Chapter 296: Room 204, Mission Room – ‘Hotel Cinema’ (18)

– Kim Mooksung

As soon as I came out of the kitchen with its strange atmosphere, I met Park Sangho.

“Hmm? Why are you coming out of there?”

“What? I mean, yes?”

Park Sangho’s brow furrowed instantly as he looked towards the kitchen.

“Don’t tell me they made you do some work?”

“No, I just went in to see if I could help with anything, but Mother said it was fine and told me to go rest in the room…”

Hearing my words, Park Sangho’s expression softened slightly.

“I see. You’re really too kind-hearted!”

“…Oh, come on~!”

Ah, shit! Do I really have to say such lines?

As if the cheesy conversation wasn’t enough, Park Sangho came closer and held my hand. Truly, my whole body was on the verge of trembling every moment.

“You don’t need to get a single drop of water on your hands! Understand? Just go to the room and rest. Who in the world would use a flower to wipe dirt?”

Is this 90s sentiment? Actually, isn’t this a bit of a shitty statement even by 90s standards? It’s good that newlywed love for his wife is piercing the sky, but if kitchen work is such a lowly task that gets dirt on you, don’t make your mother and sister do it either!

After that, there wasn’t much to do. When I just tried to go out of the room, everyone made a fuss about me going in to rest, so what could I do? After eating a delicious dinner that made me wonder if it was really prepared in the countryside, I did nothing until the sun set.

Late at night, as night approached, there was one creepy thing. There was something 10 times creepier than any monster or whatever that might appear later. Surely the “husband” wasn’t trying to do that?

Sorry, but I couldn’t endure that much. Even if I could endure it, my Abras Warrior’s arm certainly wouldn’t be able to.

Fortunately, Park Sangho didn’t seem to have any intention of causing such a commotion in a countryside house with poor soundproofing, and he quietly fell asleep beside me. I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn, worried that this bastard might do something.

“…”

– Creeak!

What’s that? Is it starting now?

As I slightly turned my eyes to look at the flimsy door lined with hanji paper, I saw “someone” peeking into the room.

Who is it? A murderer? A monster? The bizarrely strange countryside people?

I needed to check, but I was a bit anxious about going myself. What if they suddenly stabbed me with a knife when I got close? Right, such dangerous tasks should be done by this male bastard.

– Thud!

“Mmm… What—“

“Shh! There’s someone outside.”

Park Sangho’s eyes flew open as he looked towards the door. Unlike me, who couldn’t recognize who it was, Park Sangho knew immediately upon seeing.

“No, that bastard, really!”

My careful warning became meaningless. Park Sangho immediately got up and ran outside, shouting loud enough to shake the dark night, and I heard someone frantically trying to run away but getting caught and beaten.

“You bastard, why the hell are you doing this?”

“Urgh!”

For a while, I heard the sound of someone being beaten. Meanwhile, I was confused.

This is a bit strange, isn’t it? Wasn’t that feeling just now clearly a ‘crisis’? Shouldn’t he have attacked with a knife? This is progressing too smooth—

– Grab!

The next moment, something truly unimaginable happened. Suddenly, the “wall” flipped over and a firm hand shot out from behind!

I never imagined there would be such trickery in a countryside house. I immediately put strength into my Abras arm and—

Put strength into it? What should I do with that strength? Crush the limbs of those trying to kidnap me? If I proceed like that, won’t I be criticized for an idiotic development?

This hesitation itself trapped me. The cloth covering my mouth was soaked with a strong sleeping drug, and I lost consciousness in less than a minute.

…In my fading consciousness, I realized.

So this is how Elena got caught in the romance movie.

But even though I realized it, I had no idea how to deal with it.

– Splash!

“Child! It’s time to wake up!”

As soon as I woke up to a bucket of cold water, I thought.

The movie’s progression is incredibly fast.

Unfortunately, that didn’t mean that physical time passed quickly. That “benefit” was gone, after all. However, most of the events I had experienced so far could clearly be summarized within 10 minutes in the movie.

Decided to go to the in-laws’ house after talking with husband at the start.

Arrived at the in-laws’ and received a warm welcome, then experienced something strange in the kitchen.

Felt a strange gaze while sleeping at night, woke up, and got kidnapped.

It was really just three cuts. The reason for such bizarrely fast progression was probably because four short films made up one movie.

“City Girl, are you awake now?”

When I opened my eyes, I saw the in-laws who had shown strange behavior since yesterday. My body was hanging on the wall with both hands chained, and my mother-in-law was sharpening a knife.

– Shing!

“…I’m having quite an interesting experience.”

“Oh my, I thought you’d scream as soon as you woke up! Why don’t you look to your right?”

As I turned my head, I couldn’t help but laugh bitterly. Human skin was hanging stretched out on the ceiling.

…The Hotel truly is the worst environment for the education of children.

“I really don’t know how Sangho managed to bring such a pretty child.”

“Haha! Dear, aren’t you scaring her too much? What if the city girl wets herself, are you going to clean it up?”

“Oh my, oh my, how can you say such things? Child! Don’t be too scared. Tonight will be ve~ry long. You need to see what’s under the skin with your own eyes.”

At some point, I just closed my ears. The two in-laws were busy rambling about how people who were caught in the past were like this and that while spewing cruel stories.

They probably wanted to hear me crying and begging for my life. Instead of giving them the sounds they wanted to hear, I thought deeply.

Where exactly did the “mistake” come from?

Let’s go back to the starting point of the movie. The owner of this memory, “Park Sumi”, survived and escaped and came to the coffee shop. What did this mean?

It meant it was a scenario where even a woman in her 20s without any special superpowers could escape. The fact that I was now tied up by both arms and had become a toy for an elderly couple obsessed with torture and murder meant I must have missed something.

“I don’t know.”

“Your eyeballs will be—what?”

“I said I don’t know, you senile bitch!”

“Y-you!”

“Hey! Are you listening? I’m just going to brute force my way through this, so you guys research well and figure out how to solve it smartly.”

“Suddenly, what—“

– Rumble! Clang!

With the sound of the stone wall behind bursting open, the iron chains were “torn”.

In the surreal scene, I told the elderly couple with their mouths hanging open, “You’re not much older than me, so what’s with all this ‘child’ bullshit! And what? Peeling skin? Eating raw flesh? You good-for-nothing bastards with nothing but big mouths…”

“W-what on earth is this—“

Unlike the mother-in-law who fell to the ground in shock, the father-in-law, trying to be manly, charged at me with a knife. Just looking at his movements made me laugh. He was clearly a worm who had never thrown a proper punch in his life.

I stretched out the warrior’s arm, grabbed the knife, and when I applied force strongly, the knife broke into three pieces and fell.

“Father, let’s put down the dangerous knife.”

Next, I grabbed the old man’s shoulder and applied “slight” force, and the old man’s arm bent at an angle he had never turned it in his life.

“Aaaaargh!”

“Father, doesn’t that feel good? I’m quite good at massages, you know.”

Since the normal development is already screwed anyway, should I twist it this way? Come to think of it, aren’t there quite a few movies these days where the victim gets satisfying revenge on the killer?

As I ripped the old man’s ear to the right, his skin tore and white cartilage scattered. At this point, the old man had already fainted, foaming at the mouth.

“Your mouth was so noisy, but why are you so weak? Mother, would you like to come here too?”

“H-hiiik! You’re a m-monster!”

“Come to think of it, where’s Sangho?”

The mother-in-law had already lost her mind and started wailing. Even until the moment I approached and grabbed the old woman’s head, she couldn’t come to her senses.

As I was slowly twisting her head, wondering if this would be enough for the Hotel’s acknowledgement, a voice was heard from outside.

“S-Sumi!”

“…”

In terms of a horror movie, that person should be in the position of a companion who acted recklessly in the beginning and got caught by the killer… But as the development twisted wildly, it ended up in this structure.

So I just explained randomly.

“Sangho. Do you see those human skins over there?”

The man looked around with a completely dazed expression.

“Your ‘unique’ family members were probably cannibals. So, well, I had no choice but to kill them all.”

“You… You. What on earth…?”

“A secret organization agent?”

Isn’t there an organization similar to the Administration here?

“T-the Vatican’s!”

“Cardinal.”

“C-Cardinal? But, you’re only 23 years old!”

“Hey, cardinals aren’t chosen by age, but by ability. Just assume that’s how it is. And how much of an idiot are you not to know what your family does?”

“S-Sumi?”

“Will you be quiet?”

After that, well, it was all half-hearted.

Honestly, feeling like it was already screwed, my energy drained and I completely lost the will to act properly. Coming outside, thinking it wasn’t even my body anyway, I took a long drag on a cigarette while looking up at the sky, and the space started to shake.

“In the end, I beat my mother-in-law and father-in-law to death and escaped with my husband.”

“What? Suddenly?”

“Yes. Actually, I’m a cardinal of the Vatican.”

“What?”

“Cardinals are chosen by ability.”

“Ah, no… I was hoping you’d show a more serious attitude.”

“Writer, didn’t you say you wouldn’t question our stories?”

“…I’m sorry. But this story feels like you just said whatever came to mind. Let’s try again later.”

A funny thing happened when we returned to the coffee shop. Park Sumi said exactly the same nonsensical development that I had carried out.

The writer Do Inho couldn’t hide his bewilderment at the absurd story of suddenly beating murderous in-laws to death with strength, and the reason it was possible was because I was a Vatican cardinal.

This was clearly a failure. The writer’s words, “Let’s try again later,” sounded meaningful.

At that moment, Han Yuri, the beautiful woman in her 20s who had been waiting for her turn, opened her mouth, “That can happen. We’re people who have experienced such amazing things, right? Writer, can I speak now?”

“Of course. Yuri, would you please tell us?”

“This story is a memory from my high school days. Um… It’s embarrassing to say it myself, but I was quite popular during my school days.”

“It seems so. In fact, aren’t you still popular now?”

“Oh, writer! Anyway, it was everyday for my shoe locker to be full of confession letters when I went to school. But that day was a bit special.”

The space started to distort.

– Second Story, The Girl with Demonic Charm

– Ding! Dong! Deng! Dong!

Hearing the high school lunch break bell ringing all around, I sighed.

Right, it’s already the second time, so let’s not make a fuss about being in a female student’s body again.

“Yuri! Do you have time tomorrow? I got tickets for the Black Eye concert this time—“

A girl called Saerom was chattering enthusiastically about going to see a concert together tomorrow. It seemed she was a friend, but the genre of the movie was horror.

“…Don’t stick too close to me.”

“Huh?”

“You won’t live long.”

“What?”

The starting location was near the shoe locker. A girl who received lots of confessions, and the location was the shoe locker. Honestly, I knew this too.

How much stuff do these kids shove in here?

When I opened the shoe locker, sure enough, it was filled with paper. Five white papers were crammed in, and among them was a rather absurd object.

“What’s this? Jelly?”

The girl beside me, Saerom, showed a bewildered reaction.

“It’s slime? How did they put this in?”

It was a toy like a huge jelly, and I wondered where a high school student, not a kindergartener, got this from. Nevermind getting it, how did they put it in the shoe locker?

Bewildered, I pulled it out and stretched it, and there was a piece of paper inside with “I love you” written on it.

“This bastard is really an idiot. They messed up the shoe locker by stuffing this in!”

“I know right! It must be some pathetic loser. Yuri, just throw this away.”

I could kind of understand what they were thinking. Since there were so many guys who put confession letters in the shoe locker, they probably thought if they just put in a paper letter, it would get buried among the other letters.

So as a result of pondering how to put in something that could definitely catch attention unlike paper, they decided to put in this idiotic slime.

…Well, it did my catch attention. I feel like reporting this jelly terrorism to the police.

“Haa… Is this how the current generation confesses? Anyway, it’s not like they’ve never even made eye contact with a girl, who would consider this kind of terrorism a confession—“

– Bang!

A heavy piece of metal struck my head.

“D-don’t make fun of me! You, how dare you! How dare you make fun of me? Do you know how hard it was for me to make that!?”

That was my last memory in the horror movie.

The moment Kim Mooksung died just 1 minute after the second story started, the theater was filled with silence. Ahri, who was unusually drooling, belatedly came to her senses.

“J-just now, did Mooksung die from being hit by a fire extinguisher? Did they beat him to death for rejecting a confession? Are kids these days all this scary?”

The “kids these days” who heard Ahri’s words all fell silent together.