The Male Leads Are Trapped in My House

I brought Eden into my room and rummaged through the desk drawer. Inside, there was a map of the Brunel Village that I had prepared in advance.

I spread the map on the carpet and sat down casually. Eden took a seat beside me.

“Do you think Lord Ludpershire is safe?”

In response to my question, Eden just stared at the map for a while, then finally spoke.

“If luck was on his side, he would have survived. And that guy tends to be lucky.”

But Knox was not physically strong like Eden had said, he was strong in terms of intelligence. The possibility of surviving alone amidst the monsters was even slimmer.

Saying that the main supporting character with the most weight in the original work didn’t die was too irresponsible.

Now, I needed to fully realize that. This was reality, not a novel.

I glanced at Eden for a moment.

No matter how hard I tried alone, it wouldn’t make a difference if there was no cure in this world. The number of monsters would keep increasing, and unless someone developed a cure, the monsters would keep devouring humans until the very end.

And again, I had to emphasize that even if Eden had the virus antibodies, it didn’t guarantee he wouldn’t die. Just like getting a vaccine shot didn’t make someone immortal.

With that in mind, I decided to consider my life and Eden’s life equally important from now on, whether Eden liked it or not.

“There’s a way to divert the attention of the creatures outside.”

Eden, who had been studying the map for a while, turned to me again. I pointed to Happy House on the hill marked on the map.

“I’ve set up bells behind Happy House.”

This time, I pointed to the mountain marked behind the mansion.

“They seem sensitive to sound. If you pull a rope here, the connected bells will make noise. If a sound comes from the forest, the creatures’ attention will be drawn there, right? That’s when we’ll make our way outside.”

Listening to the bell idea, Eden stared at me with a face that had a lot to say. Yeah, he must be curious about why I set up bells. But Eden held back his question and swallowed his words.

Yeah, that’s right. Since we’re already in this situation, I shouldn’t bother asking why. I should just consider it a good thing and move on. Silently mumbling to myself, I gladly accepted Eden’s silence.

Anyway, if there’s one problem, it’s that the bells are meant to momentarily divert the creatures’ attention away from the mansion, they won’t actually chase away the monsters.

“For now, it might be best to keep watching them from the lookout and execute the plan when the numbers have decreased a bit.”

“I’m thinking the same thing. Currently, they’re continuously gathering, so it might have the opposite effect.”

Eden and I finally decided that we had no choice but to keep checking the lookout and wait until the creatures were tired or their numbers decreased.

However, the number of creatures didn’t decrease as easily as we thought.

To sum up-

We needed to find a telephone in the police station to gather information about the capital. To get to the police station, we had to open the gate of Happy House. The problem was that monsters were wandering around Happy House, making it difficult to get through.

It seems like the process of kidnapping Eden from the village to Happy House was too chaotic. Because of that, it caught the monsters’ attention, causing them to gather around Happy House.

As time passed, there was no sign of the number of monsters decreasing. Something else was needed to divert their attention.

‘I guess we need to use the bells after all.’

The first method to try was using the bells.

I stood beside the banquet hall on the first floor. I had installed ropes connected to the forest bells on the wall there.

The ropes were tightly tied to a small protruding rod. Just as I skillfully untied the knots on the rope, Eden approached from behind.

“When on earth…?”

He had a baffled expression, not understanding what I was going to do with the rope. Then he looked at the rope that continued beyond the wall. Suddenly, his face lit up as if he remembered something and he looked at me with surprise.

Slowly uncoiling the rope from the rod, it was rather amusing to watch his expressions change.

“Could it be that you took a bunch of bells with you back then…?”

Without solving Eden’s confusion, I brought up something else.

“By ringing the bells to divert the creatures’ attention towards the forest, Sir Eden can monitor their movements from the lookout.”

Eden looked at me with a skeptical expression.

It was indeed a request that had a lot of suspicious aspects. I knew that.

However, I knew Eden better than he knew himself. He disliked uncertainties, and on top of that, he was curious. So, he would climb up to the lookout to see what I was up to.

Again, Eden remained silent for a while, then eventually nodded his head.

“Alright. Trying any method is probably better.”

As I had informed him, he went up to the rooftop and looked down at me from the lookout. After exchanging glances with him, I grabbed the rope I had set up on the wall.

After taking a deep breath, I pulled the rope.

Clang-clang…

Clang-

The sound of bells echoed through the forest.

The creatures’ sounds, which sounded like beastly cries, gradually faded away as they moved towards the forest.

Did it work?

I kept pulling the rope.

Aaarrrgh! Thump thump thump thump thump-

The sound of creatures moving towards the forest reached us. The eerie sounds that had been circling around the mansion were gradually getting farther away.

However, the problem was that there were significantly more monsters than the prepared bells.

The creatures seemed to briefly wander around the forest and then gathered around the mansion once again.

‘Come on, seriously! Why…!’

You don’t have to feel even slightly sorry for leaving. Just please, go away! Why are you clinging on like a possessive male lead from a romance novel!

As Eden observed the situation from the lookout and descended to tell me the news.

“It didn’t work. There are too many monsters, and the sounds of the creatures are louder than the bell sounds.”

The bell sounds seemed to be helpful when there were fewer creatures around. Darn it.

I slumped to the ground in despair.

Yeah, it couldn’t be this easy to solve the problem.

* * *

Regrettably, the bell strategy was neatly abandoned.

Eden and I went up to the lookout and scanned the surroundings to come up with a solution.

We spent the whole day on the roof, tracking the movements of the creatures.

Crunch-

Crunch crunch.

What on earth was that mysterious sound? It was eerie enough to send shivers down my spine, sounding as if it was scraping the air.

The creatures with elongated noses, like anteaters, were sticking to the outside of the wall, twitching their noses continuously.

I couldn’t help but tense up since the creatures seemed like they could easily jump over the wall and enter Happy House. I hadn’t heard any reports of creatures with exceptional jumping abilities so far, but who knows.

Occasionally, depending on the state of the body before the infection, monsters boasting an incredibly robust physique or monsters with abnormally high speed were born.

Yeah, I already knew this.

However, the actual birth of such monsters was extremely rare. Most creatures were just fools who couldn’t use their heads and only knew how to walk or run forward.

Scratch-

Now there was a creature clinging to the stone wall, sticking out its claws and scraping against it recklessly.

Of course, that didn’t mean the wall would collapse easily. We had reinforced the wall to be triple-thick as a precaution against worst-case scenarios. It was about 3 meters high. After the shock from encountering a monster that was around 2 meters tall before the catastrophe, we had reinforced it even higher.

Honestly, I didn’t think all this work could be done in such a short time.

‘As expected, money talks.’

As I observed the area around the wall with an opera-style binocular, I felt a piercing gaze on the side of my face.

Eden, who had been holding his chin, tilted his head at an odd angle and stared at me intently. Then he used his finger to tap his binoculars, signaling me to look at them.

I took my eyes off the binoculars and looked at Eden.

“Where on earth did you get these?”

Eden asked me in a tone that sounded like he was observing a strange life form. I glanced down at the binoculars he was pointing at.

Even before the catastrophe, he had been like this whenever he came to Happy House. He used to question everything I did, curious about whatever I was up to.

‘Well, it’s not like they wouldn’t seem strange to me, too.’

But could I honestly say, ‘I brought them in case binoculars were essential for an apocalypse scenario with monsters roaming around’?

“Where did they come from? I bought them to go watch operas.”

Eden’s piercing eyes narrowed as he looked at me.

“There’s no opera theater in Brunel.”

“It’s in Kint.”

“There isn’t one there either.”

“There must be, right?”

“There isn’t.”

“Then maybe in the neighboring town…?”

I don’t know what the town next to Kint is, but it’s the next town anyway

I succeeded in shutting Eden’s mouth with my vague response.

He looked at me with a tired look. I pretended to look at the village through the binoculars, as if I was scanning the area.