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.
The Strongest Little Brother’s Commonplace Encounters with the Bizarre?! Page 15