Chapter 16
016 – I Am an Army (5)
The holy water I'd made as a quick fix.
Cooking-foil armor.
On top of those two, I made a secret weapon.
It was a stack of sticky notes, each page covered in a magic circle.
Sticky notes were easy to peel off and stick back on.
They were small enough to fit in my pocket, so I could pull them out and use them anytime.
Even I thought it was a brilliant idea.
Whether it could really be an effective secret weapon, though─.
That was another matter entirely.
Seeing how afraid the entities inside Ms. Yeon-seo were gave me courage.
It works.
This is a winning hand.
“Get out of that poor woman's body!”
Slap─!
I stuck a sticky note to Ms. Yeon-seo's forehead like a talisman.
The Opening magic circle.
What would happen if I stuck it on someone possessed by a ghost─?
My fingertips trembled with tension and anticipation, and the back of my head tingled as if electricity were running through it.
And then, the next moment.
“Aaaaah! Aaaaaaah!”
Ms. Yeon-seo opened her mouth.
So wide I thought her jaw might come unhinged.
Then she stuck her tongue out so far I wondered if a human tongue could really be that long─.
“Bweeeeeeeeeegh━─!”
Rumble, splat, plop─.
She began vomiting up everything inside her.
The spray hit me, standing right in front of her, with a warm, viscous liquid.
“Aah!”
Completely taken by surprise, I panicked and hopped around.
Gross! So gross!
Whether I did that or not, Ms. Yeon-seo kept vomiting everything inside her, as if squeezing out her final breath.
“Ugh, blegh, uuuugh─.”
What poured out of her spread across the floor around us like a carpet.
There were unidentifiable chunks of flesh and liquids as red as blood.
A strangely sweet smell mixed with the sour stench of stomach acid hit my nose.
What was happening?
As I wiped the liquid off my face with my hand and wondered, Ms. Yeon-seo spoke.
“This woman belongs to us.”
“For we are many, and we are an army!”
“You who use the tricks of a thief!”
Several voices burst from a single mouth at once.
They sounded like an angry man, an old man, a sobbing woman, and a screaming child.
Soon, I saw the reddish liquid that had soaked the floor creeping toward Mr. Kim Man-chun and Jo Se-na.
It was then that I understood.
Those who had lost their home, the place where they belonged, would naturally seek out a new one.
Even I would go after people who were defenseless.
“Get away!”
I frantically tore off the sticky notes bearing the ‘Sealing’ magic circle and scattered them around Jo Se-na and Mr. Kim Man-chun.
It would probably have been more effective to stick the notes directly onto them.
The truth was, I didn't know much about this magic circle myself, and had no idea what side effects it might have, so I only scattered them on the floor.
Fortunately, the barrier of sticky notes I'd thrown down seemed to work properly. The red liquid could no longer approach and retreated.
They soon headed for the pigs hanging from hooks.
“Ugh, blegh!”
Ms. Yeon-seo kept vomiting after that, too.
All the liquid she spewed soaked into the pork.
Thump.
At last, Ms. Yeon-seo collapsed, as if she'd vomited out her very last breath.
Color returned to her face, which had been so pale it looked blue. The lights in the basement cold-storage room, which had been flickering on and off, began to glow faintly with a humming sound like a generator─.
“…Is it… over?”
Still in a daze, I looked around.
The temperature, which had been so cold it felt like my flesh might crack, had risen until it was just pleasantly cool.
The vast basement, which had seemed to stretch on without end, had returned to an ordinary cold-storage room of about a hundred square meters.
“It's all over? Is it really? I can take off the blindfold now, right?”
Jo Se-na pulled the towel off her face.
Mr. Kim carefully took off his blindfold, too, then stared at Ms. Yeon-seo collapsed on the floor, his eyes widening more than twice their size.
“Y-Yeon-seo!”
Then he rushed over to his daughter, patting her cheeks and pulling her into his arms by the shoulders.
“Yeon-seo! Yeon-seo, wake up! Yeon-seo!”
“……”
Ms. Yeon-seo didn't answer.
She stared blankly at the ceiling, drool trickling from the corner of her mouth.
“Isn't something wrong?!”
Mr. Kim's face twisted so badly I couldn't tell whether he was crying or angry.
Jo Se-na took a phone out of her handbag and shone it into Ms. Yeon-seo's pupils. Then she blew smoke from the cigarette in her mouth toward her face.
“She didn't react at all to the smell of mugwort, which spirits hate, so I think all the entities have left her body. She's probably in temporary shock from malnutrition, right?”
“Haa, thank you. Haa, thank you so much….”
Mr. Kim wept openly.
Jo Se-na stood with one leg cocked, sucking on her cigarette as if she wasn't impressed.
“If you want to thank someone, thank him over there, not me. Yu-seong, you're more capable than I thought. Watching you exorcise her with Luke 8:29, I guess you have a knack for faith-based magic, too.”
I didn't even know what Luke 8:29 was.
I was just repeating a line from a movie.
But I did notice that Jo Se-na's way of addressing me had changed from ‘Hey’ and ‘You’ to ‘Yu-seong,’ and then to ‘Mr. Yu-seong.’
“Pigs have long made good sacrificial stand-ins for ghosts. We were lucky this basement was being used to store pork. If it hadn't been here, they might all have come after us… Hm?”
Jo Se-na looked down at the floor.
Apparently, she'd noticed my sticky notes.
She squatted down and picked up one of the red-soaked notes.
“What's this?”
# # #
Jo Se-na picked up a sticky note from the floor.
As she examined it, I suddenly realized what a mistake I'd made.
I should've cleaned up quickly.
But my first successful exorcism and the shock of the whole mess had left me too drained and dazed to do that.
What if she figured out these were Bori-bori's magic circles?
If people found out I might not be an ordinary magician, but a ‘wizard,’ things could get complicated in all sorts of ways.
What should I do?
Thump-thump-thump-thump─.
As my heart pounded wildly with nerves and tension, Jo Se-na took off her sunglasses.
“This is yours, right? What on earth did you draw here?”
I was caught off guard, as if she'd hit the nail on the head, but I'd always been fairly good at lying.
I asked her, testing the waters.
“Can't you tell just by looking?”
“Doodles… Oh, were these magic formulas? They're just squares and circles.”
“Ah…”
“Honestly, where have you ever seen such a simple, shoddy magic formula? You seem to have some potential, but this makes you look like a transfer student. Just like that cooking foil.”
She genuinely seemed not to know what they were.
As if she couldn't sense that it was a ‘Sealing’ magic circle.
Could my magic circle look like nothing more than a doodle to Jo Se-na?
Maybe, just as nobody else could see Bori-bori, the magic circles and their symbols only worked for me.
Sorcery is ultimately a matter of technique, like any other craft.
If you know how, most sorcerers could probably make holy water or armor lined with cooking foil.
That's what makes it sorcery.
But my magic wasn't like that.
It was my own unique domain, something other people couldn't even understand, let alone imitate.
That's why it was magic!
“Ugh, the building…”
Just then, a groan came from somewhere.
It was the sort of moan I'd often heard at the hospital, which I'd had to visit so frequently because of my younger sister.
I turned around to see Shaman Choi Jang-gun, wearing a black leather jacket, staggering toward us between the pork carcasses.
“The building… It's… it's mine… Our… our mother's building… It was ours… I have to get it back… My mother's… my… name is carved into…”
Spittle and foam dribbled from his mouth as he babbled incomprehensibly.
His eyes had rolled back until they were white, and the area around them was so sunken he looked like a skeleton.
“Ugh, that guy got eaten.”
Jo Se-na clicked her tongue.
Then she rummaged through her handbag and pulled out something like a dagger, its silver metal gleaming with a hawk engraved on it.
Would ‘silver dagger’ be the right way to describe it?
Swish─.
Jo Se-na drew it from its sheath, revealing its sharp blade.
A little flustered, I asked her,
“Sis, what are you going to do?”
“It's obvious what happens to a shaman whose body has been taken over by a spirit. His vital-energy channels are twisted, and his magic circuits are completely out of alignment. Even if we drive the ghost out now, he'll be crippled and unable to use magic for the rest of his life. It's best to put him out of his misery.”
No, wait─.
Did she mean kill him?
Panicking, I grabbed Jo Se-na by the shoulder.
“Sis, you can't kill him, no matter what! That's a crime! What if you become a murderer and end up on the wanted list?!”
“You really don't know anything, do you? Besides, that Choi Jang-gun guy seemed to hate you. And you seemed to hate him, too. Wouldn't you feel better if he disappeared right now?”
My mind went blank.
Was this really the world magicians lived in?
Even Mr. Kim, who'd been sobbing as he hugged his daughter, had stopped crying and was watching Jo Se-na cautiously.
“…Someone's going to die?”
Choi Jang-gun had disliked me from the moment we met.
So I disliked him, too.
But that didn't mean he deserved to die.
Simply hating each other wasn't enough.
I can't stand that sort of thing.
That's why I got fired from the restaurant, too.
Grrrip─.
All I could do was keep holding Jo Se-na by the shoulder.
When I got the chance, I'd stick the Opening magic-circle note to Choi Jang-gun's forehead, then peel it off.
“……!”
As I thought that, Bori-bori's tail stood straight up.
And the next moment, a voice like thunder filled the basement cold-storage room.
“Hamesh. Arba. Shalosh. Shtayim. Achat─.”
For a moment, I was startled, wondering where on earth the voice was coming from.
A circle, a hexagram, and wormlike letters began glowing in white lines across the floor and walls of the cold-storage room.
Even Jo Se-na's grip on the dagger she'd drawn slackened.
“That's the Star of David and Aramaic. Could this be─?”
“Esh.”
Fwoosh─. Fwoooosh─!
Flames erupted in an instant.
On the pork carcasses hanging in midair.
On Choi Jang-gun's body.
“Aaah… the building…”
The flames were purple.
As I stared at the strange color in a daze, Jo Se-na spoke.
“It's exorcism magic. To draw a ritual formula on this scale in such a short time… Yoo Ga-in, I suppose someone from a prestigious family really is something, even if he's a man.”
“Yoo Ga-in… He did this?”
“That's right. Solomon's Fire. A spiritual flame. It's only visible to us magicians… I've never seen it in person before, either.”
Worried, I looked at Bori-bori.
I wondered what would happen if it got caught up in these flames that seemed to burn away whatever was impure.
But contrary to my fears, Bori-bori watched the purple flames flickering here and there, gently swishing its tail.
As if admiring something beautiful.
At that moment, my mind filled with nothing but question marks.
Bori-bori.
Who are you, really?
And me, caught up in all this with Bori-bori.
I, Ha Yu-seong, was undeniably a wizard.
For better or for worse.
And so, the day drew to a close.
Everyone decided to stay at the chaotic mansion, since there was cleanup to do and all sorts of accounts to settle.
Choi Jang-gun came to his senses around seven that evening.
Perhaps because of what had happened that day, he said he couldn't see.
“My eyes… there's nothing to be done about that. More importantly, I heard Jo Se-na tried to kill me, and you stopped her?”
He sat up on the sofa despite his injuries and bowed his head to me.
“I'll be honest. Thank you. That woman would definitely have killed me.”
He thanked me so plainly that I felt awkward about it.
But he wasn't finished speaking.
“When you can't see, you can understand some things even better. You said your name was Ha Yu-seong, right? I think there's something strange about you—something you can't tell other people.”
“Huh?”
“That's why I didn't like you. That's not something a transfer student like you can handle. You'd better get rid of it as soon as you can, one way or another.”
He spoke as if he was certain of something.
Could he be talking about Bori-bori?
Could he sense Bori-bori because he was a shaman?
Thump-thump-thump─.
As my heart pounded and my palms grew sweaty, he added,
“I'm talking about that thing on your phone. I wasn't going to stick my nose into your business, but you saved my life, so I owe you the same courtesy.”
On my phone…
Ah, could he mean the 「Monkey's Paw site」?