Chapter 54

The promised three days.

The final day at Horizon Lodge dawned.

"..."

The government employee rose from bed.

He was not in a particularly good mood. At some point, he felt, things had gone awry...

Anyone would have felt much the same, especially when the work itself had never been particularly welcome.

But his shift was not over yet. He put on the work clothes laid out for him, strapped on his equipment, picked up his tool, and left the room.

Only to encounter a decidedly unwelcome sight.

"... Whew."

The first-floor living room was drenched in blood.

A pentagram had been drawn in blood, with dismembered body parts arranged on its points as though someone were making an offering.

An unconscious woman lay sprawled on the only clean sofa.

The wife of the couple.

"..."

The government employee hesitated briefly, but ultimately decided to proceed as prescribed.

He knew the dangers of exercising his own discretion.

And...

"Ugh... H-huh?!"

They were not people particularly worth keeping alive, either.

"Aaaaaah!"

The woman abruptly regained consciousness on the sofa and screamed.

Before her stood a powerfully built man in a black waterproof raincoat, holding a butcher knife easily over thirty-five centimeters long!!

The man holding the butcher knife suppressed a sigh.

'Of all times.'

She had to wake up now.

He was tired. More than usual.

Seriously, how could anything go this far off plan...!

Reflexively, the government employee thought back to his very first day at the lodge.

His first target had been one of the couple.

Their greed made them easy targets, and the Bureau's analysis suggested that killing one of the apparent couple would create an atmosphere of fear that would simplify the rest of the work.

He had intended to lure the man into the kitchen and fulfill the foreshadowing in the framed verse, following the whispers of the impulse that had infiltrated his mind...

'I'll burn him in the hearth.'

But someone had beaten him to it.

'...?!'

There was already a corpse inside the hearth. Already.

And arranged in quite an avant-garde fashion, at that.

...??

Nothing but question marks floated through his mind.

Using its accumulated expertise, the Disaster Management Bureau had obtained the appropriate cassette tape in advance and assigned it to him specifically to ensure that he would be selected for the serial-killer role.

So why had another killer suddenly appeared?

Even then, he had assumed this was another manifestation of the irregularity inherent in supernatural disasters.

Until, at lunchtime that day, he discovered the clothing of two college students reduced to ground meat in the backyard.

'...'

He had no choice but to carefully hang the large hammer he had brought back in the closet... By this point, he could not help but realize. Some crazy bastard knew everything and was beating him to the killings. It was enough to drive him mad.

And now, as if to celebrate the final day, they had even gotten the dismemberment murder out of the way first. Of course he had a headache.

What the hell was this situation?

But his task had not changed. Even amid this madness, he had to carry out his final duty according to his priorities.

That was the Disaster Management Bureau way.

"Eek..."

His brief recollection ended there.

The government employee looked down at his prey, too frightened even to resist.

Weighed down by exhaustion at what lay ahead, he was just about to swing his knife in a sharp arc when—

"Agent 007."

"..."

He turned toward the voice.

Someone was leaning against the second-floor railing, looking down into the living room.

The office worker.

The seller he had found on Salmon Market.

"You don't have to kill her."

Kim Soleum looked down.

The selected individual becomes firmly convinced that they have inherited the inspiration and legacy of a legendary killer, and undergoes mental and physical mutations.

Indeed, from the black raincoat to the gleaming butcher knife, the government employee was dressed every inch a full-fledged murderer.

Anyone could tell he was the serial killer chosen by this disaster.

But Kim Soleum knew.

'He may look like that, but I can still reason with him.'

-Are you certain, my friend?

He was certain.

'Disaster Management Bureau agents come prepared with countermeasures tailored to the disaster.'

Like the holster just visible through the opening of the government employee's raincoat, near his chest.

* * *

Records of Dark Exploration / Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau

/ Items

Lifeline

An equippable item shaped like a black holster.

When worn, grants resistance to supernatural mental disorders of Hollowing Grade or below.

Item usage requirement: A Grade 8 or higher civil servant belonging to the Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau.

* * *

That was mental defense equipment.

The government employees were not idiots. Would they really send someone unprotected into a ghost story that could brainwash them into becoming a murderer?

'They'd never send someone in with just their bare mind.'

These employees were already deployed primarily into dangerous ghost stories where fatalities were a given.

'They'd be in serious trouble if they ran into some wicked pharmaceutical company employee using affinity-boosting items like Smile Stickers.'

Which was precisely the point.

Kim Soleum addressed the government employee, who stood expressionless.

"You really don't need to kill her. All the foreshadowing has already been fulfilled."

"..."

"I took care of it all."

Silence.

"Did you kill them?"

Hmm.

Certainly, this disaster would not end unless a series of murders occurred.

According to <Records of Dark Exploration>, if outside intervention prevented any murders right up to the end, everyone would more or less end up killing one another during the inheritance portion, bringing everything to a catastrophic close.

'That's why they arranged things so the government employee would do the killing himself.'

They could not risk having their employee killed by accident, so they designated him as the serial killer instead and kept things under control.

That was the rule.

Either commit a series of murders...

"No."

"...!"

"I made it look as though I'd killed them."

Or make the disaster judge it equivalent to a series of murders!

"There were bodies."

"That's true, but..."

Kim Soleum, the office worker, rubbed the back of his neck.

"I wasn't the one who made them corpses."

"...!"

"Did you know? This lodge has a basement."

Kim Soleum recalled part of the verse inside the solid-gold frame.

It had not merely foreshadowed the methods of murder.

There had been other clues, too.

The sound of laughing, hopping feet

The wooden floor beneath goes thump, thump

The table is laden

A humming tune drifts by

That stanza had been a hint.

The wooden floor beneath goes thump, thump

It meant the sound echoed because there was an empty space beneath the floor.

And...

'Since the verse compares murder to food...'

The table is laden

Something connected to the serial killings was plentiful.

And sure enough.

"There were embalmed body parts and organs on display downstairs."

"...!"

There had been a workshop.

"It looked like you were right about there having been other serial killings at this lodge. ... I nearly fainted."

He really had.

Perhaps they were something like props left over from the serial killings in previous rounds.

At any rate, as for how Kim Soleum had felt upon bracing himself and going down to the basement in the dead of night, repeating, 'There won't be any ghosts,' only to find that sight... Well, let's move on.

What mattered was that he had devised a new use for those insane props.

The government employee caught on.

"... The bodies we've found so far."

"Yes."

Kim Soleum spoke sheepishly.

"Not many of them were in one piece, were they?"

Because he had recycled the body parts in the basement and arranged them to look freshly killed!

That was why Baek Saheon had needed to be the first victim.

'... I couldn't have done it without an assistant.'

Embalmed or not, handling dismembered corpses alone with his bare hands in the middle of the night to recreate murder scenes?

The mere thought made him want to sever all ties with the world...

Baek Saheon had looked as though he wanted to unleash a torrent of curses, but he had surrendered to the ultimate either-or choice: 'This is how we get out alive and unharmed. Or would you rather just die?'

In other words, he had obediently become a good assistant for the murder tricks.

The two worked hard to fabricate the murder scenes.

They filled the kitchen hearth with firewood and burned it in a roaring blaze, then stuck feet into it wearing Baek Saheon's sneakers.

The ground meat and bones in the backyard were recycled ingredients from the freezer behind the shed. They had simply stripped the victims' clothes off and scattered them around appropriately.

The living room, now strewn with body parts, was no different.

Still, Kim Soleum had personally ambushed and abducted every victim on his own.

'I had no choice. Braun's ability made the ambushes much easier.'

In any event, Kim Soleum shrugged and finished explaining.

"I hid everyone away and staged the scenes to make it look like I'd killed them. No one questioned it, probably because I used actual corpses."

"..."

"I thought that would at least confuse the killer enough to keep them from acting."

And yet.

"But... someone still killed people."

"..."

"I'm talking about the allergy and the landslide."

Both had died before Kim Soleum could act.

Even if the landslide death could be chalked up to getting caught in this supernatural phenomenon, the allergy could not have been a coincidence.

No one except Sherlock Holmes could identify a fatal allergy through observation alone in someone they had met less than a day ago.

'I didn't know either, until it happened to come up in conversation.'

Which made it even more impossible for him to have brought the allergen—peanuts—to the lodge in advance for a murder.

That meant...

It had been the work of someone who already knew the profiles of the people coming here and had prepared to kill them.

"Agent, were you the one who induced the allergic shock?"

"..."

The government employee did not deny it.

And Kim Soleum...

'Hmm. As I thought.'

Was not shocked in the slightest!

Shouldn't he at least show some grief when innocent civilians were being killed and sacrificed?

Well, they were not actually 'innocent civilians.'

'The government doesn't pick its victims by Russian roulette.'

The Supernatural Disaster Management Bureau selects civilians for requisition through the 'Scales of Evil.'

The counterweight is set at 'motiveless murder.' Anyone whose side weighs heavier is classified as eligible for requisition.

In other words, the government only selected people judged to have committed deranged acts worse than indiscriminate murder, and sent them into this ghost story.

'If they have to run this disaster periodically, they gather people who deserve to die and put them in.'

An attempt to preserve a minimum of ethics. Befitting an official organization.

'So this time, too... I suppose they all deserve to die by government standards.'

And Kim Soleum's conjecture was correct.

The man and woman who appeared to be a married couple were actually having an affair. The married partner's wife and young son had died together by suicide, driven by shock and financial hardship.

The college students had been charged with bullying a classmate to death, released for insufficient evidence, and then gone on to university together and joined the hiking club.

And the designated driver was a child sex offender who had yet to be caught.

Though Kim Soleum did not know the specifics, he had guessed the broad outlines and nodded inwardly.

'Hmm. Quite the dream lineup, probably.'

The government must have pulled strings to ensure that the tapes reached them.

'And then they send in a government employee to manage and supervise it all.'

The very man now answering Kim Soleum.

The government employee spoke without wavering.

"They're all criminals."

"..."

"Everyone in this lodge is a vile offender whose crimes, if criminal law had functioned properly, could even have earned them a death sentence in another country."

Apart from you, who had no tape.

Inwardly, however, the government employee was unsure how much good that explanation would do.

All the more so in light of his experiences with civilians he had met in the course of his duties.

Deeply weary, he raised his head.

But...

"Hmm... I see. That explains it. I had a rough idea."

"...!"

Surprisingly, the office worker on the second floor nodded readily.

"Anyway, everyone apart from those two is alive and well."

Looking a little sheepish, Kim Soleum continued casually.

"Well, however evil they might be, killing them personally would still take a psychological toll. So I don't think this is a bad outcome..."

"..."

At last, the government employee asked.

"Who are you?"

Worried that murders might occur, he had staged murder scenes first—and then, through rational thought, decided to trust someone dressed as suspiciously as the government employee himself?

This was not an ordinary person's mental fortitude.

"Hmm."

The man before him let out a long sigh.

"I'm just... someone who keeps getting dragged into these situations against his will."

"Are you affiliated with the Disaster Management Bureau?"

"Of course not. I've heard rumors, though. It's quite something to meet an actual agent in per... Ah."

The office worker turned his head.

CREEEAK

The kitchen's back door was opening.

Just as it had on the first day.

"It looks like the lodge keeper is back."

The disaster's ending scene was approaching.