I hardly felt time pass while the construction for the new location was ongoing. Excitement and genuine joy at seeing a project progress were one hell of a drug to make you forget about everything else that was wrong with your life–I was loveless, stuck in legal proceedings that were frankly draining my sanity, and a goddamn ghost that no one could get rid of was harassing me… But hey, my new restaurant that was going to be filled with cute clown girls was getting closer to becoming a thing! That was worth ignoring all the bad stuff, right…?

  Honestly. I was getting increasingly dissatisfied with my love life. I genuinely wasn’t finding any man who came even remotely close to what I sought, but I knew that my standards weren’t high enough to the point that only a handful of men could qualify. I knew that there were plenty of them out there–They just didn’t show up to try and seduce me! How in damnation was it possible that the men I had an interest in would also be the men who did not want anything to do with me?

  Sure, I could be intimidating, but that alone couldn’t possibly be enough to discourage them… Was I just aiming for a kind of man who was into women completely different from me? What were the odds?

  …While I was struggling on this front, the court case was still going on. It had been nearly a whole year at this point, and this piece of crap wasn’t making any progress. I had to give it to her, Eleanori was an excellent actress and could rival me when it came to pulling on the heartstrings of the jury… The jury had changed several times as well. The case was taking so long and required so much time that many people who had actual jobs to do would end up quitting, and this made the case even longer, as the new jury would need to get caught up to speed on the details.

  It was just ridiculous at this point.

  As for the ghost… I had honestly begun fading his existence out of my mind. Even when I spotted him, I would just subconsciously ignore his presence entirely. It seemed to make him irrationally angry, but like the little coward that he was, he never did anything to me. He truly was scared of getting close.

  I guess he was aware of my ability to easily restrain spirits to eat them… Oh, I’m thinking nonsense again… This has been happening more and more, too. I randomly think or say things like they are facts when they clearly aren’t. I’m… I’m fairly certain that it is a sign of psychosis or something like that, but I couldn’t find any solution to the problem whatsoever.

  Anyway. I would rather look at the upcoming sister location. The structure was being built rapidly. I was employing the best of the best to build me a place that was solid. The materials being used were quite expensive, but I had so much money that I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in how this affected my funds… And since I had a constant flow of earnings, it felt like I essentially had infinite coins as long as I didn’t actively do everything in my power to spend them.

  In any case, the construction of my new place was in parallel with the construction of the residential buildings. Thanks to the influx of people these cheap homes were going to bring, my business was pretty much guaranteed to be an instant hit by sheer proximity. I was planning on bringing the same philosophy from the other restaurants, so there would be menus cheap enough even for commoners to be willing to come by often, and with so many of them who were going to be around? It was going to be great.

  I’ll need to be very careful with the security, however. A newly opened place and a flood of people were a double-edged sword. If there were any problem, a mass of customers would quickly bring it to light. I needed to make sure everything would be safe and secure from the very moment the doors opened…

  For now, though, my bed was calling me. I closed the curtains as the dark spectre stared at me through the window, and fell asleep like a rock, awakening at the first rays of sunlight as per usual.

  The day was normal–Abnormally so, actually. It was normal in the actual sense of the word, not normal like what I had grown used to lately. The ghost did not show up at all, nothing came to remind me of the court case, and I was in good enough of a mood not to think about the fact that I was probably going to stay a single woman for a long time… I took care of paperwork at the main location and eventually went down to see how things were going, and everything was just fine.

  My employees were just as efficient and capable as I remembered them to be, the automatons were working as intended and performing on stage… They were actually singing a new song that I had added to their repertoire. There was a need for some freshness, after all. Playing the same songs over and over again would grow tiring for the clients.

  I breathed in the fresh air–The VS, or Vent System, might not seem like much, but its ability to make it seem like the air inside was just as fresh as the air outside was an important part of the restaurant. It made the place feel far less suffocating. Only our restaurants had access to such advanced means to make the customer experience so enjoyable.

  As I observed it all, I noticed Gigi walked by me holding a mop.

  “Did something happen?”

  “The usual, a kid ate too quickly and then went to the play area, took the slide and…”

  “Ah, a vomit incident…”

  Everything was truly normal. Until I noticed someone enter the restaurant. Immediately, I marked them as suspicious in my mind. Something about the way this man walked wasn’t right, and he wore a hat while looking downward, clearly trying to hide his face.

  I cracked my knuckles. Paying close attention to him… I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere before. Is this not the same guy who tried to take control of the Security Computer back then? He’s back again? That’s a good thing, actually. I can get some answers out of him.

  My instincts told me that he was on Eleanori’s payroll and was here to try to sabotage the restaurant. Either as purely a way to get back at me, or to coerce me with further threats of sabotage so that I would cough up the money she wanted… I felt like this guy didn’t really know what he was doing, however. He moved awkwardly, pretending to order something for a few minutes before trying to slip away into an employee-only zone.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  He did a good job evading my employees, showing a certain skill in terms of stealth, but I saw the whole thing from start to finish. He slithered into the maintenance area, where the automatons would be checked, cleaned, repaired, and tested for malfunctions. I casually followed after him.

  The trespasser approached the storage room for spare parts… He pulled out a screwdriver from his pocket, trying to loosen some of the screws–It was… A pathetic attempt at sabotage. Literally any of my mechanists would notice and fix the issue if they were to ever actually interact with this particular part.

  I loudly cleared my throat, making the intruder jump up in fright as he quickly turned around.

  He pointed the screwdriver at me shakily.

  “S-Stay back! Or I’ll stab you!”

  “Shiver me timbers! Come on, Buddy. Drop the screwdriver before you hurt yourself… Or should I remind you that under the defence laws, owners, employees, and animated properties are allowed to use deadly force to deal with a threat? Don’t worry, though. I won’t kill you. I’ll just break all of your limbs, unless you tell me why you’re here, of course”

  “Y-Y-You are an evil being, Nebulo! How dare you deprive a widow of what she not only deserves, but needs?!”

  “Pardon? I think I didn’t quite hear you”

  “You are just trying to keep everything to yourself! You were only after the money and businesses! Eleanori told me everything!”

  “...I guess I was right to suspect her, then… Do you have anything to say? What did she promise you? Heh… Who am I kidding? The way you speak about her is a dead giveaway. I doubt even she would sink low enough to let you do anything with her, Little Guy. You'd better find something else to lust after”

  There is truly nothing more disgraceful than a man without self-respect like this.

  “Shut up! I won’t listen to the words of a woman like you! Eleanori told me the truth!”

  “And what might this truth be, exactly? HER truth? Take this advice from me: When someone says ‘his’ or ‘her’ truth, it usually just means a lie”

  I was feeling patient since today had been a good day, but this guy did not help his case. At all.

  “She told me that you were the reason your brother died!”

  “...”

  …

  The intruder visibly paled, probably realising that he had said something he never should have said. He stumbled back deeper in the storage room until he eventually bumped into the very back of the room, where fully-assembled automatons were standing deactivated. Only their steel skeletons were present, and they lacked heads altogether.

  The robots here all used the same skeletal structure, but only had minor differences in the skull section.

  I walked closer and grabbed a disembodied automaton arm.

  “W-Wait! I am sorry! I didn’t mean to say that!”

  “It’s a bit too late to apologise. Make sure to struggle. Let’s make it last”

  “Please, I-!”

  He was suddenly cut off, and my eyes opened wide as he was grabbed by several of the headless, battery-less automatons behind him. They pressed onto his neck and took hold of his arm, quickly resulting in several sick crunches before dropping the intruder as a twitching mess. His neck was broken, but death was not immediate. He was suffocating to death as the displaced vertebrae put intense pressure on his trachea.

  He tried lifting one of his arms, but it had been snapped in several places–Despite the severe damage, not a drop of blood was drawn. The attack had been surgically brutal, and now, the automatons were back to their original positions. It was like they had never moved.

  How the hell was this possible? They should be incapable of moving due to lacking a battery, not to mention that even if they did have a battery, they weren’t equipped with anything else either, including the pieces that would give them their MI, or in other words, even if powered, they couldn’t have recognised an intruder, or even done more than move when prompted directly.

  I was confused, but certainly not sorry.

  I bent my knees, looking into the eyes of the intruder, watching as life slowly seeped from them.

  “...Your fear is delicious, My Friend”

  It did not take long before he was truly gone. His heartbeat stopped completely. He was nothing but an empty shell now. A mere corpse… What am I going to do with this? A brutal death like this, even if he was an armed intruder, was going to bring bad press.

  I searched his body, but apart from some more tools, a handful of coins, and some trash, there was nothing. I presumed that he was a nobody, and that no one would ever realise he had gone missing, but just in case–I needed to cover my tracks.

  I slung the dead body over my shoulder and headed to another part of the maintenance area, where various old things no longer in use were stocked in case they could be repurposed in the future. There, there was a big mascot costume. This one had been acquired by buying out a competitor that had gone bankrupt.

  Unlike the outer shell of the automatons here, this one did not leave any part exposed when worn, so I shoved the corpse in it for now. I will come back for it later.

  I told the day watcher that he was in luck today and could go home early. I was never averse to giving rewards to my employees, so he didn’t find it weird at all and simply thanked me.

  Seems like he hadn’t seen what had happened on the CS. Good, it made things much easier as I wiped the footage and performed some complicated tricks to replace the missing parts with duplicated footage showing the empty maintenance area.

  However, I couldn’t do the same thing with what the cameras had recorded at the entrance and main dining area. Replacing the footage would make it obvious if anyone dug even just a little bit into this.

  Thankfully, Leton’s spirits must have truly been watching over me. I knew exactly what to do and was able to do it in just over an hour.

  I ‘edited’ the footage to remove the intruder, and even made it so the door opening wouldn’t be present from when he entered. I really did everything I possibly could to pretty much erase this man’s presence from the restaurant.

  Alright. I’ll just need to do the same thing when I bring the corpse out and clean the empty costume for anything incriminating which might have been left behind.

  Then… Then I was going to have to do something about Eleanori. Outside of the courts of justice.