Chapter 7: Second Week of November: Spirit

“Yuichi Sakaki, you are possessed,” a girl announced.

The person who said that to him was his classmate, Reiko Takasugi. She had never really talked to him before, so it mainly had Yuichi feeling confused. He had just been about to enter the classroom on his way back from a bathroom break between classes. For some reason, there was a crowd of girls in front of the classroom, as if they had been waiting for Yuichi.

“Huh? I don’t think I was doing anything out of line...” Yuichi said, gazing at Reiko in disbelief.

She was a rather plain-looking girl with short hair. He couldn’t remember much about her personality, since they weren’t in their seats. He had no idea what was going on.

It was baffling to have something so strange said to him so abruptly, and he didn’t recognize the four girls standing behind Reiko, either. The sight of a whole five girls staring right at him was extremely unsettling, too.

“She doesn’t mean ‘possessed’ as in being somebody’s property,” said one of the girls standing behind Reiko. “She means that you’re possessed by a spirit.”

Is this the start of another annoying damned incident? Yuichi concentrated and looked over the girls’ heads.

Reiko Takasugi’s label read “Liar.” Behind her were “Four-Eyes,” “Fujoshi,” “Medium,” “High School Student,” and “Spirit.”

Everyone except for Reiko and “Fujoshi” Misa Akagi must have been from other classes, since Yuichi didn’t recognize them at all.

Hmm? Suddenly, Yuichi realized: there were five people standing in front of him, but there were six labels.

The label “Spirit” wasn’t attached to anybody. It was just a word, hanging there in midair.

“Um, what’s going on here?” Yuichi asked, wondering if it was actually Reiko who was possessed.

“Yuichi Sakaki,” the girl intoned. “There is an evil spirit behind you. It’s fighting your guardian spirit. Your guardian spirit is holding out for now, but it’s not looking good. You’ll need some help.”

Yuichi turned around. There was nothing behind him, and no label there, either.

“I don’t... see anything.”

“You idiot. Obviously normal people can’t see them. Only people who have a sixth sense, like Reiko, can,” the “Medium” girl said in exasperated tones. She was the one who had spoken for Reiko before, too.

“Um, so can you see it?” Yuichi asked.

“Uh, I told you? Normal people can’t see them?” the girl responded in an even more patronizing tone.

He had no idea if “Medium” counted as a normal person or not, but it sounded like she couldn’t see the ghost.

“Okay, so I have an invisible spirit or something behind me,” he said. “I’m pretty clueless about this kind of thing, so what happens if my guardian spirit loses?”

“You die,” Reiko said simply.

“I die?” he repeated, startled. It was in poor taste, even for a joke.

“If you don’t want to die, meet me on the roof after class,” Reiko said, then marched into the classroom as if the conversation was over.

Misa Akagi followed her, and the others gave Yuichi a piteous glance before returning to their own classes.

“Sheesh, what a pain in the neck...” If she’d just been a self-professed oracle, Yuichi could have just brushed the incident off. But he was worried about the labels that Soul Reader had revealed.

In the end, despite finding it all a huge pain in the neck, Yuichi decided to join them on the roof.

He headed there immediately after class ended, carrying his large school bag so he could go right to club after it was done.

Aiko walked alongside him; Yuichi had asked her to come.

Reiko and her friends hadn’t seemed to have arrived yet, so, leaning against the fence, Yuichi explained the situation to Aiko.

“What the heck?” was Aiko’s response upon hearing the details of what had happened.

Yuichi felt exactly the same way. “It was a surprise to me, too. I’ve never even talked to Takasugi before. Do you know anything about her?”

“Not much,” Aiko said. “The girls she hangs out with apparently all went to the same middle school, so they’re good friends.” Maybe that was why she rarely interacted with her own classmates.

“Still... I’m not sure about this ‘spirit sight’ of hers...”

It wasn’t that Yuichi didn’t believe in spirits. Vampires and oni and gods existed, after all, so the existence of spirits wasn’t out of line at all. It was just her story that he was skeptical about.

He added, “It would be one thing if ‘Medium’ was saying it, but since it was ‘Liar’...”

In elementary school, you often saw children claiming they could see spirits in order to get attention, but it was rare to see someone keeping up the act well into high school.

“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be here?” Aiko asked nervously.

“She didn’t tell me to come alone, so I guess so?” Yuichi said. “And if the same five girls come again, I’d feel uncomfortable if it was just me and them...”

Reiko’s retinue acted like disciples. They were likely fully convinced about her abilities.

It was a little while before Reiko finally arrived.

As expected, her groupies filed in along behind her. The lineup was the same as before.

“What’s Noro doing here?” Reiko asked as she approached him, glaring at Aiko.

“Oh, am I in your way? We were going to walk to club afterwards,” Aiko responded curtly. She was more strong-willed than Yuichi’d thought.

“Do whatever you like,” Reiko said dismissively. “There was something I wanted to say to you, Sakaki.”

“Is it about the spirit possessing me? Because I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yuichi said, scratching his head.

“What?! Are you saying you don’t believe her?” one of the girls cried.

“Reiko is incredible! You don’t know how many people she’s saved through the spirits she’s exorcised!” her groupies shouted, one after another.

“W-Wait a minute! I never said I didn’t believe her!”

“Calm down. He’ll hear you out.” Aiko’s intercession calmed the groupies down a little.

“Leave him be,” Reiko ordered. “Of course Sakaki would have his doubts, hearing something like this out of the blue. I’m going to explain things now.”

Reiko’s words shut the groupies up completely. They seemed to do whatever she told them. It seemed that Reiko was their leader, a fact that seemed based entirely on Reiko’s spiritual abilities.

“I’d certainly appreciate an explanation,” said Yuichi. “It’s a pretty big shock to hear ‘you’re going to die’ out of nowhere.”

“It’s true that you will die, but that’s only if nothing changes,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix everything. Let me explain: You’re possessed by what’s known as a ga-rei. It’s a very dangerous evil spirit.”

“Um, so why did it possess me?” Yuichi was pretty mindful about his daily behavior. He couldn’t remember doing anything wicked enough to warrant possession by an evil spirit.

“It’s just a matter of bad luck,” Reiko explained. “After this spirit destroys and kills someone, it possesses new prey. This one just happened to choose you.”

“Bad luck, huh? I guess I’m not exactly the lucky type...” Yuichi certainly had plenty experience with bad luck in his chance encounters.

“The ga-rei is in the middle of devouring your guardian spirit.”

“It’s eating it right now?!”

“Ga-rei are always hungry,” she said. “It’s munching down on it as we speak.”

“I don’t even want to think about that...”

“Your guardian spirit is a fallen soldier of the Heike,” she said. “It was of low rank, so it probably won’t last long.”

A rude thing to say about the Heike, Yuichi thought.

“After it finishes eating it, then it’s your turn.”

“Huh... so, what do I do?” he asked.

“It’s simple: Just stick with me. It will eventually get sick of being in the presence of my power and leave you. S-So... we should date,” Reiko said, suddenly fidgety.

“Huh?” Yuichi and Aiko spoke at the same time.

“Hold it! Where did that bizarre request come from?” Aiko shouted angrily.

Was this whole thing about finding a way to ask him out? he wondered. If it was, it seemed like an underhanded way to go about it.

“It’s not bizarre!” the girl insisted. “Reiko is doing this to help him!”

“Yeah! He’ll die if this keeps up! Reiko’s selflessly offering to date him because it’s the only way!” the groupies sounded off again.

Yuichi decided the best thing to do was just to turn her down flat. It was more awkward to do it with her lackeys along, but letting things drag on wouldn’t be good for anyone involved.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m glad you want to save me, but I’d prefer to work things out on my own.”

“On your own? You’ll die!”

“If I die, that’s my business. You don’t need to go out of your way to help me,” Yuichi said simply.

“You’re saying you don’t want to date me? Is it because I’m not pretty?”

“I think that’s a little off the point...”

If forced to choose one or the other, Yuichi would probably say that Reiko was pretty, though she couldn’t compare to the girls he hung out with normally.

This is trouble...

It was looking like this had nothing to do with spirits, after all.

“Noro, are you going out with him?” Reiko demanded.

“Huh? Me? Um, not really...” Aiko stammered as she abruptly became the target of ire.

“Yeah. We’re not dating, but I have asked her out, and she’s thinking it over,” Yuichi said, deciding to roll with it.

“Huh?” Aiko asked, gaping at him.

Yuichi kept up the cover. “So I can’t go out with you. Sorry.”

It was all rather pathetic, after he had made up his mind to turn her down directly.

“I see... I understand.” Reiko must have realized it was pointless to discuss any further. She left the roof, her groupies tailing behind her.

Only the “Medium” and “Spirit” labels remained.

“Was there something else you wanted?” he asked the medium girl.

She smiled back at him confidently, as if she could see right through him. “You are going to want Reiko’s help soon enough. You’d better hope that her feelings haven’t changed by then.” And with that, the medium girl left.

“Sakaki! What the heck was that?!” Aiko started pressing him the minute everyone left.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into it like that,” Yuichi said. “If I’d said we were dating, it would have caused problems later, so I said that instead. See? We can avoid future trouble by just saying you turned me down later.”

“Idiot!” she shouted.

“I said I was sorry!”

“How thoughtless can a person be?!”

“Sorry. I didn’t think you’d get so mad.”

“And what’s Konishi going to think when she hears you turned her down like that?” Aiko demanded.

She was likely referring to the recent incident when Yuri Konishi had asked him out and he’d turned her down flat. It was true that he had employed a much more underhanded method this time.

“Well, she just came on so strong, it scared me... hey, Noro!” Yuichi suddenly pulled Aiko by the hand, wrapped his arms around her and jumped to the side.

“Huh?!” Aiko let out a cry of surprise. A moment later, the fence behind them shook.

“Wh-What?”

“It’s still here!”

“What is?!”

“The spirit!”

He’d thought that all the members of Reiko’s retinue had gone, but it seemed “Spirit” was back on the roof.

“You’re not just trying to change the subject, are you?!” Aiko shouted suspiciously.

“I’m not,” he said. “I think it just attacked us!”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know!” he cried. “I’ve never fought a spirit before!”

Fortunately, the presence didn’t seem tremendously powerful. All the previous attack had done was shake the fence a little bit.

“Let’s get out of here!” Aiko cried.

“Good idea.” Yuichi took Aiko’s hand and ran for the entrance to the roof, but the door wouldn’t open.

It hadn’t been locked when they came, and the girls who had left before them surely didn’t have the key.

Yuichi felt an unsettling presence and looked upwards.

The color of the sky had changed. The sun remained white, but the rest of the sky had gone an inky black.

“What the heck!” he shouted.

“I’ve seen this before...” Aiko murmured.

It was like the barrier the “Apprentice Monster Hunter” boy had used to trap Aiko in the courtyard months ago. He’d said it was used to seal monsters in, so this one might technically be a bit different, but it was clearly a similar phenomenon.

“I’m sorry,” Aiko said. “I just assumed you were running around to distract me...”

That was only natural. She couldn’t see the spirit, so she couldn’t have known.

Yuichi turned around. The “Spirit” label was coming closer.

Yuichi glared at the air below the label, concentrating.

He remembered what had happened in the courtyard. He had seen the label “Vampire” there, and then after focusing, he’d been able to make out Aiko’s silhouette.

He convinced himself there was a person under the label. As he did, a human form gradually came into view.

“I think I can see it...” he murmured.

“What’s up with your eyes?” Aiko asked, dumbstruck.

“How should I know? She’s wearing a uniform... I think she goes to this school.”

The spirit was female and wearing a girls’ Seishin High uniform. Her face was hidden by her long hair, though, so it was hard to tell any more about her appearance.

The spirit was walking towards them slowly, hands stretched in front of her. There was a chain wrapped around her neck that extended under their feet and underneath the door to the roof.

“Hey! Didn’t your sister teach you anything about fighting spirits?” Aiko cried.

“Yeah... she said Febreze was really effective.” Yuichi had his doubts, of course. He couldn’t see how an air freshener could help drive away a spirit.

“Do you happen to have some of that on you?” Aiko asked with faint hope.

“I do, as a matter of fact, but I left my bag over there,” he said, pointing.

In his hurry to escape, he’d forgotten to take his bag. Mutsuko had included air freshener in it, though, almost as if she’d anticipated something like this.

“Could we jump down?” Aiko asked.

“In the worst case scenario, sure. But I wasn’t expecting you to be the one to suggest it...” He had assumed that would be a traumatic memory for her, but maybe it hadn’t been as bad as he’d supposed. “Okay, let’s see... There’s another thing my sister said about fighting spirits that I’d like to try.”

Yuichi stepped forward protectively in front of Aiko. It might not mean anything if the spirit couldn’t be blocked by physical means, but he couldn’t just leave Aiko in front of the enemy unguarded.

He stood facing the spirit.

The spirit’s manner didn’t change. It continued walking towards them at the same pace as before, hands outstretched.

Yuichi took a step forward.

He slapped down the ghost’s outstretched left palm and pulled her down, simultaneously striking up with his right fist from below.

The fist slammed right into the spirit’s jaw and sent her flying.

The color of the sky immediately returned to normal, and they could hear sounds from the athletic fields below — the barrier-like thing must have been cutting off sounds, too.

“Huh? What happened? What did you do?” Aiko asked in confusion.

“I punched it,” he replied.

“You can punch it?!” she shouted back.

Mutsuko’s method for fighting spirits was known in martial arts as tan shou, “Seeking Fist.”

“It’s a training method where you paint a detailed picture in your mind of a hypothetical enemy — how they’ll move and react to your movements — and work out the optimal solution for fighting them,” Yuichi explained. “Apparently it applies here, too.”

He’d painted a detailed image in his mind of his enemy going flying after he punched them. A ghost was an unreal thing, little more than an illusion, so if you imagined something hard enough, the ghost could get sucked into your fantasy. This was the totally reckless logic that Mutsuko had advocated, but it seemed to have worked in this case.

“And if they can be punched, there’s not much to be afraid of,” Yuichi added.

“That’s all pretty reckless...” Aiko sighed. Yuichi found he couldn’t blame her.

He approached the fallen spirit, which, seeming to notice his presence, tried to crawl away. Its manner had completely changed now; perhaps before it had assumed it was invulnerable. Right now, it seemed to be in total hysterics.

Yuichi picked up the chain around the ghost and pulled. Unable to resist Yuichi’s strength, the ghost was easily dragged to the ground at his feet.

“Pantomime?” Aiko asked.

“I bet it looks that way, yeah,” he said. From Aiko’s perspective, it probably looked like he was just miming pulling a chain.

“Hey,” Yuichi said to the spirit.

“H-Help me!” the spirit exclaimed.

“Oh! I think I can hear it...” Aiko said, not sounding particularly scared.

“Help you?” Yuichi asked. “But you’re the one who attacked us...”

“No! I didn’t want to do it! This chain made me do it!”

“This?” Yuichi picked up a length of chain in both hands and pulled. Just as he had imagined, the chain snapped.

“Huh?” the spirit said.

“That should do it, right? Can you explain the situation, now?”

“Thank you,” the spirit said, then stood up and began staggering towards the fence.

“Hey! Where are you going?”

“Now that I’m free, there’s something I have to do.” The spirit latched on to the fence with both hands and started climbing. Yuichi just watched, dumbstruck, as the ghost ascended to the top of the fence.

Before he could object, she pitched over the top and began to plummet head-first towards the ground below.

“Huh?!”

The ghost was gone. She had jumped off the roof.

“What was that all about? None of this makes any sense...” Aiko looked puzzled, and Yuichi was equally in the dark.

“She jumped off...” Yuichi climbed the fence and looked down at the ground, but there was no sign of the ghost.

“Cut that out! Someone might see you!” Aiko’s panicked voice shouted.

Obediently, Yuichi returned to the roof.

Later that night, Yuichi visited Mutsuko in her room.

As usual, Mutsuko was awake into the wee hours, and she let Yuichi in. The two were currently sitting across the low table from each other.

“I see! I’ve heard that location-bound spirits often repeat actions they performed in life,” Mutsuko announced, brimming with confidence as always. She wasn’t at all shocked by the sudden talk of ghosts, and showed no sign of doubting him.

“So you’re saying... she died by falling from the roof?” Yuichi asked skeptically. Despite the fact that he was the one who had come to her for advice, he was the most dubious about it all.

“It’s possible, but I haven’t heard about anything like that at school, so it must have happened a while ago. Hold on a sec!”

Mutsuko stood up and walked to her computer desk, then came back a few minutes later. She set some printed sheets on the table for Yuichi to see.

“Here. It’s from about ten years ago, but this is an article about a girl student who fell off the roof and died.”

Wherever Mutsuko had gotten the information from, it included pictures of the girl, too. Her name was Nami Eto.

“Hmm, her face was covered by her hair, so I couldn’t really see what she looked like...” Yuichi couldn’t say for sure if this was the same person as the ghost.

“Apparently it caused quite a stir on the internet,” Mutsuko said.

“Was there something strange about how it happened? This feels odd to say, but I wouldn’t think someone jumping off the roof would cause that much of a stir.” It might be a conversation topic at the school where it happened, but he couldn’t imagine it filtering out into the world at large.

“There was a bit of a mystery surrounding it, actually,” Mutsuko explained. “Two girls had a fight and ended up falling off the roof. There was a witness to that, but see... only one of them was found dead on the ground. The other one went missing.”

“Well, there was probably some trick behind it.” Yuichi imagined the scene in the back of his mind. Two people fell off the roof; only one hit the ground. The answer was simple. “She must have jumped into an open window while she was falling, right? Or she broke her fall and ran off.” He was confident that that would work out.

In a rare turnabout, Mutsuko seemed dumbstruck by Yuichi. “Yu... you know most people can’t do that stuff, right? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should expect everyone else to.” Yuichi felt a genuine twinge of pain at having his typically ridiculous sister informing him of common sense concepts. “Just so you know, most people can’t kill someone through a wall with fa jin, either.”

“I’ve never done that, and I wasn’t thinking of doing it, either!” He didn’t understand why she was bringing that up all of a sudden. “Anyway, moving on... What do you think of the evil spirit possession story that kicked this off?”

“It doesn’t sound like anything to worry about,” Mutsuko said. “You can see spirits with Soul Reader, but you don’t see anything behind you, right?”

“Yeah.” Yuichi could see labels even in a mirror, but as far as he could see, there was nothing behind him.

“And you were able to punch her, right? That means all of your techniques will work on spirits, and if they work, then you can beat them, so even if there were an evil spirit behind you, you could handle yourself.”

“The evil spirit thing sounded bogus from the start,” he said. “But I’m worried about the spirit that attacked me.”

“Yeah, the part about the chain around her is strange. You think she was being controlled by that ‘Medium’ girl you mentioned?”

Yuichi remembered the eerie words the “medium” had said. Perhaps she did have the power to manipulate ghosts, and she was siccing them on Yuichi.

“Anyway, I guess we should just watch for now,” Mutsuko said. “If things get weirder, let me know!”

And so ended their consultation for that day.

Yuichi unleashed a backfist.

He was in the hall around lunchtime, so naturally there were people everywhere, but he did it so quickly that nobody noticed.

His strike broke the neck of a spirit wearing a suit crying tears of blood. The head ended up bending backwards unnaturally on its neck, which actually made him look even more like a ghost.

A boy running across the wall on all fours spotted Yuichi and stuck his long tongue out at him. He may have intended to wrap it around him, but Yuichi just grabbed the tongue, flicked his wrist, and snapped it like a whip. The boy slammed into the floor, and Yuichi entered the bathroom.

Inside the bathroom he found a chubby girl carrying her own head in a shopping bag, which she was using to try to catch a peek at Yuichi’s crotch. Yuichi sent the bag flying with a kick, and finished his business while the chubby girl was rushing around searching for her head.

He went to the basin to wash his hands, looked up, and saw a girl covered in blood in the mirror. That spirit wasn’t doing anything in particular, so he just ignored it.

What the heck is going on here? Even going to the bathroom had become a chore.

It was the day after Reiko Takasugi had first confronted him about his “evil spirit.”

When Yuichi had arrived at school, he had been swarmed by “Spirit”s in large numbers. They disappeared if he hit them, so for now, it was more of an annoyance than anything... but as far as annoyances went, it was severe. It was especially bad during class, when he had to be subtle about it so as not to attract attention.

Yuichi left the bathroom and decided to track the chains to their source. The fact that every ghost he’d seen had a chain wrapped around their neck suggested that the chains must be significant.

The chains led him to Classroom 1-B.

He cast a surreptitious glance through the window and saw them all leading to a specific person. It was the “Medium” girl, who was sitting there eating lunch, the chains coiled around her waist.

So she is the one behind it?

The whole group of girls who had threatened him the other day were sitting there together, eating boxed lunches, laughing and chatting. Reiko Takasugi was there, too.

“Oh, Sakaki. Such a passionate gaze. Are you looking for someone to cheat with?”

Yuichi turned to see a bespectacled girl with the label “Fake” above her head.

It was Tomomi Hamasaki.

He still had no idea what “Fake” meant, and he wasn’t inclined to ask, either. If he did, it would probably just get him involved in something else annoying.

“Hey, do you know who she is?” He pointed to the medium girl. Tomomi was strangely informed in a lot of unexpected places, so maybe she would know something.

“Just blew me right off, huh?” Tomomi asked. “Hmm, but you usually try not to get involved with other people, so showing interest in a girl might indicate a change in the wind...”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Yuichi said flatly.

“Uh huh, right. Anyway, you mean her? I think her name’s Misaki Gokumon. Why do you ask?”

“Their group accosted me yesterday, and things have been strange ever since,” he said. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, though.”

“Hey, hey, you can’t ask me for info and then blow me off again!” Tomomi protested. “Don’t forget, I’m a member of the Monika Army, too.”

The “Monika Army” referred to the group Monika had assembled to help her gather Divine Vessels. Tomomi had strongarmed her way in, and was now technically a member of the gang.

“I don’t think this has to do with the Divine Vessels,” Yuichi said, though he realized he couldn’t be sure. It was possible that her control of spirits did have something to do with the power of a Divine Vessel.

“Could you at least tell me the situation?” Tomomi asked. “I might be able to help.”

“Fine. Let’s go somewhere else.”

It was lunchtime, so there were people all around them now. She and Yuichi moved to a corner of the hall.

He explained the events of the day before to her in brief.

“Spirits, huh?” she said. “You don’t sound all that bothered about this, but it could get pretty serious.”

“Really?” he asked.

“When I explained about worldview, I said that the more people who believe in a something, the more persistent that worldview becomes. And a whole lot of people believe in spirits and wandering souls... At least, more people find them feasible than tengu and oni and such. That means spirits have a lot of power, though I don’t know if they’re actually the manifestation of the souls of dead people.”

“But I’ve never seen spirits before now,” he said. “I never even saw the labels.”

“That’s because they weren’t part of your world until now. By getting involved with those girls who are convinced that spirits exist, they’ve probably had an effect on your worldview.”

“I see... so? Do you know how to exorcise spirits?” he asked.

“Huh? Why would I?”

“You’re Nihao the China’s daughter, right? Didn’t you learn any Taoist teachings or anything?” Yuichi was thinking about an old Chinese horror movie about hopping vampires. It was a long shot, but he wouldn’t be surprised if Nihao the China knew some esoteric spirit-purging techniques.

“I’m not his real daughter, and he hasn’t taught me his techniques,” Tomomi said.

“Huh? Really?”

“Oh, are you interested in my story all of a sudden?” she asked.

“No, and don’t start telling it to me,” Yuichi replied curtly.

“Hey! Why are you so determined not to learn anything about me?”

“Because I have this deep and abiding feeling it’s gonna get me wrapped up in something really annoying. And the fact that you have ‘Fake’ written above your head is really unsettling to start with.” Yuichi waved lightly and walked away.

Tomomi looked unhappy, but she didn’t seem inclined to push things on him any further.

Yuichi returned to the classroom and was swarmed by spirits as usual. As he absentmindedly banished the random spirits that attacked him on his way back to his desk, his mind turned things over.

There were spirits attacking him. They didn’t seem to be attacking anyone else.

The only place they were attacking him was at school.

There was a chain linking “Medium” Misaki Gokumon to the spirits.

There were chains wrapped around the spirits — usually around the neck, but if they didn’t have a head, it would be wrapped somewhere close to it.

When the spirits’ chains were cut, they stopped attacking Yuichi.

There were some spirits that seemed communicative, but only a select few; most of them just let out incomprehensible moans.

Some spirits could form barriers, but they wouldn’t use them in well-populated places, and the barrier disappeared if the spirit was attacked.

The spirits disappeared if they got too far away.

What’s does it all mean? he thought.

Misaki Gokumon had to be the one behind it. The fact that they only attacked him at school suggested a limit to the length of the chains, and considering the timing when they started attacking, his rejection of Reiko Takasugi seemed to be the cause. But he didn’t know why spirits would attack him just because he rejected her.

He considered talking things over with Misaki Gokumon, but it would come off as saying he believed Reiko Takasugi and wanted her help, which would just end with more talk of him dating her.

Well, I’ll just wait for class to be over, I guess, Yuichi thought, holding the neck of a ghost that was glaring bitterly at him.

After class, Yuichi and Aiko went up to the roof.

“So, that’s the story,” he said. “I want to do something about the situation.”

“Hmm, not sure what I can do to help...” Aiko wrinkled her nose.

Well, he hadn’t expected her to be able to do much.

“That’s where she comes in.” Yuichi raised his left hand.

Aiko looked at him, puzzled.

Aiko couldn’t see it, but Yuichi was holding a spirit wearing a student uniform by the neck. It was the student who had fallen from the roof the day before. He’d asked her name and learned that she really was Nami Eto.

“Um... I was really hoping you could let me go...” Nami’s voice sounded out.

“If I let you go, you’re gonna jump off the roof again, aren’t you?” Yuichi asked.

“Of course,” she said. “What do you expect? That’s my routine.”

He had already cut her chain, since there was no talking to her while she was bound up in it.

“If you answer my questions, I’ll let you go,” he said. “Why are you attacking me?”

“I don’t know! I was being controlled! You should ask the person who was controlling me.”

“He destroyed the chain before, right? So why were you attacking him again?” Aiko asked. Maybe it was boring for her to just listen to it all.

“The chain got me again,” the spirit said. “I bet it’s caught all the spirits in the area. Look, I answered your question, right? So let me go. I promise I’ll hold back on falling.”

Yuichi did feel pretty awkward holding her by the neck while they were talking, so he released her.

Nami ran away from his hand and stretched. Apparently even spirits got stiff holding the same posture for a long time. “So, who is that, anyway? She’s got an amazing aura, so I’ve been wondering...”

“Isn’t that the person who sent you the love letter?” Aiko asked.

Nami was pointing to a very wide female student who was standing nearby: Chiharu Dannoura. Indeed, it was the girl who had challenged Yuichi before and taken a beating for her trouble.

Chiharu stood with her hands on her hips, carrying an aura of confidence around her. There was an instrument case on her back — judging from the size, probably a cello. She had said she was in the choir club, so maybe she played accompaniment.

She was a little taller than Aiko, but wider in all directions. To put it bluntly, she was fat.

“That wasn’t a love letter. It was a letter of challenge. She’s Dannoura, by the way.” Yuichi normally spoke more respectfully about women he barely knew, and only be more casual when he got to know them better. In this case, though, his lack of deference wasn’t an indicator of closeness.

Chiharu just laughed. “For what purpose do you call me here? You wish to surrender to me? If so, I welcome it!” The fat girl gestured boldly.

“Oh, did you settle on a speech pattern?” Yuichi asked.

“Yes. Even I realized I had sounded a bit strange. I worked hard to choose this one!”

“You shouldn’t need to work hard just for that... Ah, well. I called you here because I have a favor to ask you.”

Yuichi had gotten Chiharu’s contact information from Mutsuko. Apparently they knew each other; she and Mutsuko had worked together to develop some bizarre weapons.

“Oh? A request for me? But after all, I am in your debt,” she said. “I do not mind hearing you out... but if I may ask, who is that girl?”

Chiharu pointed a pudgy finger at Aiko.

“That’s Noro,” he said. “She’s from my class.”

As he introduced Aiko, Chiharu began inspecting her up and down. “Ah-ha... in appearance, she is perhaps neither above nor below my level...”

“No, Noro’s way cuter,” Yuichi said, surprisingly comfortable with the insult.

“C-Cuter...” Aiko stammered.

“Ah, well,” said Chiharu. “My nature is one of magnanimity. Though you are a part of my harem, I shall permit you a harem of your own!”

“It’s a club, actually,” said Yuichi.

Aiko seemed to recover from her shock enough to draw closer to Yuichi and speak to him in hushed tones. “So... who is this person? Why did you bring her here?”

“As for who she is, that’s a little hard to explain... but as you can see, she’s got a pretty unfortunate personality, so don’t worry about it too much,” Yuichi said. “The reason I called her here, though, is her eyes. She has eyes that see weird stuff, too.”

“Weird stuff? How rude! My eyes are the Apocalypse Eyes!” Chiharu exclaimed.

Chiharu had apparently walked up to them at some point and joined in with Aiko and Yuichi’s huddle.

“Hey! Aiko and I are having a private conversation here!” Yuichi shouted.

“If you do not wish me to hear, do not speak in front of me!” Chiharu declared. “Well, regardless, I shall show you my power! You there! Noro, was it? Why don’t I give you my appraisal?”

“Wh-What?” Aiko drew back, afraid.

“Hm... a love interest rating of only 5? Trash...” Chiharu said disdainfully.

“Hey!” Aiko looked at Yuichi, jaw dropping. It was the face of someone who wanted to speak, but couldn’t find the words.

“She says she can see numbers,” Yuichi said. “Though we don’t actually know what the numbers mean.” Yuichi remembered her saying before that it was something like battle power. “The one I want you to look at isn’t Noro, it’s her. You see?” Yuichi pointed at Nami.

“Hmm? Mm? I see merely numbers floating in space. Minus 30... but I have never before seen a negative value. What does it mean?”

“Apparently she’s a spirit.”

“Eek!” Chiharu let out a cry of fright and flew at Yuichi.

Yuichi sidestepped.

Chiharu hit the floor with a dull thud.

“Why did you dodge? A beautiful girl leaped at you for fear of a ghost! Your job is to catch her gently!” Chiharu complained as she hopped back up with a sour expression.

“That looked more like a body press to me,” he said. If he’d been hit by that, he would have been hurt pretty badly. Such mass couldn’t be underestimated.

“Um...” Aiko said, hesitantly. She’d probably never seen a high school girl leap into a body press like that.

“Anyway, we know she can see spirits too, now, so she might be useful,” Yuichi said. The reason Yuichi had called Chiharu was to evaluate the threat level of the spirits. It was easy for him to appraise the strength of a fellow human, but with a spirit it was that much harder.

“But will knowing those numbers actually help you in solving it at all?” Chiharu asked.

“Hmm, that’s a good point...” Yuichi had thought it might be handy to have someone besides him who could see spirits, but he hadn’t thought it out any further than that. “So, is the number all you can see of the spirit?”

“What is this? You say that you can see it?”

“Yeah, faintly.”

“Hmm,” Chiharu said. “It is not logical that you should see it, yet I cannot. I shall practice slightly greater exertion!”

Chiharu opened her eyes wide. Yuichi found it a bit scary.

“Oh-ho... I can see her now,” Chiharu continued. “In appearance, she is neither above nor below my level...”

“You keep saying that, but your level’s pretty low!” Yuichi burst out.

“Hey, I wonder if I can see her,” Aiko said, apparently feeling left out.

“I don’t know... try to focus, I guess?” Yuichi said vaguely, uncertain of how else to answer her.

“Okay. I’ll try.” Aiko, seeming to take his words seriously, began to focus. She knit her brows together, narrowed her eyes and gazed at the area where the spirit was. “Oh, I think I can see something...”

“Seriously?!” Yuichi looked at Aiko, partly in disbelief, then suddenly startled. “Noro! Your eyes! Your eyes turned red!”

“Huh?” she cried. “No way! What do I do?”

Her eyes turned red when she was using her vampiric powers. They’d done that once when she was injured, but seeing them turn red over something like this was totally unexpected. He was in a panic trying to figure out what to do about it.

He quickly looked over at Chiharu, but fortunately, she was fully focused on inspecting Nami, and hadn’t noticed Aiko’s change yet.

Yuichi pulled a pair of goggles out of his bag. (Naturally, Mutsuko had stuck them in there on a whim.) “Here! Put these on!”

“O-Okay!” Apparently also a bit panicked, Aiko did just as she was told, pulling the massive goggles down over her eyes. Being night-vision goggles, they covered almost the entire top half of her face.

“Ah! What are those? How impressive! Is that why her love interest power has ascended to 3,000?” Chiharu asked as she turned back to them, apparently having grown bored with inspecting Nami.

That was a close call.

“Why would goggles increase her love interest power?” Yuichi demanded. It must have been her vampiric abilities increasing her power level. Chiharu had said that Yuichi’s level was 18,000, which meant Aiko’s was one-sixth of his. This might sound like a brag, but Yuichi was thinking that Aiko must be quite strong in her current form.

“So, now we can all see them. What do we do n—”

“Hey! Why are you always on the roof? Do you love the roof that much, Yu? You should marry the roof!”

Yuichi turned to face the sudden interruption.

Mutsuko was standing at the entrance to the roof. For some reason, she was wearing the outfit of a miko, with a white “kosode” kimono and red hakama, and she was holding a large bag in one hand. “I told you to tell me if things got weirder, and if you’re skulking around here, they obviously did! So what happened? What’s the weirdness?”

“The only weirdness here is you as a miko, Sis...”

“What was that?!” she demanded.

“Ah, nothing. Sorry. I wasn’t sure what to do next, actually, so this is good timing. Please help us, Sis.”

“Okay!” Mutsuko smiled brightly. That one little request seemed to have been enough to completely restore her mood.

“Ah! It is you, Sage Mutsuko!” Chiharu said with an exaggerated air of surprise.

Yuichi had known that they knew each other, but not that their relationship was such that she would address her as “Sage.”

“Hey, Dannoura, are you here, too?” Mutsuko asked. “That’s great! What’s the heck’s going on here?”

Yuichi proceeded to sum up to Mutsuko exactly what had happened.

“I think I get it! The Misaki Gokumon girl is controlling the spirits so that her friend can pretend to have a sixth sense!” Mutsuko cried.

“Gokumon didn’t seem to be aware of it herself, though,” Yuichi said. Perhaps this had happened before. The result, then, was that Reiko had become more arrogant, and picked up even more followers.

“There are three ways to resolve this!” Mutsuko declared.

“If you’re giving us choices, it means most of them are going to be bad... but let’s hear them out, I guess,” Yuichi said, without getting his hopes high.

“One: Defeat Misaki Gokumon, the medium!”

“You mean beat the hell out of her, right? I’m not gonna beat up an ordinary girl my age!” Yuichi shouted. He couldn’t beat someone up just because she controlled spirits.

“Two: Placate Misaki Gokumon by dating Reiko Takasugi!”

“If I was gonna do that, I’d have done it already,” Yuichi griped.

“Three: Hold an exorcism at the school! If the spirits she’s enslaved go away, she won’t be able to do anything to you!”

“I guess we’ll have to go with the last one... and judging by your outfit, you knew that, right?” Yuichi glared at Mutsuko through narrowed eyes. Why hadn’t she just said so from the start?

“Th-That’s not true! It’s just a coincidence that I happened to be wearing this...” Mutsuko said even as she began rummaging through her bag to pull things out.

“What is that?” Yuichi demanded.

It was a pot. There was also a gas burner, a bamboo steaming basket, and a bottle of water, as well as bags of rice and salt. Was she going to cook? Yuichi suddenly grew nervous.

“It’s a pot and a resonator,” Mutsuko said with supreme confidence. “The rice has been washed and dried out in the sun over the course of several days. With this, we can perform a kamanari ritual and exorcise the ghosts!”

Mutsuko swiftly began the preparations. She unrolled a cloth as big as two tatami mats out over the roof, revealing a large octagonal pattern painted on it. Each direction had a different label, like “Gate of the Living” and “Gate of the Dead” — a Dun Jia chart used in Chinese divination.

Mutsuko set the burner at the center of the diagram, placed the pot atop it, and filled it with water. She then added a handful of salt, put the steaming basket-like “resonator” on top and lit the burner.

“What, do we have to wait for it to boil?” Yuichi asked. The pot was large, with quite a lot of water inside. It seemed like it was going to take a while to heat up.

“Good point,” Mutsuko said. “So, I’ll recite the Longer Sukha Vativyuha Sutra until it boils. If-these-vows-I-have-made-should-not-bring-me-to-the-un-sur-pass-ed-way...” Mutsuko began chanting with a leisurely sutra rhythm.

Aiko began to tremble, then wilted into Yuichi’s arms.

“That’s right, you can’t stand sutras, can you?” Yuichi said. He had completely forgotten about that.

“I forgot, too... I’m not sure if I can make it through an exorcism...”

“Sis, we’re gonna get some distance!” Yuichi called. He pulled Aiko to the edge of the roof. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I was shocked since it came out of nowhere, but once I know it’s happening, I think I can deal with it.”

Nami the ghost and Chiharu arrived a few moments later.

“What should I do? If I’m exorcised, I might move on...” the former moaned.

“What’s wrong with moving on?” Yuichi asked. “Or is there a reason you don’t want to do that?”

“I have unfinished business. That’s why I’m still here.”

“Then keep your distance for a while,” he said. “Though I don’t know how wide that pot’s range of influence is...”

“Okay, I’ll do that.” With that, the ghost climbed the fence — it seemed she couldn’t phase through it despite her incorporeal nature — and leaped off the roof.

“Incidentally, Yuichi Sakaki,” Chiharu said. “Do there not appear to be more spirits than before?”

“Ah?!” he exclaimed.

Just as Chiharu’d said, crowds of spirits had appeared out of thin air. They had chains around them, so they must have been slaves of Misaki Gokumon.

“It doesn’t seem like they’re coming after me...” he said slowly. “You think they’re trying to stop Sis’s ritual?”

Yuichi quickly tried to return to Mutsuko’s side.

But Chiharu stopped him. “Fear not, Yuichi Sakaki. I prepared for this eventuality!”

She set down the instrument case she was wearing on her back, and opened the lid. Within it lay a Western archery-style bow, which Chiharu pulled out, slowly and theatrically.

“Heh heh! Dannoura style has an archery technique for destroying fell influences! Its name, the Dannoura-style Azusa Yumi, Meigen-no-Tsuru-uchi!”

“I’ve got a whole lot to say about that, but first: Why do you carry your bow in a musical instrument case?” he asked.

“Is there a purpose to instrument cases besides holding weapons?!” she demanded.

“Apologize! Apologize to the instrument case-makers of the world!”

Chiharu ignored Yuichi and began to draw the bow. There was no arrow nocked in it, which was typical for Azusa Yumi... though Yuichi had never heard of using a Western-style bow for this Shinto ritual act.

“Purge!” Chiharu shouted as she released the bowstring.

Nothing happened.

The string trembled, and nothing more... or so it might have seemed, if he hadn’t seen the effect it had on the spirits themselves.

Holes appeared in several spirits in a line, as if an invisible arrow had torn through them. Those spirits dispersed a second later.

“Ah... hmm,” said Chiharu. “W-Well? Amazing, isn’t it?!”

“You seemed pretty surprised by it yourself...” Yuichi muttered. Maybe she hadn’t expected it to have so much power. She had only seen spirits for the first time today, so she’d probably had no idea what would happen.

“Ah! The Dun Jia chart is a barrier, so spirits can’t get in! No need to panic!” Mutsuko called.

“You could have mentioned that earlier! And if that’s the case, let us in, too!” Yuichi snapped.

He returned to Mutsuko’s side and stepped into the bounds of the Dun Jia diagram. Just as she had said, it seemed the spirits couldn’t get inside.

Mutsuko began to add rice to the resonator and stir, suggesting the preparations were complete. Then she began to chant the misogi-harai prayer of purification:

“I ask with utmost humility and submission, of the myriad gods of heaven and earth, that the great gods of purification — given form by the will of the gods and goddesses that dwell in high heaven at the time of our honored father Izanagi-no-Mikoto’s purification at Tsukushi-no-Himuka-no-Tachibana-no-Odo-no-Agihara — might purify and cleanse me of my failings, sins, and filth.”

“Your sister has a pretty good memory, huh?” Aiko said, standing beside Yuichi, apparently impressed that Mutsuko was chanting the complicated prayer from memory.

“Noro, are you okay?” Yuichi asked.

“Yeah, looks like I can handle this.”

He’d be hard-pressed to understand the reason why, but apparently she could handle Shinto chants.

Now that he thought about it, Mutsuko had a Confucian diagram, a Buddhist sutra, and a Shinto ritual and prayer. He wondered if it was okay to jumble it all together like this.

Mutsuko spoke the prayer several times, and at last, there was a ring from the pot. That was enough to cause the swarming spirits to writhe in pain.

Mutsuko lifted the lid of the resonator, then bowed, clapped twice, added more rice, and bowed again. The ringing sounds from the pot began to echo even louder.

“Okay! Everyone else do the same thing!” she cried.

“Huh? You never mentioned this!” Yuichi had assumed Mutsuko would take care of the whole thing.

“Participation is mandatory!” Mutsuko ordered. “Now, snap to it!”

Urged on by his big sister, Yuichi joined in on the ritual. Aiko followed, and the ringing from the pot grew even more violent.

The next thing they knew, all the spirits had vanished from the roof. The pot was ringing with an incredible sound now.

“Okay, Yu, pick up the pot!” Mutsuko declared.

“Huh? You can’t mean...”

“Yep! We’ve gotta take the pot around the school to exorcise all the spirits!”

Just as he’d thought.

In the end, it took until night to purge the whole school of spirits.

Yuichi felt extremely embarrassed walking all around the school carrying the loudly clanging pot, but when Mutsuko told him to do something, he couldn’t go against her. He got quite a few side glances from teachers, but Mutsuko managed to excuse her way around it.

According to Mutsuko, the Narikama ritual was quite a powerful exorcism method. It could completely restore any space to its pristine state. Yuichi tended to think of these kinds of things as scams, but it seemed all lingering signs in the space had been completely washed away. That meant it must work on quite powerful spirits, too.

Yuichi came to school the next day and indeed, he didn’t see any spirits. Thanks to the Narikama ritual, the school was at peace once more, which both eliminated the danger of Yuichi being attacked by spirits, and meant that he wouldn’t have to date Reiko Takasugi.

He went to see Misaki Gokumon at lunch, but she wasn’t acting like anything had changed. She really must not have realized what she had been doing.

That should clear up the whole spirit mess, Yuichi thought. Still, he returned to the roof once more.

As expected, he found Nami there.

“So you didn’t move on, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. After I fall, I think I go somewhere else for a while... then the next thing I know, I’m in the school. I go to the roof and fall off, then do it all again. So I guess I was unaffected by the exorcism in the time I was gone after falling? Well, I guess not having the others around might make things a little easier for me...”

It seemed the pot only had any effect while the ritual was still in progress.

“What about the chains?” Yuichi asked.

“I haven’t seen any yet today,” she said. “But why are you doing here, Sakaki? You don’t have to interact with me anymore.”

“Unlike the others who only moaned, I could actually talk to you,” Yuichi said. “I can’t just leave a sentient being who seems to be suffering on her own.”

“Ah, do I seem to be suffering? Well, I suppose I do have a regret... I can’t stop wondering about how things came to this.”

“Yeah, I heard the circumstances around that were a bit odd,” Yuichi said. “Could you tell me more?”

Two had fallen. One had died, and the other had gone missing. According to the article, the girl who’d died was Nami Eto, and the one who’d gone missing was Chie Amatsu.

“It was an accident,” Nami said. “We did have a fight, but I wasn’t trying to kill her. I don’t think Chie was trying to kill me, either. There’s a fence here now, but at the time it was only a railing, and it broke in the scuffle.”

“So what happened after you fell together? That’s the mystery.”

“Chie was falling a little before me, but she disappeared before my eyes. That’s the last thing I remember. After that, I probably just hit the ground.”

“She disappeared?” Yuichi asked.

“Yeah,” Nami said. “I think that’s what I can’t stop thinking about. I really want to know where Chie went.”

That meant Nami wouldn’t be able to escape her cycle until the mystery was solved.

“I’m going to look into the incident a little more,” Yuichi said. “Maybe if I find other mysterious disappearances, I might learn something.” And if he told his sister about this, she might get some inspiration.

“Really? Well, I’ll wait, though my hopes aren’t high.”

“You’re gonna jump again?” he asked.

“Yeah. But I won’t do it in front of you again.”

It was true that he didn’t want to watch someone jump off a building, so he left Nami behind on the roof.

✽✽✽✽✽

It was automatic.

It existed only to capture the spirits in the surrounding area.

It did not do so by the will of its master, Misaki Gokumon; it just took control of every spirit within a certain range, and then when she went out of range, it released them. That was all it did.

It had some will of its own, but that will was not connected to Misaki’s. It simply needed it to capture spirits. The chains would wrap around the spirits and make them slaves, but if it just attacked them, they would get away. So it had arrived at this sort of pseudo-consciousness, out of necessity.

It now felt uncertain.

There was no prey.

The usually plentiful spirits were all gone without a trace.

But the instinct to ensnare spirits was almost like a hunger. It wouldn’t give up just because there weren’t any nearby.

It extended its chains throughout the school, but there were no spirits anywhere.

Nevertheless, it searched tenaciously for its prey.

Then at last, it arrived at the roof where it found a single spirit.

The chain reached for the spirit, but before it could catch her, the spirit fell.

The chain followed it from the roof to the ground. The spirit struck the ground and disappeared.

Its hard-fought prey was gone, but undeterred, it resumed searching for others.

That was when it noticed them.

There were spirits nearby — a nest of spirits filled with evil.

If it hadn’t pursued that spirit, it never would have noticed them. If it’d had feelings, it would have rejoiced.

But it did not, and so all it did was extend its chains towards its new prey, and drag them out from the darkness in which they were bound.

✽✽✽✽✽

It was the morning two days after the exorcism. The weather looked bad. Dark gray clouds covered the sky, and it felt like it might rain at any moment.

As usual, Yuichi was walking to school with Aiko. The minute he entered the school, he realized something was strange.

“What is... this?” he asked.

There was a man’s torso crawling along the floor. He had no bottom half, and something like that looked like reddish-black rope trailed out behind his stomach — probably his intestines. There was no sign of pain in his expression, only overwhelming hatred.

There was a woman crawling around on four strangely elongated limbs. She moved like a spider, her head turning around and around as if searching for something.

There was an inhuman thing with legs growing from its head left that blood behind wherever it stepped.

Above each hung the label “Specter.” Indeed, they did seem far more wicked and monstrous than the “Spirits” he had seen before.

Aiko clung to Yuichi.

“Can you see them?” he asked, although Aiko’s eyes were still black.

“Yeah, I asked Akiko and she had some contacts that would hide the red. I’m wearing them right now,” she said.

“Akiko’s pretty incredible, huh?” he commented. Akiko was the maid who worked in Aiko’s house. Yuichi was impressed by the idea, but then realized it might have just been a traditional way for vampires to disguise their eyes.

“But does this mean the exorcism didn’t work?” he asked.

The “Specter”s weren’t wearing any chains, which may have been why they weren’t attacking Yuichi directly. But while they were just wandering around for now, it was hard to believe they should just be left at large.

Even so, Yuichi and Aiko couldn’t afford to be late to class, so they headed for their classroom.

Another specter arrived in the middle of class, a pale, tall, slender women that slipped in through the hallway-side window. She had no eyes, only blank eye sockets that served as the one dark spot on her pale body.

The lack of eyes didn’t seem to matter to her, though, as she bent over as if to peer into a student’s face with great concentration.

“Not you.” She then moved to the next student, and leaned in again. “Not you.”

She came up to Yuichi.

“Not—”

Yuichi formed a spear hand and plunged it through the woman’s neck. She spat up blood and then fell onto the ground, writhing and rolling. Of course, hardly anyone in the class noticed.

This isn’t good... he thought. The specters seemed to be growing more active.

During lunch break, Yuichi decided to check the 1-B classroom, but Misaki Gokumon wasn’t there. It seemed she was absent that day, which suggested she wasn’t connected to the specters’ appearance.

Yuichi waited until after class to head up to the roof with Aiko.

They had contacted Mutsuko in advance, so she was already there before them. She had her miko garb on and had already started the Narikama ritual. She added the rice and began the chant, but unlike before, it didn’t begin ringing.

“What’s wrong?” Yuichi asked. Knowing Mutsuko, it was unlikely that she had made a mistake in the execution.

“It’s no use. It won’t ring out in a place that’s too impure.” Mutsuko furrowed her brow.

Which meant they’d need to find a new way of purging the spirits.

“What’s going on here, anyway?” Yuichi asked.

Black clouds had covered the sky. It was hard to believe the presence of specters would even affect the weather, but there was still something deeply ominous about it.

“Hmm, I guess the purging of all the spirits created a spiritual vacuum here, so other spirits came to take their place! Naturally!” Mutsuko said.

“Naturally?! Why did we do the exorcism at all then?”

Nami approached them, the pot seeming to have no power over her when it wasn’t ringing. “You mentioned other spirits, but... I saw someone who looked like Chie earlier. She seemed strange... like there was a shadow over her face...”

“Were you able to talk to her?” Yuichi asked.

“Actually... she seemed really dangerous... so I ran away...”

“Well, I guess I’ve gotta go around beating them all...” he sighed. Maybe that would just end up summoning new specters, but it was the only thing Yuichi could think of.

Yuichi was just about to go out and start punching specters when Chiharu appeared.

“I have completed my errand!” Chiharu declared. “As you surmised, Sage Mutsuko, I detected an unusual presence on a second floor classroom! It is packed full of evil creatures with power levels ranging from minus 2,000 to minus 30,000!” She was spouting seemingly random numbers as usual. There was an enormous compound bow in her hand, which she was probably using to attack the specters and protect herself.

“Ah-ha! Thanks, Dannoura!” Mutsuko exclaimed.

“What’s she talking about?” Yuichi asked. He didn’t understand at all. They must have been plotting something before Yuichi arrived.

“I thought back on the story up till now and realized there must be something strange going on in this school, so I had Dannoura watch Eto’s fall from the athletic fields,” Mutsuko explained.

“But the specters can’t really be in the classroom like she said, right?” he asked. It was had to believe they could have all been there and never hurt anyone before.

“Actually, I think you have to go in through the window to get there,” Mutsuko said. “In other words, it’s all a matter of direction. Maybe it’s a type of katatagae, lucky and unlucky directions. Just the smallest slip-up can take you to another dimension!”

Katatagae was a ritual where you avoided traveling directly in certain directions, based on an old idea that traveling in certain directions would put you in contact with evil gods and get you cursed. Yuichi had a feeling it had nothing to do with katatagae directly, but more that you needed a certain process to get there.

“That means, Yu, you have to enter the second floor classroom by jumping off the roof!” Mutsuko declared. “Then you can find the nest of evil spirits and beat them all at once!”

“I wonder if there’s a high school student out there who’s jumped off more roofs than me...” Yuichi whispered.

Of course, he couldn’t defy Mutsuko.

Yuichi stood facing the fence as the evening sunlight streamed over the roof.

He was jumping from the side facing the athletic fields, so there was a good chance he might be seen. He had to plan the timing just right.

“You can go now!” Mutsuko called.

Mutsuko must have been making her decision based on watching the athletic field. Yuichi heard her voice through the glasses he was wearing.

The glasses were the same wearable computer that he had worn during the incident involving Aiko’s big brother Kyoya. They contained a transmitter that let Mutsuko see and hear whatever Yuichi did. He wasn’t sure if she had brought them for this purpose, but she’d had them in her bag.

Yuichi jumped straight up, grabbed the top of the fence, and jumped over. Then he plunged down at top speed.

He could see Chiharu on the athletic field, bow at the ready. He could hear the string sounding out just as he jumped. It was her Azusa Yumi support fire driving away the specters near the entrance.

He reached the second floor window in an instant, grabbed the upper frame, and changed his trajectory to leap into the classroom.

He rolled over once to slow his momentum, then stood up immediately. He didn’t have time to lie around — he was probably in the middle of an enemy hive.

Despite the evening sun shining outside, it was very dark in the classroom. It was like the outside light couldn’t make it in.

The interior of the classroom was different from what Yuichi knew. Like the old school building, it was made of wood. It had also been badly weathered by time: most of the chairs and desks had half rotted away. It felt like a place that had been abandoned for decades.

There was a thick layer of dust on the floor, like ash, and a quick look around revealed notable traces of old burn marks in the classroom.

Is this another dimension, then? Yuichi wondered. This place looked nothing like the Seishin High School he was used to.

The place was swarming with pallid human figures. They didn’t move right away, as if uncertain as to how to respond. Maybe they hadn’t expected anyone to come in here that hadn’t been dragged.

“Specter.” Yuichi saw the labels above the heads of all the figures at once. They were identifiable as human, but just barely — they were all twisted in some way. Some had no limbs, some were bleeding from their eyes. Some were giant; some were tiny; some were mostly intact aside from huge swollen portions.

Yuichi looked around the classroom.

He’d come in here to destroy them all, but he’d been asked for one more thing: Chie Amatsu.

If Chie had been pulled into this world, then she might be here somewhere. Nami had wanted him to save her if possible.

Of course, I doubt she’s still alive... he thought. Nami likely knew that, too.

The only label he saw around him was “Specter,” which meant Chie might be a specter already. If she was, then unfortunately, he’d be forced to take her out.

“Chie Amatsu! Are you in here?” Yuichi called out.

“Gruuuuuh!” In response, the specters let out a choir of moans. Then they began to shuffle towards Yuichi.

“I wasn’t asking for you guys!” he shouted.

A nearby specter attacked, attempting to grab him. Yuichi launched a fist at the part that looked most like a face. He felt it impact, and the specter went flying.

“You’re not scary if I can punch you!” he added.

He mowed down the specters with kicks. He grabbed heads and plunged knees into faces. He snatched hands, broke elbows, twisted bodies, and tossed them against the floor.

And as he drove away the attacking specters, all the while he looked for Chie.

✽✽✽✽✽

“What on earth? This is crazy...” Aiko said in disbelief.

She was used to seeing Yuichi in brawls, but watching him pound the hell out of those specter things with his bare fists had still spurred her to comment.

They were watching the battle on the screen of Mutsuko’s tablet on one corner of the roof.

“Yeah! It’s a shame I can’t see it. I can see the weird ruined parallel world, but not the specters!” Mutsuko cried in chagrin.

Aiko’s eyes could see the specters, though, even through the display, so she explained to Mutsuko what she was seeing.

“The key is imagination,” Mutsuko said. “In other words, you picture your opponent in your mind and imagine punching them and twisting them and sending them flying! If you can do this, you can even fight spirits, no problem. And generally speaking, living beings will be stronger than incorporeal ones.”

“So it’s all about the mindset?” Aiko asked.

“Yes! It’s a battle of wills, and Yu can never lose a battle of wills! He might look flighty, but he hates to lose, and he’s overconfident, and cocky, too! The thought of losing never enters his mind!”

It was a horrible thing for his own sister to say, but Aiko sympathized a bit.

“Um, I understand why he can punch them, but why do the ghosts’ attacks just pass through him in return?” Aiko wondered. She could see that Yuichi’s attacks were effective, but not why the specters’ attacks weren’t.

“That’s an imagination thing, too,” explained Mutsuko. “In other words, you’ve gotta think, ‘These attacks won’t hurt me! There’s no such thing as ghosts!’ Then they won’t hurt you.”

“Um, am I the only one who thinks that’s... kind of cheating?” Aiko said.

In other words, in the instant Yuichi hit them, he was imagining that the ghost existed, but when the ghost attacked him, he negated the attack by denying its existence.

“Well, it’s usually the other way around!” Mutsuko declared. “I think it’s good for the ghosts to get a taste of their own medicine!”

Mutsuko was right that this was the reverse of the way Aiko usually imagined it going. Most people believed that ghosts could harm people, but not the other way around.

“The question is, where is Chie? Eto, do you see her?” Mutsuko asked to a random part of thin air.

Aiko could see Nami, though, who was pointing to a corner of the screen.

“Sakaki! To the right, at the end there! Chie’s in the seat on the rightmost side, second desk from the front!” Aiko said, talking to the tablet.

✽✽✽✽✽

But Yuichi didn’t even need Aiko’s direction.

He had already defeated all the specters, and the seat furthest to the right, second from the front, contained a girl who had been there the whole time without budging an inch.

The label “Specter” hung over her head, but she was wearing a Seishin High girls’ uniform. There was no one else who looked like that, which meant this must be Chie. Nami had said she seemed different, but Yuichi didn’t notice anything strange about her other than a slightly hazy silhouette.

Yuichi walked up to Chie. “Are you Amatsu?”

“Who are you?” Chie asked in an empty voice, not even looking at him. Her eyes remained where they were, pointed to the front of the room.

“My name’s Yuichi Sakaki,” he said. “Nami Eto asked me to come here and save you.”

“Nami... Eto... Nami...”

“Yeah. You remember her?”

Chie muttered absently, and Yuichi began to wonder if she still had any right mind left. Would she still have any memories of her old life after becoming a specter?

“Nami... Yes... because of her... I was killed, and then...”

“Amatsu?” he asked.

Chie looked at Yuichi for the first time. There was a smile on her face: an emotionless, pasted-on smile that caused Yuichi to jump back from fright.

The attack that came from the side a second later grazed his face. Chie’s arms were still on the desk. But there was a third arm reaching out to grab Yuichi. Then, there was a fourth, and then a fifth.

The label above her head had changed to “Superficial Bodhisattva.”

“She feels less like a Bodhisattva and more like an Ashura, to me...” he muttered.

A few months ago, he might not have been able to dodge this, but his experience fighting monsters had helped him to mature. The growth of a few arms wouldn’t be enough to throw him off.

“Let me see... I don’t know who you are, but perhaps I’ll send your head to Nami,” Chie said, her smile unwavering.

She still had her mind, it seemed... but that mind was a prisoner to madness.

✽✽✽✽✽

Aiko and the others were heading for the athletics field.

“No matter what monster you face, don’t be afraid, don’t feel despair, and don’t freeze up in horror,” Mutsuko said. “I wanted to train Yu so that his first thought would always be, ‘How do I beat it?’ And he’s finally getting there!”

As usual, the things Mutsuko said felt utterly inhumane, but Aiko had gotten used to that, too.

“If he keeps this up, he should make it in time,” Mutsuko added in a whisper that Aiko couldn’t quite make out.

They arrived on the field and met up with Chiharu. “How are things going? Most of the numbers within have vanished, so I assume that Yuichi Sakaki is winning. N-Not that I was worried! It’s just that I wish to be the one to defeat him, myself!”

“Are you a tsundere-slash-rival now?” Aiko objected mildly.

“Yeah, I guess he’s fighting the final boss?” Mutsuko said. “Though I sure hope he’s not making Chie the final boss... wasn’t he supposed to save her?”

“Um... well, in the state she’s in, she’s probably not capable of asking to be saved...” Nami said in a low voice, suddenly beside them.

They watched Yuichi fight through the tablet screen.

“Uh, am I the only one who feels bad for the specters?” Aiko asked.

“Yeah, this is a little off-putting...” Mutsuko mused.

Yuichi had pulled off Chie’s arms and was beating her with them. Chie’s archaic smile remained, yet there was something strained about it now.

Chie continued growing more arms to attack Yuichi, but Yuichi dealt with them head-on. When an arm struck out at him, he struck back and caused it to vanish, or tore it off and threw it away. As this happened over and over again, Chie started to recoil in fear.

Yuichi had her on the ropes.

As they arrived at the window’s edge, he mercilessly kicked Chie in the solar plexus, a hard enough blow to likely kill a human.

“Ah.” Aiko looked up at the second floor classroom.

The window glass broke and Chie fell out. Yuichi fell after, to stomp her on the ground.

“Graaaagh!” Chie let out a desperate scream of a sort rarely heard from a girl. Her pasted-on smile disappeared, her face becoming tormented by fear and despair.

“Chie!” Unable to just sit back and watch this, Nami ran up and covered Chie protectively. Then she glared up at Yuichi, and cried, “Stop it!”

“Um... I got Amatsu out of there?” Yuichi said, brow furrowed.

“Sakaki... did you totally forget until now that you’d gone there to save her?” Aiko shouted.

“Yuichi Sakaki... this seems a bit excessive, even for you,” Chiharu added.

Both of them were dumbstruck.

“Nami... why... you killed me... why save me?” the specter murmured.

“I didn’t! I fell and died, too! It was an accident! No one was at fault!”

“Nami...” Chie responded weakly. Her form had grown dim and started to disappear.

“Chie, I’m sorry,” Nami sobbed. “I’m sorry we fell! I’m sorry I couldn’t save you!”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Chie murmured. “The grudge I held against you is the reason I ended up in this form...”

“Hey! Why is Chie disappearing?” Nami cried.

“I don’t really know...” Yuichi frowned, unsure of how to answer her.

She was likely disappearing because of Yuichi’s attacks, but it had been the only way to get her to listen to reason. Thus, Nami wouldn’t have been able to work things out with her if he hadn’t, so maybe things had worked out for the best.

“Maybe she’s trying to move on?” Mutsuko suggested. “She had turned into a specter, but if her grudge against Nami has disappeared, maybe she’s starting to disappear because she’s free.”

“Chie... I’ll go with you, then. My regret about you was the only thing keeping me here...” Nami’s form began to fade, as well.

As the two wrapped their arms around each other, they disappeared together.

✽✽✽✽✽

By the next day, Seishin High School was totally back to normal. Of course, hardly anyone had noticed anything strange to begin with, so most of the students were acting the same as ever. Even Reiko Takasugi, who was venerated for her sixth sense, didn’t seem to be acting any differently. She hadn’t seemed to notice the specter invasion in the school the day before, either.

“Sakaki, how have you been feeling? You don’t have much time left...” Reiko warned.

“Hmm, I feel pretty good. I don’t think you have to go out of your way to help me,” he replied. He had been walking with Aiko after class when he happened upon Reiko Takasugi in the hall.

Reiko had her groupies with her, as always. Misaki Gokumon, who had been absent the day before, was now present. Her face was rather pale, and she seemed unsteady on her feet. It seemed she had taken the day off yesterday because she was feeling sick, and it looked like she hadn’t fully recovered yet.

“I see. If you say so,” Reiko replied, brimming with confidence. Perhaps she still expected him to give in to her in the end, as others had all done before.

As the group passed by, Yuichi unleashed a backfist. He hooked his fingers and struck Misaki’s back with the back of his hand.

The head of the “Specter” went flying and dispersed, and the chain leading out from Misaki’s waist vanished at the same time. It seemed Yuichi couldn’t see the chains unless they were holding a spirit in them.

It was the specter that was causing Misaki’s illness. Even if she caught them with chains, she couldn’t control them, and it seemed the specter had possessed her.

That should do it for now, but the same thing could still happen again... he thought.

Misaki had to find a way to control her “Medium” ability. It might mean parting ways with Reiko, but that part wasn’t any of Yuichi’s business.

“Hey. Do you think I can banish specters, too?” Aiko suddenly asked, with eyes filled with hope.

“Hmm, you probably shouldn’t try,” Yuichi said after a moment’s thought. “You can see them, and you probably could beat them, but I think it would make you vulnerable to spirit influences.”

To acknowledge the existence of specters meant acknowledging the power they could have over you. Unless you had a firm belief that you could beat them, it seemed better not to get involved.

While they discussed the subject, they eventually arrived at the school’s exit.

“Well, well! If it isn’t Yuichi Sakaki!” Chiharu called out, her instrument case on her back.

“Don’t act like we just happened to run into each other! We agreed to meet here!” he shot back. They had decided to patrol the school just to be safe, so she had been waiting for him there.

The three of them walked around the school together, but they found nothing amiss. At the end, they decided to stop by the roof.

There would no longer be a sad spirit there throwing herself off of it... or so they thought when they came, but they were surprised by what they saw:

Chie Amatsu, “Specter.”

“What are you doing here?” Yuichi demanded.

“Uh, I guess you could say I’d built up too much bad karma to move on,” she admitted. “Or maybe I ended up with new unfinished business?”

“Did Eto move on?” Yuichi asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know if it’s Heaven or the Pure Land, but she definitely went ‘upstairs.’ She hadn’t really done anything wrong. I got denied, though.”

“Does that mean the specters I beat up didn’t move on, either?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “They just sorta got blasted to bits. They might re-coalesce soon enough, but I doubt they’ll come back here again. They’re scared of you, Yuichi.”

“Why did you come back, then?” he asked.

“Hey... even if I am a spirit, we can make it work as long as we can touch, right?”

“Huh?” He couldn’t understand what she was talking about.

“See, I died before I could get a boyfriend, and I really feel like I missed out,” she said. “I never had a proper youth, and I still want a proper high school experience. So I thought... since there’s a boy here who can touch ghosts, that’s pretty perfect!”

“Unacceptable! I shall be forced to purge you myself!” Chiharu shouted. She began to unpack the bow from the instrument case on her back. “Yuichi Sakaki is a part of my harem! No specter shall ever lay hand upon him!”

“When did I become a part of your harem?” Yuichi muttered.

Chiharu began twanging the bow string again and again. The invisible arrows flew in a torrent, but Chie blasted them away easily. She had been sort of like the specters’ boss, which suggested she must have had quite a lot of power.

“Damn! And isn’t this change of character a bit too sudden?!” Chiharu shouted. Perhaps because her attacks didn’t worked, Chiharu began to scold the specter on other, more random points.

“Sakaki... this ability you have that Takeuchi mentioned, to befriend the people you beat up... it’s really something...” Aiko said with a furrow of her brow.

“I do not have that ability! At least... I don’t think I do, anyway...”

Yuichi couldn’t actually say with confidence that he didn’t.