Ethan.

Ethan was cleaning the grill alone — the machine that had made endless trouble in Jack's hands and worked a miracle in Chris's. With a steel-wool pad he scrubbed the cooled grease again and again, mechanically, his motions slow and heavy. He seemed to sense Chris's gaze, raised his head, and looked toward the second-floor gallery. Their eyes met in the air. From Ethan's eyes Chris could read unwillingness, confusion, and a thread of defeat he couldn't quite hide. Ethan couldn't work it out.

He couldn't work out why his near-perfect start had been overturned by a chaotic team on the brink of collapse. He couldn't work out why his proud process management and systematic thinking had lost so thoroughly to a seeming "madman" who played by no rules. Chris didn't avoid his gaze. He only looked back at Ethan, calm. In truth, he very much wanted to tell Ethan where he'd lost. He'd lost because he'd treated his teammates as machines executing orders, not as people.

Machines could stay efficient in fair conditions. But hit a sudden situation, let one part fail, and the whole system easily fell into chaos, even collapse. Leo's lost focus was the first stone that toppled the dominoes. And Chris — though he too had used systematic thinking to rebuild the kitchen — had, from the start, factored in each teammate's strengths and weaknesses, their emotions, their limits. He hadn't issued cold orders; he'd drawn out everyone's potential.

He'd turned Jack from a failed manager back into a top craftsman. He'd saved Owen's faltering confidence with a spoonful of vinaigrette. He'd shown everyone hope born of a hopeless place with a liquid-nitrogen ballet. What he'd won wasn't just the numbers — it was people's hearts. Of course, he wouldn't say any of this aloud. To a loser, any "lecture" from a winner felt like cheap pity and showing off. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Ethan needed to work it out himself.

Ethan soon looked away too. He lowered his head and kept scrubbing his grill, as if to scour every bit of his unwillingness and shame into the cold steel. Chris drew his gaze back, without a shred of a winner's superiority in his heart. Because he knew what defeat tasted like. Just a few weeks ago, he'd been the one standing downstairs — eliminated, humiliated, taken by everyone for a punchline. He knew better than anyone the flavor of falling from the clouds to the valley floor, the whole world set against you.

So he wouldn't mock any loser. He would only step over their "corpses" and keep climbing, firm, without hesitation.

"Hey, look over there." Sarah nudged Chris's arm, motioning to the other side of the kitchen. There, Leo — the one who'd triggered the Red Team's collapse — was surrounded by several teammates, who were quietly accusing him of something.

"…It's all your fault! If you hadn't gone gawking at that damned liquid nitrogen, we wouldn't have lost!"

"Right! Because of you alone, all of us have to do the elimination round!"

"You useless—" Leo crouched on the floor, head in his hands, like an abandoned puppy, saying nothing, letting his teammates' spittle drown him. This was the cruelty of a team battle. Rise together, fall together. And when failure came, finding a scapegoat seemed to be human instinct.

"They're going too far. Losing the round wasn't Leo's fault alone." Sarah couldn't quite bear it.

"This is Burning Kitchen," Chris said mildly.

"It doesn't believe in tears. Only results." He watched the tableau of human nature below, but his mind was on something else. Tomorrow's elimination challenge — of the Red Team's six, who would stay, who would go? The proud but still-capable captain Ethan? The skilled-knife but shaky-nerved David? Or this Leo, now thoroughly isolated by his teammates? The elimination challenge was usually individual. Stripped of a team's constraints and dead weight, their true levels would be fully exposed.

Chris knew that any of them who survived tomorrow's elimination would undergo a transformation, in nerve and in skill. They'd become more terrifying rivals. And he had to run faster and grow stronger before they did. He opened the system panel in his mind.

[Culinary competitor: Chris White] [Culinary Rating: B (75/100)] [Arena Points: 307] [Core modules: Data Eye (active), Dish Simulation (active)] [Skills held: Absolute Heat Control (Short Duration) ×1] [Items held: Vane's Approval (Passive)] Through this restaurant takeover, his overall rating had climbed from B- to B. His Arena Points had reached an unprecedented 307. He turned his eyes to the one option in the Skill Shop he'd long regarded as the ultimate weapon.

[Gareth Vane Taste-Preference Analysis Report (Season Ten edition)] [Price: 50 Arena Points] [Description: through big-data analysis of Gareth Vane's scores, comments, expressions, and tone across this season and all past shows, generates a detailed report on his personal palate, dish preferences, deal-breakers, and potential bonus factors.] Before, he'd always felt the report was too expensive, and that his own ability fell short of catering to Vane's palate anyway. But now he had the points, and the confidence.

He would buy it. He wouldn't merely win the competition — he'd win it in the way Vane liked best. He would completely conquer the man who had once thrown him out of the kitchen. Just as he was about to tap "Redeem," a commotion broke out in the kitchen below. The production crew was carrying in an enormous table, draped in a great black cloth, looking mysterious. Gareth Vane reappeared in the kitchen too. He clapped his hands and drew the attention of every cleaning Red Team member.

"All right, trash, stop playing dead." His voice was as caustic as ever.

"You think tonight's over just like that? You think I'll let you sleep well and come back for the elimination tomorrow?"

"How naive." He walked to the cloth-draped table, a devil's smile on his face.

"Your elimination challenge starts now." In the second-floor gallery, the Blue Team — Chris included — all froze. An elimination round overnight? It had never happened in the history of Burning Kitchen. What was Vane up to? Under everyone's stunned gaze, Vane abruptly threw back the cloth. Beneath it were no precious ingredients, no complex tools. Only six identical burlap sacks stuffed full of potatoes. And six of the most ordinary peeling knives.

"Six of you, one sack of potatoes each." Vane's voice was a sentence from hell.

"For the next eight hours, you have only one task."

"Peel potatoes.

"Before dawn, whoever peels the most, and cleanest, survives. The other five get the hell out."