Even if I fall into a ghost story, I still have to go to work
Chapter 54
The promised three days.
The final day at ‘Horizon Lodge’ dawned.
“…….”
The public servant rose from his bed.
He wasn’t in a particularly good mood.
He felt that things had been warped from a certain point….
And since the job itself wasn’t exactly pleasant to begin with, no one would have been in high spirits.
But because his shift wasn’t over yet, he put on the prepared work clothes, strapped on his gear, picked up his tools, and stepped out of the room.
And then he saw a sight that was far from pleasant.
“……Phew.”
The first-floor living room was a bloodbath.
As if offering a sacrifice to someone, a pentagram had been drawn in blood, with dismembered body parts placed at each point.
And on the only clean sofa lay an unconscious woman.
It was the wife of the couple.
“…….”
The public servant hesitated for a moment but ultimately decided to carry out his assigned task.
He knew the danger of exercising personal judgment.
And….
“Ugh…… Wh-what?!”
Because they weren’t exactly people whose lives were worth saving.
“Aaaaah!”
The woman, jolting awake on the sofa, screamed.
Before her stood a burly man clad in a black waterproof raincoat, clutching a Butcher Knife that was easily over 35cm long!!
The man holding the slaughter knife suppressed a sigh.
‘Of all the times.’
She had to wake up now.
He was tired. More so than usual.
No, how could a situation possibly deviate this far from the plan…!
The public servant reflexively thought back to his first day at the lodge.
His very first target had been one of the spouses.
The Bureau’s analysis suggested they were an easy target due to their greed, and that killing one member of the couple would create a sense of terror, making the subsequent work easier.
Following the impulses whispered into his mind by the infiltration, he had intended to lure the man into the kitchen to fulfill the foreshadowing in the picture frame….
‘I’ll have to burn him in the furnace.’
But someone had beaten him to it.
‘…!?’
There was already a corpse in the furnace.
And in a rather avant-garde fashion at that.
…??
His mind was filled with question marks.
The Disaster Management Bureau had used their accumulated expertise to obtain and assign that specific cassette tape so that he would be cast in the role of the serial killer.
So why was another killer suddenly popping up?
Even then, he had thought it might just be the unpredictability of a supernatural disaster manifesting again.
Until he discovered the clothes of the two college students, turned into minced meat in the backyard that afternoon.
‘…….’
He’d had no choice but to quietly hang the large sledgehammer he’d prepared back in the closet….
By that point, it was impossible not to realize.
Some crazy bastard knew everything and was beating him to the punch.
It was maddening.
And since they had even gone ahead and done a dismemberment murder for the final day, a headache was inevitable.
What kind of insane situation was this?
Yet, his task remained unchanged. Which meant that even in this mess, he had to carry out his final duty according to priority.
That was the judgment befitting a member of the Disaster Management Bureau.
“Eek….”
The brief reminiscence ended.
The public servant looked down at the prey cowering beneath his eyes.
Feeling a deep exhaustion at the task ahead, just as he was about to swing the blade with precision—
“Agent 007.”
“…….”
He turned his head toward the voice.
He saw someone leaning on the second-floor railing, looking down at the living room.
The office worker.
The seller he’d met through Salmon Market.
“You don’t have to kill her.”
Kim Sol-eum looked down.
The individual in question comes to firmly believe that they have inherited the inspiration and legacy of a
legendary killer
, experiencing both mental and physical mutations.
Indeed, from the black raincoat to the gleaming Butcher Knife, the public servant looked every bit the professional killer.
To any observer, he was the serial killer chosen by this disaster.
However, Kim Sol-eum knew better.
‘Even if he looks like that, he can be reasoned with.’
-Are you sure,
friend
?
He was sure.
‘Disaster Management Bureau agents always come prepared with countermeasures for the specific disaster.’
For instance, like the holster-shaped equipment slightly visible through the gap in the raincoat near the public servant’s chest.
======================
Darkness Exploration Records / Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau
/ Item
Line Holder
A black, holster-shaped equipment-type item.
When worn, provides resistance against supernatural mental abnormalities of Goyoung (刳形) class or lower.
Item Usage Condition: Level 8 or higher public servant belonging to the Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau.
======================
That was mental defense equipment.
Public servants weren’t idiots; they wouldn’t deploy someone empty-handed into a ghost story where mental brainwashing could turn them into a killer.
‘There’s no way they’d send him in without his wits about him.’
Especially since these agents were deployed mainly to dangerous ghost stories where fatalities were a given.
‘It would be a disaster if they ran into a devious pharmaceutical employee using affinity-building items like Smile Stickers.’
Exactly.
Kim Sol-eum spoke to the silent public servant.
“You really don’t need to kill her. All the foreshadowing has already been fulfilled.”
“…….”
“Because I did it all.”
Silence.
“Did you kill them?”
Hmm.
It was true that this disaster would not end unless a serial murder occurred.
According to the Guide, if someone artificially intervened and no murders happened until the end, they’d usually end up killing each other during the inheritance phase, resulting in a total catastrophe.
‘That’s probably why the stage was set for the public servant to do the killing.’
Since they couldn’t afford to have the agent die by mistake, they managed the situation by designating him as the serial killer instead.
That was the rule.
Either commit a serial murder.
“No.”
“…!”
“I just made it look like I did.”
Or make the disaster judge it as equivalent to a serial murder!
“There were corpses.”
“There were, but….”
The office worker, Kim Sol-eum, rubbed the back of his neck.
“The corpses weren’t made by me.”
“…!”
“Did you know? This lodge has a basement.”
Kim Sol-eum recalled a part of the verse inside the gold frame.
It hadn’t just contained foreshadowing for the methods of murder.
There were other clues as well.
The sound of hippity-hop laughing and jumping
Thump, thump on the wooden floor beneath your feet
The dining table is bountiful
I hear a hum
This stanza was a hint.
Thump, thump on the wooden floor beneath your feet
It meant there was a hollow space under the floor, causing the sound to echo.
And….
‘Since that verse compared murder to food…….’
The dining table is bountiful
Something related to serial murder was abundant.
Sure enough.
“There were dismembered body parts and organs preserved in chemicals on display in the basement.”
“…!”
There had been a workshop.
“It seems serial murders have happened in this lodge before, just as you said. …I thought I was going to faint.”
Seriously.
They were likely leftovers from previous cycles of serial killings.
In any case, after heading to the basement at night while chanting ‘there are no ghosts’ to psych himself up, only to see that sight… well, let’s just move on.
The important thing was that he had devised a new way to use those macabre props.
The public servant realized.
“…The bodies that have appeared so far.”
“Yes.”
Kim Sol-eum said somewhat sheepishly.
“None of them were in one piece, right?”
Because he had recycled the parts from the basement to make it look like they had just been killed!
That was why Baek Sa-heon had to be the first victim.
‘……I couldn’t have done it without an assistant.’
Preserved or not, the idea of handling dismembered corpses with his bare hands alone at night to recreate a murder scene?
Just imagining it made him want to quit the world….
In any case, although Baek Sa-heon looked like he wanted to scream every profanity in the book, he had succumbed to the ultimate binary choice: ‘This is the only way to get out alive. Or do you just want to die?’
It meant he had obediently become an excellent assistant for the murder tricks.
The two had worked hard to fabricate the murder scenes.
After stuffing wood into the kitchen furnace and burning it until it charred, they stuck a foot in and put one of Baek Sa-heon’s sneakers on it.
The ground meat and bones in the backyard were recycled ingredients from the freezer behind the warehouse, with the clothes stripped and scattered appropriately.
The state of the living room now, strewn with body parts, was the same.
Though Kim Sol-eum had done all the actual ambushing and kidnapping of the victims himself.
‘It couldn’t be helped, since Brown’s ability made the ambushes easier.’
Anyway, Kim Sol-eum finished his explanation with a shrug.
“I hid the people away and staged the scenes to look like they’d been killed. Because I used real corpses, no one suspected a thing.”
“…….”
“I thought the killer would at least stay quiet out of confusion.”
However.
“But… someone still killed people.”
“…….”
“The allergy and the landslide.”
Both had died before Kim Sol-eum could act.
While the landslide could be attributed to the supernatural phenomenon itself, the allergy was not something that could happen by chance.
Unless you were Sherlock Holmes, there was no way to discover what fatal allergy a person had through mere observation within less than a day of meeting them.
‘Actually, I didn’t know either until we happened to talk.’
Therefore, it was even more impossible for him to have brought the allergen, peanuts, to the lodge in advance for a murder.
Which meant….
It was the work of someone who knew the profiles of the people coming here in advance and had prepared for the murders.
“The anaphylactic shock—was that your doing, Agent?”
“…….”
The public servant did not deny it.
And Kim Sol-eum….
‘Hmm, as I thought.’
Wasn’t shocked at all!
One might ask if he shouldn’t show a little grief over the death and sacrifice of innocent civilians.
The truth was, they weren’t exactly ‘innocent civilians.’
‘The government doesn’t pick victims through Russian roulette.’
The civilian draftees for the Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau are selected through the ‘Scales of Evil.’
The weight on the scale is set to
‘unmotivated murder,’
and those whose crimes weigh heavier are classified as targets for drafting.
In other words, the government only gathers and places people in these ghost stories who have been judged to have committed acts more heinous than random murder.
‘If this disaster must be operated periodically, they round up people who deserve to die and put them in.’
A decision made to maintain a minimum level of ethics. It was typical of an official organization.
‘I guess this time too… they’re all people the government considers better off dead.’
And Kim Sol-eum’s guess was accurate.
In fact, the man and woman who appeared to be a couple were having an affair; the man’s original wife and young son had committed family suicide due to the shock and financial hardship.
The college students were perpetrators of a school bullying case that resulted in a classmate’s death, but they had been released due to insufficient evidence and had gone on to college together and joined a hiking club.
Even the designated driver was a child sex offender who had yet to be caught.
Though he didn’t know these specific details, Kim Sol-eum, having guessed the general idea, nodded inwardly.
‘Hmm. It’s probably a dream lineup.’
The government must have pulled strings to ensure the tapes ended up in their hands.
‘And then they deploy one public servant to manage and supervise the whole thing.’
Like the man currently answering Kim Sol-eum.
The public servant spoke without a hint of agitation.
“They are all criminals.”
“…….”
“If the criminal law functioned properly, every person in this lodge is a villain whose crimes are severe enough to warrant the death penalty in some countries.”
Except for you, who does not possess a tape.
However, the public servant was inwardly unsure of how much weight his words would carry.
Especially based on his experience with civilians he had met during his duties.
He lifted his head, feeling a heavy fatigue.
But….
“Hmm… I see. No wonder. I had a feeling.”
“…!”
To his surprise, the office worker on the second floor simply nodded.
“Anyway, except for those two, the rest are alive and well.”
Kim Sol-eum spoke casually, looking a bit awkward.
“Well, even if they are villains, the person doing the killing would feel a psychological burden, so I suppose this isn’t a bad outcome….”
“…….”
The public servant finally asked.
“Who are you?”
Staging a murder scene out of concern that a real one might occur, and even trusting a clearly suspicious person like himself through rational deduction?
This was not the mental strength of an ordinary person.
“Hmm.”
The man before him let out a long sigh.
“Just… someone who inevitably gets caught up in these kinds of situations.”
“Are you affiliated with the Disaster Management Bureau?”
“Of course not. I’ve heard rumors, though. It’s quite interesting to meet an agent in person… Ah,”
The office worker turned his head.
Creeeak.
The back door of the kitchen was opening.
Just like on the first day.
“It looks like the Lodge Keeper is back.”
The ending scene of the disaster was approaching.
