Chapter 24: Touma Kazusa
Beneath the dim shine of the star filled night, the abandoned park of Houjou University Attached High School looked eerier than ever.
Weeds had long since swallowed the paths. Under the pale moonlight, the trees twisted into grotesque shapes, their shadows stretching across the ground like clawed hands. The rusted playground equipment nearby creaked faintly in the wind, adding another layer of desolation to the place.
Even before the supernatural incident, this park had already been infamous.
Among the students of Houjou University Attached High School, it had always been one of the academy's most popular ghost story spots. Countless rumors had been born here.
Over the years, the school administration had tried more than once to redevelop the area. There had been plans to build a library here, or perhaps a swimming facility, or some other major campus addition. But for one reason or another, the projects had been delayed again and again until nothing ever came of them.
Now that a real supernatural incident had broken out here, even if the school had managed to suppress its spread to a very limited range, construction was obviously no longer happening anytime soon.
"To think that after more than a year, I'd return to Houjou University Attached High School in a way like this."
Gin Tsumugi stepped through the overgrown weeds, looking toward the seven story teaching building not far from the park. For a moment, he could not help but feel how unpredictable life had become.
A year ago, he had just been another student sitting in a classroom, living an ordinary life no different from the countless students still studying here now.
If spiritual recovery had never happened, perhaps his days would still be that quiet and monotonous.
Thinking about it carefully, ever since dropping out, this was indeed his first time returning to Houjou University Attached High School.
"Enough reminiscing."
Gin exhaled lightly and gathered his thoughts.
Business came first.
He continued toward the place Ogiso Setsuna had identified as the original location of the wishing tree. But before he had gone far, a series of dull, heavy sounds reached his ears.
In a place like this, at an hour like this, such sounds would have been enough to scare the life out of an ordinary person.
Gin, however, only grew curious.
Who could it be?
Who would come here at this time?
In the eyes of the public, this park was now a forbidden place, a site that had already been tainted by a supernatural incident. Most people would avoid it at all costs. Who would be so reckless as to enter it voluntarily?
Relying on the moonlight, Gin finally saw the source of the sound.
It was near the spot where the wishing tree had once stood.
Someone was swinging a shovel again and again, digging into the earth with obvious effort.
The moment he saw that figure clearly, his eyes narrowed.
So it was her.
Why was she here?
And more importantly, she carried the same hidden mark Ogiso Setsuna did.
Still as solitary and stubborn as ever.
"Huff... huff... it should be here. I clearly remember she buried it in this spot. So why can't I find it...?"
Touma Kazusa stopped to catch her breath, her small mouth parting as she panted. Her fair face was flushed from exertion, and sweat beaded across her forehead. She wiped it away with her sleeve, breathing unevenly.
For a wealthy young lady who had rarely ever done physical labor in her life, digging through hard ground with a shovel was clearly pushing her to her limit.
Her gaze swept over the seven or eight small pits she had already dug.
All of them were empty.
"Did I remember it wrong? Was I standing too far away that day, so my sense of the exact spot was off?"
Kazusa pushed back the messy strands of black hair clinging to her forehead and stared at the ground in frustration, thinking about where to dig next.
The atmosphere around her was eerie enough to make anyone want to turn around and flee. More than once, the thought had flashed through her mind.
But every time it did, she forcibly crushed it.
She refused to run.
Not after what had already happened.
She had no intention of curling up like everyone else, praying that luck would spare her. That would be nothing but self deception. If the result waiting for her in the end was disappearance, just like the others, then at the very least, she wanted to claw out some truth before that happened.
With that thought, she tightened her grip on the shovel and prepared to dig again.
Then a voice suddenly sounded behind her.
"You won't find anything that way."
The sound came so abruptly, in a place so unnaturally silent, that Kazusa's entire body went rigid.
A surge of cold shot up her spine.
Her pupils shrank at once.
She spun around, forcing herself to suppress the panic in her chest, and shouted with as much courage as she could summon, "Who's there?!"
"It's me."
Kazusa immediately locked onto the source of the voice.
A familiar figure stood not far behind her.
The moment she realized it was a person and not some lurking spirit, the suffocating fear in her heart loosened a little. But that relief lasted only an instant before her expression shifted.
Because the young man standing there slowly overlapped with someone in her memories.
Someone who had disappeared from Houjou University Attached High School over a year ago.
"Gin Tsumugi?!"
Gin looked at her calmly.
"Touma Kazusa. I didn't think we'd meet again under circumstances like these."
Kazusa's willow fine brows drew together.
"What are you doing here?" she asked sharply. "If you don't want trouble, then leave. Right now."
Admittedly, she and Gin had never been especially close. Back in school, they had only exchanged a few brief words now and then. But because of that very distance, she had always retained a clear impression of him. He had carried a quiet, refined air that made him hard to dislike.
That was exactly why she did not want him dragged into this.
Not because she feared for herself.
But because she did not want an outsider to be tainted by the thing haunting her.
"Whether I'll have trouble is one matter," Gin said evenly, "but if you keep digging, then real trouble will arrive very soon."
Kazusa frowned harder.
"What do you mean?"
Gin did not answer directly.
Instead, he drew out a talisman, folded it between his fingers, then slowly tore it into pieces and let the fragments scatter into the air.
"By urgent command, reveal."
The scene that followed made all the warmth drain from Kazusa's body.
Whatever relief she had felt at seeing Gin vanished instantly. The cold surged back into her chest harder than before, so intense it felt as if it were freezing her from the inside out.
She had not noticed it at all.
Not until now.
The park around her was already packed with evil spirits.
They were everywhere.
Ghostly women in bridal gowns filled the surrounding darkness. Their faces were pale and hideous, some already showing signs of decay. Their eye sockets were hollow and dark. Some crawled along the ground. Some dangled from branches overhead. Some stood half buried in the earth like withered flowers planted in cursed soil.
One of them was so close that if it stepped forward once, it could touch her.
Kazusa's teeth began chattering uncontrollably.
"T this..."
She could barely force the words out.
Gin had already moved.
"Namah sarva tathagatebhyo visva mukhebhyaḥ sarvatha... by urgent command."
"Fire Boundary Spell."
He brought his palms together.
In the next instant, blazing solar fire burst forth like a giant serpent, roaring through the park in every direction. Wave after wave of scorching heat surged outward, and the entire abandoned park was lit up as brightly as noon.
Shrieks tore through the darkness.
The bridal gown spirits had no ability to resist.
They were swallowed whole by the Fire Boundary Spell, their bodies igniting instantly before being burned into nothing.
But Gin did not stop there.
His hand signs changed again.
The already terrifying flames suddenly swelled even higher, becoming like an awakened volcano. Layer after layer of fire climbed skyward, erupting into a column of light so massive it looked as if it connected earth and heaven.
Within a radius of several miles, countless people saw it through their windows.
Even if they did not know what had happened, they all understood one thing at once.
A powerful onmyoji was carrying out an exorcism.
No one sane would mistake such a scene for an ordinary fire.
Kazusa stared at the inferno in utter disbelief.
"Gin Tsumugi is actually an onmyoji?!"
At that moment, standing amidst the flames, he looked less like a man and more like some divine being descending into the mortal world.
A glimmer of hope flickered to life inside her, fragile but real.
Could it be... was he really here to deal with the wishing tree?
This was the first time since everything began that hope had appeared in her heart without immediately being crushed by despair.
Meanwhile, Gin's attention had already shifted elsewhere.
There was nothing suspicious on the surface.
The sky above the park was also clear.
Even after using both the Fire Boundary Spell and his spiritual sight to probe the entire area, nothing abnormal had appeared openly.
Touma Kazusa clearly knew something others did not.
That much was beyond doubt.
His hand signs shifted once more.
The raging solar flames from the Fire Boundary Spell changed direction, drilling downward into the earth. The ground blackened inch by inch as the fire seeped into the soil, spreading and probing through every layer beneath the park.
Then Gin's expression changed.
He had found something.
In one specific place, something buried below was obstructing the fire's advance.
"Out."
Boom.
A pillar of fire burst from the ground.
Wrapped inside a fist sized ball of flame, an object slowly floated up and stopped in front of Gin.
Kazusa stared.
"That's... a hairpin!"
As Gin dismissed the flames, the object dropped into his hand.
It was indeed a hairpin.
Its shape and craftsmanship were unmistakably ancient. It did not resemble any modern accessory at all. Instead, it was strikingly similar to the ornaments used by the aristocracy, even the imperial court, during the Heian period.
"Not similar," Gin murmured, examining it closely. "There's a good chance this really is from the Heian period. Possibly even an imperial tribute."
A strange aura lingered around it.
It gave him an odd sense of familiarity.
Yet no matter how he searched through his memory, he could not identify where that feeling came from.
One thing, however, was certain.
This hairpin was extremely important to the entity behind the wishing tree incident.
Otherwise, it would never have stationed so many evil spirits here to guard it.
No.
Not evil spirits.
Ghost servants.
The bridal gown spirits that had gathered around Kazusa earlier were not mere wandering dead. They were ghost servants, most likely transformed from the souls of the girls who had hanged themselves before.
Even so, two questions immediately surfaced.
If this hairpin was so important, why had the wishing tree not retrieved it personally?
And if this hairpin was buried here, along with so many ghost servants lurking nearby, how had the Onmyo Agency failed to notice any of it when they handled the case before?
Kazusa, still staring at the object in his hand, spoke in a low voice.
"A hairpin... so that really was what she buried here."
Gin looked at her.
"Tell me everything you know."
To be safe, he first sealed the hairpin with a talisman before turning back toward Kazusa.
Kazusa hesitated.
"It's not that I don't want to say it... I just don't know where to start."
Gin saw her difficulty and quickly explained why he had come here, including Ogiso Setsuna's commission and the information he had already gathered about the Houjou University Attached High School case.
"Kazusa, I need to know everything you remember. Even small details."
Kazusa listened in silence.
When Gin mentioned Ogiso Setsuna, her eyes flickered.
"So it's Setsuna... I thought she'd already given up."
"That doesn't really suit her," Gin said. "Though she was certainly starting to look desperate."
And that was true.
People like Setsuna and Kazusa were not weak. They had not simply resigned themselves because they were cowards. The problem was that unless an onmyoji had reached Gin's level, most could not even see the abnormality on them, much less solve the underlying incident.
Even Gin himself had originally felt unsure where to begin.
But Kazusa's presence here was an unexpected breakthrough.
If he handled it well, she could become the thread that unraveled the entire knot.
So he asked again, "Who buried that hairpin here?"
Kazusa exhaled slowly.
"It started the day before the wishing tree appeared."
She looked down at the blackened ground.
"That evening, while I was passing through the park, I saw a girl from my grade secretly burying something here. I didn't think much of it at the time and left."
Then her voice hardened.
"The next day, the wishing tree appeared."
"So you suspected her from then on?"
Kazusa immediately shook her head.
"Of course not. I'm not some detective who can connect every clue the moment it appears."
That was fair.
"The reason I started to suspect her came later," Kazusa said. "After the Onmyo Agency uprooted the wishing tree, she was the first person to disappear."
Gin's gaze sharpened.
"And before she vanished, her behavior at school became very strange."
"In what way?"
Kazusa thought for a moment, trying to recall her exact words.
"She would mutter things that made no sense. Terrifying things."
Her expression darkened.
"Like, 'I already paid the price.' Or, 'It has nothing to do with her.' Or, 'They're all dead.' And... 'It wasn't supposed to be like this.'"
Gin fell silent.
That was not much.
But combined with the ghost servants and the hairpin, it was enough to create a real opening in the case.
If he followed this thread carefully, it should lead somewhere.
"What's her name?"
"Kuda Mai," Kazusa answered at once. "Class 2 D."
Gin nodded slowly.
"Then I need your help with one more thing."
Kazusa looked at him without refusing.
She understood perfectly well that helping him now meant helping herself.
Gin took out several talismans and handed them to her.
"These need to go to every student who's been having the same dreams as you. Give each of them one. And tell them not to remove it from their body under any circumstance. Not even for a moment."
Kazusa accepted the talismans carefully.
"I understand."
At Gin's signal, she finally left the park.
Only after her figure had disappeared from sight did he move again.
He drew out another talisman and attached it to his chest.
"Sparrow God's protection, by urgent command."
"Sky Soaring Spirit Talisman."
His body rose effortlessly into the air, breaking free of gravity and soaring upward.
He did not stop until he was dozens of stories above the ground.
From that height, the entire park spread out beneath him.
The dried up lake.
The rock garden.
The small woods.
The abandoned paths.
Everything lay exposed under the moonlight.
And yet even from this vantage point, nothing looked wrong.
"Neither the Fire Boundary Spell nor direct spiritual sight found anything suspicious."
His frown deepened.
The original site of a supernatural incident should not have been this clean.
The hairpin and the ghost servants had already proven that appearances were deceiving.
Gin flicked his wrist.
More than a dozen talismans flew out and vanished into the void around the park, taking their positions in complete silence.
.....
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