An Exorcist Magical Girl! – Chapter 95

Author: Dakku-san

Pow!

The sound of the branch hitting the stone was drowned out by the simultaneous explosion.

“Hey, come here! It’s…!” Seon-yeo shouted with obvious joy.

The explosion sounded like a firecracker going off as the black ghost was instantly thrown out of the statue.

The blow had disgorged the ghost from head to toe.

The scratch marks that had been the link had rapidly blurred from the moment of the explosion and were now completely gone.

With the link gone, the ghost could not be absorbed back into the statue like before.

“Wow, this is crazy. Baek Iri, you are a genius, a genius!”

“No, why does this work?” I asked, stunned.

Lee Dae-wook’s spirit jumped out of the statue and floated in a daze for a few seconds, then began to run like a four-legged beast.

“That’s…!”

An indigo-colored circle hovered behind Seon-yeo’s head. With a flick of her hand, the edge of the circle glowed with golden light.

I wonder if this is what it would be like to bring the halo depicted in Buddhist tanka paintings to life.

With another wave of her hand, a golden band appeared around the ghost’s head.

As the golden band tightened around its head, the flailing suicide ghost froze.

“Oh, nice.”

I was about to give her a spontaneous high five when I grimaced. It only lasted a second, but my head felt like it was going to crack.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine, what happened to me?”

“You must have used too much power at once.”

“Power? Me? I’m just writing on a rock, what…” I mumbled something about not using any power, and she slapped me on the side of the head.

“Aw!”

“You’re so dumb. You just wrote on a curse.”

She explained that I had used up too much power by writing on top of a curse.

“Oh, my head was throbbing with pain…”

Unbeknownst to me, I was engaged in a chi battle.

“Anyway, what just happened worked because of you. You did it. It probably wouldn’t have worked if I had done it.

The unheard method of adding strokes to letters.

She patted me on the shoulder and added that the only reason it worked was because I’d used my S⁺ level spiritual power to completely erase the curse.

Fortunately, the pain was gone in a flash, and I woke up with a headache I’d never had before.

“Shall we get rid of this now?”

I asked, pointing at the still fluttering suicide ghost, ready to pounce at any moment, and Seon-yeo thought for a moment.

“Um, well, you should get rid of it…”

“But?”

“I don’t know if it’s right to exorcize it now.” She sighed heavily and went on. “I’m pretty sure we can’t just send the suicidal spirits to the afterlife and be done with it, because I’m pretty sure the questioner wanted us to find out who owns the statue and build a fence around it.”

The problem was that we were asked to eliminate the cause of the suicides’ souls being trapped in the statue to prevent the same phenomenon from happening again.

Perhaps the suicides’ ghost would provide the clues needed to find the statue’s owner.

Seon-yeo was worried that if she exorcised the suicide ghost too quickly, she would miss the statue’s owner forever.

“Ugh, what am I supposed to do with this…”

Seon-yeo grabbed her head and crouched down. I also crouched down and scratched my head.

At that moment, Lee Dae-wook’s ghost opened its mouth.

“Let me go… I will… take you to the sculptor…”

His whole body stiff, his lips twitching, Suicide ghost Lee struggled to speak.

“I will take you to…, where…, the sculptor lives… To the place… where the sculptor, the owner of these statues, lives.”

When she heard that, the color drained from her face.

“Yes, I knew it! This is how you make progress in solving problems!”

There was no need to make any more effort here, as the power of the link would naturally disappear once the owner of the statue was removed.

“Come on, Baek Iri, let’s get this over with before it gets colder. Ugh, it’s cold…”

“Oh, yes. It’s getting colder.”

As time passed, the fog in the forest became thicker and the air even colder, making the conditions less favorable for fighting.

Soon it was so foggy that you could barely see a few feet in front of you. We had to hurry before it got any worse.

“But how could we keep up with that thing? It was frighteningly fast.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I don’t want to get rid of the pigtails, I just need to loosen them up a bit. See, that’s the only way you can move.”

With a wave of her hand, the golden bands holding the Suicide Spirit’s head loosened.

The Suicide Ghost’s head creaked and its limbs moved slowly. It was not as wild as it had been before.

“Let’s go.”

Seon-yeo followed closely behind the suicide ghost. She could hear the urgency in its footsteps.

“He’s taking us to the owner of the stone statue…”

Unlike Seon-yeo’s brisk pace, I hesitated for some reason.

Something was tugging at me. My intuition was screaming at me that I shouldn’t go along with this.

***

‘Why did I suddenly hear the Head Collector’s scream in my head?’

From then on, I kept hearing voices in my head.

“Sing, sing, sing, sir.”

“Zen, sir, please start the piano accompaniment.”

“Sir, please conduct the harp”

‘Uh, huh?’

“Sounds like…?”

At the unfamiliar words coming out of my mouth, Seon-yeo’s head snapped around.

“What? Why are you suddenly…? I told you to hurry up and go.”

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“You can’t go now. You can’t follow this right now.”

Seon-yeo stops when I emphasize the word ‘now’.

“What do you mean? If not now, when?”

“After I’ve exorcised all the spirits in the remaining statues.”

It was only after the remaining twelve statues were neatly emptied that the owner of the statue called “Sculptor” would be confronted.

“What is the order of things? You know it’s much easier if the curse in the name is removed all at once. Baek Iri, you just said you had a headache, how are you going to get all twelve out now?”

Her voice was sharp, but I knew that she was really worried about me.

“I can handle it,” I said, “it was just a little headache, and look, it went away.”

“Still, I can’t deny it’s more efficient to get rid of the statue’s owner first.”

“Now calm down and listen to me and I’ll explain that it’s not.”

Seon-yeo crossed her arms and glared at me.

“I saw a similar situation at school.”

I briefly told the story of the head collector.

The master of the statues, called “Sculptor” by the suicidal spirits, and the head collector, called “Teacher” by his disembodied students.

There was an uncanny resemblance between them.

Collecting things and trying to bring souls under their control.

These two were especially similar.

The Head Collector collected the skulls of inanimate objects to fuel his power over disembodied souls, and the souls of those he possessed became another source of power.

I still remember the panic of the moment when the Head Collector grew to control hundreds of souls, as if it was only ten minutes ago.

This time, he had fewer souls under his control, but all thirteen of them were Suicide Ghosts, a formidable race.

The power they offered to the Sculptor would surely be comparable to or even greater than the power the hundreds of disembodied disciples had brought to the Head Collector.

“So what you’re saying is…”

After listening to my story, Seon-yeo slowly opened her mouth.

“Collecting statues like this is a form of collecting, and the suicide spirits in the statues give power to the “Sculptor”?”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm, that makes sense.”

“Right? Oh, and this is just speculation, but… Once we’ve blocked the Sculptor’s power to some extent, the fog and cold might get better.”

When I added that, Seon-yeo raised her voice in surprise.

“You’re saying that the Sculptor is responsible for the deterioration of the environment? I thought that’s what the testers originally set the background settings to…”

“I’m not sure, I just thought it might be.”

“Okay, then I’ll take your word for it. Let’s clean this place up first, then we’ll go to the boss fight.”

Once she was convinced, she coolly accepted my opinion.

The last time she and Seo Jun got back together, she was the kind of person who wouldn’t hesitate to break her stubbornness if she thought she was wrong.

How can she be so uncompromising? She has an incredibly clear mind.

When she had come to a conclusion, Seon-yeo immediately tightened the golden band around Suicide Ghost’s head.

“Iri, you concentrate on getting the rest of the ghosts out, I’ll do the exorcism.”

Once I was sure that Lee Dae-wook was immobilized again, I cast Meteor Magic on the names of the other stone statues.

I changed “Kim Won-jae” to “Kim Wen-jae” and tapped the knife marks on the statue to exorcise the spirit.

She clasped her hands in unison and the halo on the back of her head changed color.

The indigo circle suddenly filled with the same golden color as the edge, and golden flames swirled outward around the circumference of the circle.

The light, which had no specific direction and illuminated a wide area around it, soon narrowed to pinpoint the suicide ghosts that had just emerged from the stone.

A beam of golden light shot down like an arrow and melted the body of Kim Won-jae’s suicide ghost.

I then changed Yoon Ho-ho to Yoon Hosung, Choi Min-eun to Choi So-eun, and Kim Mi-young to Com Mi-young and exorcised the ghosts one by one. The ghosts were immediately exorcised by Seon-yeo.

The golden flames burned brightly and the ghosts melted away from all sides.

After about eight statues were exorcised, the fog that had settled over the area began to clear.

The air that had been as cold as late fall gradually returned to its original early summer warmth.

“Hey, Baek Iri, you were right!”

Seon-yeo exclaimed as she took a moment to catch her breath after melting the eighth suicide ghost.

“That’s right…!”

I couldn’t believe that it was really the “Sculptor” who made the area foggy and cold.

At first, I thought the Examiner was trying to pull off a time attack.

“Damn that Sculptor! Staging a sabotage plot?!”

In retrospect, I realize that from the moment we first tried to exorcise the ghost from the statue, things slowly started to deteriorate around us.

It was our way of defending the statue.

“How is your head? Can you continue?”