Tanaka Family Reincarnates: Volume 4 (eBook)

Choco (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-1329-3 (ISBN)

Infos

The Tanakas are back, and they're facing utter destruction! Well, maybe they aren't, but the Eastern Empire is, and that means the destruction of good old Japanese food. Surely that's equivalent, right?
With some adorable (and not-so adorable) massive beasts on their side, they're returning to the Eastern Empire as a family to take down the deadly threat facing the country: a botanical crisis in the form of monsters called owatas. Will the Tanakas be able to cut down these flowery foes, or will the Eastern Empire be doomed forever?

Textauszug

Chapter 54: A Great Feast

Thump.

Melsa dropped the stem of an owata on the desk; she’d brought it home from the Eastern Empire for reference. It made such a hard, dull sound that for a plant-type monster, it didn’t seem plantlike in the slightest.

William picked up the stem and carefully looked it over. “It’s hard, but super light... Maybe the stem here is structured a bit like bamboo?” William knew as much about owatas as he knew about other monsters he’d read about in books, but he’d never seen one in real life. Now, he could see for himself that the insides of the stems were hollow and sectioned off.

“I was only able to bring back the stem, but the leaves and seeds are apparently both hard and heavy.” Once the yellow flowers Melsa saw in the Eastern Empire were finished blooming, the seeds and leaves would form and grow heavier with each passing day. Because the stem was segmented, it would steadily bend, but it wouldn’t break.

“Wow! I can hardly believe these sturdy stalks can bend! Those seeds and leaves must be pretty darn heavy!” Emma said. She tried to flex the stalk herself, but it wouldn’t give at all.

“And you said they launch the seeds, right?” George shuddered, thinking that if something like that were to land on you, you’d be squashed flat. Once the seeds had grown enough to sprout, the leaves (which were there as weights) would all fall off and the stalk, which would have bent as far as it could, would pop back up at full force like a spring. This motion would send the seeds flying as if from a catapult, and they were weighty enough that, with such force, they would destroy anything that might get in the way of their growth. They could almost certainly demolish any house with ease.

“So how did they cut through this stalk, anyway? All the books I read said they were too tough to cut through no matter what you used.” Since there were no records of owatas ever appearing on the southern continent, William would’ve been hard-pressed to say the things he’d ever read on them were especially detailed, but everything he had read said they were too tough to be cut by any blade, and thus could not be felled. It was odd to him that there had been an owata’s stalk cut short enough to carry home in the first place.

Owatas supposedly could not be cut down, but the stalk Melsa brought home showed clear signs that it had been severed by a particularly sharp blade of some kind.

“Oh, they apparently cut this with one of the Eastern Empire’s national treasures... They said they slew this owata using a sword by some guy named...Okisato Nagasone? They apparently have a bunch of incredible swords being kept as national treasures, and only a few of them were able to cut through the owatas.”

“What?!” Emma twitched.

Did she just say...Okisato Nagasone?!

“Mother! That’s a kotetsu!”

Melsa gave Emma a look of confusion and tilted her head. “Kotetsu?”

“What else did they have, mother?! What other kinds of swords did they have?! Do they have Masamune?! Muramasa?! Kanemitsu?! Oooh, c’mon, you guys! What’s with the weird looks?!” At that point, Emma’s whole family was giving her a look that said, What are you talking about? Even William, the former otaku. Apparently, the rest of her family still didn’t completely remember their previous lives.

“What others were there...?” Melsa shook her head. “Regardless, I did hear that even those precious katanas were rendered dull after just one swing at an owata.” The Eastern Empire had given Melsa all the information they had on owatas, but she couldn’t remember the names of every last sword they’d used to kill one.

“Noooo! That’s a total waste of a kotetsu!” Emma was the only one who seemed to be distraught to hear that one of the Eastern Empire’s great swords had been dulled.

“So this...uh...kotetsu? I guess? Must be a katana that’s insanely strong, right? So why can’t we just use those?” George thought the whole reason owatas were so dangerous was that they couldn’t just be cut down.

“C’mon, George. Do you really think first-rate swords good enough to be national treasures are that easy to make? You just heard you can only use them once. Not to mention, you’ve gotta find people who know the right techniques too. Even if we could cut them down, it’d probably just be a couple!” Emma shot George a look as if to say, Think before you speak, man! The shock of losing such a historical relic made her especially harsh on her poor brother.

“But knowing you can cut them does mean we can harvest them, right?” Leonard said, trying to calm Emma down a bit.

“You’re right. But if this is all we could get from using one of their national treasures, then they’re probably almost all useless now, right? And from what we heard, the owatas have already spread pretty far and wide. About half of the Eastern Empire is already covered in them...”

In other words, they didn’t have nearly enough weapons. To defeat all those owatas, they would need several thousand swords that were sharper and more durable than even the most legendary swords of all time. It would be impossible. They knew they had to prevent the destruction of the Eastern Empire if they wanted their rice. However, if they could come up with a plan to do so on the fly, then the Eastern Empire wouldn’t have been struggling for so long. The whole family began thinking how they could solve this crisis. If they didn’t do something, then their precious, precious rice...

Wait.

Rice?

Precious rice?

“M-Mother! I just realized something!” The whole family had put their thinking caps on for once when Emma raised her hand to ask permission to speak.

“You already came up with something, Emma?” Though Emma was the Herald of Hullabaloos herself, she did have a very rare and creative mind, so Melsa was expecting quite a bit from her.

“The sun’s starting to set! And that means...we can start to get the rice ready, right?!”

The whole family gasped.

“You’re right!”

The next time the owatas would spread their seeds was in the summer. They could postpone their brainstorming for just a little longer. What was more important right then and there...was that night’s dinner. They knew they had to hurry and get to the kitchen, and so the fifth Tanaka family meeting was brought to a close.

◆ ◆ ◆

The family scrambled to the kitchen, where they found their cooks at a loss for what to do and four young blue-haired boys working their tails off.

“Well? How are we doing in here now?” Melsa asked the cook, who was simply watching the young men.

“Ah, Mistress Stewart. My deepest apologies, but these are all ingredients we’ve never used before, so...we weren’t sure what to do. The young boys you brought from the Eastern Empire seem to have it handled, but we can’t communicate with them...” the cook responded apologetically.

The spaghetti napolitan Melsa made in the Eastern Empire had been an even wilder success than she’d expected it to be. The gentle flavor of the spaghetti was a healing salve on the souls of the people of the Eastern Empire, who had long since given up on everything.

When Melsa had left the Eastern Empire, she had offered Ume all the recipes she could remember from her previous life as Yoriko. Ume had been shocked by how many there were, and then said she had a favor to ask of her.

“Lady Melsa. We will likely be out of rice in six months if things continue this way. We must subsist off of the relief the kingdom provided us for the next half a year until our Empire is destroyed. Can you please take these children and teach them how to cook so our people can still enjoy good food for the last months of their lives?”

Ume wanted Melsa to teach four boys how to cook food that the people of the Eastern Empire would enjoy, and those four boys were now working in the Stewart family kitchen.

“How are you doing, Ito? Is it too difficult to cook without magic stones?” Melsa asked one of the boys.

“Lady Melsa! No, it’s perfectly fine! It’s a lot like my grandma’s kitchen, so I’m making do.”

Melsa had been worried that it would be difficult for the boys to get used to life in the kingdom without magic stones, so this was a relief to her.

“Er... Lady Melsa? Their names were also a bit difficult to understand...or even try to pronounce,” the cook reported reluctantly.

“Everyone was able to say Prince Tasuku’s name just fine, though?” Emma had been enjoying the scent of the rice being cooked, but felt she needed to question the cook’s report.

“Well, that’s because... W-Wait, why are all of you in here?” It wasn’t just Emma but also George, William, and Leonard who had now gathered in the kitchen, drawn to the smell of the rice.

“Oh yeah... The king had no problem saying Prince Tasuku’s name either.” Leonard nodded, the grumblebugs in his stomach making a true chorus of sound.

“Prince Tasuku is easy to understand! But these boys...their names were like...Eetoo? Hera? Chihuahua? Na—...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.10.2025
• Reihe/Serie: The Tanaka Family Reincarnates
• Illustrationen: Choco
• Übersetzer: Choco
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: Cats • Comedy • Family • High Society • light-hearted • Light Novel • Low Fantasy
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-1329-2 / 1718313292
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-1329-3 / 9781718313293