An Exorcist Magical Girl! – Chapter 96

Author: Dakku-san

“Wow. It’s finally over.”

The exorcism was completed when the suicide ghost in the thirteenth statue was removed.

By the time I dealt with the tenth statue, Seon-yeo’s golden headband had weakened and Lee Dae-wook almost ran away, and by the time I faced the twelfth curse, my headache was so bad that I almost hit my head on a stone, but I still managed to finish.

“Wow, the higher level questions are hard.”

“Well, the last one was the hardest, so…”

“That’s right, it’s hard.”

Seon-yeo wiped the sweat from her brow.

We lay down on the dirt and rested for a while.

“The last suicide ghost was like a mid-level problem boss.”

Coincidentally, the last ghost we killed was the first suicide ghost in this forest, the one who had been trapped inside the stone statue the longest. The grudge was immense.

Oh, how did we know it was the first suicide?

We recognized it by its clothes. It was wearing a hanbok.

Anyway, there was no exaggeration in her words.

In fact, she was as difficult to deal with as the main spirit of the interrogation, so I had to participate with a headache, but it was worth it because the cold and fog had completely disappeared.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“Got it.”

When I firmly decline, she shoves the tea into her bag with a sour face.

“Hey, Iri. Is your head okay?”

“Uh, yeah. Honestly, earlier it felt like my brain was being pulled out of my skull, but now it’s fine.”

“Good. I thought you were still sick because you kept lying down.”

“I just lay there because you didn’t get up. I thought you were still exhausted…”

“What? I’m fine.”

“What the hell.”

“Let’s get up.”

We shook off the sleep and got up.

Lee Dae-wook’s ghost, stiffened by Seon-yeo’s skill, gave me an angry look.

“Now that I think about it, you’re a terrible sculptor. Don’t thank me for pulling you out of the stone.”

Seon-yeo frowned and loosely adjusted her golden leash.

“I said I’d show you around. Lead the way.”

Lee Dae-wook’s ghost could no longer grumble and he shuffled off into the forest.

“I don’t know if I should just follow him. What if we can’t find our way out? Shouldn’t we leave some kind of sign?”

“Oh, then let’s do that.”

In response to her worried words, I pulled out a skill.

❰Skill: ‘Creator of Something Our of Nothing’ has been activated❱

The rope I formed with black energy was a rope.

The long rope I had improvised to bind the Head Collector when I couldn’t even make a stake.

It had failed miserably to trap the Head Collector, but it might be useful as a guide.

“We’ll just have to stretch this out.”

“Oh! You’re really good with skills. That’s a relief.”

Lee Dae-wook was a man who was so hostile that he threatened to kill the statue’s owner, the man who had imprisoned him in the stone, and yet he called him “Mr. Sculptor” with extreme respect.

I don’t know if he didn’t know that he had been sealed away or if he gave in to the Sculptor’s power, but either way, I couldn’t trust him 100% to lead us into a trap.

The two of us stayed alert and followed Lee Dae-wook.

We walked deep into the forest for a long time. A black line stretched endlessly behind us.

“…Where are we going?”

“Isn’t he driving in circles on purpose?”

I began to wonder if we were going in the right direction.

Boom! Crack! Boom! Crack!

Somewhere nearby, a series of cracks sounded like a tree being struck by lightning and snapped in half.

The source of the sound was not far from here.

“Ah, ah… Sculptor, he is calling for me… He is looking for me…”

Lee Dae-wook, the guide, began to babble dazedly.

“… I must have made a wrong turn.”

Seon-yeo muttered, her eyes fixed on the source of the sound.

We ran ahead of Lee’s ghost, just to get a glimpse of what was ahead and then return to exorcise it.

“Do you see it?”

“No. This way, right?”

“Yep.”

I crept along as stealthily as I could.

When we got close enough, we could hear a rattling sound, like rusty knives clashing, alternating with a clatter.

It wasn’t loud enough to be heard from a distance, so it seemed to reach our ears only now that the distance had closed.

We continue for another dozen meters or so and soon realize that the landscape around us is strange.

All the green leaves of early summer were gone, and the trees around us were as bare as hardwood trees in winter.

The wind whistled through the dry, twisted branches, creating an eerie melody.

And there, in the center of the desolate space, was “it”.

The sculptor, the key to question 13, the master of the statues, was there.

Rising from the rubble were two hands so large that at first glance they could be mistaken for wood.

From a single wrist, two hands extended to either side like growing branches.

The hands were paler than a mannequin’s and so huge that their bones poked through the leather.

The two hands clapped together, palm to palm.

The knuckles of their palms tangled and fell apart, stretching the flesh like threads, and their finger-long nails rattled as they touched and intertwined.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The sound that brought us here was the clapping of two giant hands.

“Hey, back here. See where the core is?”

“Yep. It’s in the pulsating part of my wrist.”

“Right. Then let’s get Lee Dae-wook out of here first.”

Before we could fight the sculptor in earnest, we had to let go of Lee Dae-wook, the Suicide Ghost who had led us this far.

But the moment we turned around.

Boom!

Two hands slammed into the ground and the whole forest shook.

Crack!—

The golden braid on Lee’s head shattered with the tremendous sound.

“The Sculptor has called for me…”

“No!”

“Aaaaah…, aaaaah…!”

Freed from the constraints of movement, Lee Dae-wook sprang to his feet and ran, throwing himself into the giant hand.

It happened in an instant.

The hands of the Sculptor squeezed and crushed the black soul. Lee’s soul was crushed, mashed, melted, and finally absorbed into the palm of the hand.

It was the last of the ghosts whose egos had been possessed by the fly.

The hands that had absorbed the ghost wriggled contentedly.

The scrawny hands became fleshy, the pale leather turning to blood.

At the same time, the part of its arm that had been buried in the rubble rose up.

The hand was huge, and the arm was longer than most trees. The core of the wrist now pointed high into the sky.

‘I have lost.’

That was my first thought.

My second thought was, ‘Thank God there’s only one suicide ghost left.’

If it had absorbed all thirteen ghosts, it would have been a disaster.

And the third thought came out of my mouth unfiltered.

“Wow, I lost. We’re screwed.”

Our mouths dropped open at the sight that followed.

***

The tips of the ten fingers up there cracked open and a tiny human form gurgled out.

“Holy shit, I never thought that thing would look like a Head Collector.”

The image of the Head Collector spitting out chunks of clear jelly to form a headless body was superimposed over my head.

“Kaaaaaaaaa…!”

“Kyaaaaah!”

“Kaaaaaaaaaah!”

“Kiiiiii…! Kiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

“Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

Ten human figures covered in blood and flesh slowly crawled down the arm.

“Seon-yeo, I’ll cover you, you take the core.”

“Understood.”

Her skill was perfect for ranged attacks.

Her circular halo began to glow gold again.

I tied the black rope I’d used to keep myself from getting lost to a nearby tree, then formed a baseball bat and held it in both hands.

“Kyaaaaaaah!”

“Eeeeeeeeeeeee…!”

Human shapes rushed at me, screaming with eardrum-splitting force.

I punched the first one that came at me in the head.

Pfft!

The creature’s side was gouged out, but its head soon bounced back like a rubber ball, and it creaked to life.

Like the Head Collector’s alter ego, this was the kind of creature that would regenerate endlessly if its body wasn’t disposed of.

“Isn’t that a damn zombie?”

Seon-yeo shouted as she shot out a series of golden rays of light.

The sculptor’s flesh melted under her light. But the blow had only hit the skin, not the core.

“Baek Iri, as you can see, this will take some time, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, don’t worry about me, just focus on the sculptor!”

Seo Jun told me that day.

She told me that she had to remove the markings on the body to make them unrespawnable, otherwise they would burn to ashes and come back to life.

“No, when you burn the doll, shouldn’t the markings on it be burned as well?”

“No, only the part of the doll with the markings will remain unburned, and when the flames die down, the doll will rise from the ashes in its original, complete form.”

Pow! BANG!

After sending the attackers on both sides flying, I grabbed the one in front of me.

“Keeeeeeee!”

I yanked my arm back as sharp nails tried to tear at my throat.

The sigil was carved into the center of the back of its hand. It wasn’t carved into the stone like an inscription, but rather stuck to the surface of the flesh like a sticker on chewing gum.

Seo Jun said she scraped them off one by one with her dagger.

They weren’t gentle like the heads in that procession, they came at me from all sides, and I couldn’t scrape them off one by one, and I have short nails.

So there was only one way out.

“Whoa…”

I took a deep breath, and then I bit down on the pattern on my hand as if picking at flesh. The flesh gave way like clay and came off easily.

I tore the seal from the flesh, then chewed it into a fine powder.

The human form that had lost the seal sagged, unable to rise again.

With that, the sculptor’s fingertips cracked once more, and a new human form poked its head out.

Seeing this, Seon-yeo redirected the lightning and aimed it at the sculptor’s fingertips.

Zap—!

The flesh of the finger that was struck by the flash melted and stuck together, sealing the gap that had spewed out the human form.

“We’d better start with the fingers.”

As she said that, she fired a series of golden flashes.

As the gaping fingertips closed, one by one, I dealt with two more human forms.