Hit This Spot
I had just discovered that the Death Game I'd endured for ten years was, in reality, a broadcast program for anomalies called the Shocking! Horror Escape Show.
And that after I was kidnapped, I'd worked the entire time without pay...!
Ah-ha!
"I swear I will find you and wipe you from existence, you Organizer bastard."
"...Heh heh. That is the spirit of a true exorcist."
Park Jincheol, the man who had just broken to me the shocking news of my ten years of unpaid appearances, promptly went on to reveal his true affiliation.
"I come from... the Unidentified Entity Management Bureau — a covert agency that protects the populace from entities such as these. We would like to entrust you with a single request."
"Wh-what did you say? The Bureau?"
Good heavens, of all the things in this world...!
I knew about them because, seizing on a slow stretch with no clients, I'd recently started reading horror web novels. The genre's archetype was the SCP Foundation, and since then every ghost story and anomaly novel out there has boiled the concept down to the marrow and feasted on it — by now, all that's left is a bone riddled with holes... isn't it?!
"Good heavens... to think such a thing actually exists in reality. I can hardly believe it."
Truly unbelievable. The day I signed on under these people, my adventure would turn, in the space of a heartbeat, into a total yawn-fest about me warring against the Bureau's upper-echelon power brokers...!
If this world were a web novel, the author would need a good fifty chapters' worth of pages just to expose the Bureau's wicked schemes and gather a party of anomaly comrades to stand against them.
And if that happened, the author would absolutely, positively starve to deeeaaath!!!
"Of course, entirely separate from the request — our Bureau is in constant recruitment of precious talent such as yourself, so at any tim—"
"However, I must decline."
With offers like this, you refuse them cold, or they come back later and cling to you like a damp leech.
"Hmmm... answering without a moment's deliberation, I see. The treatment and pay are better than you'd imagine, you know... Perhaps one more thought...?"
"I love my freedom above all else. I've only just escaped ten years of dancing on someone else's strings, haven't I? Being shuffled around at the whim of unknowable higher-ups — I find the very idea repugnant."
"...Haha, now that you put it that way, I suppose you might feel that strongly. Even so, you could at least accept the request itself, yes?"
"I'll hear the story out, at least."
But Mr. Park Jincheol shook his head, side to side.
"No. Once you have heard it, you will not be able to refuse. This matter is classified to precisely that degree."
"Hmm... in that case, I really ought to hear about the compensation beforehand, shouldn't I?"
"Resolve it, and 500 million won in cash, net of taxes, is deposited on the spot. As an added bonus, I will contact the collection division of the National Tax Service and arrange things so that Han Doyun, 'collaborator' of the Unidentified Entity Management Bureau, never becomes entangled in any tiresome matters concerning his future tax payments."
So the message is: refuse to cooperate, and he goes straight to the tax office and rats me out.
All I did was conscientiously run my scams and dodge my taxes — why won't anyone just leave a man like me alone? The chairmen of the great corporations hop into a wheelchair and evade hundreds of billions at a stroke, and they live wonderfully.
As a subsistence-level tax evader, I had no choice but to shed a stray tear or two.
"Haha! Well, that is an offer I cannot refuse."
"I knew you would accept. Then I take it I may proceed to the contents of the request?"
"Of course, Client Park Jincheol."
"Ah — 'Agent Park Jincheol' will do just fine."
"Very well, Agent."
While Park Jincheol — no, sorry, Agent Park Jincheol — busied himself fishing out a laptop and pulling up a PowerPoint, Cheogwi, holed up in the break room, had secretly fired a Soul Chat my way. Presumably because, being a Bureau agent and all, there was a chance the man could perceive Cheogwi with the naked eye.
What the—?
So you're telling me you were a "gloomy, big-boobed loner loser of a long-straight-haired, big-boobed virgin ghost"?
The way her list of traits kept stacking, I had a nagging feeling the 'air-puncher' ghosts were about to be mass-produced all over again.
I see. Fair enough, honestly — Chaser balance patches were serious business in the Death Game. Port a Chaser's full lore-rated strength straight into the game as-is? The community brands it a dumpster fire on day one, kidnaps the developers, and starts blinding them with flashlight beams for fun.
Which meant that, from Cheogwi's point of view, an ordinary washed-up virgin ghost like herself had spent her shifts surrounded by a chaebol-heir Berserker and a Clown prosecutor clearing 300 million won a year after taxes, both concealing their true power.
No wonder she'd shrunk into her shell.
Anyway — time to hear the actual briefing, no?
"Ah, my sincere apologies. At my age, these setups take a moment. Anyway... let's begin with this photograph, shall we? Given your extensive history of entanglements with unidentified entities, Mr. Han Doyun, something may come to you."
"Sure, why not..."
I studied the photograph on the first slide of the PowerPoint.
"A shut-down school, I see?"
"Correct. This is Baeksol High School, currently classified by the Unidentified Entity Management Bureau as a Location-Type Entity. It closed roughly three years ago due to falling enrollment... but lately, strange things have been happening there. It would be pleasant if 'strange' were where it ended — however, several horror YouTubers have recently gone missing inside those grounds."
"Mm-hmm. I see."
An abandoned school, hm... Two flavors of school maps used to come up regularly back in my Death Game days, so it's a familiar setting for me too.
"So what exactly would you have me do?"
"What the Bureau wants, at its core, is the complete normalization of the Location-Type Entity in question. Repelling, or... sealing away, the unidentified entity responsible for the disappearances, for instance. But if repelling it proves beyond you, then simply surviving one night inside and bringing back information on the interior will earn you 100 million won on its own."
In other words: 500 million for completing the request — or a mere 100 million if I failed but crawled back alive with some intel.
"'If you come back alive with information'... which tells me communications won't work once I'm inside."
"Precisely. Daytime poses no problem... but the moment night falls, all communication is severed completely. Our analysis team believes that, keyed to nightfall, some manner of otherworld forms around the place."
"Fine by me. Let's give the damn thing a go."
"...And you accept without a flicker of hesitation, despite knowing full well your life may be on the line."
"Oh, that sort of thing I happen to be very confident about."
Exorcise the anomaly? Even that much could fail if my luck ran out — if something like Cthulhu suddenly came crawling out, I'll admit Cheogwi and I together couldn't beat it.
But if the goal was simply to survive until morning? On that, I had no confidence whatsoever. No confidence in losing, that is.
The ride to the destination was a comfortable one, courtesy of Agent Park Jincheol's official vehicle.
"This is as far as I go. I'm counting on you, Han Doyun."
"Thanks for the lift. I'll report the results tomorrow."
"Yes. Then, I'll be off..."
—Vroooooom...
With Agent Park gone, it was finally safe to chat freely with my partner.
"You ready, Che?"
"Supernatural firepower sufficiently stocked?"
"Now THAT's fighting spirit. Let's get started, then."
Baeksol High School, several years into its abandonment, radiated a genuinely sinister atmosphere even though the sun had yet to set.
A visual that would make horror YouTubers go feral.
"Evening glow's setting in... which means it's about time for the school's true identity — the part cleaved off from reality — to start revealing itself. What about it, Cheogwi? You picking anything up?"
"Then it's still in hiding. It'll show its face only once night fully falls."
Quietly, I pulled the aluminum bat out of my hiking pack and began sticking evil-spirit talismans onto it, one by one.
"Here's my thinking. If the anomaly's a spiritual type, I beat it down with the talismans lashed to the bat. If it's a physical type, I beat it down with the bat itself."
"Then I've got other options. The important thing is luring the creature out into the open first."
"If the anomaly loves killing humans, you simply stage a situation it can't resist showing up for."
I usually call this aggro.
"So, like I was saying — step one of aggro is changing into the appropriate outfit."
I tossed the exorcist garb aside and slipped into a comfy t-shirt.
"Well? I had this made as an exact replica of the shirt I used to wear when I played. Pretty gre—"
—WHAAAAM!!
"GYAAAAAH!! Not you too, Cheogwi!!"
Survivor-Demon Han Doyun! The moment he swaggered into the abandoned school, brimming with confidence, he took a punch to the solar plexus so fucking hard that he went — droooooooool!!
Next chapter drops tomorrow morniiiiiing!!