Chapter 34: Mysterious Girl
It did not take long after Gin Tsumugi and the others left for the aftermath to arrive.
Sirens wailed through the thinning night as more than a dozen police vehicles sped through the empty streets and came to a sharp halt outside the gates of Houjou University Attached High School. Uniformed officers poured out at once, moving with practiced urgency as they sealed off the entire campus and erected a perimeter to keep civilians away.
The residents who had gathered in the surrounding streets to watch from a distance immediately understood that something serious had happened.
And not just serious.
With so many police cars, so many officials, and, most notably, so many onmyoji in white kariginu stepping out alongside them, it was obvious this was no ordinary explosion.
Something supernatural had erupted at Houjou University Attached High School.
At that point, even if the academy's administration wanted to bury the matter, it was already impossible.
The scale alone had gone beyond anything a school could contain. Once the missing students and the casualties tied to the case were fully brought to light, the academy would have no choice but to face the consequences, especially from the families who had lost their children.
In the abandoned park area, the scene was already under full investigation.
Officials worked under floodlights while onmyoji from the Onmyo Agency moved through the ruined grounds, carefully checking for lingering contamination, hidden curses, or traces of hostile entities. Every visible detail was being photographed, tagged, and recorded.
At the edge of the nearly drained Bing Lake, Kohara Daisuke, the official administrative head responsible for Shibuya Ward, stood staring at the lakebed with an expression so grim it bordered on ugly.
There, lying in blackened silence amid mud and ruin, was the corpse of the monster.
The Wedding Dress Tree.
"So this is the strange wishing tree from three months ago," he said at last, voice low and tight. "Who would've thought it was actually a yokai capable of forming a Ghost Domain?"
Beside him, Ibe Tomoya, branch chief of the Shibuya Ward Onmyo Agency, looked no better.
If anything, his expression was even worse.
A yokai of this level had been hiding in plain sight within his jurisdiction, right under the Onmyo Agency nose, and neither the civil administration nor the Agency had truly realized what they were dealing with.
That was not merely embarrassing.
It was dereliction of duty.
And for Ibe Tomoya, the sting was sharper than most.
When the strange wishing tree had first been reported, he had personally led the team that went to Houjou University Attached High School, uprooted it, and sealed it. Looking back now, the whole thing had been nothing but a shell, a trick, a deliberate misdirection. He, the branch chief of the Shibuya Ward Onmyo Agency, had been toyed with by a yokai and never noticed.
Even though he had indeed filed a report about its abnormality afterward, that was still nowhere near enough to wash away the shame of it.
Kohara Daisuke exhaled heavily, cold sweat still lingering from the memory of the report he had received earlier that night.
"Thank goodness the White Fox Office stepped in. If Lord White Fox hadn't acted in time..." He let the rest hang, then muttered with lingering dread, "I don't even want to imagine what this would've turned into. Those students could have gone on disappearing one by one without any of us ever realizing what was happening."
"That's the truth of it," Ibe Tomoya said grimly. "The fact that this incident was resolved before it turned into a full scale disaster is entirely thanks to Lord Gin Tsumugi."
Even with his own status as a Ninth Rank Professional Onmyoji and branch chief of the Shibuya Ward Bureau, he still addressed Gin Tsumugi with formal respect.
Because only someone standing where he stood could truly understand how outrageous that young man's strength had become.
Ibe Tomoya knew his own limits very well.
If he had been the one forced to face a yokai that could weave a Ghost Domain, surviving would already have been a miracle. Defeating it would have been a fantasy.
That alone made one thing painfully clear.
The Ninth Rank on Gin Tsumugi's certificate and the Ninth Rank on everyone else's were not the same thing at all.
"No wonder Lord Miyoshi openly said Lord Gin Tsumugi has a real chance of entering the National Level within three years."
Ibe Tomoya looked down at the Wedding Dress Tree's charred remains and narrowed his eyes.
"And that Fire Boundary Spell..." he murmured. "Its power and intensity are absurd. That's not something a normal Professional Level onmyoji should be able to cast. It already rivals Lord Enma's fire arts."
As a Ninth Rank Professional himself, he had more than enough discernment to judge what he was seeing.
The Wedding Dress Tree had been killed by fire.
Not ordinary fire.
Not ceremonial flame.
But a Fire Boundary Spell refined to a terrifying level.
"I'll handle this investigation personally," Ibe Tomoya said. "A yokai capable of forming a Ghost Domain is no minor matter."
Kohara Daisuke gave a quick nod.
The two of them moved down toward the dried out lakebed, intending to examine the Wedding Dress Tree more closely.
Then everything stopped.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
The officers.
The onmyoji.
The drifting leaves.
The breeze.
Even Kohara Daisuke and Ibe Tomoya themselves froze in place as though some invisible hand had pressed the world into stillness.
Time seemed to halt.
Only one sound remained.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Footsteps on dead leaves.
From the darkness beyond the ruined park, a young girl walked slowly toward the lake.
She wore a luxurious kimono of red and gold, so exquisitely made that even under the bleak night sky it seemed to glow with a richness that ordinary fabrics could never possess. Her presence was strange, almost contradictory. One moment she carried the untouchable dignity of a princess. The next, the elegance of a noblewoman. Then the soft tenderness of a bride. Then a charm so dangerous and alluring it could ruin any man who looked too long.
All of those qualities coexisted within her, perfectly fused.
It was not mere beauty.
It was enchantment.
The kind that felt almost unlawful.
At her pale ankles, golden ring bells chimed softly with each step, their crisp notes spreading through the frozen silence.
And yet the most unsettling thing about her was not her clothes, nor her aura.
It was her face.
Or rather, the fact that it could not be seen.
A mysterious force blurred her features, veiling them from the world itself. No matter how one looked, no one could truly behold her countenance, as though heaven itself had forbidden others from gazing upon it.
She came to a stop before the charred Wedding Dress Tree.
For a moment, she said nothing.
Then, in a low voice touched by unmistakable melancholy, she murmured, "Even after I sheltered you for a thousand years... you still could not escape the calamity that was meant to claim you."
Her gaze rested on the corpse of the tree.
The sorrow in her voice lasted only an instant.
Then it vanished.
What replaced it was coldness.
With a flick of her sleeve, the earth around the deepest roots of the Wedding Dress Tree split open.
What lay buried there was revealed.
Fruit.
Dozens upon dozens of blood red fruits.
They clung tightly to the tree's primary root system, packed together in dense clusters like some grotesque organ grown in secret underground. Nearby lay more than a dozen shriveled fruits, dried out entirely, as if they had long since been drained empty to nourish the tree itself.
The sight would have made anyone who had seen the earlier Minato Ward case shudder.
Because these fruits were identical to the ones produced by the Weird Wood Spirit that had consumed Kasugano Sora's family.
Not merely similar.
The same kind.
The girl let out a cold snort.
"What a clever scheme. Using Yamata no Orochi as the obvious blade was not enough. You wanted to push even this concubine into the light as well, to draw the onmyoji's fire."
She raised one hand.
In the next moment, every single blood red fruit turned to ash.
"Did you think I would obediently play your role for you?"
The windless stillness pressed around her, eerie and absolute.
Then she turned her gaze southwest.
Toward Shibuya.
Toward the White Fox Office.
"Though he is this concubine's mortal enemy, I have no desire to face him again," she said softly. "And yet... you have already exposed a corner of yourselves before him."
A pause.
Then, with faint amusement and a trace of something darker, she added, "It will not be long before your nightmare begins."
With that, she lightly swept her sleeve once more.
The ruined earth closed. The lakebed returned to its previous appearance. The traces of the buried fruits vanished as though they had never existed.
And then the girl disappeared.
The instant she was gone, the eerie stillness broke.
Time resumed.
The breeze moved again. Leaves fell. Officers shifted. Ibe Tomoya and Kohara Daisuke blinked almost at the same time, a vague ripple of confusion passing through both their faces.
Something felt off.
As though a piece of memory had been torn out just now.
As though they had forgotten something important.
But no matter how hard they searched their minds, they could find nothing concrete.
The feeling passed quickly, leaving behind only an indistinct unease.
After a few seconds, both men unconsciously dismissed it and returned to their work.
Around them, the rest of the investigators did the same.
The investigation continued in orderly fashion beneath the bright floodlights, no one aware that a mysterious girl in red and gold had stood among them only moments earlier, or that the truth hidden beneath the roots of the Wedding Dress Tree had already been erased before their eyes.
.....
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