I Joined a Dating Sim Game and Got the Horror Boss Instead

---- Chapter 13 There was only one thing I remembered, one belief carved into my bones: Kill every "outsider." That was my purpose. During the day, everyone on campus looked human. But once night fell, we all turned into monsters. My existence was dull and repetitive. Occasionally, a new batch of "outsiders" would arrive, and the monotony would break for a few days. I overheard many of them whispering that they wanted to clear the game and win the prize money. To do that, they had to kill the final boss. Me. I wasn't angry. If anything, I found it amusing.

So I was the monster they wanted to hunt. But as more and more outsiders came and died, even that amusement faded. ---- My life returned to its stagnant, murky stillness. Until one day, I met someone unusual. She greeted me first with bright, direct, fearless gaze. She even marched into the principal's office and demanded to enroll in school. I felt immediately that she was different from every outsider before her. Still, an outsider was an outsider. I allowed her to enroll anyway. On her very first day, she became my desk mate.

And from that day on, she went to the school store every morning to buy snacks and offer them to me, trying to win me over. I suspected for a while that she had somehow learned the truth that I was the real boss. Maybe she hoped that by pleasing me, I'd spare her life. But my identity is a secret. No outsider has ever known. Every player thinks the principal is the boss. They spend all their time gathering the three keys, hoping to kill him. ---- I decide who gets a key and who doesn't. It depends entirely on my mood. In the end, their fate never changes. They all die.

The shopkeeper even told me the outsider paid with a strange kind of paper currency he'd never seen. linstructed him to accept all of it and told the homeroom, teacher to give her a campus card loaded with several thousand. No matter how strange she was, she was still just an outsider. And outsiders die. That night, she stumbled toward me, threw herself into my arms, and called me her honey. She asked me to be her boyfriend. Of course I refused. But after that day, her voice kept echoing in my head. "Be my boyfriend, okay?" And something shifted. Barely noticeable at first, but enough.

---- I began watching her. I discovered that she wasn't like the other outsiders at all. Those outsiders knew exactly how terrifying this world was. She wandered through it like a newborn fawn-soft, clueless, without the faintest sense of danger. So I deliberately shielded her from it. At night, when she slept, I filled her room with a calming floral scent so she wouldn't wake up and see the monsters. When she failed to return to her dorm before curfew, the time when every outsider should have been hunted down, I ordered the ghosts to hide.

In the past, the rule was absolute: any outsider wandering at night would be attacked. But for her... I made exceptions. I told myself it wasn't because I wanted her alive. I was simply prolonging her life so I could kill her later. At the time, I didn't realize how deeply my belief had already begun to crumble. ---- leven gave her keys on purpose. I wanted her to collect all three. Not because I wanted her to die. But because... I wanted to see the look on her face when she opened that box.