Editing A Simple Survey:Volume1 End1 (section)

===Part 4===

It was a holiday. However, even if his parents had been deathly ill, he had the flu, he was trapped on a desert island in some distant sea, and an asteroid was about to crash into the earth, he would not have been able to cancel the job.

“You don’t get to go back to sleep!!” said Harumi.

“How did you know where my apartment is?”

“Kozue told me.”

“I don’t remember telling Kozue either!!”

They were called out to a completely normal looking vacant lot. A middle-aged man wearing work clothes was there. He smiled and waved over at them. Anzai was prepared to grab a metal pipe off the ground and beat the man over the back of the head if he said they had to be transported somewhere with blindfolds on, but that did not happen.

“There you are. I’m Suzukawa, the section manager. You two are the newcomers I take it.”

“Yes!!”

“Yesssss…”

Anzai’s response was incredibly halfhearted, but the gears of the world continued turning.

“What is our job today!?”

“It’s nearby. We can walk there. Oh, take these. They’re your tools for the job, so take care of them. They’re the life of a worker.”

“…A bucket and…what’s this? A roller-shaped cleaner used to get hair out of carpet?”

“It’s a roller for paint. Girl, you take the paint can.”

“Okay!!”

They were to be working in a rundown apartment complex that was a 5 minute walk away.

In fact, it was the apartment complex Anzai lived in.

“Why has everyone done research into where I live!?”

“What is he talking about?”

“He sometimes says strange things.”

Anzai quite reluctantly followed the other two into the apartment building. They arrived at the room next to his own.

“This is an empty room.”

“…What are we going to do?”

“Paint the walls. It has to look nice for the next person to move in.”

“Hmm,” muttered Anzai, but then, “Huh?”

He was overcome by a strange feeling. He had a feeling something about that quickly given premise did not add up.

However, Harumi and the section manager were already heading into the empty room.

And they did not even take off their shoes.

“Here it is. On the roof.”

“Wow.”

“Okay, just paint it over. Hurry. Hurry up now.”

Wondering what they were talking about, Anzai timidly entered the room.

What he found was an eerie stain that he felt should get the room nominated for the top 100 haunted spots in Japan.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

“Anzai-kun has an over-the-top reaction to everything, doesn’t he?”

“He keeps things lively,” replied Harumi.

“To hell with this!! What is that!? It’s clearly a person!! That stain looks just like a life-sized person with their limbs spread out!! What the hell happened in this apartment!?”

“C’mon, hurry up and paint it over.”

“We are paid by the hour, so we do not want to be too quick.”

“No, wait!! Explain this!!!!!! In fact, I don’t think even having the victim of a fatal stabbing on the other side of the ceiling would cause a stain like this! What the hell happened to create such a horrifying stain!?”

(Come to think of it, ''a strange girl lived next door'' up until about 2 weeks ago! She had white hair, was about 12, referred to herself with the first person pronoun “konata”, and lived alone!! How did things end up so this absurd stain got here!?)

Anzai’s brain seemed to be overheating.

Meanwhile…

“Don’t ask me. I was just told to have you do something about the stain.”

“…So you’re just going to seal it away without knowing what it is?”

“The request wasn’t to figure out what it is.”

As he spoke, the middle-aged section manager removed the lid from the paint can and poured white paint into the bucket. He then took the tool that looked like an adhesive tape roller used to remove stains from carpet and stuck it into the paint.

“Now, get this over with. You shouldn’t need a stepladder for this. C’mon, get to it. You may get paid the same per hour no matter how much work you do, but try not to slack off in front of me.”

“Wahh! The paint drips down on me when I hold up the roller!!” shouted Harumi.

“Isn’t there something else to be surprised by!? And what kind of secrets does this cheap apartment I live in have!?”

However, the other two did not seem to care about anything other than the money.

The section manager spoke to Anzai who was still complaining.

“This kind of thing is to be expected.”

“Eh!? Are you about to tell me this place is haunted because of some horrible incident form the past!?”

“No. People can hire us to do anything, remember? Well, you made the ridiculous request of a three-days-a-week job that pays 1000 yen an hour. You shouldn’t be surprised to get jobs like this.”

“…So you don’t do jobs like this year-round?”

“No. We will do anything requested of us, so we get a lot of different types of jobs. If you are fine with low wages can choose the safe, easy jobs. With the amount of money you wanted, it’s only natural to get something a little more difficult. So quit complaining.”

“Right!! Right, right!!”

“I’m beginning to worry about Harumi’s IQ…”

As much as Anzai disliked it, a job was a job. He could always ask the landlord about that stain later. Of course, he did not actually live in that room, so it was possible the landlord would have no obligation to tell him about the room next door.

He stuck his paint roller into the bucket to gather some paint. When he stretched up, he could just reach the ceiling. When he thought about it, the whole thing seemed suspicious from the point that they were going straight to painting without removing the wallpaper first, but it was the apartment’s landlord that was plotting something suspicious not the group Anzai was working for.

“…That reasoning gets pretty dangerous if it goes as far as killing someone, though.”

“Did you say something?”

Anzai did not want to cause any trouble, so he switched his mindset over to trying to finish the job.

He pressed some white paint against the ceiling.

Just by moving the roller back and forth, the human-shaped stain would disappear. But then…

“Mm…mm…?”

“It just spoke!! This stain just mumbled somethiiiinnnngggg!?”

“Ah!? Don’t wave your roller around!!”

“You’re getting it everywhere. Well, we’re going to be painting it all, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

They both seemed unconcerned.

That in itself was a problem, but a certain word caught Anzai’s attention.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“So we’re not just painting the ceiling, but the walls and floor as well? Wait, is there some reason why we have to do that?”

“That’s what we were asked to do.”

Anzai quickly looked around the walls and floor. One of those walls was shared with his apartment, so he had a serious reason to be concerned.

“W-well, I don’t see any human-shaped stains… Do you?”

“Nope,” said Harumi.

However, a bad feeling oozed up in the back of Anzai’s mind.

“…So there’s something other than a stain there?”

“Probably. Oh, more importantly, hurry up and paint over the stain on the ceiling. It’ll get away.”

“What do you mean the stain will get away!? Does that mean it isn’t actually a stain!? Don’t tell me it’s actually a collection of small, black bugs that just looks like a stain!!”

“Either way, you still need to paint over it. C’mon, hurry, hurry. It’ll escape into the room next door.”

“Gwooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

Despite still not knowing what was going on, Anzai swung the roller around like a sacred sword and sealed the (thing that looked like a) black stain behind the paint.

“Well done!!”

“Wow, I wouldn’t think an amateur could do that.”

“Wait!! Did that actually solve this!? I get the feeling it’s still very much alive and we just can’t see it!!”

“The stain is ‘very much alive’? You certainly say some strange things.”

“How poetic!” commented Harumi.

“No fair!! Don’t take normal views of things only when it’s convenient to you!!”

“Okay, that may be done, but we still need to paint the rest. Anzai-kun, you cover up the hair sticking out from the cracks in the floor. It seems to be slowly but forcefully heading this way.”

“Nooooooo!! This time it’s something clearly physical!?”

“Ha ha ha! How can you call this obviously unnatural hair a physical phenomenon!?” said Harumi.

“Oh, so you’re admitting that these things aren’t normal now!?”

Afterwards, the three were faced with “a large quantity of mold that clearly looked like a baby’s handprints”, “a wall covered in breast-shaped protrusions discovered when they removed the installed bathtub”, “feminine writing saying ‘delicious’ that looked like it had been scratched there by someone’s fingernails”, and other similar phenomena. They sent them all back to the darkness.

In the evening after they had finished, Anzai’s face was completely pale.

“…I-I need to go check if there are any paint trails in my room!!”

“Wow, getting 1000 yen an hour just to paint is great!” said Harumi.

“Yes, but be glad you kept it at the 1000 yen line. You would have gotten even worse jobs if you had asked for the 1200 yen line. Those jobs are at the Ab. Buster level.”

“Things worse than this!?”

(And what's that term he used? Ab. Buster!?)

“Yes.” The section manager who was experienced in such darker things nodded. “There’s a national university nearby, right? We recently had a job to pretend to be students there. That survey is definitely something I want nothing to do with.”

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