An Exorcist Magical Girl! Chapter 77

A girl with long brown hair and a somewhat washed-out face called out to me.

 

She didn’t seem to be a junior, because she called me in half a language.

 

“I’m Baek Iri…”

 

“Ah…!”

 

The tired eyes of the brown-haired girl lit up slightly.

 

“I came to visit you because I have a request for an exorcism… Oh, I’m Lee Soo-yeon, second year, first class, same student council member as Ji-won.”

 

They were the same age.

 

“Come here, please help me. Please… I’ll do anything for you. I’ll do anything you want. This morning someone kept pulling my hair. At first it was a gentle tug, then it got stronger and stronger, and now it’s pulling my hair out…”

 

Her face was as dark as a dying man’s. Was it a ghost? How long had she suffered?

 

According to Lee Soo-yeon’s rambling words, she always feels an uncanny gaze staring at her right before something pulls out her hair.

 

“Baek Iri, I’m fine, so you can finish her request first.”

 

Kim Hae-yoon, a freshman who came first, gave way to the next request. 

 

I don’t know if it was because the person after me was a senior or because I felt sorry for Lee Soo-yeon’s condition.

 

“Thank you very much… Really.” Lee Soo-yeon mumbled her thanks while holding Kim Hae-yoon’s hand.

 

Then she suddenly recoiled in fear.

 

“Ah! Not again…! Someone, someone is staring at me…! It’s that look…!” Soo-yeon’s voice echoed down the hall, half breathless with fear.

 

“Uh, where is it?! I don’t know where it’s looking, but something’s staring at me! Is it behind me? No, wait. I don’t think it’s behind my back… There isn’t anything behind my back, is there? Isn’t there?! If it’s not behind me… is it to the side? Is it to the left? Is it to the right?! To the right?!”

 

Lee Soo-yeon couldn’t bring herself to turn her head, and her eyes flickered from side to side.

 

“Ah, no, not all of them. That leaves…”

 

At the same moment Soo-yeon realized the source of the gaze, I opened my account to 80% and saw something that had been bothering her since this morning.

 

It was exactly as she had suspected.

 

It was a pair of red, bloodshot eyes.

 

“Not behind you, above your head, looking down from above…!”

 

❰Skill: “Simple Clairvoyance” has been activated❱

❰Skill: “Creator from Nothing” has been activated❱

 

“Close your eyes, Lee Soo Yeon!”

 

I shouted, sharpening the energy on my fingertips, and at the same time, the spirit roughly pulled Lee Soo-yeon’s hair.

 

“Aaaaaaaaah!”

 

Lee Soo-yeon’s head snapped upward with a tearing scream.

 

It was faster for the ghost above her head to make eye contact with her than for my fingertips to shoot out the finished black spikes.

 

At that moment, Lee Soo-yeon’s soul was ripped out of her body by the ghost’s touch.

 

“Holy shit!” I screamed.

 

The ghost’s purpose in pulling Lee Soo-Yeon’s hair was to pull her soul out of her body.

 

I had learned that the last step in the process of being possessed is usually to tell the spirit your name or make eye contact with the spirit.

 

That’s why I told her to close her eyes!

 

Fortunately, my black energy penetrated the spirit’s core just before it took over the empty body.

 

The ghost’s arm reaching for Lee Soo-yeon’s body disappeared like sand, and I quickly picked up Lee Soo-yeon as she collapsed in a heap.

 

❰【Talent: Exorcist (Aspiring)】 Defense against the erasure crisis is 5.2% advanced❱

❰Defense work progress has reached a total of 42.3%!❱ 

 

Lee Soo-Yeon’s soul floated in the air, dazed.

 

Of course, this sight was invisible to the general public.

 

Kim Hae-yoon, who thought that Lee Soo-yeon had suddenly fainted, quickly took out her cell phone.

 

“Senior…?! We need to call 911 quickly…!”

 

“No.”

 

But there was someone stopping them.

 

“You can’t rush her to the hospital. Leave her to me.”

 

***

 

It was Seo Jun.

 

Not long ago, Seo Jun had also stopped someone from calling an ambulance, saying, “You’ll get in trouble if you take the corpse far away.

 

I don’t know how long Seo Jun had been watching the situation, but she stepped in at just the right time.

 

“I’ll leave it to you… Seo Jun, were you capable of such a thing?”

 

By “such a thing” I mean the return of the soul to the body.

 

In a normal out-of-body experience, the soul would return to the body on its own, but since Soo-yeon’s soul was unconscious, it couldn’t. 

 

Someone else had to put her soul into the empty body.

 

And Seo Jun said that she could do it.

 

“I can do it, but it will take some time, maybe 15 minutes.”

 

I’m at a loss. My next class is about to begin. What should I do?

 

I can’t take her to the nurse’s office. The nurse would probably call 911 first if a student was in this condition.

 

Of course, I had anticipated this situation and didn’t take Yang Ji-won and Kwon Yuri to the hospital.

 

“What should we do? We can’t even go to an empty classroom.”

 

Because of last Friday’s incident, it is forbidden to enter an empty classroom without a class in session.

 

If you sneak in and get caught by a passing teacher, you’re done.

 

With nothing to do but stomp their feet, a saving grace appeared.

 

“Guys, is this a similar situation to our CPR training day? Let’s go to the broadcast room.”

 

“Ha-Hanbyul…!”

 

I saw Hanbyul with a halo. Not in a good mood, but for real.

 

“Of course, there’s no one in the broadcast room right now, and all the windows in the hallway are covered, so we won’t be seen. Let’s go quickly.”

 

The three of us, Hanbyul, me, and Seo Jun, decided to go to the broadcasting room.

 

Our class president, Min Jiyoon, and some other friends offered to help, but they were only graciously accepted because they thought too many people would attract attention.

 

“Hae-yoon, I’m sorry. I’ll definitely get that doll head that keeps coming back to your seat next recess. First grade… What grade did you say? Sorry.”

 

“Oh, I’m in the fifth class of the first year, senior, and you don’t have to be sorry, of course the one who fell down goes first…!”

 

What a generous junior.

 

“Senior… Then don’t forget to come back later…!” 

 

Kim Hae-yoon was worried about what would happen if I forgot and didn’t show up, so she asked me to come again and again, and then went back to class.

 

***

 

Later, in the broadcasting room, they managed to sneak in safely.

 

While Seo Jun was putting Lee Soo-yeon’s soul into her body, I was trying to figure out why the ghost was tormenting her.

 

It was actually a ghost that I’d seen a few times before.

 

It was usually attached to the trophy in the main hall.

 

The one with the missing head.

 

Like the ghost in the girl’s statue, this one had almost taken up residence in the trophy.

 

I wondered if it was angry at someone for destroying its favorite trophy.

 

When I mentioned this to Hanbyul, she said, “The trophy must have been its home,” and nicknamed the ghost that haunted Lee Soo-yeon “Tsalgwi”.

 

It was a shortened version of the ghost that lived in the trophy.

 

Hanbyul later told me that the teachers asked Soo-yeon to erase the red line on the trophy’s neck during lunch yesterday, Tuesday.

 

“Why did they ask her to do that?” I asked.

 

“She just walked by and they noticed it. She was also in the student council, so I guess the teachers felt comfortable letting her do it.”

 

Since Soo-yeon had cleaned the trophy, it had been kept in a locked display case.

 

Until this morning, when she noticed that the head was missing.

 

“If you’re right,” Hanbyul said, “then Lee Soo-yeon was the last person to touch the trophy.”

 

The last person to cut off the head?

 

The trophy, the wooden dolls, and the heads of the students’ individual dolls were taken by ghosts, not people.

 

Of these three items, the trophy was the only one I was able to observe up close, so I was slow to be certain, but now I can say with absolute certainty.

 

It was done by a spirit.

 

In the cut where the head was removed, I could feel the aura of another spirit.

 

When it was just a red line, I couldn’t tell it apart because it merged with Tsalgwi’s aura, but this morning, after Tsalgwi left the trophy with the missing head, I could definitely see it.

 

And it wasn’t even human.

 

How in the world could someone rip the head off a metal trophy, let alone open a locked display case?

 

And with teeth marks that look like they were bitten off.

 

“…Anyway, if the ghost was just following the trail of the person with the most vivid marks on the trophy, it makes sense that Soo-yeon was targeted.”

 

“Poor Soo-yeon… She just did what they told her to do! And when she erased the red line, wasn’t she doing a good deed for the ghost? Is it because she couldn’t remove the red line cleanly? No, but how could she remove the meteor magic perfectly? Isn’t that too much for Tsalgwi?”

 

Hanbyul was astonished and said that she had never seen such a cheap spirit before.

 

Meanwhile, Seo Jun finished returning Lee Soo-yeon’s soul to her body after about ten minutes of struggle.

 

“Bwah!” Soo-yeon’s eyes widened.

 

“Can you stand up?” Seo Jun held out his hand to her.

 

She staggered to her feet, and they carried her to the nurse’s office, explaining what had happened, and after hearing everything that had happened to her, she thanked the three of us profusely.

 

She spoke to Seo Jun with a voice full of respect and almost used superlatives.

 

As I watched her, I felt as if I could hear someone’s voice echoing in my head.

 

What is this familiarity? Why do I keep seeing someone over and over again?

 

“…Hwang Hanju?”

 

“Baek Iri? What did you just say?”

 

“Oh, nothing.”

 

By the way, Seo Jun and Cha Hanbyul appeared like heroes today and did what heroes do.

 

“You don’t want to be a hero, do you?”

 

Seo Jun asked me the first time I told her about my business plan for exorcism at Mukgyeong Girls’ High School.

 

I can’t imagine the look on her face when I told her that I looked like a hero.

 

When I told her what was going through my mind on the way back to class, she grimaced, not sure if she was laughing or stiffening. It was a subtle expression.

 

She said, “You’re looking at the wrong person.”

 

***

 

I wasn’t scolded for being late to class because my classmates had excused us beforehand, saying we were late to help a friend get to the nurse’s office.

 

As I grabbed my textbooks, I quickly checked my phone and saw a text from Yin Charang saying, “I’m going to take the subway the wrong way and won’t get there until lunchtime.”

 

If Seon-yeo had heard that, she would have scolded me a lot.

 

Sometimes they are like mother and son.

 

While I was thinking these innocent thoughts, a twisted feeling of discomfort suddenly came over me.

 

As soon as I thought of Yeo Seon-yeo, I felt that something was wrong…

 

Ah.

 

Yeo Seon-yeo, Hwang Hanju and Banho Mall.

 

The feeling that the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together came from here.

 

When they were out of body, their bodies must have been taken to a hospital far away from Banho Mall.

 

And they were still alive.

 

Then why did Seo Jun stop Yuri, Ji-won and Lee Soo-yeon from being taken to the hospital?