I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

This is a complete disaster.

“Statistically speaking, when an ordinary person falls into a horror story, less than 10% manage to escape with all four limbs intact. Couldn’t this just be one of those cases?”

“You just want to get rid of him because he’s in the way.”

“Why do you have to put it like that? I’m telling you, it’s the most efficient method in every possible way.”

“Minhyeong…… Woo Minhyeong…….”

The situation was so chaotic that even I wanted to lose my mind already.

My eyes met the duck’s.

— Quack. Kwek. Chomp.

It seemed to have almost completely finished eating Woo Minhyeong’s head, because it was opening and closing its beak more slowly each time.

At least I had to keep my head straight.

“Mr. Park Hyeonho, get up.”

I grabbed Park Hyeonho by the back of the neck. He had crawled over to Woo Minhyeong and was holding her hand, which was beginning to grow cold, his cheek still swollen.

I forced him to his feet.

“Let go of me! You said it wouldn’t attack. You said it was just a decoration! You weren’t right about anything! This is all your fault!”

Park Hyeonho slapped my hand away and, breathing furiously, pointed at me as if he wanted to devour me.

“I didn’t know either.”

“And saying you didn’t know is enough? Does that fix everything?!”

We didn’t have time for this.

Trying to suppress the impatience beginning to take hold of me, I glanced sideways at the duck before looking back at Park Hyeonho.

“Then do you want to die too?”

Both Myeong Haebin and the application were urging me to abandon him.

I wasn’t the kind of person who could sleep peacefully after watching someone die, but the fact that I was trying to save him now was still an act of goodwill and interference on my part.

My priorities were very clear.

If my life and Park Hyeonho’s were placed on a scale neither of us could escape from, I would choose myself without hesitation.

So I hoped Park Hyeonho wouldn’t keep exhausting my patience.

Even if only for his own sake.

“T-That…….”

In the end, human beings are alone.

No matter how close Woo Minhyeong had been to Park Hyeonho, all of that became insignificant in the face of his fear of his own death.

Especially when the other person was already dead.

“Then stop mourning, get up, and get ready to run.”

I grabbed him again by the back of the neck, the same place where he had slapped my hand away earlier, and pulled him up.

Park Hyeonho, his face covered in tears, looked back and forth between Woo Minhyeong and me before bracing his hands on his knees and standing up.

Myeong Haebin, who was watching me as though frustrated by my attitude, clicked her tongue and looked away.

“Are we going to run? That thing was insanely fast just now.”

“It’s better than standing still.”

— Quack!

The duck spread its wings and began approaching with slow, staggering steps, as though trying to intimidate us.

“Ugh……. Ah, shit!”

We pushed Park Hyeonho from behind as he swallowed a scream and started running, passing dangerously close to the duck.

I decided to stay at the rear and looked over my shoulder.

I had hoped, even if only a little, that it would go back to Woo Minhyeong, but the duck chased after us again.

It still wasn’t flying this time.

“Haebin, did you mark the anomalies?”

“There wasn’t anything special. Just the anomalies that had already repeated before.”

Then it would be enough to mark the booth, the pond, and the duck.

Considering that duck was practically one gigantic anomaly all by itself, I supposed this place had at least some conscience.

“Go ahead and mark them. I’ll stay with Mr. Hyeonho.”

“Yes! Don’t take too long!”

Myeong Haebin must have been considerably exhausted too, but she sped up and ran ahead.

Park Hyeonho, on the other hand, wasn’t doing well.

“What…… did I do wrong……? Sniff, ugh…….”

His cheeks were completely streaked with a mixture of sweat and tears.

I placed a hand on his back.

“If you run while crying, you’ll exhaust yourself even more.”

He looked at me as though he were staring at a lunatic.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand how he felt, but this horror story was a battle of endurance. Tears were water too, and losing even more fluids wasn’t going to help us.

— Quack, quack…….

The duck’s quacking gradually grew more distant until, at some point, we could no longer hear it at all.

[East Gate of Chodam Park]

It seemed to be because we had returned to the park’s starting point.

I thought this was exactly where the duck had torn a chunk out of Woo Minhyeong’s leg, but all the blood that had soaked the area had disappeared without a trace.

‘Can’t the duck cross through the loop?’

Perhaps that was only natural, given that it was an anomaly.

Fortunately, the water-level gauge didn’t seem to have risen again either.

Of course, the transformed environment of the park remained unchanged.

The trees were still covered in hanging branches and leaves, and the mist over the water remained unbearably thick.

“Hah, haa……. I…… just a moment…….”

We finally managed to make it back to the pond, but just as we were about to cross the stepping stones, Park Hyeonho’s legs gave out and he collapsed.

He didn’t even seem to care about the garbage fish splashing around below.

“Let’s rest here for a bit.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to say that…….”

As if she really had been waiting for those words, Myeong Haebin planted her hands on her knees and bent forward.

I also crouched down on the stone next to Park Hyeonho.

The truth was that my physical endurance was already reaching its limit.

My throat wasn’t just rough as though I had swallowed sand; I was even beginning to taste blood. My thighs and the soles of my feet burned as though they had been scorched.

As I kicked away the garbage fish that stubbornly kept trying to climb onto the stones, Park Hyeonho spoke to me without even turning his head.

“……You seem used to this.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Someone just died.”

Park Hyeonho’s hollow words, as though he had given up on something, didn’t sound aggressive.

They were more like a blade.

Sharp enough to wound.

— Quack. Quack.

I was about to open my mouth to answer when I heard a quack I never wanted to hear again.

I grabbed Park Hyeonho by the shoulder when he tried to jump to his feet.

“Wait.”

“Why? Why……?!”

The duck’s eyes, like glass marbles, appeared between the bushes.

The creature watched us while tilting its head in that peculiar birdlike manner, but it did nothing more than wander aimlessly around the pond.

“It looks like it can’t get in.”

What the hell was in this pond?

Why couldn’t the duck return to the pond where it lived, while the fish were desperately trying to escape onto dry land?

Even if I wanted to look into the pond, the bubbles and shadows created by the garbage fish’s fins made it impossible to see the bottom.

‘Isn’t this fish the bread bag that was lying beside the pond?’

I raised my head.

All the trash that had previously been scattered along the shore had disappeared.

It seemed that the garbage had turned into the fish in the pond, but what did that have to do with the loop?

No.

Right now, those fish weren’t important.

Myeong Haebin, who had been locked in a staring contest with the duck, opened her mouth.

“Could we be trapped here?”

“If we keep running like before and rest here every time…… I suppose…….”

“We could escape from it. But we’d miss the anomalies.”

Running away from the duck at full speed while searching for anomalies was practically impossible.

If we missed even one, the water-level gauge, which was already dangerously close to the limit, would end up reaching the maximum.

Then we had to make the duck disappear.

‘Is it possible?’

That mysterious ability I had received from the application after completing the previous achievement.

[Tool Upgrade: Garbage Bag]

You can now dispose of that which cannot be disposed of.

Range: All garbage bags used by Kim Hanmu.

It wasn’t clear exactly what “that which cannot be disposed of” covered.

But normally, you didn’t put living creatures into a garbage bag to throw them away.

‘Try it. Right now, it has the best chance of working.’

We had lost all our equipment, but I still had the plastic bags in my pocket that had been prepared as part of another environmental campaign at that booth.

They were bags specifically meant for collecting trash, and now they were in my hands, so they could be considered garbage bags too, right?

“Boss, where are you going?”

“Wait.”

I slowly crossed the stepping stones in the pond. The duck, which had been staring at us for a while, had disappeared.

It would appear on the other side, just as it had with Woo Minhyeong.

However, even after I reached dry land, the duck didn’t appear.

‘Was I wrong about all my assumptions?’

Both about the duck considering us food and about it chasing us if we crossed to the other side.

I pushed aside the bushes with a tense hand, deliberately making noise, but the duck didn’t even poke its beak out.

“Boss! How is it?!”

Myeong Haebin shouted from afar.

“It looks okay! Cross over!”

If it hadn’t appeared even after I searched for this long, there probably wouldn’t be a problem.

Myeong Haebin crossed the stones in long strides, and Park Hyeonho followed behind her.

“Come on. I’ll help you.”

“C-Can I really……?”

It happened just as Park Hyeonho’s foot touched the ground while he clung to my forearm.

— Quaaack!

From the exact same bush I had checked, the duck shot out with its beak wide open.

The inside of its mouth was a mess of blood, chunks of flesh, hair, and skin, with several rows of sharp teeth overlapping one another.

‘Why now?!’

I let go of Park Hyeonho and opened the plastic bag I was gripping.

“Ugh……!”

The weight of the duck crashing into the plastic, which I hadn’t managed to fully open, made me lose my balance.

My shoulder hit the ground with a Thud. To make matters worse, it was the same side where I had suffered the burn, and a sharp pain shot through my body.

— Quack! Quack!

The duck struggled violently, trying to break free from me. With the plastic bag suddenly covering it, it flapped its wings, jumped around, and repeatedly snapped its beak.

“Stay still……!”

I had tied enough garbage bags to fill several trucks.

I shoved the duck’s neck inside, gripped the opening of the bag tightly, and pulled downward to force the air out. Then I swung it around several times in the air.

— Quack, quaaack!

And when I tightly tied the neck of the bag, now completely compressed…….

The quacking that had been echoing everywhere went silent as though someone had cut the power.

Thud.

The garbage bag, which now contained something resembling a mangled mass of feathers, fell onto the damp ground.

“……Wow.”

It really worked.

What was inside the bag was no longer that monstrous duck that moved like a living creature.

Now it was nothing more than garbage crushed by force, as though it had been put through a press filled with teeth.

But before I could carefully check what it had become, it disappeared.

It literally evaporated.

The plastic bag vanished along with its contents, as though it had never existed.

It was as if the garbage had been collected the very instant I threw it away.

The application sent a new message.

[Well done. Keep cleaning! 🦆]

A duck emoji.

So was the application really the one taking away the garbage bags?

‘Setting that aside, what’s with that way of speaking?’

Wasn’t the tone of that sentence a little strange?

I didn’t think it had spoken like that before.

But none of the other tabs had changed.

After checking another screen and returning, the message had disappeared again.

“What was that just now?”

Myeong Haebin was the one who broke the silence.

“Boss, how did you do that? Huh? Huh?”

Myeong Haebin ran toward me with shining eyes, examined both my hands, and began patting me all over as though she wanted to search me.

……How the hell was I supposed to explain this?

I remained completely still for quite a while before I finally managed to get something out of my mouth.

“Well…… I don’t know. I just thought it would work?”

“Boss, you’re a genius! The greatest talent in our entire company!”

My answer was extremely suspicious, but Myeong Haebin looked ready to lift me into the air and toss me upward in celebration if she could.

“That’s not normal…….”

Yes.

That guy’s reaction was the normal one.

Park Hyeonho, his face completely pale, was slowly backing away from me, leaving bloodstains on the ground.

Normal people felt wary or afraid of the unknown.

If someone saw a person stuff a monstrous duck-like creature into a bag and then make it disappear completely, the logical reaction would be fear.

“Are you all right?”

After moving Myeong Haebin aside for a moment, I approached Park Hyeonho. Terrified, he began frantically rubbing his hands together.

“It’s just…… no, I’m sorry. Since all I do is get in the way…….”

We were inside a horror story where common sense was useless.

Maybe it had been too much to expect an appropriate reaction from an ordinary person who knew absolutely nothing about this kind of thing.

After Woo Minhyeong’s death, Park Hyeonho seemed to have lost half his sanity, so I decided there was no point in pushing him any further.

“It’s fine. Let’s go.”

“W-Where……?”

Regardless of his bewildered question, I could still taste blood in my throat.

Catching a single monster didn’t mean this damn loop was over.

I nudged one of the feathers the duck had left on the ground with the tip of my foot and looked beyond the mist over the water.

“My blood sugar is low.”

Now that it seemed we had more or less gotten things under control, it was time to loot that damn store we hadn’t been able to return to earlier.