I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

“But it says here that students are prohibited from entering.”

“So you’re not going in?”

Clank, clank.

Every time Team Leader Yong grabbed the locked window and shook it, the noise echoed even louder through the hallway.

Of course not.

It was still far too early to give up.

A hidden classroom.

It perfectly met the conditions of the place we were looking for.

“No teachers! Three minutes of break left!”

“Perfect.”

Myeong Haebin, who had quickly gone over to the sunny part of the hallway to keep watch, reported the situation to us.

The window was the common old-fashioned type, locked from the inside with a latch that lifted upward.

But surprisingly, every time Team Leader Yong shook it, the latch dropped a little.

“Can you see inside?”

“No.”

I tried looking through the fogged-up glass, but desks and chairs had been piled up haphazardly, completely blocking the view.

‘It still looks too narrow for a person to fit through, but maybe there’s another entrance…’

Clank!

“Got it!”

Maybe every once in a while, the world didn’t run on intelligence, but brute force.

With one final jolt, the window opened.

Team Leader Yong must have used quite a bit of force, because the bandage wrapped around his hand had turned red with fresh blood.

“Team Leader, your hand…”

“Hmm? Ah, a little leaked out.”

“Normally, people don’t say blood ‘leaked out a little,’ do they?”

“What does it matter? Get in already.”

It was a little absurd, but he didn’t seem to have completely lost the use of his hand.

He could manage on his own.

On the other side of the window were overturned chairs and desks precariously propped against one another, forming something like a minefield.

Even so, there seemed to be enough space to squeeze through.

“Cross carefully. If you touch the wrong thing, all of this will come crashing down on us.”

“Yes! You go first, Boss!”

I was the first to enter, practically crawling over the desks.

Then, after checking that there was nothing in the hallway, Myeong Haebin climbed through the window frame.

“Would you like me to help you?”

“What do you take me for, a child? No need.”

Team Leader Yong was the last to come through.

Despite saying that, he ended up entering through the gap between the desks that I was holding firmly in place for him.

Once we made it through that wall of desks and chairs, we found several countertops and sinks, just as one would expect from a place called the Home Economics Practice Room.

“Still, it’s pretty cozy inside, isn’t it? Though the lights don’t work.”

“Looks like it hasn’t been maintained in a long time.”

Cozy?

How could he look at this and say something like that?

Unlike the normal classrooms, which, though somewhat gloomy, showed signs of use, the countertops and the teacher’s desk were covered in a thick layer of dust.

Even the lights didn’t work.

To me, it was a vision of hell.

It made me want to immediately open the doors and windows to air the place out.

On top of that, my nose was starting to itch, so I put on a disposable mask.

‘Now I can breathe.’

Only then was I able to run a finger across the surface of a table while calmly examining the place.

Just as I thought, this place.

“Boss! Look at this! It really is a secret hideout!”

Myeong Haebin called out to me from the back.

In an area that could barely be seen from outside, there were blankets and cushions.

There was even a bear-shaped stuffed toy that looked fairly soft and several comic books of unknown origin.

“Yeah. Looks like some students used to come here.”

“It could also have been used as a storage room. Why do you think it wasn’t?”

“Here and here, there are traces where the dust was wiped away. Also, the amount that’s accumulated is different.”

When a person moves around, settled dust naturally gets stirred back up.

In a classroom where there was practically no airflow, there was no reason for the dust to disappear from certain areas of the countertops.

That meant someone had been using the path leading from the door to the place where the blankets and cushions were.

“Are you a pervert?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just find it funny that, like a true cleaner, the first thing you do is run your finger through the dust.”

That was a little unfair.

I was only saying what I could see.

Even so, I felt a little awkward and cleared my throat.

“Ahem. For now, let’s search the place. There shouldn’t be much time left before class starts.”

As soon as I finished speaking, something struck the back of my head.

But it couldn’t have been a person.

It was too light and small.

‘Did I imagine it?’

I turned around, but I didn’t see anything particularly different.

I decided to ignore it, thinking it had only been my imagination.

This place seemed very likely to contain the prohibited items mentioned in the app.

Whether in the area being used as a hideout or among the countertops, we would surely find something if we searched carefully.

Bzzzt—

At that moment, the speaker installed above the blackboard emitted a faint burst of interference.

“Didn’t you just hear something from that speaker?”

“That noise? I heard it too.”

“Looks like the speaker in this classroom is broken too.”

An unpleasant static noise gradually began leaking from the dust-covered speaker.

And then it abruptly stopped.

We all tensed up completely, waiting for some anomaly to occur.

But when nothing happened, we eventually relaxed and began searching the Practice Room.

“Doesn’t look like there’s anything. Boss, there are some ingredients left here, but this isn’t what you’re looking for, right?”

“Flour, rice… there’s salt in the back too. Just in case, don’t eat anything.”

“Yes!”

“There isn’t a single knife. Looks like they removed all the cooking utensils.”

There were no knives.

And since I didn’t know what could possibly be special about uncooked food, I even emptied the flour into a bowl to inspect it.

We carefully searched the drawers, the lower cabinets, and even inside the sink filled with water.

But we found nothing that could be considered a clue.

‘They can’t possibly just be asking me to clean all of this.’

I had the feeling I was overlooking something.

While I was thinking about it, Myeong Haebin raised her head, now covered in a thin layer of dust.

“By the way, how long have we been in here?”

“Let’s see… Ah, the clock in here has stopped too.”

“I don’t think it’s been that long. If the bell had rung, we would’ve heard it.”

The school bell had been perfectly audible even from the main lobby.

So we should still have enough time to get out.

Whack!

“Ow! What the hell?”

This time, I definitely felt it.

Something had struck me directly in the back of the head.

“What’s wrong?”

“This eraser hit me in the head. Did one of you throw it?”

“What are you talking about? Why would I throw that at you?”

Lying forlornly on the floor was a mint-colored eraser, the kind practically everyone carried around during their school years.

But it hadn’t been there before.

And behind me was only the window.

There shouldn’t have been anything else.

So how had it happened?

Was this an anomaly too?

“Lend me a Marker of Dismantlement.”

The Marker was much larger than that unsettling eraser.

But the moment I stuck it onto the eraser, the symbol appeared clearly.

So it really was an anomaly.

But.

Why was it only attacking me?

But I couldn’t keep clinging to something that wasn’t even clear.

“For now, let’s go back to class. Lunch comes after this, so we’ll have plenty of time to finish searching the place…”

“Boss, behind you!”

Before I could turn my head, Team Leader Yong reached out and barely managed to deflect the object.

This time, it was a thick, completely full pencil case.

“Ah! Tsk. Hurts like hell.”

Apparently, he had instinctively used his injured hand, because Team Leader Yong began shaking it.

“Are you okay?”

Why the hell did everything keep flying at me?

If that had hit me, it definitely would’ve left me with a nasty headache.

At first, it had been something very light.

Then an eraser.

And now a pencil case.

This was starting to get scary.

“For now, let’s get out. It’s quiet outside.”

It was quiet outside?

Myeong Haebin climbed onto a desk and began carefully opening the window.

But before she could, I quickly grabbed her by the back of the neck.

Tap, tap.

From the far end of the hallway came that familiar sound of dress shoes.

“We can’t go out.”

There was no way the hallway would be quiet during break.

It never had been until now.

Besides, students were expressly forbidden from entering this place.

If we were caught climbing out through a window, we wouldn’t even have an excuse.

Had the noise we heard from the speaker earlier been the bell signaling the start of class?

Even if it had been, the sound should have reached us from the hallway.

Why hadn’t we heard anything?

“Shhh. He’s getting closer. Get down.”

Fortunately, the piled-up desks and chairs blocked the view inside from outside.

We held our breath and crouched close to them so the Professor wouldn’t accidentally see us through the window.

“But if we do this, how are we supposed to leave?”

An idea flashed through my mind.

When something had hit me in the head earlier, there had definitely been a trigger.

“Maybe we don’t have to go.”

“Go? You mean to class?”

For example.

A certain word I had been repeating.

“Yes. But just in case, cla—!”

The moment Team Leader Yong raised an eyebrow, one of the chairs in that mountain of desks and chairs fell directly toward his head.

‘If that falls here, we’re finished!’

And not just because of his head.

There was no way the Professor wouldn’t hear that kind of crash.

Without stopping to think, I threw myself toward the chair.

But maybe I had acted too hastily.

Instead of catching it, my hand ended up knocking it aside.

“Hup!”

Myeong Haebin practically slid across the countertop and caught the chair with her entire body.

Tap.

The Professor’s footsteps stopped directly in front of the Home Economics Practice Room door.

We froze completely, as though we had been turned to ice.

Only our eyes darted frantically from side to side.

Tap, tap.

But the footsteps began moving away again.

Only when the sound had completely disappeared were we able to release the breath we had been holding.

“Phew… I thought we were going to die…”

“I did well, right? Seriously, old man!”

“How was I supposed to know it would be that word? What kind of sense does it make for that to be a forbidden word in a school?”

We had come dangerously close.

But thanks to that, it was clear now.

Inside this Home Economics Practice Room, the word class was forbidden.

This time, it had been a chair.

Next time, they might throw an entire desk at us.

However, we had discovered something else.

“Since we’re already here, let’s skip class.”

“What does skipping class mean?”

“Uh… Explaining it properly is harder than it sounds. Let’s just say it means enjoying fifty minutes of freedom without being chained to a chair. Though I don’t know if we can actually do it.”

I carefully placed the chair Myeong Haebin had caught on the floor and set the eraser and pencil case with the Markers of Dismantlement attached to them on top.

“This Practice Room wasn’t just a hideout. It looks like students who skipped class used it.”

The cushions and other things were arranged to the point that it looked like someone practically lived there.

On top of that, the place attacked whenever someone said the word class.

And although the Professor had come all the way to the door, he hadn’t entered.

It was the perfect place to skip class.

“Besides, even if we managed to get into class now, we wouldn’t be able to get the textbooks.”

“That’s true. And we’d need three of them.”

On top of that, Team Leader Yong had been advised to go to the infirmary because of his hand.

If he wanted to avoid being forced to leave the school, it would be best to stay as far away from the teachers as possible.

Team Leader Yong also seemed to conclude that skipping class was safer and finally nodded.

He glanced upward, still worried about the possibility of getting another chair to the head, and sat down with his back against the desks.

I rolled up my sleeves.

“Haebin, let’s go.”

“Where?”

“I’m not spending all day sitting in this pit of dust.”

Without the slightest hesitation, I pulled garbage bags, wipes, and other supplies out of the bag.

Myeong Haebin’s eyes widened.

“You’re going to clean?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Are you planning to leave all that flour we spilled there?”

It felt as though dust was accumulating in my lungs every time I breathed.

Team Leader Yong burst out laughing when he saw me, but I ignored him and began spraying water into the air above the dust-covered countertops.

When dust has formed such a thick layer, you shouldn’t remove it with a duster.

Especially not in a place with no ventilation where we didn’t have a vacuum cleaner either.

When it came into contact with the moisture, the dust clumped together.

I pushed it along with a wet wipe and carefully collected it in a bag.

Afterward, Myeong Haebin went over the surface again with another wipe to remove the residue.

Then the white surface of the countertop appeared.

And along with it, things that had remained hidden beneath the dust.

Theory is so boring.

ㄴ A game of gomoku?

Did you see the sweet-and-sour pork with mushrooms at lunch today? It’s too much.

ㄴ Just close your eyes and eat it. Are you sure you won’t get caught?

ㄴ Ha no.

They were messages left behind by the students who had used that Practice Room.

“Haebin, don’t scrub too hard.”

I wasn’t exactly fond of leaving graffiti uncleaned, but it might contain clues about this place.

For now, it was better to preserve it.

“What does yaja mean?”

“It’s short for self-directed night study. Why?”

Myeong Haebin, who was finishing cleaning an area where there were already traces of someone having previously wiped away the dust, called me over.

Are we really going to do it during night study?

ㄴ I’m scared. What are we going to do about the teachers on duty?

ㄴ We just have to make sure they don’t catch us, hahaha.

“What were they planning to do?”

“Whatever it was, I don’t think the teachers would’ve been very happy about it.”

Unlike the other graffiti, which looked old and had been partially erased or smudged, these messages remained intact.

And on top of that.

ㄴ Won’t they actually kill us if they catch us?

ㄴ Did you chicken out?

Were they planning to do something behind the teachers’ backs during night study?

Judging by how worried they were, it definitely wasn’t anything appropriate.

This smelled extremely suspicious.

I was about to keep reading the messages when the speaker emitted static again.

Bzzzt—

It must be the bell signaling the end of fourth period.

Just as I thought that, a mechanical voice cut through the interference.

— We repeat the announcement. It is time to enjoy a healthy and delicious lunch. All students who hear this announcement must finish their meal without exception.

Was the speaker working properly?

The moment I realized what was happening, my body began moving on its own.

“Boss, my body’s moving on its own!”

“Ugh! Watch the window!”

Myeong Haebin, who had been cleaning the sink.

Team Leader Yong, who had been changing his bandage.

All of us.

Our bodies left the Practice Room on their own, as though we were puppets.

We walked down the hallway.

Went down the stairs.

And ended up stopping at the end of a long line, as though our feet had taken root.

I had a bad feeling.

[Cafeteria]

The place our bodies had forcibly brought us to was the cafeteria.

The air was saturated with an intense metallic smell of blood.

[The conditions have been met. A new section has been unlocked.]

The phone vibrated inside my pocket.

With great effort, I managed to move my fingers, stiff as sticks, and turned on the screen.

What had just been unlocked was the [Achievements] page.

[Achievements]

Hwaae High School! Eat lunch and escape from the cafeteria. (Incomplete)

※Caution※ This achievement may cause irreversible physical damage.

Reward: ■■ ■■ ■■ +??

So…

That meant if I ate lunch and managed to escape, I would suffer physical damage.

But in exchange, I would complete the achievement.

And they think I’m going to do that?