I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

That was really, truly……

[The feeling of guilt has been separated and disposed of.]

Terribly pleasant.

The suffocating sensation that had filled my chest to the point of discomfort, the nausea that threatened to make me vomit at any moment, and even the tears that had begun to flow on their own disappeared in an instant.

I ran my fingertips around the strangely damp corners of my eyes.

“Why was I crying?”

“Boss, are you okay?”

“……Ah. Right. That civilian died.”

Was something like that really a reason to cry?

I didn’t understand.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Myeong Haebin tilted her head to one side as she watched me.

“It’s nothing. I just find it interesting.”

“What do you find interesting?”

Myeong Haebin stared at me from so close that our noses nearly touched, but soon smiled broadly and stepped back.

“I guess I meant that I like how Boss is different from everyone else.”

It had to be an effect of Waste Separation.

Leaving Myeong Haebin squeezing the hem of her uniform, which was still dripping with water, I turned on my phone.

I wanted to check the new function.

[The Waste Separation tutorial has ended.]

[Waste Separation]

Allows you to select something unnecessary, separate it, and dispose of it.

Range: Things owned by Kim Hanmu.

It was an extremely simple explanation.

Should I test it?

‘Can I separate and dispose of my uniform?’

[Would you like to separate and dispose of Uniform (Daecheonmyeong)?]

[Y] [N]

So it didn’t only work on emotions, but on objects as well.

After pressing [N], I looked at Myeong Haebin, who was wringing out her soaked hair.

[This item cannot be separated and disposed of.]

‘I wanted to see how far “things owned by Kim Hanmu” extends, but it doesn’t work on people.’

Was it because a person couldn’t be owned?

‘Can’t I recover something after I’ve separated and disposed of it?’

[No answer is available.]

Does this count as a question too?

How strict.

However, now that I had drunk some water and my head was clear, I could think properly again.

“Boss, are you dry now?”

It was impossible to dry off completely, but Myeong Haebin, who had managed to squeeze out a good amount of water, approached me and let out a deep sigh.

“You haven’t wrung anything out! You’re going to catch a cold!”

“It’s fine. We’ll be getting out of here soon.”

If my assumption was correct, it should have returned.

I shook out my damp hair and stood up. The pond water that had collected in my pants poured onto the ground in streams.

“Let’s go.”

“Don’t blame me if you regret it later.”

“When have I ever asked you to take responsibility for anything, Haebin?”

I grabbed her hand and strode through the fog.

Maybe because I was no longer thirsty, my steps felt light despite being soaked.

‘…….’

In the middle of a path without even a fork stood a sign pointing only toward the West Gate.

It had to be the exit.

The shop owner had been right.

After throwing trash into the perfect pond, the path to the exit appeared.

“It’s the West Gate! Boss, it’s the West Gate! Wait, but I think there were anomalous phenomena this time too……”

Myeong Haebin’s words, which only moments ago had sounded as though she were about to jump for joy, gradually lost their strength.

“Don’t you think it’s strange? The fish, the temporary booth, all of them were anomalous phenomena. Then why isn’t the East Gate appearing even though there’s a monster in the pond?”

Bzzz―.

[Completion Condition: Clean the pond of Chodam Park, the horror story.]

“The loop and the anomalous phenomena were just decoys.”

“What?! After everything we went through?!”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been tricked.

I turned my back on the sign pointing toward the exit without the slightest hesitation.

“Let’s clean the pond.”

“Finish explaining before you leave! Besides, we don’t even have any equipment right now……”

Instead of wasting time answering, I started walking back the way we had come.

First, the shop.

I untied the rope that tightly secured the waterproof tarp.

The owner still didn’t appear, but the items I was looking for were still there.

Then I went straight to the temporary booth and grabbed a handful of neatly folded plastic bags.

“Tear some bags open. Just the sides and bottom, so we can turn them into a single sheet of plastic.”

“But we don’t have any tools.”

“If there’s no knife, we’ll have to use our teeth.”

The plastic bags were thinner than official garbage bags, so all it took was biting into them with my canines and pulling to tear them open.

The cuts came out crooked, but it didn’t matter.

We could join them together with the duct tape I had brought from the shop.

As she reluctantly tore through the plastic with her teeth, Myeong Haebin asked,

“Explain a little. What do you mean when you say they were decoys?”

“What was the loop in this park like?”

“Extremely long. It took away our food, we had nothing to drink, and the anomalous phenomena…… well, they weren’t that dangerous, but they were pretty annoying.”

All those characteristics had something in common.

“The loop in this park exists to force people to walk over and over until they’re completely exhausted. When someone reaches a state of extreme dehydration, they eventually drink the pond water, because it looks like the cleanest water available.”

“Without knowing there’s a real monster underneath waiting with its mouth open.”

“Exactly.”

Riiip.

I tore off a piece of duct tape and replied indifferently. I could feel the sticky adhesive clinging to my canines.

“They were deceiving us from the very beginning. The water-level gauge rose whenever we gave a wrong answer so that we’d become obsessed with the idea that we had to find the anomalous phenomena.”

It was a blind spot caused by our own preconceptions.

Or, more precisely, I should say that the water-level gauge had blinded us.

If the level rose whenever we incorrectly identified an anomalous phenomenon or violated something that seemed to be a rule of the park, it was only natural that we would end up paying more attention to the gauge than to the pollution in the pond.

“We were so focused on the loop that we didn’t think about the increasing contamination of the pond. And in the meantime, we lost the easy way to escape.”

“We were wrong from the very beginning. We should’ve just participated in the environmental campaign.”

“We didn’t know that at the time.”

As the pollution progressed, the monster in the pond had gradually accumulated strength.

In the end, the image of the head hooked onto the fishing hook on the No Fishing sign made sense.

In other words, a person had to be thrown into the pond to lure out the monster that served as the fish.

Thanks to offering the monster a special sacrifice, we could now leave.

But if we left like this, what would happen to the cleaning?

Now that the only trash remaining in the pond was the monster, there was only one way to clean it.

“This should be enough.”

I clenched my molars tightly and tore off the last piece of duct tape.

When we finished taping it together, we had created a special garbage bag bigger than Myeong Haebin and me combined.

“It’s not going to work. It’ll definitely tear! It’s as big as the two of us put together, and that monster is incredibly strong too.”

“Didn’t the duck have teeth?”

I had something I could rely on.

‘The Tool Enhancement clearly said it applied to every garbage bag I used.’

Since I had also used this bag when we caught the duck, I didn’t have to worry about whether or not it counted as a garbage bag.

“And how are you planning to open something that big? And how are we going to lure the monster?”

“Haebin, since when did you become so distrustful of me?”

“It’s just that Boss has been acting weird for a while now…….”

I absentmindedly patted her head a few times as she answered hesitantly, then handed her the enormous plastic bag we had just finished making.

“That’s the narrowest section and where the fog is thickest…… understood?”

Myeong Haebin bit her lip throughout my entire explanation, but eventually nodded.

“Understood. Ah, seriously, Boss is going to make me die of worry.”

Myeong Haebin picked up the duct tape and the enormous plastic bag, stood up, and disappeared into the fog.

I watched her leave before heading in the opposite direction, toward the pond.

The water was still completely crystal clear.

It was impossible to imagine that a monster capable of devouring a person in an instant lived there.

“Hmm…….”

I dipped one hand into the cold water and stirred it slightly.

But no monster appeared. There wasn’t even any sign that a single ripple would form aside from the ones I caused myself.

‘As expected.’

Why had the duck attacked Park Hyeonho?

You could say Woo Minhyeong had simply been nearby, but when I had searched for it for quite a while, it had remained quiet. Yet the moment Park Hyeonho stepped onto dry land, it lunged at him.

The monster in the pond hadn’t attacked us either.

I had thrown myself into the water and done all sorts of things, but it hadn’t even poked its head out.

There was one difference between Woo Minhyeong and Park Hyeonho, and us.

The ‘Responsible Environmental Guardian of Chodam Park’ wristband.

“It was strange that it could be removed.”

The creature at the temporary booth had said.

‘Are you trash?’

In this park, anyone who isn’t wearing the wristband is considered trash.

I removed the green rubber wristband and dropped it into the pond.

Blub.

In the distance, bubbles began rising from the water.

“Good.”

I decided to turn myself into trash.

An enormous number of bubbles began rising from the bottom of the pond.

I instinctively stepped back.

And then it happened.

Woooosh!

The surface exploded upward, and the gigantic axolotl-shaped monster burst through the column of water and shot out.

Its jaws snapped shut on empty air right where I had been standing.

If I had reacted even a second later, it probably would have torn off my entire torso.

— Kiiiiiek! Grrruuk!

Frustrated at having missed its prey, the monster let out a grotesque shriek as it dragged its enormous body onto dry land.

It had lost the agility it possessed in the water, but its sheer mass was still overwhelming.

Every time it planted one foot on the ground, all the garbage stuck to its body—old tires, crushed cans, rotting nets, and other filth—produced an ominous mixture of crunching and rattling sounds.

It looked exactly like something that belonged in the trash.

‘Maybe we should’ve made the bag even bigger.’

Without looking back, I plunged into the thick fog.

Boom! Boom! Clang!

The monster’s footsteps crushed the ground behind me, making the earth tremble like an earthquake.

The muscles in my thighs, utterly wrecked after being pushed to their limits for so long, screamed as though they might tear apart at any moment.

‘Where is it?’

The narrowest part of the path, where the fog gathered most densely.

Just as the jaws of the monster, which had shoved its head into that narrow passage while chasing me, came so close they could almost reach me, I finally found it.

A flat strip of tape lay stretched across the middle of the path like a branch.

Duct tape.

I crouched down and slid across the ground as if performing a sweep, grabbed the tape, and pulled downward with all my weight.

“Haebin, hold it tight!”

Riiip―!

The enormous plastic bag that had been precariously suspended between the trees on both sides suddenly opened like a fishing net and dropped over the monster’s head.

If the trash was too big to carry to the bag……

Then all we had to do was make the trash walk into the bag by itself.

“Uah! Boss, help me!”

Myeong Haebin, who had climbed a tree to hold the mouth of the bag open, lost her balance and fell.

I ran toward where she was falling.

Thud.

I ended up getting crushed beneath her in a rather inelegant fashion, though I hadn’t exactly expected to catch her stylishly.

“Huh?! The mouth of the bag!”

There was no time to worry about the pain in my back, which must have struck something.

I grabbed the mouth of the bag with both hands before the monster could drag it away and pull it completely open.

— Grrruk! Kirik!

The monster, which had come looking for food only to end up trapped inside the translucent plastic, began struggling so violently that my entire body shook.

“Ugh……!”

It swung its long tail, which was near the mouth of the bag, and my body went flying along with it before crashing into the bushes.

Sweat soaked my palms as I nearly lost my grip on the edge of the bag.

I had never had to throw away trash that moved before.

Myeong Haebin, who had already gotten off me, practically climbed on top of the monster’s tail and began forcing as much air as possible out of the bag.

Even then, it wasn’t enough.

“It’s too big! We can’t tie a knot!”

“Give me the tape!”

The instant Myeong Haebin let go with one hand to remove the roll of tape from her arm, the monster thrashed violently and sent the intruder sitting on its tail flying through the air.

“Aagh!”

I heard Myeong Haebin slam hard into something solid, probably a tree.

I didn’t have time to look.

“Damn it!”

The tape that had fallen from her wrist rolled to a stop near me, but after freeing itself from one of the forces pinning it down, the monster twisted its body around, swapping the positions of its head and tail.

— Kirik! Kyagarak!

It opened its jaws as though, since it couldn’t bite through the plastic, it intended to chew me up along with it.

‘Why do all the creatures in this place have such fucked-up teeth?’

Its green gums, covered in sharp metal fragments, looked more like a shredder than a mouth.

Its whitish breath spread across the inside of the plastic and blocked my vision.

‘Got it!’

Just before the monster closed its mouth, I leaned my torso as far back as I could and caught the roll of tape with my outstretched hand.

I grabbed the protruding end with my teeth, pulled out a long strip, and wrapped it around the mouth of the bag that I was still holding shut.

Crack.

Instead of biting me, the monster tore off a large chunk of plastic and raised its enormous body.

Then it stepped on my ankle.

I heard a sound I really didn’t like.

“Damn it. I did exactly what you wanted! When the hell are you going to collect the trash?!”

It happened at that moment.

A void resembling a black hole appeared in midair.

It was so enormous that it could have swallowed not only me, but several monsters the size of the one that lived in that pond.

That void devoured the entire space containing the bag with the trapped monster in a single gulp.

Gulp.

It sounds strange, but at that exact moment, I felt with my entire body as a new string of text appeared with absolute clarity.

[Completion Condition: Clean the pond of Chodam Park.]

[Completed]