“Where are you?!!”
No matter how much I shouted, nothing inside the haunted house answered.
My girlfriend was easily frightened, so I’d had her follow behind me, but at some point, she had disappeared.
In her message, she said she was hiding somewhere inside the haunted house, but…
I wanted to call her if I could, but one of the haunted house’s safety rules said not to make phone calls, so we had no choice but to communicate by message.
In the eerie atmosphere, relying on the light of the flashlight I’d been given, I moved forward one step at a time.
“If you can hear me, answer me!”
“I’m… here.”
A human voice came from somewhere, like an echo.
It was her voice.
Even running was against the rules, so I headed toward where the voice was coming from at a brisk walk.
“I’m here… Come this way.”
The voice was coming from a certain closed room.
The moment I stood in front of the door, I hesitated.
She was behind this door. Even so, I did not want to open it.
[Rule 14. Do not open any doors inside the haunted house. This rule is absolute. Do not open them, no matter what sounds you hear from inside.]
Cold sweat ran down my back.
“I’m here now, so it’s okay. So come out. Let’s go, quickly.”
I tried to get her to open the door and come out on her own.
“I’m too scared. I can’t move. Oppa, please come take me out…”
If she was in there, then she must have opened the door and gone inside. In that case, there shouldn’t be anything strange about me opening the door and going in too…
Thinking that, I was about to open the door when I was seized by a strange sense of wrongness.
My girlfriend is two years older than me.
But… “oppa”?
When I’d asked her to call me oppa just once last time, she’d completely ignored me…?
“Honey. When is your birthday…?”
“Is now really the time to ask that?!”
“Just tell me first. If you tell me, I’ll go in.”
“Fine. My birthday is… ■■■■■■.”
“What…? When did you say your birthday was?”
“I told you. I told you, so hurry up and come in! I’m really, really scared right now!”
“O-okay. I’m coming in!”
If I asked any more questions, her affection toward me would plummet.
And in the worst case, if she even broke up with me…!
Without thinking any further, I opened the door.
And what I saw was…
“Heeheeheeheeheehee!!!!!”
.
.
.
Thud.
The sturdy man collapsed the moment he opened the door.
He had come face to face with the lesser ghost waiting in front of it.
“But… why did I bother using my ability to lure him in?”
It was fun, at least.
Apparently, some instinct from when I lived on Jangsan still remained.
The ghost gave me a double thumbs-up.
It meant that it was satisfied too.
[Bzzt. This is inside the haunted house. A person has fainted. What should I do?]
A few seconds after I sent the radio message, a reply came back.
[A person fainted…? You’re joking, right?]
[No.]
Another few seconds of silence.
[I’m sorry, but as of today, you’re fired.]
[What…?]
Damn it, this is my first day at work.
[Why?]
[Employee Rule 17. When a person faints inside the haunted house, you must first exit the interior and then report it. Since you violated that, I’m sorry, but there’s no hope for you. Our security team will be there shortly.]
After that, no further radio messages came.
No hope… What did that mean? Did it mean there was no hope of getting rehired?
But I soon came to understand its meaning.
Because from the secluded corners of the haunted house, not ordinary lesser ghosts, but hungry ghosts were crawling out.
Because of the intense attachments they left behind in life, souls are unable to cut themselves off from the mortal world and turn into ghosts.
By that logic, hungry ghosts have much stronger attachments than ordinary lesser ghosts.
Because they are pitiful souls who starved to death.
In normal circumstances, they would simply cling to humans and induce appetite, causing them to fail their diets. But in a place with yin energy this strong…
Grrrrk…!
Hungry ghosts in horrific human forms drooled thickly onto the floor as they approached the unconscious man.
If I didn’t stop them, that man would be turned into a bizarre corpse with all the yang energy sucked out of his body.
Hungry ghosts don’t chew up flesh, but they do tear away and eat the yang energy attached to it.
The problem was… those bastards were a bit troublesome even for me…
“Can’t be helped.”
My eyes changed into vertical pupils.
The lesser ghosts that met my gaze were busy scrambling away, but the hungry ghosts didn’t even glance at me.
This is why I hate hungry ghosts…!
I grabbed the head of the hungry ghost closest to the man.
Its horrible appearance was enough to bring to mind the skull that had held the water Samyeong Daesa drank.
Crack, crunch!
The hungry ghost’s head shattered to pieces with a sound like chewing through the cartilage attached to pork belly.
Even so, the other hungry ghosts still showed no intention of running away.
Some of them were even drooling as they looked at me.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, (crunch!) seriously kidding me. (crunch!) When are those security team bastards or whatever coming?! (cruuuunch!)”
.
.
.
“Security team, listen up. They say a person has fainted inside the haunted house.
One employee will be sacrificed, but it can’t be helped. We’ll clean out the things inside in our own way!”
The haunted house was already under control.
All that remained was for our security team to deal with those things.
“Enter!”
At the team leader’s signal, the security personnel scattered throughout the haunted house.
“Nothing here!”
“Nothing here!”
“Nothing here either!”
“Here too!”
“Nothing!”
Replies came from the security personnel entering each room.
“There’s something here!”
Hearing that, the other security personnel tried to head toward the room the reply had come from.
“Wait!”
But only the team leader sensed that something was strange and stopped the security personnel.
“How many people are on our team in total?”
“Six, including me!”
“Our whole team is here… so why did an answer… come from over there?”
“…….”
“Get ready.”
Following the team leader, they crept toward the room where the answer had come from.
“You said you were the security team? You sure took your sweet time getting here.”
It had taken around five minutes from the end of the radio call for them to arrive.
That was enough time.
Enough time for me to smash all the hungry ghosts’ heads.
I looked over their appearance.
On the outside, they looked like an ordinary security team, but I could see yang energy pouring out from various parts of their equipment.
At a glance, they were novice exorcists.
Seeing as six of them had come swarming in against hungry ghosts, their combat skills probably weren’t that high either. Not that there was any reason to kill them here…
“Are you an employee?”
A sturdy man who looked like the security team leader asked.
“Yes, I’m an employee. No, wait, I got fired, so I guess I’m not an employee anymore?”
“How did you survive? And where are those things?”
“Good question. How did I survive again…?”
“Don’t joke around. We are the security team.”
“(Don’t joke around. We are the security team.) Security team, my ass. No matter how I look at you, you’re just a bunch of novice exorcists who work while relying on talismans.”
Thud.
“…What did I just hear?”
After hearing my perfect vocal mimicry, the security team leader sank to the floor.
“S-subdue him!”
“The target is a person, though. Should we really subdue him?”
“That’s not a person! Hurry up and proceed with subduing him!”
The security team leader seemed to have the most skill among them, at least.
The others had been completely fooled by my appearance, which stimulated the human protective instinct, but he seemed to have some idea of what level I was at.
Even so, in front of me, his skills were just as pathetic.
Thwack, thwack, urk!
“Okay. Sent one guy off for now. Anyone else want to come at me? Or do you want to try talking?”
These guys’ level of martial arts was truly abysmal.
In the first place, lesser ghosts melt when they touch a talisman, so maybe they didn’t need martial arts. But if you wanted to catch a flesh-and-blood spirit beast like me, martial arts were essential.
No, maybe even good martial arts wouldn’t be enough? Well, if a human wants to face a tiger, they’d need at least an AK-47.
The next guy watched for an opening and tried to rush me.
But the team leader stopped him with his arm.
“You said… talk? Very well. I’ll listen.”
As if proving he wasn’t called the team leader for nothing, he gazed at me calmly and spoke.
“Not with you. I’m talking with the higher-up who hired you. Where do you get off, you talentless exorcist? If I’d met you in the old days, you’d already be in my belly.”
“Khmm…!”
.
.
.
At that moment, an anime was becoming a hot topic on the internet.
[Title: (I Became the Romantic Target of a Yuri Novel Author.) Did you see the voice actor section in the ending credits?]
The voice acting was so perfect that I checked who it was, and there was only one voice actor?
-Stop talking bullshit
-???? I checked and it’s true! Holy shit.
-Aren’t there over twenty characters in that? How can that be one person?
┗No idea?
-This is actually real? Someone ask the production company.
-Aren’t there male characters too?
┗Right?
-What’s the voice actor’s name?
┗Sanbeom. Never heard of them before.
[Title: I emailed the production company.]
They said one person really did all of it.
They said that person even did all the male voices.
-Human?
┗Not human…
-Fr
-You’re telling me this wasn’t bullshit?????