Chapter 177. Extinguished a Kitchen Fire Like It Was an Enemy Combatant
The sudden heat was startling, searing the air between them.
"I’m controlling it; I’m controlling it!" Ellie gasped, her voice cracking with the unmistakable strain of someone whose control had just evaporated into thin air.
Instinct took over the raw, panicked reflex of a student who had spent months learning to leash her overwhelming magical reserves. A thin, unstable thread of her magic flickered toward the flame.
’Think light, think calm, think—’ Ellie’s mind screamed.
But her magic was a creature of instinct, and in her panic, she misread the situation entirely. Instead of a cooling barrier, she channeled a burst of raw energy that misfired spectacularly.
Rather than dimming the blaze, the magic fed it like oil on a pyre. The flame brightened to a blinding white-blue intensity, roaring toward the ceiling as if the fire itself had been given wings.
Catherine reacted not as a baker, but as the seasoned veteran she was. The moment the fire roared upward, her brain didn’t register ’kitchen accident’; it registered ’hostile breach.’
Years of brutal combat instinct and years spent in trenches where a single spark could mean death took over before she could even consciously process the danger. Her hand shot out with lethal accuracy, snatching a heavy linen cloth from the counter.
In one fluid, violent motion that had absolutely nothing to do with culinary arts and everything to do with battlefield reflexes, she smothered the flames.
She struck at the fire with the same decisive ferocity she would use to disarm a swordsman. The cloth wrapped around the blaze, crushing it beneath the weight of her palm.
The fire died instantly, strangled in its tracks, leaving behind only a pathetic curl of grey smoke and the sharp, acrid stench of singed fabric and scorched oil.
For two agonizing seconds, the kitchen was deathly silent. The only sound was the ragged, uneven breathing of two girls standing too close to one another in the sudden dimness.
Then, the dam broke.
Both of them burst into laughter at the exact same moment, the kind of hysterical, helpless, doubled-over laughter that only comes when adrenaline floods the system and finds nowhere to land.
It was the laugh of survivors who had just stared down a minor catastrophe and come out grinning.
"You just extinguished a kitchen fire like it was an enemy combatant!" Ellie wheezed, doubling over and clutching her stomach, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes from the sheer force of her mirth. "I thought you were going to draw a dagger on the stove, Vice Headmaster!"
Catherine leaned against the counter for support, her chest still heaving, though her expression was slowly shifting from battle-ready intensity to genuine amusement.
"In my defense," she panted, trying to regain some semblance of authority while her shoulders shook, "it was an unprovoked attack! And it came out of nowhere!"
"It was oil, vice headmaster!" Ellie managed to choke out between gasps for air, wiping tears from her cheeks. "It was just cooking oil... to be fair, it wasn’t attacking us!"
Catherine straightened her spine, though her eyes were still dancing with residual adrenaline. She looked at the blackened spot on the stove with absolute, unblinking seriousness.
"It was attacking the bread, Ellie. The mission was to produce sustenance, and that flame was actively attempting to sabotage our objective."
The sheer absurdity of the statement delivered with the deadly solemnity of a general reporting a failed siege was the final blow. Ellie collapsed against the table, her laughter escalating into high-pitched giggles that made her ribs ache.
"The bread! Oh gods, the bread almost died in the crossfire!"
Catherine couldn’t help it. A genuine, rare laugh escaped her throat, a sound that rarely echoed through the cold halls of the vice headmaster’s office.
"Precisely! We cannot allow the ingredients to suffer such casualties, and we must maintain operational security."
"Operational security," Ellie repeated, wiping her face with her apron, still grinning like an idiot. "We are literally just making a sponge cake, Vice Headmaster."
"We’re not conducting a covert op."
"That is exactly what someone who failed to secure the perimeter would say," Catherine countered, though she finally allowed herself to relax, the last of the tension bleeding out of her frame.
After the storm of laughter finally receded, leaving them both physically exhausted and gasping for air, they stood in the quiet aftermath to survey the wreckage of their culinary battlefield. The kitchen looked like it had been caught in the crossfire of a minor magical skirmish.
Flour dusted nearly every available surface like a fresh snowfall after an explosion; a faint, ominous scorch mark darkened one corner of the counter where the oil had roared; and a sticky residue of spilled ingredients clung to the floor.
When they finally pulled the bread from the oven some time later, it emerged looking less like a bakery masterpiece and more like something that had survived a collapsed tunnel.
It was distinctly lopsided, leaning precariously to one side, with one crust significantly darker, almost charred, than the recipe’s golden brown ideal.
Catherine leaned forward, studying the misshapen loaf with an intensity usually reserved for assessing enemy fortifications.
"It’s ugly," she said flatly, though there was something between genuine disappointment and a strange, reluctant fondness in her voice. "The structural integrity is questionable at best."
"The symmetry is nonexistent."
Ellie leaned against the counter beside her, shoulders relaxed, a tired but genuine smile tugging at her lips.
"Maybe so, Vice Headmaster, but it’s ours," she said, nudging Catherine’s arm gently. "In this kitchen, that counts for something."
They didn’t bother with plates or proper table settings. Instead, they tore off thick, uneven slices of the imperfect bread and ate them standing right there amid the flour-coated chaos, not yet having found the motivation to begin the cleanup.
The bread was warm, slightly crunchy on the burnt side, and honest.
As Catherine chewed, she found herself caught in a rare moment of introspection. She watched Ellie, still flushed from laughter and still covered in flour, and realized that something had shifted.
Since Ellie had joined her regular training rotation, a new rhythm had formed between them. It wasn’t the rigid, formal mentor-and-student dynamic that defined Catherine’s relationship with every other student at the Academy.
Nor was it quite the deeper, more complex, and often heavier bond she shared with William.
This was something simpler. Something lighter.
’It’s strange,’ Catherine thought, watching a stray speck of flour drift through a shaft of afternoon light. ’I spend my life preparing for worst-case scenarios, for blood, for betrayal, for the moment everything breaks.’
’But here... breaking things feels different. It feels human...’
It was a friendship that had crept in quietly, not through grand gestures or shared victories, but through shared mistakes, burnt bread, misfired magic, and that specific, unguarded kind of laughter that only surfaces when you know nobody is watching to judge the outcome.
In the silence of the messy kitchen, the weight of her responsibilities as vice headmaster felt momentarily distant.
Ellie broke the silence, brushing a thick layer of flour from her sleeve and squinting at the mess.
"We should definitely do this again sometime," she said, her eyes bright with mischief. "Though, next time, I suggest we choose a venue with considerably less flammable oil."
"Maybe something safer. Like... water polo?"
Catherine actually let out a small, genuine huff of amusement, wiping a smudge of flour from her cheek.
"Preferably," she agreed, and for once, the vice headmaster wasn’t speaking from duty or protocol.
She meant it with every fiber of her being.