WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 18: I'm Mary. Right Now...

──────

Only I could see Gari.

More precisely, the only ones here who could see spirit bodies without any charms or preparation were me and the old man, who was a ghost himself.

Maybe that was why only the old man and I could see the energy being absorbed from the urban legend bus, and the eye that had opened in Gari's ring because of it.

【Eek! It ate a soul! Black magic! This is black magic!!】

Come on, old man.

Isn't keeping your husband around as a shikigami even more black magic?

Anyway, the ring had absorbed the soul from the urban legend bus, and Gari had spoken the name Decarabia.

I shot Gari a sideways glance, asking if it could actually talk.

But Gari didn't use that smooth, reciting voice from before. It only moved its teeth.

Click click!

"Mm..."

I fiddled with the brass ring.

Something inside it was vibrating like it was thrashing around.

It was a faint vibration, but I could clearly feel a will in it. No way.

"Decarabia?"

Ruuumble!

The moment I spoke Decarabia's name, the force churning inside the brass ring began to flow along with my will.

I understood.

This brass ring let me use a demon's power.

"Gari Bodhisattva. We should get moving. We need to find the next urban legend."

"Hey! I've got the engine running! Get in already!"

With Scholar Yoo and Gagaram hurrying me along, I got in the car for now.

It would take a little while to reach our destination.

In the meantime, I sank into thought.

If mages made contracts with demons to cast spells, then those spells were probably Decarabia's abilities.

That meant I might be able to get hints from the spells those mages had used.

They had mainly summoned birds to attack me.

Were they using bird souls like a familiar?

Besides that, they had dropped little star-like things, and the lead mage had shown illusions.

Birds, stars, illusions.

Those were probably the clues to Decarabia's magic.

Quietly, I tried reciting one of the spells the mages had used.

"O one who spreads black wings, answer the contract. Beneath the seal of the stars, gather and take shape according to my will?"

...

...

Nothing happened?

"Gari Bodhisattva? What did you just say?"

"Oh, I was just talking to myself."

Scholar Yoo gave me a puzzled tilt of the head, so I decided to stop testing spells for now.

I needed to watch this a bit longer.

"We're here. Rose Girls' High School. What do you think, Gari Bodhisattva?"

Gagaram looked back and asked me.

The stench hit me first.

The girls' high school was reeking so badly it almost made my skin prickle.

And apparently, I wasn't the only one who noticed.

【Old lady, wake up. Time to work.】

"Ahem!"

Maybe the old man, being a ghost, could sense the urban legend's aura. Park Bokrye opened her eyes from her doze, apparently sensing her husband's attempt to wake her.

Either way, there was definitely an urban legend here.

"Yes, it's here."

* * *

Naturally, every light in the school was out.

A guard was probably making rounds once in a while, but Gagaram or Scholar Yoo would have dealt with anyone like that.

"Grandma, are you going too?"

"Mmm... gotta work~"

Park Bokrye still had her eyes half closed, like the sleep hadn't quite left her yet.

At this point, it felt like I'd heard the old man's ghost voice more than Park Bokrye's actual voice.

"Let's start searching right away. How about we split up?"

"It's practically certain the thing is here, and you want to split up?"

Wasn't that exactly how people got wiped out in horror movies?

There's a ghost or monster right in front of them, and instead of sticking together, they scatter.

I wanted to avoid that horror movie cliché, but unexpectedly, Scholar Yoo agreed.

"These things dislike crowds. When too many people gather, they do not reveal themselves so easily."

Urban legends were supposed to be the kind of beings that revealed themselves on their own, but apparently the number of people was an important part of their story structure too.

"Those dirty bastards. They set traps and lie in wait, then only go after you when you're alone?"

"That's just how the supernatural is."

"But you don't need to worry too much. When an urban legend appears, it'll make some kind of sound. Then we all gather up."

And then we'd swarm it.

Cheap phrasing, sure, but weirdly reassuring.

"All right, then... what about Park Bokrye?"

"Oh my~ I'll go on ahead."

"Park Bokrye... hmm, I don't think we need to worry about her."

The two of them said that and promptly left.

Wait. Did they seriously just dump the old lady on me and bolt?

"..."

"I'm hungry~ Is there a burger place nearby?"

Why had this grandma even come along?

Anyway, I decided to check the places the other two hadn't gone first.

It looked like Gagaram had headed to the gym, while Scholar Yoo had entered the main building right in front of us.

Then that left the annex.

I was planning to start on the first floor and work my way up when, at some point, Park Bokrye had vanished.

"Ma'am? Grandma Park Bokrye?"

No, seriously, where did she disappear to?

I was worried, but this was also an opportunity.

"Decarabia."

The moment I called the demon's name, one eye opened in Gari's ring.

It was a disgusting, grotesque eyeball, but there was no mistaking it.

That demon I had faced while fighting the mages. Demon Decarabia.

It was trapped inside this ring.

"Is it still alive?"

Even after being crunched to pieces like that?

Then again, maybe I shouldn't judge angels and demons by the standards of living things I knew.

"Gari, how am I supposed to use Decarabia's spells?"

I asked because I wondered if Gari would teach me again, the same way it had taught me how to use prayers.

Then Gari suddenly bit down on the ring circling its body and crunched Decarabia's eye.

────!!

It felt like a soundless scream was pouring out.

No, hold on, it just chewed up the eye. That is downright evil... no, no. This was our Gari. Nice Gari. Good Gari.

As its eye was being crushed, Decarabia's eyebrow twitched and it tried something.

A faint ripple spread out from its gaze, scanning the area around us.

I wondered what it had done, and then something in one of the flower beds on campus began to glow faintly.

Black energy was flowing around it. When I got closer, I found a bone.

A small bird's bone.

"Ah...?"

I remembered the mages attacking me with bird spirits.

On a hunch, I held the ring up to it...

【Chirp chirp!】

A tiny sparrow-shaped soul rose out of the bone.

"Necromancer. No, necromancy? Same difference, I guess?"

Decarabia was doing something.

Maybe it was brokering a contract with the bird's soul.

Whatever had gone right, the sparrow's soul flew toward me and landed on the finger wearing the brass ring.

The energy inside the brass ring flowed into the sparrow's soul.

The spiritual energy absorbed from the urban legend bus poured into the sparrow, and soon the sparrow's soul became distinct.

I understood it instinctively.

The familiar contract with the sparrow's soul was complete.

As long as I kept supplying it with spiritual energy, the sparrow would move as my hands and feet.

"Ohh..."

This was kind of amazing.

Still, using Decarabia, which Gari had eaten, like this...

At that point, something else came to mind.

"King Solomon and the seventy-two demons? Is this what I think it is?"

Click click!

Gari bobbed its head. I knew it.

King Solomon was the third king of the Kingdom of Israel in the Old Testament.

As the son of David, the second king, he was known as the king of wisdom and as the great ruler who made the Kingdom of Israel prosper.

But besides that, there was another story in the legends surrounding King Solomon.

The story of King Solomon and the seventy-two demons.

That he was a sorcerer king who commanded the seventy-two demons.

That God gave him a ring that could subdue demons, and that he used those demons to build the Temple in Jerusalem and make his kingdom flourish.

"Pastor, then why isn't that in the Bible?"

"There are things called the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. Works that were not recognized as canon, or were judged to be false."

Come to think of it, Pastor Kim had explained something like that once during elementary Sunday school, when the lesson topic was interesting stories about the Bible.

He had thrown in tidbits like that to keep the kids from getting bored.

"They say King Solomon sealed all the demons in a brass jar and buried it in a deep gulf in Babylonia. But then people opened the jar, and the seal was broken."

"Gasp! Then does that mean demons are really wandering around the world?"

"You could say that. So, kids, be careful not to be swayed by a demon's voice. Listen to your parents and study your Bible hard~"

"But they're demons. If we study the Bible hard, they won't snatch us away?"

To the anxious children, Pastor Kim had said this:

"I know because I've beaten up... I mean, caught a few demons myself. They don't mess with kids who study the Bible hard~"

"Wow, really?"

"Sure, sure. Even those mutts don't crawl into bodies that might die if you smacked them a few times with a stick... ahem. Look at the time already."

"..."

No way.

That had all been real?

Demons really existed in this world, and King Solomon had really been a sorcerer king?

"You really never know with this world."

Just how many hidden truths were there?

Still, I needed to finish the job in front of me first.

The stench felt sharp enough to stab.

That nasty smell was hanging over the whole school, but by the time I reached the annex, it had become blatant.

I was sure of it.

There was an urban legend here.

I was about to open the door and go inside the building when... it was locked with a latch?

More specifically, there was a bolt fastened from the inside.

It was the kind of latch you closed from within, so I physically couldn't reach it.

Should I break it?

If I did that, there'd be hell to pay in the morning.

While I was hesitating, the sparrow soul chirped and passed straight through the door.

Right. It was a spirit body, so it could just go through?

"Hey, Chirpy. Can you open the door for me?"

Chirp?

The sparrow soul seemed to understand what I said. It fluttered its wings and started nudging the bolt above the door with its beak.

Clack!

The locked door opened.

"Oh."

Just as I was thinking how convenient that was, something struck me as odd.

It was a spirit body, so how had it opened the door?

It could pass through objects as a spirit, but it could also interfere with objects.

Convenient.

If I used this right, the applications would be ridiculous.

And that wasn't all.

The mages contracted to Decarabia had used a few more spells besides necromancy.

If I could use those spells too, the possibilities would be endless.

I'd need to catch more urban legends first, though.

Forming a contract with the sparrow soul had used up part of the energy I absorbed from the urban legend bus.

There was no doubt about it. Using magic required that spiritual energy.

At this rate, this urban legend hunt could be a chance to build up more spiritual energy.

"Mmm..."

Separate from that, the school hallway was creepy as hell.

The field outside the windows had sunk into pitch-black darkness, and even the streetlights outside were dead, so the only light was the moon.

It sent a chill over me.

A rusty hinge let out a long creak in the faint breeze.

Other than that, the hallway was completely silent.

Every step I took made the rotten wooden floor groan.

If I hadn't known beings like this existed, I would have brushed off this eeriness as my imagination.

But in this space, I could unmistakably smell the foul stench of the supernatural.

Riiing!

"...!"

Jesus, that scared me.

My heart pounded at the sudden ring of a telephone.

It was the sound of an old landline.

The sound seemed to be coming from the teachers' office.

Riiing!

At the end of the hallway.

Toward the administrative office.

I swallowed and moved closer.

Riiing!

The phone didn't stop ringing.

Normally, if nobody answered after it rang this much, it would have stopped by now.

No, more importantly, calling a school in the middle of the night was insane to begin with.

Riiing!

When I opened the teachers' office door, the ringing became clear.

Inside the empty teachers' office were desk computers and piles of paperwork, a cabinet of cleaning supplies, a mirror, things like that.

The sort of school scene you could find anywhere.

And in the middle of it, only the sound of the ringing phone stood out as something unnatural.

"Gari, keep watch around us."

Click click!

They said urban legends lured people in through the story structure they carried with them.

Either way, the story probably wouldn't move forward unless I answered that phone.

After telling Gari to watch our surroundings, I slowly walked up to the phone that kept ringing.

Then I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear.

【Watashi, Mary-san. Ima, gomisuteba ni iru no.】

(I'm Mary. Right now, I'm at the garbage dump.)

"Huh?"

Japanese?

I was so blindsided by a foreign language popping out of nowhere that I just froze.

Right.

This was a Japanese urban legend.

No, but if you're going to speak Japanese...

Click.

The line went dead.

While I was still standing there in confusion, the phone immediately started ringing again.

Riiing!

When I picked up the phone again...

【Watashi, Mary-san. Ima, undoujou ni iru no.】

(I'm Mary. Right now, I'm at the schoolyard.)

"Excuse me? Ma'am? Hold on, I don't speak Japanese..."

Click!

Riiing!

"..."

【Watashi, Mary-san. Ima, shokuinshitsu no mae ni iru no.】

(I'm Mary. Right now, I'm in front of the teachers' office.)

"Ma'am! You don't speak Korean?!"

Click.

"You filthy Japanese ghost!!"

Riiing!

Was this really how it was supposed to go?

Did I really have to answer it?

After a moment's hesitation, I had no choice but to pick up the phone.

Click!

【Watashi, Mary-san. Ima, anata no ushiro ni iru no.】

(I'm Mary. Right now, I'm behind you.)

"...!"

At that moment, a shiver ran down my spine.

As I slowly lifted my head, I saw the mirror beyond the desks in the teachers' office.

Inside the mirror reflecting the room,

there was me holding the receiver, and...

Crunch crunch!

Mary being chewed up and swallowed by Gari.

Yeah. Well... I kind of figured that's how this would end.

"If you'd said it in Korean, we could've at least talked."

If you came to Korea, you should speak Korean. Seriously.

Tsk, tsk.

Footnotes:

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