Chapter 6: This Isn't My Specialty
His first weekend since joining the company.
"Hah—!"
The moment the tension let go, it hit him just how utterly impossible everything that had happened really was, and he shot upright clutching his head.
"This is insane. Insane, insane..."
Once he had pulled himself together, he searched up everything he could find on vampires, werewolves, and travel between dimensions.
...And on the buying and selling of human bodies, too.
Before he knew it, three hours had gone by with nothing but web surfing.
...Is there even a point to this?
Drowning in urban legends and horror stories only made his head ache worse.
Haah... If all he could manage were bleak thoughts, he might as well grab at straws.
That person from before. The one who was definitely human.
He reached out to the former employee who had pressed a business card into his hand in the lobby on the day of his interview.
Brand Design Team
Even in the brief moment they had crossed paths, she had been kind.
She helped me get a visitor pass.
When he texted, she answered again in that same gentle tone.
Or perhaps a pitying one...
She readily agreed to meet at a cafe the very next day, Sunday.
He was about to send the address of a chain cafe right in front of the station, but his designer's pride made him swap it for a place with a nice atmosphere, a ten-minute walk away.
"It's been a while. Did your first day go all right?"
...Why didn't you stop me back then!
He nearly tried to pin the blame on someone else for no reason, realized he would only be taking it out on a decent person, and swallowed the words.
Don't forget. She gave up a weekend worth its weight in gold to meet me....
Well. Breaking company property had been his fault, too.
"Yes. Have you been well, Yeon-woo? I'm Choi Lee-hyun. Thank you for the other day."
And don't forget the kindness of someone who helped a person lost in the lobby.
"It's not an ordinary company, so you must have been pretty shocked, right? I almost told you before the interview, but you never know how desperate someone might be. Especially in a hiring freeze like this."
......I'm sorry for thinking badly of you, even for a moment.
Guilt washed over him....
"And I had a feeling someone like you would adapt just fine, Lee-hyun."
Yeon-woo answered with a gentle smile, and there was something slightly odd about the answer.
When we met in the lobby, did I really look that much like Vanta's idea of talent?
Anyway, he needed to start with what he most wanted to know. Confirming this part was the urgent thing.
"When you signed your employment contract, Yeon-woo, was there anything unusual? The company getting some kind of leverage on you, strange language buried in the fine print, a minimum term of employment—anything like that?"
"No, nothing in particular. It was just an ordinary full-time contract. The kind you can quit whenever you make up your mind to."
...Had all those bizarre things happened only to him?
Back then he had been in a complete panic, backed into a corner with nowhere to go, and he had signed.
......Looking back now with a clear head, he wasn't even sure he had been the one who broke the sculpture.
I think there was a little distance between me and the statue.
What if it had simply shattered at the perfect moment—by chance, or by someone's design?
...But the world is crawling with designers!
Hmm... If he started believing they had hired him even at the cost of smashing a Michelangelo, that might just be an oversized ego.
The thoughts left him unsettled. It must have shown, because the woman with the ponytail went on, offering comfort.
"Strange things happen, but Vanta Design is a decent place to work. The pay is good, and the work-life balance depends on the project... but it's better than other agencies in the human world."
"Right. That's true."
"The benefits are good, too. Three meals a day from the company cafeteria isn't something you can ignore."
Is that food even safe to eat? What if they used strange ingredients—something like Persephone's pomegranate seeds?
...He wanted to ask, but he had already eaten plenty of it.
Ignorance was probably bliss, so he decided not to. Yeon-woo was perfectly fine, so it was probably all right.
...And if nothing else, squeezing every last benefit out of the company might make him a little less miserable!
Then again, did she really work at the same company I do?
......A vampire for a CEO, a headless corpse for a secretary, and a werewolf as his direct supervisor?
Startled by such a generous assessment of the place, and finding it at odds with the path she had just taken, he asked.
"You seem pretty satisfied with Vanta Design. Would it be all right if I asked why you resigned?"
"Mm... Everyone in the Planning Department left. That was the big one."
Yeon-woo took a notebook from her bag and sketched an organization chart.
Until not long ago, she explained, there had been a Planning Department made up of three teams, like this.
"The Research Team surveyed the clients' worlds and did the market research. If you're going to decide how to position a brand, you have to understand that world."
True enough. This agency gathered intelligent beings from every kind of place.
There would be plenty of times when one person's common sense simply didn't apply.
"Using the materials the Research Team brought back, the Strategy Team and the Language Team set the direction, the name, the slogan, and so on. Then our department designed from that."
Pretty systematic, for an agency.
With the tentacle monster last time, time had been tight, and the client had already arrived with a firm plan, so maybe they had skipped it.
"...But while they were researching one particular project, the entire Research Team went missing."
"Missing? Then who took over the work the Research Team was doing?"
"At first the other teams in the Planning Department split it up and took it on. But the Research Team vanished during work—while they were out surveying another world...."
Yeon-woo hesitated, then went on.
"A lot of people already dreaded that kind of work, so they resigned one after another. Even the ones who stayed all quit once the workload ballooned."
"......"
With a sense of dread closing in, he made himself speak.
"...Then what's become of the Planning Department's work?"
"We agreed that whenever a design team running a project needed something done, they would handle it together. That's also why I resigned."
Ah.
Aaaaaah.
This was, without question... over. He was finished.
No......
He was fucked.
I was already shaking just sitting across from a perfectly polite client in a conference room!
I'm supposed to go tearing all over strange worlds without any real protection??!! An ordinary human being??!!
Every kind of simulation started spinning through his head.
What if the thing the tentacle monster burst open wasn't a slime, but him....
"Still, it's not as if every request needs a new survey. Worlds we already have materials on don't need research."
"......"
"And if it's only the planning work being added on, it's easier anyway when the person doing the design sets the direction, too."
Adding that the CEO had been trying to bring in new people, Yeon-woo attempted to comfort him as he panicked.
But of course, it was no comfort at all......
Haah......
Home again after that shocking conversation, he sprawled out, drained of strength, and waited for the Monday bearing down on him.
Like a cow about to be led into the slaughterhouse.
On the phone he glanced at now and then, the only thing growing was his search history.
"......"
Miserable, he turned the afternoon's conversation over again.
Fine. I can live with the planning work piling on.
Just as Yeon-woo had said, when a designer got involved from the brand-strategy stage, the finished design came out stronger.
That was why plenty of designers already did both. He did too, more than a little.
But this is the problem.
The research work.
Exploring a new world.
He did not want to wander a place that didn't even have data and die a miserable death...!
Bzzzz—!
As if his inner screaming were none of its concern, the buzz of his phone filled the room.
He looked. Another message, from the number that had texted him on the day of his interview.
...Insane boss!
Something that could perfectly well have gone out on the company messenger on Monday, and they just had to—absolutely had to—send it as a personal message on a Sunday evening.
They seemed to like humans well enough. Do they not understand human culture?
Unless it was urgent, contacting someone on the weekend was bad manners. If only some brave soul would tell them!
But the frightening stories about vampires came back to him, and he typed with perfect courtesy.
· · ·
And so time passed, until it was Monday—the day he walked into the slaughterhouse.
...Should I just disappear?
He even pictured simply not going in.
...In the end, with no idea what those surreal beings might do to him, the ill-fated office worker clocked in diligently again today.
Nobody in the lobby again, same as last time.
But once he tapped the visitor pass he had been issued on a temporary basis and stepped through the gate, he saw a guard standing at the desk that had been empty.
A small dip of the head—
Once again, he offered a light nod to the guard whose gaze met his.
So this entrance gate really is the point where you cross into another world.
Coming in free of the pressure of a project, with a little room to look around, he began to notice things he hadn't properly seen before.
...First time I've really gotten a look at the guard, too.
Closer to a police dress uniform than a typical security outfit: black, and slightly classical, as if the CEO's taste had been worked into it.
Only the collar of the jacket sat a little high, and above it a hat seemed to float.
And... between that collar and the hat, there was nothing.
A pitch-black blank.
In the empty space, two round lights like headlights floated, adrift, where eyes ought to be.
Gives me the creeps.
Goosebumps climbing both arms, he took the elevator up to his desk.
The moment he logged into the company messenger and his status flipped to On Duty, a message flew in from the CEO, who had noticed he was in.
In the messenger window, only the CEO's name was set in a slightly unusual font.
Because, set against the other employees, whose names appeared in an ordinary typeface—
—the CEO's name, whether someone had set it that way on purpose, stood rather spectacularly apart.
"......"
Kind of cringe......
Anyway, when someone above you called, the rule was to go quickly.
All the more so when that someone was a frightening vampire who handed out bizarre contracts as if they were nothing!
Better get moving.
So he went to the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.
Ding—
And before he knew it, he was standing in front of the CEO's office.
He straightened his clothes and drew one deep breath.
He lifted his hand, and in the instant he meant to knock—
"Yes, come in!"
A cheerful voice came from beyond the door.
He froze, hand still raised.
......He hadn't even knocked yet.