"Try looking at me like that one more time."

It was obviously the sort of supernatural phenomenon that should have made a person’s skin crawl, but Ariel was completely impolite about it.

She stared straight at the woman’s face in the painting, as if inviting the peeping evil spirit to come have an intense little interaction with her.

The woman in the painting, of course, did not respond. It looked like nothing more than an ordinary painting.

"Boring."

After waiting for a while and confirming that nothing at all was going to happen, Ariel pouted in dissatisfaction.

"I thought it’d be more exciting than this."

"...Nobody does a haunted house like that."

Muen gave a helpless bitter smile.

Once again, the haunted house was not serving the function he had expected.

Wasn’t this supposed to be the place where a delicate beauty got frightened by creepy, terrifying things and screamed as she threw herself into your arms? Then you got to seize the chance to display your courage and manliness, and under that eerie atmosphere, elevate the relationship on an emotional level with the frightened beauty.

But with Ariel acting like this, it felt more like, if you’re scared, you’re welcome to lean on my shoulder for support... So which one of them was supposed to be the delicate girl being won over here?

Still, thinking about it carefully, this too was something he should have seen coming. If she were the type who scared that easily, she would not be Ariel. All it meant was that, just like with the roller coaster, Muen had been slightly influenced by the fixed image of haunted houses from his previous life.

The supernatural horror of his previous life had been genuinely supernatural horror—something your subconscious recognized as a dangerous thing that could easily take your life.

In this world, being afraid of ghosts just meant you weren’t strong enough.

For someone as fierce as Ariel, what if a ghost scared her? Simple. Punch it back. Was she supposed to let it scare her for free?

"Is there anything else fun in here?" Ariel’s eyes brightened slightly, eager to try more.

Though it had not been as thrilling as she imagined, this haunted house really was full of novelty for her.

She had long since gotten tired of high-difficulty ancient ruins. Playing around in this simple-difficulty haunted mansion instead had quite a different sort of charm.

"That would mean going farther ahead—"

Before Muen finished speaking, he heard some faint sound.

It seemed to be the sound of gears turning, hidden behind the floor and the walls. At the same time, a thin mist drifted in from who knew where, making the already dim corridor even harder to see through and the atmosphere even stranger.

Ariel’s senses were sealed, so she did not hear those sounds. All she could see was that the surroundings were becoming more and more to her liking.

"Let’s go."

"Mm."

The two of them felt their way forward down the corridor. Since he was holding her wrist, they would not get separated.

They had not gone far when Ariel suddenly felt a chill at the back of her neck.

It was like a dead person’s fingers brushing lightly across the nape of her neck. The cold, sticky sensation made her hair stand on end, accompanied by a low, hoarse whisper...

"Intruder... die..."

"I’ll kill your big-headed ghost mother!"

Without the slightest hesitation, Ariel spun around, bent low, rotated through the motion, and drove a beautiful straight punch right into the stomach of the thing trying to ambush her.

"Ugh!"

It was a grotesque, blood-soaked figure, its body stitched all over with dense, crisscrossing wounds, blood constantly streaming from them. One eyeball even hung outside its socket, flopping back and forth with its movements in a disgustingly vivid way.

A textbook living corpse from a horror story.

But after taking Ariel’s punch, the corpse actually let out a pained grunt, its body folding sharply like a shrimp.

"Huh?"

Ariel looked at her own fist. "That felt pretty good?"

All her power had been sealed away. In terms of combat strength, she was completely just an ordinary girl right now. But the moment that punch landed, she felt the exhilarating rush of being back at her peak.

And that rush naturally made Ariel want to throw another punch.

"Wait... that’s not what we agreed—"

Seeing the girl bearing down on him, genuine panic appeared in the corpse’s one good eye. He wanted to loudly denounce this immoral behavior of attacking an NPC, but the moment he lifted his gaze, he saw the blond man behind her making a pay-more gesture at him.

Hah. As if a mere pay raise could make him sell out his body like that...

Ten times.

"Ah, damn you, intruder!"

After being attacked, the corpse immediately let out a furious roar. "Die!"

"The one dying is you, you weak-ass corpse!"

What greeted the corpse was Ariel’s fierce set of punches. Though her strength was gone, some of the techniques still remained in her body’s instincts, so the corpse—whose combat ability was roughly five—was soon beaten so badly by Ariel that it fled in miserable panic and dove into the shadows.

"Intruder! Die!"

The corpse had barely run off when a battered old door was suddenly kicked open. A bloated, obese pig-headed man stitched together like rotten meat came stomping out, wielding a huge bloodstained butcher’s cleaver, vicious red light shining from its eyes.

The pig-headed monster charged straight at Ariel with the momentum of someone about to chop her into pieces and toss her into a stew. Some eerie background sound also rose at just the right time, making it seem even more terrifying.

But Ariel felt no fear at all. Not caring in the least that she was wearing a skirt, she charged right in and delivered a stylish flying kick that knocked the pig-headed monster flat. While it was still dizzy, she quickly snatched the cleaver away.

"Wait... what, what are you trying to do?"

The pig-headed monster crawled backward in terror.

"Hehehehe."

Ariel played with the cleaver in her hand. Under the red glow, her pretty face somehow took on an oddly seductive, wicked beauty.

"Don’t be scared. I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to play something fun with you~"

"Ah, no, don’t! Don’t come over here—"

The pig-headed monster scrambled away in panic, using both hands and feet, while Ariel chased after it with an excited expression.

And while she gave chase, a mummy wrapped in bandages, a woman in white like a female ghost, a glossy-furred werewolf, a ripper that let out sharp, vicious laughter—one by one, creatures straight out of urban legends appeared, as if they had already received word from the corpse, lured by ten times the money, and so had abandoned their hiding places to launch the most horrifying supernatural ambush possible at Ariel.

...And then Ariel beat every last one of them into the floor.

"Too weak, too weak!"

While using the ripper’s scissors to shear the werewolf, Ariel laughed with utterly heroic boldness.

"You’re this weak and you still came here to play ghost villains? What a joke!"

...

Honestly, Ariel looked more like the villain now.

Muen rubbed his forehead helplessly.

He had long understood Ariel’s personality, but this really was not how the scene was supposed to look. Was this how a haunted house was meant to be played? Was a haunted house supposed to be your personal power-fantasy stage? Had the roles between her and the ghosts somehow gotten reversed?

But...

Forget it.

Watching Ariel’s excited back, Muen could not help smiling faintly as well.

Even if the plot of the delicate beauty seeking hugs had not happened as planned, it was still nice to see her this happy.

Wasn’t that what a date was like? All kinds of plans made in advance, all kinds of painstaking design, a great deal of money and time spent, and maybe the story unfolding in a completely different way from what you imagined... but the moment the other person showed a smile that came from the heart, it all felt worth it.

...

...

"Is this all? Is this seriously all?"

Ariel chased the ghosts and monsters all over the place, killing her way through the entire mansion until "blood ran like rivers" and "the cries of the fallen filled the air." Before long, not a single demon or ghost dared show its face in front of her anymore.

By the time she came back to herself, even Muen had already been left behind somewhere.

The area around her was completely empty. She alone remained in the sinister fog.

"I told him he should keep holding onto me. And now look at that, we got separated after all."

Ariel glanced at her now-empty pale wrist and inexplicably curled her lip.

But whatever. For now, she was not going to nitpick over such a minor issue with Muen. After all, she had been having quite a good time herself.

Ariel swung the butcher’s cleaver in her hand. It was huge, as big as half her body, yet she could lift and swing it easily.

Ordinarily, that would have been completely normal. She could handle even larger blades with ease. But Ariel had not forgotten her current state. After all, when she had gotten excited earlier and tried to rip open a cabinet with her bare hands to drag out the female ghost in white hiding inside, she had failed.

She was still an ordinary girl right now.

It was not that her strength had returned. It was that the blade itself was just that light. Though it had been made to look frighteningly real, once she held it, she could still tell it was only a prop for acting.

The same went for those demons and monsters. No matter how hideous they looked or how convincing their disguises were, with just one punch, Ariel had been able to tell they were not real monsters at all—just staff members dressed up as NPCs.

The mist, the sounds, the strange supernatural effects were probably all the work of some kind of mechanism too.

"They really did... put a lot of care into this."

Ariel nudged an eyeball lying on the floor that someone had apparently dropped. Just by looking at it, even she could not tell whether it was real or fake, which spoke to how finely crafted it was.

She was not angry, nor did she feel tricked. Because she knew that the nature of all this was the exact opposite of deliberate deception. Every prop, every disguise, every bit of design here spoke of Muen’s care and effort.

For Muen Campbell, son of a duke, grabbing a real evil spirit and throwing it in here would have been far simpler, more convenient, and cheaper than making all these fake things.

But he had still done it.

Because the one dating him right now was not Ariel Bugaard, the woman who bulldozed her way through everything and was unmatched among those of the same rank, but merely a delicate girl with no strength at all.

So everything he had done revolved around that girl.

"Hmph. Meddlesome. Do you really think this is enough to win me over? How naive."

Ariel gave two disdainful little hums and casually flung aside the butcher’s cleaver, preparing to go back and find Muen.

She was going to properly point out all the flaws and weaknesses in these things to him, then laugh at him mercilessly for them.

"Hm?"

But the moment she stepped forward, Ariel suddenly frowned and hugged her arms, giving a little shiver.

She felt cold.

Actually, the mansion had always been cold. After all, it was hard to «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» create a horror atmosphere in a place warm as spring.

But she had already been running around for so long, and she still felt cold. That meant the temperature had dropped even further.

And as the temperature fell, a strange sense of foreboding began to flicker faintly in Ariel’s heart. It was as though something had been watching her from not far away since some time ago.

Based on Ariel’s experience...

"This is the sign that some kind of boss is about to show up, right?"