Bug House
"Let's exterminate the bugs!"
Dohee declared solemnly.
Unfortunately, the reactions of her housemates were not nearly as enthusiastic as her own.
"Bugs?"
"I mean, it'd be nice to get rid of them, but..."
"What's with those reactions? Don't tell me you guys still don't want to get rid of them after seeing this?"
Frustrated by their lukewarm responses, Dohee held up and opened the trash bag in her hand.
Naturally, their eyes drifted toward the inside of the bag.
A moment later, screams erupted from both of their mouths.
"Ugh!"
"Aaargh! Na Dohee! What are you doing?! Close it, hurry!"
Unlike Dojin, who merely frowned and turned his head away, Seungwan completely lost it.
She covered her eyes with both hands and shrieked as she scrambled backward.
It was as if she had just laid eyes on a cursed object.
Actually, that description might not have been too far off.
"Why? Is this gross to you? This is actually the better part—they're all dead! But there are live ones crawling all over this building!"
A completely unhinged Dohee chased Seungwan around with the open bag, shouting at the top of her lungs.
Dojin squeezed his eyes shut at the sight.
The bag was piled high with the corpses of various insects.
And most of them had been ripped in half.
Horizontally, vertically, diagonally.
Some were missing only their heads or tails, and Dojin had absolutely no desire to know where those severed parts had ended up.
I thought they were behaving themselves. Where on earth did they catch so many of these things?
In truth, he already knew the answer.
Dojin had checked the CCTV footage himself.
The sight of the cats opening the door in the early hours of the morning, hunting bugs, and returning with them had been quite a shock to him.
But the biggest shock of all was the pile of insect corpses Dohee had discovered in the playroom.
No wonder they stopped going inside the scratcher house.
They would scratch the outer walls of the cardboard house with gusto, but not a single cat would step foot inside.
Dohee had finally uncovered the reason.
They had been hoarding their nightly catches inside it.
Upon discovering that, Dohee had let out a scream that shook the entire playroom.
Well, I can't blame her. I would've been terrified too.
Because they were piled inside the bag, it was hard to tell the exact scale, but the sheer volume of insect corpses was endless.
They were in the scratcher house, the cat condos on the shelves, under the cat wheel, and even in the hammock of the cat tower.
It seemed the cats had decided to completely eradicate the pests themselves, stuffing dead bugs into every nook and cranny available.
Having practically turned the room upside down to clean it, Dojin fully understood why Dohee was so determined.
However, executing her plan presented a critical problem.
"It's a good idea. But how do you plan on doing it?"
Sekki House, where they lived, was no ordinary home.
Though they had remodeled large portions of it out of necessity, it was, strictly speaking, an abandoned school building.
Buildings left without human care quickly decay and rot.
On top of that, the place was massive.
In other words, it was the perfect breeding ground for pests.
"There must be thousands of bugs living in this building alone. How are we supposed to catch them all?"
Seungwan chimed in, agreeing with Dojin.
Her face was drenched in sweat—the result of running away from Dohee in the sweltering midsummer heat.
"Why would we catch them? We can just call a professional service!"
Dojin made a troubled face at Dohee's suggestion.
"A professional service? Like Cesco? We could call them, but I doubt they'd take the job."
Normally, it would have been possible.
After all, educational facilities like schools were major clients for pest control companies.
But it was highly doubtful they would service Sekki House.
"Still, let's at least call for a consultation. You never know."
"Hmm..."
"I don't know about that..."
Miffed by Dojin and Seungwan's hesitation despite her insistence, Dohee glared at Dojin.
"Oppa."
"Yeah?"
"Didn't you say you wanted to marry me?"
"Huh? I—I did. But why bring that up all of a sudden...?"
As Dojin stammered, caught off guard by the sudden transition from bugs to marriage, Dohee pouted.
"Then this is going to be our newlywed home. Are you just going to sit back and let bugs run wild in it?"
"Huh? No... Actually, the plan was..."
Dojin started to reply, but quickly shut his mouth when he glanced at Seungwan next to them.
In truth, the place he envisioned as their newlywed home was the staff quarters, not the main school building.
Wasn't that why he had gone through the trouble of doing a massive remodel there?
Currently, the staff quarters only looked the same on the outside; the interior had been completely rebuilt from scratch.
I was originally planning to have Dohee move into the staff quarters first.
But with Seungwan joining them, the situation had become awkward.
They had been sharing a bedroom converted from the female teachers' lounge, so he couldn't very well tell only Dohee to move to the quarters.
That was why Dojin had stopped himself.
If he blurted out, "Actually, our newlywed home is the staff quarters," the quick-witted Seungwan would probably start commuting from her own home instead of staying here.
While Dojin hesitated, Dohee turned her gaze to Seungwan.
"Are you okay with this?"
"W-With what?"
"Bori and the kittens are your absolute favorites. If we leave things like this, they're going to keep eating insect snacks every single night."
"Ugh!"
Seungwan's face contorted in an instant.
The images of the insect corpses she had seen earlier flashed through her mind.
Each one missing a body part.
She didn't need to think hard to realize where those missing parts had gone.
But Dohee showed no mercy.
She delivered the final blow that completely broke Seungwan's resolve.
"Maybe when Meok-bo threw up on your dress, the other half of that bug was..."
"Aaargh! Stop it! Fine! I get it! Let's catch them! Let's get rid of them!"
Having finally extracted a surrender from Seungwan, Dohee looked at Dojin triumphantly.
Her eyes practically asked, What about you, Oppa?
Dojin let out a wry chuckle and nodded.
"Alright, fine. I'll contact a pest control company."
"Yes!"
Having successfully persuaded both of them, Dohee pumped her fist and cheered.
Dohee had confidently convinced Dojin and Seungwan, but unfortunately, she didn't get what she wanted.
"Sigh..."
"Cheer up."
"Yeah, what can you do if they're fully booked?"
Despite Dojin and Seungwan's comforting words, Dohee remained thoroughly dejected.
Since this was the first project she had taken the initiative on at Sekki House, the failure left her deeply disappointed.
Watching her, Dojin felt a pang of guilt.
To think every single company we called would be fully booked. I was too naive.
Dojin hadn't anticipated that finding a company would be this difficult.
Before his regression, he had only worked in factories around this time of year, so he hadn't realized how busy pest control companies were.
The pandemic was keeping any business with the word "disinfection" or "quarantine" in its name swimming in cash.
"Should we buy some pesticide and do it ourselves for now?"
"...Us?"
Dohee reacted slightly to Dojin's suggestion.
She, too, thought doing something was better than just sitting idly.
Seeing Dohee perk up, Seungwan chimed in.
"Yeah, they said they won't have an opening for at least a month anyway. Let's do what we can in the meantime."
"Should we?"
With her friend egging her on, Dohee quickly bounced back to her usual self.
As if she had never been depressed, she energetically began searching for pest control products.
Relieved to see her back to normal, Dojin and Seungwan exchanged satisfied thumbs-ups.
And that was their mistake.
Instead of congratulating themselves, they should have been monitoring what kind of pesticide Dohee was looking up and stopped her.
"...So, this is the pesticide?"
"Yeah. I looked around, and this one had the best reviews, so I bought it."
"..."
Dojin stared at the boxes piled in front of him.
Inside were cans about the size of canned pineapples.
Yes, cans.
No matter how he looked at it, they were just cans.
While Dojin was baffled by the unfamiliar form of pest control,
Seungwan, who seemed to be thinking the same thing, asked Dohee.
"Aren't pesticides usually sprays or gels?"
"Usually, yeah, but this is different."
"How so?"
"It's a fumigant."
"Fumigant... meaning smoke?"
Dohee nodded at Seungwan's question.
"Sprays dilute in the air too quickly, so they barely work. And I ruled out the gel tubes because we can't risk the animals eating them."
"Ah, that makes sense. We never know when they might open the door and sneak out again."
Although they had installed latches to prevent the animals from opening the doors after Ttorang-i's heist, they couldn't be too careful.
Since the animals might slip out at any moment, they couldn't just spray chemicals everywhere.
"Bait stations are convenient and effective, but you have to set up different ones for each type of bug. To cover this whole place, a few wouldn't cut it, so I gave up on that too."
Dojin and Seungwan nodded in agreement.
Even in a small studio apartment, people usually put down at least four to six bait stations.
Some even put down twelve, claiming it still wasn't enough.
And that was just for a tiny studio.
So, how many would they need for a building this size?
They would need hundreds, at the very least.
And they would have to buy different types for each insect.
"So, how do we use this?"
"You just pop the lid and pour in some water. After about a minute, the water reacts with the chemical and starts emitting smoke."
"That sounds... simple? How long does the smoke last?"
Seungwan, initially put off by the strange appearance, grew increasingly interested as Dohee explained.
Noticing her friend's interest, Dohee continued her explanation with even more excitement.
"About four hours? That's what it says. According to the manual, we just need to stay outside during that time and come back later."
"Four hours... That's a bit awkward. It's not exactly a short amount of time."
"Isn't it fine for us? We can just hang out on the playground with the animals."
"Hmm... True. Once we start playing outside, four or five hours fly by."
"Right? Let's try it out quickly!"
At Dohee's urging, Seungwan turned to Dojin.
Even though they all lived together, Dojin was the actual owner of Sekki House.
Reading the instructions on the can, Dojin nodded at Seungwan's questioning look.
"Since we already bought them, let's give it a try. I'll seal the window frames starting from the top floor, so Seungwan, please take down the smoke detectors. Dohee, take Ttorang-i and Bori's family outside."
Since the smoke would trigger the fire alarms, they had to be removed beforehand.
"Got it."
"Okay! We'll just stay outside the whole time."
The prep work took longer than expected.
Since they rarely went above the second floor of the main building, it required a surprising amount of effort.
After an hour of preparation, Dojin finally finished and quickly poured water into the cans placed on the fourth floor.
Since one can covered about 700 square feet, nearly twenty cans were scattered across each floor.
Sssssssssss.
As Dojin finished pouring water into the last can on the fourth floor, he heard the chemical reaction beginning.
Thick smoke began to billow from the very first can he had watered.
Hearing the sound, Dojin hurried down to the third floor to water the cans there.
By the time he finished the second and first floors and stepped outside, the building was so filled with smoke it looked as if it were on fire.
"...Is this really okay?"
"Should we call the local fire station just in case? We should probably let them know that if they see smoke, it's not a real fire and they don't need to dispatch."
Dojin pondered Seungwan's suggestion for a moment before shaking his head.
Looking closely, no smoke was escaping the building.
It was thanks to their meticulous sealing of all the gaps beforehand.
"Looking at it, the smoke isn't leaking out. The manual says it will settle on its own after four hours, so it should be fine."
"I hope so..."
Seeing Seungwan stare at the building with a worried expression despite his reassurance, Dojin spoke up.
"If you're really worried, we can take turns keeping an eye on it. I'll watch it first. We can swap in an hour."
"Okay, sounds good. I'll go play with the kids until then."
At Dojin's words, Seungwan finally looked relieved and headed toward the playground.
Dohee was already there, playing tag with the animals.
To be precise, only Ttorang-i was actually playing with her, while Bori and her kittens were scattered around, doing their own things.
Five hours later.
Dojin and Seungwan stood in front of the main building's entrance wearing gas masks.
It was time to ventilate the building.
The manual stated that at least two hours of ventilation were required.
"Make sure the kids don't run inside!"
"Got it, leave it to me!"
Dohee gave a thumbs-up from a distance at Seungwan's shout.
Seungwan chuckled at her friend and turned back to the entrance.
"I'll start ventilating from the fourth floor and work my way down, so Seungwan, please handle the first and second floors."
"Alright."
Nodding confidently at Dojin's instructions, Seungwan peeled off the tape sealing the entrance.
It was the tape they had used to prevent the smoke from leaking through the door cracks.
Once all the tape was removed, Seungwan threw the doors open—and immediately bolted in the opposite direction.
Spinning around.
At full sprint.
"KYAAAAAAAH!"
"S-Seungwan! What's wrong?!"
Startled by the blood-curdling shriek and the sight of Seungwan sprinting toward her, Dohee cried out.
Looking closer, her boyfriend, Dojin, was also running toward them at full speed.
Because of this, Dohee couldn't see what lay beyond the open doors.
Namely, the carpet of insect corpses so thick it made the floor look like black asphalt.