Prologue
His body swayed at a steady, gentle rhythm, as if cradled in a rocking cradle.
With great effort, he lifted eyelids that felt as heavy as lead weights. Beyond the clear glass window, a brilliant blue sky stretched out.
He rolled his hazy eyes around.
The interior didn’t look like any vehicle commonly used in the modern era. It had the appearance of a carriage from the 19th century.
Platinum-blond hair swaying in a soft breeze caught the sunlight, sparkling brilliantly.
It belonged to the man seated to his right. For some reason, he was leaning his head against the man’s shoulder.
His vision was strangely blurred.
One thing was certain, though — that man was someone he didn’t know.
“…Who… are…”
「Sleep a little longer.」
Something white and broad swept down over his eyelids.
He turned the sensation over in his mind, that fleeting touch.
「It will take some time to reach the manor. Sleep for now.」
Just as he finally realized it was the hand of a man wearing silk gloves —
A pleasant, low voice murmured softly against his ear.
「…René.」
“…….”
「That’s what Jun calls me.」
At that gentle reverberation, his consciousness sank downward in a strange rush, all at once.
He lost count of how many times he asked himself that question, silently. If he had known who that bastard was in that moment, would he really have gone along so willingly?
But the answer changed every time.
There’s no use in regretting it. In the end, René took him away, and he followed —
And so he arrived at that place.
The corridors of the manor, eerie in their vastness, were utterly silent — not so much as a crawling insect to break the stillness.
He followed behind the maid, who walked at a mechanical, measured pace, and swallowed dryly.
[Would you like to proceed with the Tutorial?]
In the air, a square notification window still blazed with bright light. He quickly dropped his gaze in a show of polite indifference.
Ignore it, ignore it. When you run into something illogical, the best way to survive is to pretend you don’t see it.
There’s that well-known story — if you make eye contact with a ghost, or answer when a ghost speaks to you, it’ll go “Oh, you can see me?” and come after you.
He stilled himself and glanced around sideways. The only thing disturbing the silence was the muffled thud of footsteps sinking into the deep crimson carpet with every step.
Creeeak — with a spine-chilling screech of metal, the room door swung open.
“This is the room prepared for you, Teacher. If you need anything, please pull the bell rope beside the bed.”
“…….”
“Teacher?”
“Ah, yes. Thank you.”
He snapped back to his senses a beat too late and dipped his head in a bow. The maid left with a practiced smile.
Teacher. Me…? A title he still couldn’t get used to — it grated against unfamiliar ears before he could even begin to adjust.
Bang!
A sharp, explosive sound split the air.
Clatter. Rattle. Thud. Click.
Violent crashes rang out from behind him. His eardrums hummed and vibrated wildly.
His startled heart hammered at his temples — thump, thump. He clenched his fist so hard the knuckles bleached white beneath the skin.
He turned around.
The window, which had been perfectly fine when he walked in, was now stained a deep, vivid red.
Gripping his trembling heart, he rose on his tiptoes and crept forward carefully.
Bang — Crash — Bang — A thunderous noise like hammering grew louder and louder, shaking the entire room.
And then, the moment his feet came to a stop in front of the window —
Every sound cut out at once.
“…….”
The icy silence sent a chill shooting up his spine.
He reached out a trembling hand and pushed on the window latch. With a grinding screech of metal, the window began to open, just barely.
He looked down.
The blood-soaked carcass of a crow lay on the grass below his window. Its skull had been crushed.
So… all that hammering noise just now was that poor animal enthusiastically headbutting the glass.
Which means the liquid pooling thickly on the windowsill, pouring down like a waterfall, is —
In other words —
That —
“……Ah.”
He took one good look at the blood, and sure enough, his vision went white and his body toppled backward.
Clearly, I’m passing out. Even so, this isn’t too bad a shock. I should be able to wake up in about ten minutes or so.
Through his dimming vision, he caught sight of a translucent glowing window. As if fed up with being ignored, it pulsed and flashed in every direction like a disco ball, irritatingly frantic.
[Would you like to proceed with the Tutorial?]
[Would you like to proceed with the Tutorial?]
[Would you like to proceed with the Tutorial?]
[Would you like to proceed with the Tutorial?]
[YES / YES]
“Get… lost…….”
He would have loved to flip it off, but his hand wouldn’t move at all. The flickering consciousness snuffed out the instant the back of his head hit the floor.
From beyond the black fog, he heard the voices of colleagues he — for the first time in his life — found himself missing.
‘Jun, if you keep playing horror games every single day like this, you’re going to go insane. If your job is already being a killer, at least make your hobbies peaceful.’
‘Right, like the racing game Takeshi plays. Or even something like Michael over there with that 〈Lust Compa…〉, damn it. Well — something like that would be better.’
What had he said back then? Something like, this is also a form of training, so don’t bother me.
‘You addict. What are you gonna do if you actually get sucked into a game someday?’
Exactly. If he’d known it would come to this, he would have played some wholesome healing game where you pet dogs and cats and sparrows. He never would have touched that game with the terrible name — Bloody Invitation or whatever it was. Why had he let that precious advice go in one ear and out the other?
[…Auto-loading…]
[START]
Should I just bite off my tongue and die in advance?
…That’s also scary.
[Tutorial]
“Jun! There’s a small fry behind the corner —”
“I know.”
He spun the gun like winding a spring, adjusting its aim in 0.01 seconds. Toward where he sensed a presence. No need for precise aiming. A certainty of the exact angle traveled from his fingertips.
This is the spot.
He pulled the trigger without hesitation. Bang — at the very same moment as the explosion of the gunshot, a death cry rang out from the target point as the enemy’s breath was cut short.
“Damn, Jun! You’re really something else. How do you hit so precisely without even looking — Eagle Eye?”
“The four of us alone, and we just demolished the Mafia’s Slavic branch. That’s got to be worth a promotion, right?”
“Did you see Jun’s three consecutive shots? If I were Jun, I’d enter the shooting Olympics and win gold.”
His thoroughly excited teammates kept falling over themselves to praise him, today’s VIP.
Feeling smug, he turned his head absently toward where their cheering was coming from.
“Of course, you bastards. I’ve trained so hard to —”
He had been about to flash a confident smile.
“So… hard… to train…”
His voice came out fragmented, halting.
Through his raucous teammates, he could see the path they’d walked through. Bodies shot and stabbed to pieces were strewn across every corner. The once-white marble floor was dyed red with the enemies’ blood.
Which meant… blood. Human blood.
“…Ah.”
The instant his nose, numbed by adrenaline, registered the metallic scent of blood, his legs gave out beneath him.
Dizziness hit in one swift wave. His body, stripped of balance, pitched helplessly downward.
Through his blurring vision, he could see the expressions of his teammates — who had been looking at him with something like reverence — shifting into something pitying. Ungrateful bastards. Already forgot everything I carried them through, apparently.
“What the — passed out again just from seeing blood? Jun really, his skills are good, but…”
His grumbling teammates’ voices buzzed away beyond his fading consciousness.
“Still managed to take them all out before fainting this time, at least.”
“Michael, help Jun up.”
“For hell’s sake. Why is it always me?”
“Because you’re the biggest one, you gorilla!”
Killer. Strictly speaking, their scope ranged from leaking classified information to infiltration, espionage, assassination — a secret organization that took on all manner of illegal contracts.
There was a sad story behind how he, someone who fainted like a paper doll at the mere sight of blood, ended up working a job like this.
He first met his father — a complete stranger — at his mother’s funeral.
Though she was his mother, there wasn’t much he knew about her.
She had swept runways all over the world as a model in her youth, and retired when she became pregnant with him, unmarried.
His mother never disclosed who his father was, and left him — a three-year-old — alone in a house staffed with a few housekeepers, before vanishing.
Meetings, at most, were once or twice every half year. Only for the brief while before she dropped by on a whim, then disappeared without a trace.
The only things he’d ever been able to know were the name his mother left him — Ju Jiwoon — and the fact that his father was a Westerner. His face was obviously exotic mixed-blood at a glance.
In any case, it had nothing to do with him. He grew up ordinarily in Korea.
From the age of fifteen, most of the housekeepers had quit as well, so he began living alone. On rare occasions, when he felt a hollow ache inside, he’d search his mother’s name online, marvel that she really was a model, and leave it at that.
That life of his changed completely the summer he was sixteen — after his mother’s funeral.
‘What’s your name?’
The father he met for the first time in his life had the commanding, distinguished air of a Hollywood actor, and spoke in Italian.
He asked a few questions about his mother, then abruptly declared, ‘You’ll be living here from now on,’ and dropped him in the middle of America.
He was used to being alone, so life in America wasn’t terribly difficult. In the early days, the language barrier made it hard to even buy a proper meal, but as time passed he adapted well enough — to the point where even his real name, he used not ‘Jiwoon’ but the easier-to-pronounce-abroad ‘Jun.’
Then came his second year of university. Something happened.
‘The Boss is calling for you.’
His father had summoned him.
It was the first time in his life a family member had called for him. He was barely twenty, reckless — he went right away without a second thought.
His father greeted him not with words, but with the barrel of a gun pressed to his forehead.
A secret organization tasked with infiltrating other agencies to extract information, and carrying out contract killings such as eliminating key figures. Publicly, it posed as a global security consulting firm.
His father had said he needed a tool to plant in the organization’s North American branch. That was their third meeting. His father turned out to be a son of a bitch beyond imagination.
The process may have been semi-coerced, but once he’d set foot inside the organization, there was no backing out.
Joining this place — where confidentiality was everything — was a lifelong contract. Even if you managed to leave alive, surveillance followed you for life, and if information leakage was ever suspected, you’d be the first one scrutinized.
He only learned after joining that his father was a senior executive within the organization. Having come this far, he resolved with burning drive to outshine everyone and make his father eat his words.
Fortunately, he had considerable talent for this profession.
He adapted quickly to the high-intensity physical training, and his shooting scores were invariably perfect — 10.9 out of 10.9. He had nimble hands as well, and was skilled at assassination and other dark arts: pickpocketing, lacing cars with poison, driving needles into vital points.
And so, by the time he reached his first year on the job, he was able to proudly place his name in the top five of his branch’s department-wide ‘Employee of the Year’ rankings.
…However, he never once broke into the top three. He oscillated perpetually between fourth and fifth.
The reason was one thing alone.
‘…Jun? Jun! Hey!’
Every single time he saw blood, he fainted.
He hadn’t known, having lived an uneventful life where the worst he’d encountered was a scrape or, at the most, a sprain. Blood in movies had frightened him, but he could handle it because he knew it was fake.
In the field, the moment a nearby colleague took a gunshot wound and blood sprayed everywhere, he barely managed to stagger away before collapsing on the spot.
Because of that, the missions assigned to him solo were limited mostly to sniping, infiltration, surveillance, or poisoning.
Close-range combat with blades was out of the question for the most part. He could fire a gun, but even then — outside of sniping — he was only assigned as part of a team, as a precaution against the possibility that he might faint.
Determined to find a solution to this insufferable weakness, he had eventually come up with a particular remedy.
[DEAD]
“Ugh, I died again!”
The remedy was simply this: playing horror games.
