Ever since the rat-demon incident, Yuzaburō and the rest of his unit had gained absolute confidence in Ren Kuroda's strength.
After all, even the specialists in the Unnatural Phenomena Countermeasures Division had been stunned when they received the corpse of that enormous rat demon. And if Ren was the one who had taken it down… well, that meant he was on an entirely different level.
But after listening to Hinano's explanation of the new case, Ren frowned.If everything she said was true, then another monster was almost certainly involved behind the scenes.
The incident Hinano described was simple on the surface—what people commonly called "getting trapped in a maze"—and thankfully, no one had been injured.
The victim this time was a female office worker at a major listed corporation. She'd been working overtime on a Sunday—forced to stay late by her supervisor. Irritated and exhausted, she secretly sipped some alcohol to relieve the stress.
But when she stepped out to use the restroom, she saw a woman who looked exactly like her slowly emerging from the dim, half-lit corridor.
Terrified, she ran blindly through the office… yet no matter where she went, she couldn't escape.Darkness kept swallowing the lights around her, and between the alcohol and sheer panic, she eventually lost consciousness.
When she woke up the next morning, she was lying in front of a window inside the company building.
Considering the company was over ten stories high, if she'd stumbled while still conscious, the outcome would have been catastrophic.
Naturally, she arrived at work the next day utterly petrified and immediately told her coworkers—and her supervisor—what had happened.
Her supervisor, however, dismissed her account as drunken nonsense.
Unable to endure the growing pressure and the embarrassment she'd caused the company, the woman was ultimately fired.
Everyone assumed that was the end of it. After all, who takes the ramblings of a drunk at face value?
But then… a similar incident happened again.This time, involving the supervisor himself.
Even after the woman's dismissal, rumors continued to circulate, harming the company's reputation. Wanting to put an end to it once and for all, the daring company president decided to stay in the office on Sunday night and turn on all surveillance cameras—to prove the woman had simply been drunk.
That weekend night, the building was almost entirely empty.At first, the supervisor was calm. But shortly after midnight, the lights in his room began flickering like faulty bulbs.
Just as the woman had described, darkness began to devour the light… and from a pool of shadow, a man identical to him stepped out.
The figure wore a friendly smile.The supervisor found it bone-chilling.
Right then and there, panic surged through him. Everything the fired employee had said—everything he'd mocked as drunken rambling—was happening exactly as she described.
But unlike her, he was a man, and the company president to boot. He prided himself on being more composed than the average employee.
And yet, as she had said… escape was impossible in that darkness.
Running blindly would only risk tumbling from a deadly height. The fact that the doppelgänger wasn't attacking meant its capabilities were likely limited.
He forced himself to think.How had the woman survived?
Right—she'd passed out and slept until morning.
For once, he was grateful he hadn't brushed off her entire story as a "ghost tale" and told her to shut up.
He didn't know whether it would work, but as the smiling copy of himself drew nearer, the supervisor gritted his teeth, slammed his head against his desk, and knocked himself unconscious.
Turns out… his decision had been right.Like the woman before him, he woke up the next morning unharmed in his office.
Aside from the painful bump on his forehead, nothing in the room had changed.
Having experienced it firsthand, he could no longer dismiss the woman's story as drunken rambling. He had witnessed the phenomenon with his own eyes.
After ordering all employees never to work on Sundays again, the president went straight to the police. He was truly desperate.
He even tried consulting onmyōji and monks—only to encounter nothing but frauds who couldn't do a thing.
And to his surprise… the police actually accepted the case instead of brushing him off.
Officially, the incident fell under the jurisdiction of the Non-Natural Supernatural Countermeasures Unit, but they were severely understaffed, and although the culprit was apparently a yokai, the threat level wasn't high. So the case had been shelved.
However, after Yuzaburō's team handled last night's rat-demon incident flawlessly, the higher-ups decided to assign this low-threat supernatural case to his group.
After all, they'd witnessed a whole swarm of dangerous rat demons and survived. The higher-ups believed they had potential as a future support unit.
Even if they failed, the company president had said it himself—If things got bad, they could simply knock themselves unconscious.
Upon receiving the assignment, Yuzaburō and his team were speechless.
No one knew their own abilities better than they did.
Frankly, if not for the two talismans Ren had given them the night before, they would've become rat-demon chow.
When they first saw that monstrous tide of rat demons… every one of them, including Yuzaburō, was utterly terrified.
Despite the higher-ups repeatedly assuring them the new case was "extremely low-risk," the entire squad remained tense.After all, any normal human would feel fear when confronted with unknown, incomprehensible forces.
Their excitement over the promotion they'd received after completing the mandatory rat-demon mission evaporated instantly.No ordinary person wanted to encounter supernatural creatures again.
And so, naturally, every one of them thought of Ren Kuroda—the one who had saved them from the rat demon the night before.
If Ren agreed to help… this mission would be a guaranteed success.
After all, this new incident was classified as a low-level E-Rank.The rat-demon rampage the previous night—thanks to the Rat Demon King's presence—had been a full B-Rank threat.