The woman runs.
She flees through the castle, on and on, with nowhere to go.
Her long white dress streaming behind her, her black hair—grown down past her waist—thrown into disarray, she runs in desperation from the thing she fears.
The inside of the castle was strangely intricate.
Long corridors that turned, and turned, and turned again.
An empty room with four doors in it.
The woman cannot keep track of which she has gone through or which way she has come.
And no wonder. The castle's structure is changing moment by moment.
Through a door, down a corridor, through another door, over and over and over.
She runs a zigzagging hallway with everything she has.
"Why, why…"
the woman let slip as she ran.
She is sprinting flat out, fleeing with all she has—and her pursuer comes flying through the walls.
Exactly like a ghost.
That relentless pursuit wore her body and her spirit down to nothing, and at last the pursuer caught her.
A hand reaches out of the wall and seizes the woman's shoulder.
"Caaaught yooou…"
"Kyaaaaaaaaaaaah!!"
When the woman woke, the place had changed.
This is the throne room.
"So? How does it feel? Having exactly what your sort does to other people done back to you?"
The woman was a ghost.
She had been foolish enough to pick a fight with me—filling the throne room with grudge-laden whispers, setting off poltergeists.
So I reversed the positions of the corporeal and the spectral, and chased her about with a hand raised that would deal her excruciating mental pain.
"'My sort'—I don't know anything about other ghosts."
"Are you sure? Do you genuinely want me to consider you separately from the other ghosts? You're worse than the other ghosts, so if I do that I'll only be blaming you harder."
"What? That's awful! What exactly have I done wrong? All I did was—"
Shrill and grating, but what she is saying is self-serving self-defense, out of step with any common understanding. The end state of someone steeped too long in romance.
She had been a Hero's lover.
Whenever she caught sight of the Hero being friendly with another woman, her jealousy turned into a vengeful spirit, and she tormented the woman in question as a living wraith.
Moving objects about in a room where no one should be was the cute end of it. At her worst she would show herself with her hair hanging over her face and pursue the other woman relentlessly, passing through walls all by herself—exactly like that game of tag just now.
And when I killed the Hero, her obsessive love was such that she learned of my existence.
She was crushed to death by a monolith, but her mounting hatred of me turned her into a vengeful spirit.
'Hooow could yooou. How could you kill hiiim.'
When the ghost woman came to me, she set off poltergeists and made me listen to that grudge-laden voice while keeping herself out of sight.
Her resolve never to forgive the enemy who took the person she loved most was quite something—it surpassed even the sense of mission of the Heroes who had visited My Castle before her.
But having meddled with me, she was not going to get off free.
And so I reversed our positions and administered a punishment, which brings us to the events just described.
"Hey. Are you listening?"
"I wasn't, no. You've gotten awfully familiar all of a sudden. Tell me, isn't your attitude a bit big?"
I applied a good deal of weight to the pressure, and the ghost woman shrank into herself and muttered an apology.
"People do like to say that love is beautiful—but looking at you, I find myself thinking that love is an ugly thing."
"…………"
"To invert the preciousness of an entire concept—don't you think that's rather a sin?"
"Um? I don't really… understand…"
"Oi. Did you actually think about it? Did you make even the slightest effort to understand what I said?"
"I did—"
The ghost woman glared at me from behind her long fringe and cut in with a rebuttal.
I knew what she was going to say without needing to hear it, so I headed her off.
"Lie to me and I won't forgive you."
"I'm sorry."
Quick to fold, too. She is mentally fragile.
Which makes her prone to fixing on one single thing and believing it absolutely right.
"You think the only meaning your existence has is romance, don't you."
"Yes…"
"Look—do you really need to be human anymore? The great difference between humans and non-human animals is that humans are furnished with reason, isn't it? Strictly speaking, creatures other than humans have reason too, but humans are the one peculiar species that escaped being ruled by the instincts of primary appetite, aren't they?"
"Wait, I don't follow what you're—"
"There it is again. Again you aren't trying to understand. You gave up from the start and stopped listening. Don't use being stupid as an excuse. Listen properly."
Saying so was pointless and I knew it. So, since there was no help for it, I made the ghost woman understand directly.
Do too much of that and the ghost woman stops being stupid and becomes a different person—but there was no avoiding it if I wanted my own satisfaction.
"I-indeed, I was no different from a monkey…"
"Shall I make you a monkey, then?"
"Either is fine. I am already a ghost, so human or monkey makes no difference."
She became a different person after all. Having forced her to understand what I said, I had raised her intelligence to the level required to make that possible.
This ghost woman's thinking runs to extremes; she has gone and attained enlightenment.
"True enough. But then, ghost or not, you are hardly different from a monkey anyway."
Turning her into a monkey now that she had attained enlightenment would be no punishment at all.
And in any case the original her was gone. The ghost woman in front of me is a new existence, born moments ago. I could put her back, but low intelligence makes conversation impossible, which is dull.
"That's enough of that."
I annihilated the ghost woman.
There is no settled name for the world in which ghosts exist, so let us use the one humans most commonly employ: the Underworld.
Having only just defined it, I annihilated that Underworld.
With that, every ghost in existence ceased to exist.