Chapter 54
Chapter 54
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 54
Chapter Title: Promised Three Days
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The promised three days had passed.
The final morning at the 'Horizon Lodge' had dawned.
"......"
The civil servant slowly rose from his bed.
It was not a pleasant awakening. Because from a certain point during this operation, things had felt fundamentally twisted—like a meticulously laid plan slowly unraveling at the seams.
To make matters worse, the assignment itself wasn't exactly a task he had been eager to take on. But since the operation wasn't officially over yet, he stoically donned his prepared work uniform, strapped on his tactical gear, picked up his designated tools, and stepped out of his room.
What awaited him outside was a sight far from pleasant.
"......Hoo."
The first-floor living room was an absolute bloodbath.
As if offering a grotesque, occult tribute to some unseen entity, gallons of blood had been utilized to draw a massive pentagram across the floorboards. Severed, dismembered body parts had been carefully placed at each geometric point.
And on the lone, unsullied spot—the center sofa—lay an unconscious woman.
The adulterous wife of the couple.
"......"
The civil servant hesitated briefly, calculating the variables, but ultimately resolved to proceed as planned. He knew all too well the catastrophic risks of acting on arbitrary personal judgment in the field.
And besides...
"Ugh... Wh-what in the world...?!"
They weren't exactly the kind of people worth sparing anyway.
"Aaaah!"
The woman, suddenly regaining consciousness on the blood-soaked sofa, unleashed a bloodcurdling scream at the sight before her.
Looming right in front of her stood a burly man clad entirely in waterproof black rain gear, silently gripping a heavy butcher knife at least 35 centimeters long!!
The man wielding the slaughter knife suppressed a heavy, exhausted sigh.
'Of all the times.'
She just had to wake up right now.
He was deeply exhausted. Far more than usual for these assignments.
Seriously, what kind of chaotic, unpredictable situation was this, where absolutely nothing went according to the Bureau's operational plan...!
The civil servant's mind reflexively flashed back to the first day at the lodge.
His initial, designated target had been the husband of this couple. They were greedy, vulnerable, and an incredibly easy mark. Furthermore, the Bureau's psychological analysis indicated that eliminating one half of the pair first would effectively sow paralyzing fear among the survivors, making the subsequent culling much smoother.
Following the intrusive, scripted impulse planted in his mind by the anomaly, he had planned to lure the target to the kitchen, realizing the ominous foreshadowing depicted in the picture frame...
'I'll burn him alive in the hearth.'
But someone had beaten him to the punch.
'...!?'
There was already a charred corpse stuffed inside the hearth.
And it had been left in a bizarrely avant-garde, grotesque state of mutilation.
...??
A swarm of confused question marks had flooded his disciplined mind.
The Disaster Management Bureau had utilized their vast institutional know-how to acquire and pre-assign that cursed cassette tape, explicitly selecting him to fulfill the narrative role of the serial killer.
So why the hell was a rogue, competing killer suddenly popping up out of nowhere?
At that point, he had forced himself to dismiss it, assuming it might just be the unpredictable irregularity of supernatural disasters flaring up again.
That was, until he found the college students' shredded clothes mixed amid the ground-up meat in the backyard at lunch that day.
'......'
He had no choice but to quietly, awkwardly hang his prepared sledgehammer back in the wardrobe...
By then, the reality of the situation was glaringly obvious.
Some crazy, rogue bastard knew the entire narrative structure and was getting ahead of the script, preemptively slaughtering the victims first.
It was utterly maddening.
And now today, the final day, this unknown variable had even gone so far as to stage this elaborate dismemberment scene for him. How could his head not throb from the sheer absurdity of it all?
What kind of insane, off-script situation was this?
But his overarching task remained unchanged. Even amid this chaotic mess, he had to carry out the final execution according to institutional priority.
That was the Bureau way. Follow orders, regardless of the variables.
"Eek... p-please..."
The brief flashback ended.
The civil servant looked down at his designated prey, who was paralyzed by terror, unable to mount even a token resistance beneath his cold gaze.
As he sharply raised the heavy knife, a thick, suffocating fatigue settling in his bones at the thought of the butchery to come—
"Agent 007."
"......"
He froze, slowly turning his head toward the voice.
Someone was leaning casually against the second-floor wooden railing, looking down calmly at the bloody tableau below.
The unassuming office worker.
The anonymous seller from the Salmon Market.
"You don't actually have to kill her, you know."
Kim Sol-eum looked down at him with an expression of mild exhaustion.
The relevant individual will firmly believe themselves to be the destined successor to a legendary serial killer's inspiration and legacy, undergoing severe mental and physical mutations.
Indeed, the civil servant—from the dripping black rain gear to the gleaming, oversized blade—looked every bit the genuine, psychotic article.
Anyone with eyes could see he was the designated serial killer ordained by this localized disaster.
But Kim Sol-eum knew better.
'Despite looking like a B-movie slasher villain, he's a professional. He'll listen to reason.'
-Are you absolutely certain of this, friend?
Certain.
'Bureau agents come highly prepared for these kinds of disasters.'
For instance, take the sleek, tactical holster barely peeking out from beneath the rain gear near the civil servant's chest right now.
That was standard-issue, government-grade mental defense gear.
The Bureau would never send their valuable agents into a ghost story where mind-control mechanics could permanently rebirth them as psychotic killers without outfitting them with heavy cognitive protection.
'They'd never send them in with a clear, unprotected head.'
These were specialized agents deployed primarily into highly lethal ghost stories where a 100% casualty rate was often the assumed baseline.
'If a ruthless corporate employee using something as simple as a Smile Sticker affinity inducer could manipulate them in the field, the government would be in massive trouble.'
So, yeah.
Kim Sol-eum spoke calmly to the expressionless, knife-wielding civil servant.
"You really don't need to kill her. All the required narrative foreshadowing has already been perfectly realized."
"......"
"I took care of all the groundwork for you."
A heavy silence hung in the air.
"Are you claiming that you killed them yourself?"
Hmm.
It was true that this specific disaster definitively wouldn't end without a quota of serial killings being met.
According to the Darkness Exploration Records, if an outside intervention forcefully prevented the murders from occurring, the narrative would violently autocorrect. The survivors would descend into a paranoid frenzy during the 'legacy inheritance' phase, leading to a massive mutual slaughter and an inescapable bad end.
'So the Bureau specifically sets it up for their embedded agent to systematically commit the killings himself.'
They can't risk having their highly trained agent die by accident during a mutual slaughter event, so they intentionally designate him as the serial killer to carefully manage the death toll and control the narrative pacing.
That was the rigid rule of this anomaly. Commit the serial killings.
Or...
"No."
"...!"
"I just made it seem like the killer did."
Trick the overarching narrative into judging the serial killing conditions as fulfilled!
"But there were physical bodies."
"That's true, but..."
The office worker, Kim Sol-eum, rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.
"The mutilated bodies I used to stage the scenes weren't ones I actively made."
"...!"
"Did you know? This lodge has a hidden basement."
Kim Sol-eum recalled his deduction process.
A specific snippet of the cryptic poem displayed in the pure gold frame in the living room.
It wasn't just establishing foreshadowing for the murder methods. There were other vital topological hints hidden within the text.
Bouncing laughter echoing brightly
Thud thud on the wooden floor below
The table grows incredibly abundant
A cheerful humming tune drifts in
This stanza was the key hint.
Thud thud on the wooden floor below
Meaning there was an explicitly empty, hollow space beneath the floorboards, causing the sound to echo.
And...
'The poem directly compared the act of murder to a feast of food, so...'
The table grows incredibly abundant
Something directly related to the serial killings had been made abundant and stockpiled.
And sure enough, his deduction had been flawless.
"The basement contained a vast, grotesque collection of preserved, dismembered bodies and organs on display."
"...!"
It was a serial killer's macabre workshop.
"Like you just noted, it seems a string of horrific serial killings happened here during previous iterations. ...I nearly passed out when I found it."
For real.
They were likely the grotesque byproducts and butcher trophies left over from a previous cycle's serial killings, preserved by the disaster's mechanics.
Anyway, venturing down into that pitch-black basement late at night, desperately steeling his fragile nerves with the mantra 'there are no ghosts here,' only to be greeted by that horrifying display—Kim Sol-eum's psychological state had taken a massive hit... well, moving on.
The critical part was that he'd found a highly pragmatic new use for those crazy, macabre props.
The civil servant instantly caught on to the logistical implication.
"...The bodies I found so far."
"Yes."
Kim Sol-eum smiled sheepishly.
"Not many of them were in a highly intact condition, right?"
He had actively recycled the preserved, mutilated chunks from the basement, meticulously staging them to look like fresh, brutal kills!
That was exactly why the spineless Baek Saheon had to be isolated as the first 'sacrifice.'
'...I could never have done all that heavy lifting solo without a dedicated assistant.'
Preserved by anomalous means or not, fiddling barehanded with dismembered, rotting corpses alone in the dead of night to meticulously recreate crime scenes? Just imagining undertaking that task solo made him want to quit the corporate world and expire.
Anyway, Baek Saheon, terrified, had looked like he wanted to curse up an absolute storm, but he ultimately submitted to the ultimate tactical dilemma: 'This is the only way we survive unscathed. Or do you prefer to just die?'
He had meekly become the perfect, terrified murder-trick assistant.
The two of them had diligently and methodically faked the gruesome scenes.
They stuffed the kitchen hearth with firewood and a severed torso, burned it explosively, then planted a pair of severed feet clad in Baek Saheon's spare sneakers to complete the illusion.
The pulverized bones and ground meat in the backyard had been recycled from the storehouse freezer's macabre ingredients. They stripped the college students of their clothes and scattered the garments appropriately to sell the narrative.
The current, occult-style dismemberment in the living room had been executed using the exact same method.
Though Kim Sol-eum had personally handled all the stealthy abductions of the living victims himself.
'I needed Brown's anomalous ability to make the physical assaults and extractions fast and smooth.'
Anyway, Kim Sol-eum shrugged casually, wrapping up his explanation.
"We incapacitated and hid the targets securely, then staged their brutal deaths using the basement props. Because we used actual, physical human bodies, the disaster's logic didn't suspect a thing."
"......"
"I figured if I acted first, even the designated killer would panic at the sudden shift in the narrative and hold still while I worked."
But.
"Still... someone actually did kill two of them."
"......"
"The severe peanut allergy and the localized landslide."
Both of those targets had died before Kim Sol-eum could intervene and abduct them.
The sudden landslide could theoretically be chalked up to the unpredictable, supernatural phenomena of the lodge, but the anaphylactic allergy? That was no coincidence.
No one short of Sherlock Holmes could casually observe a near-stranger and pinpoint a highly specific, fatal food allergy in under twenty-four hours.
'Even I didn't know about it until it came up in casual chat.'
It was logistically impossible to prepare peanut oil in advance for a targeted murder unless you already possessed prior intelligence.
So...
The killer was someone who knew the civilian profiles beforehand and came explicitly prepared to execute them.
"The anaphylactic shock—did you cause it, Agent?"
"......"
The civil servant didn't offer a denial.
And Kim Sol-eum...
'Yeah, I figured as much.'
He wasn't shocked in the slightest!
Shouldn't a decent, moral civilian mourn the tragic loss of the innocent dead at least a little bit?
Well, these targets weren't exactly 'decent civilians'.
'The government doesn't play Russian roulette when selecting civilian victims for a disaster.'
The Bureau meticulously selects civilian draftees via an esoteric metric known as the 'Scale of Malice.'
The scale weighs a person's karma against the baseline of 'motiveless murder'; if their sins are heavier, they are flagged and covertly conscripted.
In other words, only those definitively proven to be morally worse than random thrill-killers get actively selected to feed these ghost stories.
'If the Bureau has to run this disaster regularly to keep it contained, they might as well fill the quota with disposable, irredeemable human scum.'
It was a way of maintaining minimal institutional ethics. Very coldly official.
'This time too... it's an entire roster of government-vetted, death-row material, huh.'
And Kim Sol-eum's cynical guess was spot on.
The 'married couple' were actually adulterers; the man's real wife and young son had died by suicide from the sheer despair and financial hardship caused by his actions.
The two college students had been indicted as the primary perpetrators for ruthlessly bullying a classmate to suicide, but were freed due to insufficient physical evidence, and were now casually enjoying university life in a mountaineering club together.
The substitute driver? A still-at-large, highly prolific child sex offender.
Even without knowing the exact criminal specifics, Kim Sol-eum nodded inwardly with grim understanding.
'Yeah, it's a fantasy lineup of garbage alright.'
The government must have actively rigged the cursed cassette tapes to fall into their specific possession.
'And they inserted exactly one armed agent to manage the narrative and supervise the slaughter.'
The guy answering him right now.
The civil servant spoke, his voice dead and calm.
"They are all severe criminals."
"......"
"Everyone gathered here—if the legal system functioned correctly—would face the death penalty in multiple countries for the sheer severity of their crimes."
He hesitated, adding, "Except for you, who arrived without a cursed tape."
But inwardly, the agent deeply doubted if that moral justification would actually land with this man.
Especially given his past, highly volatile experiences dealing with unaware civilians on active duty.
He looked up at the second floor, a heavy, crushing fatigue weighing down his posture.
But...
"Ah... I see. That makes perfect sense. I had a hunch that was the case."
"...!"
Surprisingly, the unassuming office worker on the second floor nodded readily, accepting the grim reality without a flinch.
"Anyway, the others are currently alive and well, securely hidden away, besides those two you handled."
Kim Sol-eum said casually, rubbing his neck, looking a bit awkward.
"Well, even if they are absolute scum—direct, hands-on killing weighs heavily on the mind, so avoiding it isn't a bad outcome overall..."
"......"
The civil servant stared at him, finally asking the question burning in his mind.
"Who exactly are you?"
This man was worried enough about the psychological toll of murder to painstakingly pre-stage fake crime scenes to avoid it, yet he inherently trusts a highly suspicious, knife-wielding figure in a raincoat based purely on rational deduction?
He possessed no ordinary mental fortitude.
"Hm."
The man before him sighed deeply.
"I'm just... someone who keeps getting forcibly dragged into messes like this."
"Are you affiliated with the Bureau?"
"Not at all. I've heard the rumors, though. It's fascinating seeing an actual agent up close... Ah."
The office worker suddenly turned his head.
Creeeak.
The heavy kitchen back door was slowly swinging open.
Just like it had on the very first day.
"It feels like the lodgekeeper has finally returned."
The disaster's grand ending scene was rapidly approaching.