An Exorcist Magical Girl! Chapter 130

“The third video was recorded in a hurry on Monday of this week.”

 

The video played at the same time as Jeong’s statement.

 

True to her word, the video starts in the middle of the incident, but the first few seconds are shaky and hard to make out.

 

 

─”Shit, shit, shit! Something’s coming!”

─”Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

─”What’s wrong with him?! Crazy!”

─”Sir, are you sure you don’t want to come into the classroom…?”

─“The window is closed!”

─“Why don’t you do something…! You’ve never done that before!”

─“Ahhhhh! Get out of the way. I’m getting out!”

 

 

Clear screams filled the sound of the video, a far cry from the murmur of the first video.

 

The videographer wandered around, unsure whether to hold the phone horizontally or vertically, and after about 10 seconds, she finally locked the screen in landscape.

 

Only then did the sight outside the window come into focus.

 

 The girl ghost from the previous video was hanging from the window.

 

With the soles of her feet on the glass, her back was bent at a right angle backward, toward the ground floor.

 

From this position the ghost moved. 

 

Not downward as usual, but upward.

 

 It walked slowly up the outside wall of the building, dragging its feet precariously along the glass.

 

The eerie sound of the white, bluish-black soles of her bare feet rubbing against the glass ended the video when she was up to her hair and out of sight.

 

 “It was the first time… I’ve ever seen anything like that.”

 

Two days earlier, on Monday, the ghost crashed at 10 a.m. as usual.

 

About five minutes later, it reappeared from below, its body bent into an “A” shape.

 

 “He didn’t come back after that ascent, not yesterday, not today.”

 

“I see.”

 

That was the end of the documentary.

 

The lights came back on in the classroom and the screen rolled up over the board with a distinctive mechanical sound.

 

I watched for a moment as the room reorganized itself, then spoke again.

 

“So, Senior.”

 

I finally got to the point.

 

“You asked me to find a ghost, didn’t you?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

Not to exorcise a ghost, but to find one that’s already gone.

 

The request didn’t make sense, but no one corrected me, not Jeong, not the other students around me, not anyone. They all looked at me as if it made perfect sense.

 

“I want to know why.”

 

“Oh, the reason.”

 

Jeong Sae-eun muttered, “You mean you want to know the reason…?” and strangely avoided my eyes.

 

The classroom quickly fell silent.

 

‘What is this atmosphere of reluctance to talk in detail?’

 

After watching me for a few seconds, the class president, Jeong Sae-eun, suddenly let out a deep sigh.

 

“Hey, should I say this…, should I say this in my own words? Ha…”

 

She wasn’t talking to me, but to the other students around her.

 

“Then you should do it, you’re the president.”

 

“What are you waiting for?”

 

“Go ahead, President! You’re the leader of the class.”

 

“Haah…”

 

At the urging of her surroundings, Sae-eun let out another deep sigh.

 

“No, I said let’s just leave it alone since it hasn’t come out for two days… An, you’re the one who made me put in a request with a clear conscience, come out and explain!”

 

Another student grunted in frustration and jumped up from her seat, dragging Claw-Pin by her hair.

 

“It’s you, you! An Yerim, you’re the one who insisted we do this!”

 

Apparently, her name was An Yerim.

 

“Eh, it’s no big deal. Come out here. You tell her.”

 

When she was called out, An Yerim brought a chair and sat down in front of me.

 

“It’s really nothing, but it’s so embarrassing. Do you mind if I tell her?”

 

“Oh, sure.”

 

“Since you keep talking about ghosts, I’ll tell you what we call her. We call the ghost “Tinker”.“

 

“Tinker?”

 

“Yes, Tinker. Now, before you get the wrong idea, it’s not like we’re in love with this ghost or anything, quite the opposite.”

 

I put aside my reasonable suspicion that if they can name it, they’re in love with it.

 

The corner of my mouth twitched and An Yerim continued.

 

“We want to find the ghost and get rid of it once and for all.”

 

There was a seriousness in her voice that couldn’t have been more obvious.

 

“I thought you were used to the ghost’s presence.”

 

“We were used to it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother us. Think about it.”

 

Exaggerated gestures automatically followed each sentence.

 

“Where am I?”

 

“This… is a high school classroom, isn’t it?”

 

“Yes, it is. It’s a senior classroom.”

 

She makes the obvious sound unnecessarily dramatic.

 

“And that “Tinker” asshole!”

 

My anger grows as I speak, and my voice suddenly rises.

 

“Calm down, asshole.”

 

“Why are you yelling at the child?”

 

For being too emotional, An Yerim was removed from the speaker’s chair.

 

This time, another student, who looked relatively calm and wore horn-rimmed glasses, sat down in front of me.

 

“Hello. I’m Kim Ji-yugo, I’ll continue where she left off.”

 

“Yes…”

 

“The reason we hated Tinker is simple. She kept “falling” out of the window of our high school classroom.”

 

“What?”

 

“It’s not like we’re stressed and anxious as it is, and it’s not like we’re failing college. Why does it always have to fall in front of our class, and honestly, isn’t it annoying?”

 

“Ah…”

 

So that’s why they called it “Tinker”.

 

“One student made eye contact with him and actually dropped six grades.”

 

Another student chimed in next to me.

 

“We had some unspoken rules in our classroom: don’t make eye contact with ghosts, don’t say it fell, say it hit the ground, don’t pull down the blinds, keep the window closed at all times, don’t stick your head or hand out the window for about 20 minutes around 10 a.m., and during practice tests or exams, write on the board, ‘Tinker, thanks to…’ stuff like that.”

 

The student, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, rattled off a list of rules in her third-grade classroom.

 

Senior year of high school.

 

It’s a time of heightened sensitivity and anxiety, a time when everything you see and hear has meaning.

 

It was the way they chose to deal with the ghosts they couldn’t control as part of their daily lives.

 

Before I thought it was absurd or stupid, I felt sorry for them.

 

But it still didn’t solve the question of why they entrusted me with this case at this time.

 

They were adapting almost perfectly, even making their own rules.

 

“Well… you’ve adapted.”

 

“Yes, because we’ve seen it every day for months.”

 

“Actually, we considered you to be student number 0. You’re not really a regular.”

 

“We thought you were good, too.”

 

“Wow…”

 

“Yeah, look at this crazy asshole who automatically brings up the phrase ‘hot pass’ like it’s a relevant search term, and we thought we were jaded enough not to care!”

 

They added a few words here and there, ending with a deep sigh from Jeong Sae-eun and a cheeky pat on the back from An Yerim.

 

“Until… Monday, when we saw it go up here.”

 

 The student with the horn-rimmed glasses took the words in her unchanged calm tone and continued.

 

“That’s…”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That was the first ‘pass’ signal from that damn ghost in about three months and a week.”

 

“Aha, right…, huh?”

 

My mind went blank for a moment.

 

“That…, you mean the one that was falling all the time was a rejection, no, a hot rejection, and the one that went up yesterday was the opposite…, a pass?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Oh, my God.”

 

My bewildered expression didn’t bother her horn-rimmed glasses.

 

“We realized for the first time that day that we weren’t used to “falling,” that we weren’t comforted by the phrase “falling is rock and failing is rock,” and when we realized that, we were scared. If I ever see that thing fall again, I think I won’t be able to handle it mentally and I’ll explode.”

 

She sounded so calm and serious, which made it all the more bizarre.

 

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

 

“Oh, yes…”

 

“Monday’s “pass” must be the last we see of the ghost. As soon as we saw it go up, it put an arbitrary period in our minds. That there would be no more “falls”.”

 

By this time I was starting to get scared out of my mind.

 

‘What in the world could mess with a high school student’s mind like that?’

 

“No, if it didn’t come out yesterday and today, it’s over. Do I really have to do a confirmation kill? Aren’t you even embarrassed to say that to your juniors? You’re sitting there like some kind of literature tutor, giving meaning to the wrong answers…”.

 

Only Jeong Sae-eun, the president, said something straight with empty eyes.

 

It was a far cry from when she sat me down and played the video.

 

Maybe she was overwhelmed by the atmosphere of the class shouting out their wishes in unison and lost herself for a moment.

 

The class president’s initiative was enough to contact me directly, buy me grapefruitade, and organize a screening of the video, but when the reality of accepting the request hit me, I felt embarrassed.

 

The students around me silenced me.

 

“Shut up, President. Where’s the vice president? Come out.”

 

“Okay, the president has had enough. Now go away.”

 

“Wow, these assholes are so…”

 

Sae-eun grumbled, but backed away again, leaving the student with the horn-rimmed glasses to finish the story.

 

“Anyway, that’s why we want you to find the Tinker and get rid of him once and for all, so that he never shows up in front of us again.”

 

No matter how ridiculous the circumstances that led to the request, I welcomed it, because the request was not just to find the ghost, but to destroy it.

 

“Then I’ll do you a favor.”

 

“Good luck!”

 

The students waved at me as I left the classroom, videos and grapefruit Kool-Aid in hand.

 

‘What’s this all about?’

 

I don’t blame them for wanting to end this here and now.

 

In another situation, as a magical girl, I was lucky enough to succeed at an attack skill that I had failed dozens or even hundreds of times in a row. 

 

After countless failures, this one success was both exhilarating and terrifying.

 

Having inadvertently tasted the sweetness of success, I didn’t think I could accept the next failure as calmly as before.

 

I thought it would be better to stop here and safely claim the title of “at least I succeeded one last time,” rather than pile failure upon failure.

 

I’m sure these students feel similar to me, except that the spirits are falling and they have nothing to do with the actual failure or success.

 

I understand what they’re feeling, but it’s still hard to shake the feeling that they’re connecting it to reality and giving it meaning. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that they’re collectively crazy.

 

“Well, I’m just going to do my job.”

 

Finding the missing ghost.

 

Normally I would have borrowed Seo Jun’s amulet, but this time I’ll try to do it on my own without her help.