Cooperation?
Atlas Vance swore that the face before him was the most hideous, distorted, and terrifying thing he had ever seen.
The instant he brushed Sadako Yamamura’s long black hair aside, the horrifying expression underneath nearly made his legs give out beneath him.
He staggered backward and barely managed to keep himself from falling onto the floor.
Sadako quietly watched his reaction and seemed rather satisfied.
Fear had always been one of her most effective weapons, and the sight of people collapsing in terror was hardly unfamiliar to her.
Even after becoming bound by the strange contract, apparently nothing prevented her from frightening Atlas without directly attacking him.
Atlas took several breaths and finally steadied himself.
“Sadako, change your face back to normal.
And from now on, unless I specifically tell you otherwise, don’t deliberately distort your face like that just to scare me.”
Sadako gave a faint scoff.
Who did this human think he was?
Did he really believe she would obey simply because he ordered her around?
Yet before that thought had even finished, the grotesque expression vanished from her face without her permission.
Sadako froze.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t distort her features again.
Her face had returned completely to normal under the force of Atlas’s command, leaving her staring at him in stunned silence.
Everything that had happened tonight had become increasingly absurd.
Normally, anyone unfortunate enough to watch her cursed videotape would have seven days before the curse reached its conclusion.
Yet the strange tape Atlas had played had somehow allowed her to manifest before him almost immediately, and in her already irritated state, Sadako hadn’t minded dealing with the viewer personally.
Instead of killing him, however, she had somehow ended up bound to him by an inexplicable supernatural contract.
Worse still, this human had kissed her.
Now even her own body refused to disobey his commands.
In all the years of her supernatural existence, Sadako had never encountered anything so outrageous.
Even the terrifying supernatural presences she had crossed paths with before, including another infamous Japanese onryō like Kayako Saeki, had never been able to impose this kind of absolute control over her.
The thought only made the resentment in her dark eyes grow stronger.
Atlas, however, had stopped thinking about the contract.
He was staring at Sadako’s face.
Without the horrifying distortion, she looked completely different.
Her skin remained unnaturally pale and her long black hair still gave her an eerie appearance, but underneath it was the delicate face of the nineteen-year-old young woman she had once been.
For someone who had just nearly scared him unconscious, Sadako was unexpectedly beautiful.
A ridiculous thought suddenly crossed Atlas’s mind.
If you’ve got enough courage, even Sadako could become girlfriend material.
He immediately pushed that dangerous thought aside.
“Miss Sadako,” Atlas said carefully, “how about we try peacefully coexisting from now on?”
“Ah…
wu…”
Sadako produced a faint and unclear sound.
Atlas frowned.
“What?”
“Ah…
wu…”
He stared at her for several seconds before giving up.
Whether it was because she didn’t want to communicate with him or simply wasn’t accustomed to speaking after spending so long as a vengeful spirit, ordinary conversation clearly wasn’t getting them anywhere.
Fortunately, there were other ways to test exactly what his contract could do.
Atlas glanced around at the destroyed living room.
“Sadako, repair the furniture and clean everything you just destroyed.”
Sadako’s eyes immediately narrowed.
Before she could refuse, her body moved on its own.
She slowly raised one pale hand.
Broken pieces of furniture, shattered glass, overturned chairs, fallen decorations, and scattered objects all floated into the air under an invisible psychic force.
Atlas watched in amazement as damaged pieces reassembled themselves and returned to their original positions.
Within two minutes, the living room looked almost exactly as it had before Sadako’s rampage.
Atlas stared around the room in disbelief.
“That is ridiculously useful.”
Psychokinesis powerful enough to tear apart a room could apparently be used for household repairs just as easily.
Atlas immediately decided that having Sadako around might be even more valuable than he had originally imagined.
A supernatural actress, bodyguard, and someone capable of repairing damaged property without hiring contractors sounded like an incredible deal.
Sadako clearly did not share his enthusiasm.
Atlas led her toward the sofa and motioned for her to sit before heading into the kitchen.
Ghost or not, she was technically a guest in his home for the first time, and he still possessed enough manners to offer her something.
After searching through the refrigerator, he poured a glass of Sprite and returned to the living room.
Then he stopped.
Sadako was halfway inside the television.
Her head and shoulders had already disappeared through the screen while the rest of her body desperately followed.
She was apparently trying to return through the cursed videotape before Atlas could discover what she was doing.
“Miss Sadako,” Atlas called out.
“You just got here.
Why are you already trying to leave?”
Sadako immediately accelerated.
Atlas moved toward the television, intending to unplug it, but she slipped completely through the screen before he reached it.
On the television image, her white-clad figure hurried through the distorted landscape toward the old well with a level of determination he hadn’t seen from her all night.
She reached the edge and was already preparing to descend when her body suddenly froze.
Sadako looked down.
Then slowly looked back toward the viewpoint.
Three minutes later, she was sitting upright on Atlas’s sofa again.
Her posture was perfectly straight, her hands rested neatly in her lap, and an unmistakable atmosphere of despair surrounded her.
Atlas stared at her innocent-looking face for a moment and almost found it difficult to connect this quiet young woman with the murderous spirit who had nearly destroyed his apartment a few minutes earlier.
Atlas sat across from her.
“I want to make a horror movie called Ring.
I want you to play the female ghost.”
Sadako finally reacted.
Ring?
Something about that title naturally caught her attention.
“Are you willing?” Atlas asked.
Technically, he could simply command her to participate.
The contract apparently gave him enough authority to force the issue, but treating Sadako like a supernatural slave would almost certainly make her already terrible opinion of him even worse.
More importantly, Atlas genuinely preferred cooperation if cooperation was possible.
He wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed forcing a ghost into doing something against her will.
Bang!
The chandelier directly above Atlas suddenly broke free from the ceiling.
He instinctively threw himself sideways.
Crash!
The heavy fixture smashed against the sofa and shattered across the floor.
Pieces of glass scattered everywhere while Atlas stared at the place where his head had been only a second earlier.
If that chandelier had landed directly on him, he might have died before his filmmaking career even began.
Atlas slowly turned toward Sadako.
She sat perfectly still.
Their eyes met.
Atlas immediately understood.
His command prevented Sadako from directly attacking him, but apparently she had already discovered a loophole.
She didn’t need to attack Atlas if she could simply damage an object above his head and let gravity finish the job.
“Seriously?”
Sadako silently looked away.
Atlas’s mouth twitched.
This woman was trying every possible method to kill him without technically violating his command.
Yet when Atlas remembered Sadako’s past, his anger gradually faded.
The young woman sitting before him had experienced enough tragedy to make her hatred of humanity understandable.
Her rage hadn’t simply appeared out of nowhere.
Sadako had inherited extraordinary psychic abilities from her mother, Shizuko Yamamura.
After Shizuko’s psychic demonstration ended in public humiliation and accusations of fraud, her mental state deteriorated and she eventually committed suicide.
Sadako later joined a Tokyo acting troupe at nineteen, hoping for something resembling a normal life, only for fear, jealousy, suspicion, and her uncontrolled supernatural abilities to turn the troupe against her.
Her story ended even more horribly.
After the two manifestations of Sadako merged, tragedy consumed the troupe, including Hiroshi Toyama, the young man she loved.
Dr.
Heihachiro Ikuma later poisoned Sadako, struck her near the old well, and threw her inside while she was still alive, leaving her trapped there until death transformed her hatred into the curse connected to the videotape.
Atlas couldn’t pretend that he would have remained kind after experiencing something like that.
“Sadako.”
He carefully cleared several pieces of broken glass from the remaining section of the sofa and sat down again.
With the chandelier gone and only a few lights illuminating the room, the apartment now looked far more like the set of a horror film than someone’s home.
“I know what happened to you,” Atlas said.
“I know about your mother, the acting troupe, Toyama, Dr.
Ikuma, and the well.”
Sadako’s eyes shifted toward him.
Atlas continued, “That’s why I want to make your story into a movie.
I want people to know what happened to you instead of only seeing the monster you became.”
Sadako remained silent.
“Don’t you hate humanity?” Atlas asked.
“Don’t you want people everywhere to experience your fear?”
Her gaze sharpened.
Atlas leaned slightly forward.
“But how many people can one cursed videotape reach?
A few victims every week?
Even if you continued for another thousand years, most of humanity would never know your name.”
Sadako’s expression gradually changed.
Atlas smiled.
“You were an actress once.
You stood on a stage and proved you had real talent before everything fell apart.” He extended one hand toward her.
“Let me put you in front of a camera again, Sadako.”
“I can take your terror beyond one videotape.”
“Movie theaters.
Television.
Home video.
Eventually the entire world.”
Atlas’s smile widened.
“You want humanity to be afraid of you?”
“I can make that happen.”
“How about we cooperate?”
For the first time since appearing from the television, Sadako looked directly into Atlas’s eyes without immediate murderous hostility.
The coldness in her gaze remained, but something else had appeared beneath it.
Perhaps curiosity, perhaps recognition, or simply the memory of the young actress she had once been.
A long silence followed.
Then Sadako slowly nodded.
[Ding!
Sadako Yamamura’s favorability increased by 50!]
[Current Favorability: -50!]
[Current Emotion: Still wants to twist the host’s head off and kick it across the room.]
Atlas’s smile stiffened.
“Well…
progress is progress.”
Another notification immediately appeared.
[Ding!
Sadako Yamamura has received a special contracted-spirit reward!]
[Rare Physical Abnormality Eliminated!]
Atlas blinked.
“Rare physical abnormality?”
Before he could think further, another message appeared.
[Notice: This condition concerns Sadako’s contracted spiritual body and does not alter established events from her human life.]
[Spiritual Body Reconstruction initiated!]
[Please select Sadako Yamamura’s permanent physical sex characteristics: Male / Female]
Atlas didn’t hesitate for even half a second.
“Female.”
Then, worried that the system somehow hadn’t heard him clearly, he immediately repeated himself.
“Definitely female.”
A faint supernatural ripple passed across Sadako’s body.
She suddenly stiffened.
Sadako looked down at herself in confusion as though she had sensed some fundamental change in her reconstructed spiritual form.
Nothing visible happened through her white dress, but she clearly understood that something about her body had been altered.
Atlas studied the system notification before nodding with satisfaction.
Whatever strange condition the system had detected belonged to its own supernatural reconstruction process rather than anything he remembered from the Japanese film continuity.
What mattered now was that Sadako’s contracted physical form had been permanently stabilized as female.
“From today onward, you’re completely female in this contracted body,” Atlas said.
Sadako looked at him suspiciously.
Atlas decided explaining the system in detail could wait.
Instead, he extended his right hand.
“Miss Sadako Yamamura, from today onward, you’re officially the first contracted supernatural actress of Vance Horror Pictures.”
Sadako looked down at his hand.
“Happy cooperation.”
Before she had completely figured out what he meant, Atlas gently took her pale hand and shook it.
His entire body shivered.
Her hand was freezing.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!