An Exorcist Magical Girl! Chapter 100

“Huh? Hey, Hanju! Hanju!”

 

They have solved question 13 and can move on to the next question.

 

Passing by the pool, they see Hwang Hanju in the distance walking towards the trailer park and call out to him.

 

“Wow, how can you tell who that is from this distance?”

 

I stuck out my tongue, and Seon-yeo laughed, saying that I can usually tell just by looking at the atmosphere.

 

“That’s Hwang Hanju, isn’t he the one running?”

 

“Yeah, I don’t know.”

 

I heard that Yeo Seon-yeo and Hwang Hanju had been friends since first grade, so they could recognize each other just by looking at their silhouettes.

 

Hwang Hanju, who was running somewhere in a hurry, spotted us and waved at us.

 

“Hanju, do you have any middle or high level problems?”

 

“…?! Hey! This isn’t… right now! I only have… a thousand… s! First of all, look at Kara…! Come on!”

 

Seon-yeo shouted at the top of her lungs and Hanju also shouted back eagerly.

 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

 

“What is he saying? Do you understand?”

 

“That’s not the point, is it?”

 

Did I hear that?

 

I stared in amazement, and she blurted out the next words.

 

“Something just showed up, and they want us to meet them at the trailer park first… What is it? It must be urgent.”

 

“What did he say?”

 

“I don’t know, it sounded like a person’s name. Wongchun?”

 

She understood the general context, but she didn’t understand what it was that had appeared.

 

“I don’t know what it is, but we should go as soon as possible.” Seon-yeo said, her voice sounding uncharacteristically serious.

 

Of course, I had no idea if her voice was serious or not, but what the hell… If Seon-yeo says it, then I guess it is.

 

It wasn’t that far from where we were to the entrance of the caravan camp, so we sprinted, ignoring the fatigue that was building up in our bodies.

 

“Didn’t you see anything on the way back?”

 

Hanju, the first to arrive, asked before we had a chance to catch our breath.

 

“What? We didn’t see anything, why?” Seon-yeo replied with a gasp. 

 

It was a mid-June night, not exactly cool, and a drop or two of sweat was trickling down her forehead.

 

“Really? There was nothing?”

 

“Uh-huh, out of breath. Yeah. No ghosts, no trouble.”

 

Hanju frowned as if it was strange.

 

“No, what’s wrong with you? Please tell me everything from the beginning. What do you mean, Wongchun appeared?”

 

“You are crazy. You haven’t heard the most important thing.”

 

Hanju racked his brain.

 

“It’s not Wongchun, it’s Koo Young-chun.”

 

The name came out of nowhere and Seon-yeo doubted her ears for a moment.

 

“Koo Young-chun? The one from Banho Shopping Street…?”

 

“The Koo Young-chun we know?”

 

Hanju nodded vigorously that it was him.

 

The man in black, Koo Young-chun, who appeared in front of me and Yin Charang the day Hwang Hanju and Yeo Seon-yeo were kidnapped from Banho Mall.

 

Koo Young-chun, who was beaten to death with my bag and then buried in the gourdwood I had brought with me, died on his way home from the police investigation.

 

It was a mysterious death.

 

“Heh…That “Koo Young-chun” became a ghost and appeared here.”

 

A feeling of foreboding descended.

 

Hanju quickly explained how he and Seo Jun had solved Question16, how a ghost without a core came out of the mirror at the end of the problem, and how after checking with his skill, the ghost’s name was “Koo Young-chun”.

 

“I caught it with my skill and it suddenly disappeared. I wonder if it ran in your direction.”

 

“It didn’t disappear?”

 

“I never touched the core, so it can’t disappear.”

 

“Hwang Hanju, you may have destroyed the core without realizing it.”

 

“Me? Without my knowledge? Do you think I’m stupid enough to let a bunch of ghosts trick my clairvoyance? And it wasn’t like the ghosts disappeared.”

 

“Well… If it was, it would have gotten a point on the ring, but this is an evaluation center, so it can’t be what you say it is.”

 

“Isn’t that right? It’s strange.”

 

Yeo Seon-yeo and Hwang Hanju exchanged a puzzled look. 

 

Neither of them seemed to have a clue about the “core-free ghost”, which was fortunately a phenomenon I already knew about.

 

I’d encountered it once in school, probably the first day I opened a case.

 

“So… you took the core out of the soul?”

 

When he explained why he couldn’t find the core in Koo Young-chun, Hwang Hanju asked incredulously.

 

“Yes. The core is kept in a safe place, and only the outer shell is out there. I’ve seen similar cases before.”

 

I explained that an evil spirit that wanted to possess a bug corpse left its core inside a girl’s statue and appeared all over the school.

 

Their faces lit up with a combination of relief that their questions had been answered and disbelief that such a school existed.

 

“If Koo Young-chun’s spirit has stored the core somewhere, as Baek Iri said, then it makes sense that Hanju hasn’t found it.”

 

“What the hell is Mukgyeong Girls’ High School anyway?”

 

We went to the caravan where he first met Koo Young-chun’s ghost. The trailer where Question 16 took place.

 

“Is Seo Jun still there?”

 

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if she just left or not, since she finished the problem…”

 

Hanju shrugged as if he didn’t know.

 

“Don’t you think it’s better to talk to the exorcist Shin Ji Woon? I’ve turned in my cell phone…, and I’m sure the ring has an emergency contact function…”

 

“Uh, I was going to go to the exorcist after talking to you anyway. There’s no point in calling the emergency number if I’ve already missed everything.”

 

“Right. The emergency number is for randomly paging teachers.”

 

I felt threatened for some reason, so I kept asking questions and talking.

 

The fear that came over me immediately after hearing Koo Young-chun’s name snowballed.

 

Was it really a coincidence that Koo Young-chun’s spirit appeared at the evaluation center in front of two of the five of us who were deeply involved in the crimes committed by him and Eom Jingyu?

 

Did I kill him? Did I? Did I? No. Young-chun was punished by heaven and now I’ll be punished by heaven too!

 

Eom Jingyu’s words under investigation suddenly came to mind.

 

Punishment.

 

From there, the questions never stopped.

 

If what Eom Jingyu said was true, then Koo Young-chun’s death was a punishment.

 

But then Eom Jingyu was caught and found dead, so was he also punished? Was it just a figure of speech? If not, then it means that there is a real entity that punished them.

 

Who is behind Koo Young-chun and Eom Jingyu?

 

“Wait.”

 

I called Hanju and Seon-yeo with a shaking voice.

 

“Hanju, did you call Koo Young-chun a ‘jobber’ earlier?”

 

“Huh? Yes, that’s right.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Um, well, because he was incredibly weak at first…”

 

Yes, that was the problem.

 

Koo Young-chun’s spirit was not as powerful as the “life-thirsty evil spirit” that inhabited the girl statue.

 

According to Hanju, who had dealt with the spirit himself, it was only at the level of an ordinary ghost, no more and no less.

 

There was no way a ghost with such a low level of power could remove the core on its own.

 

Someone had removed the core from Koo Young-chun’s soul.

 

That someone was probably the same mysterious entity that had ordered Koo Young-chun and Eom Jingyu to kidnap the “souls that had just separated from their bodies” and eventually killed them.

 

If so, Eom Jingyu’s soul would still be in its grasp. Just like Koo Young-chun’s soul, only the core had been neatly separated from the soul.

 

Koo Young-chun? He’s just a pawn, a pawn.

 

“He’s a pawn, I’m a priest. Heh, heh, heh!”

 

“I am not like him. I tried to become a priest, I sacrificed my soul to become a priest!”

 

“What the heck is a priest? I’ll be a lackey!”

 

Was this what it meant to be a goddamn pawn, to be murdered and finally have your soul completely taken over?

 

“…Seo Jun is in danger. Seo Jun!”

***

 

I didn’t have time to think about the meaning of Eom Jingyu’s words.

 

Was Koo Young-chun running away from the mysterious being that attacked him and Eom Jingyu? Was he running from Seo Jun and Hwang Hanju, who happened to be involved in the soul abduction case?

 

It wasn’t something that could be dismissed as “it just happened”.

 

An unknown entity made Koo Young-chun appear in front of Seo Jun and Hwang Hanju.

 

Either by making him jump out of the mirror or by pulling him out of the mirror itself. Either way, it was an artificially created situation.

 

I don’t know if the intention was to watch me or to harm me, but it was likely that the unknown entity was nearby. No, there had to be.

 

“I don’t know why you’re acting so nervous all of a sudden, but shouldn’t Seo Jun have left the caravan by now? Team points are distributed automatically anyway, so there’s no point in waiting for her, and I doubt she’d be hanging around if she had nothing better to do.”

 

“No, she’s still there.”

 

She dismissed Seon-yeo’s explanation.

 

It was not an unfounded conviction.

 

“My friend died because he was trapped in this room.”

 

“I know I was wrong to use you for my own ends, but I would do the same thing again and again to close it.

 

“To me, it’s a greater sin to leave an anomaly open that kills people, never knowing when it might open again.”

 

On an emergency mission in the park, Seo Jun had said, “I don’t know when it will open.”

 

She was clumsy and insistent, as if closing the door to that room was her only purpose in life.

 

There was no way she was going to leave the mirror that spat out the ghost.

 

Completely closing the door to the room was something only an S or S⁺ could do, but Seo Jun herself had said she could seal it temporarily, so she must have stayed in the caravan to try.

 

“Shit, it’s the mirror again.”

 

It was a mirror that trapped Seo Jun in the park, and it was a mirror that spat out Koo Young-chun’s soul today.

 

I don’t want to dismiss these as mere coincidences.

 

But it wasn’t a subject I wanted to delve into right now, so I pushed the mysterious coincidence to the back of my mind and flung the caravan door wide open.

 

“Seo Jun!”

 

***

 

Inside the darkened caravan.

 

Seo Jun stood still in front of a mirror that shimmered like the surface of a lake.

 

She should have been surprised that she had caused such a ruckus, but somehow she didn’t flinch.

 

“Is everything okay?”

 

With her back to the door, I couldn’t see Seo Jun’s face.

 

I cautiously approached her and placed my hand on her shoulder.

 

What I saw was a pale complexion, red and bloodshot eyes, and bloody lips from chewing so hard, and bloody hands clutching the amulet.