Chapter 21 - Ghostbuster (5)
8 min read ·
The Special Response Section’s Team Three office.
Shin Sion, Team Three’s leader, was a black-haired woman with a composed air. In the office, she brought up a photograph in her presentation and briefed her team members, along with Team Leader Park, who had stopped by out of curiosity.
The photograph showed a calm-looking, black-haired man. Yohan.
“Kim Yohan. Raised in an orphanage, twenty-one years old, single. At his university and the comic café he recently quit, he’s described as diligent and good at his assigned work. However, he never attends drinking parties or gatherings and has no notable friendships. ... He responds readily when spoken to, but never initiates anything. They say they don’t really know him because they’ve never had an in-depth conversation with him.”
Sion’s calm voice filled the room.
“That is the basic information on Kim Yohan, whom I currently consider a suspect in the university murder case.”
Team Leader Park studied Yohan’s photograph and asked, “Everyone’s been too busy with other cases to pay much attention to this one. Did you investigate it separately, on your own?”
Sion nodded.
“Yes. It kept bothering me.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“No. Except that, given the circumstances, he fits the culprit’s profile best out of the students in the lecture hall when the professor died.”
“... A gut feeling, then?”
Team Leader Park nodded.
“Well, when Team Leader Kim from the team next door has spaghetti for once instead of his usual pork cutlet for lunch, you’re the sort who goes...”
He furrowed his brow and mimicked Sion’s piercing stare.
“‘Why is he eating spaghetti when he always has pork cutlet...? Suspicious.’”
The new female operative failed to contain her laughter at his teasing.
“Pfft—s-sorry!”
Sion’s eyes narrowed involuntarily.
“...”
She spoke in a slightly sulky voice.
“... I believe that is ample cause for concern.”
“Anyway, the uncanny is involved. Without solid evidence, a gut feeling can be reason enough to investigate. Still—”
Team Leader Park continued.
“You’re heading out to investigate another case soon. Don’t push yourself too hard.”
“... True. Understood.”
As she tidied up the office, Sion told her team, “This is only something I investigated personally. Please don’t concern yourselves with it. Focus on your own assigned cases.”
The team members breathed sighs of relief. She had only been sharing information. Fortunately, this didn’t mean extra work.
Sion wasn’t a boss who ground her team down to get results. If anything, she managed their workloads appropriately. Even so, far too much work had been pouring in lately.
Sion put away the university murder case files and looked over the material for her new assignment. The police had referred it to them because something about it felt off.
[Weekend Farm – Experience Livestock Farming]
On the surface, it was an unremarkable farm offering livestock-farming experiences...
But several visitors had gone missing.
The police had investigated the site without finding any clear evidence.
Sion’s eyes narrowed.
A livestock farm: the least suspicious place to obtain animal blood, flesh, and hides.
It might be a magician’s workshop disguised as a farm.
... Or it could be an organ-trafficking operation.
Either possibility was terrible.
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Sion’s unease was justified. Both suspicions were correct.
Weekend Farm was a magician’s workshop, and it also trafficked in organs.
What’s more, it sold human flesh.
In an operating room in the basement of Weekend Farm’s villa, a woman with manicured nails and a slender, celebrity-beautiful face rolled one eye upward.
“So you searched sooo hard, but you couldn’t find a grimoire? My, you must have worked terribly hard.”
At the words of Kim Miryeo, one of Chairman Kim’s little bastards, Manager Kim—a man who looked like an educated gangster—bowed deeply.
“I apologize, miss. With ordinary people like us doing the searching...”
“Are you saying I should run around looking for it myself?”
“No! I apologize!”
Manager Kim bent even lower.
He cautiously glanced at the copy of the grimoire in Kim Miryeo’s hand...
<Cultes des Goules>
Its original title was Cultes des Goules—Cult of Ghouls.
A grimoire exploring eternal youth and longevity through cannibalism.
‘Fucking bitch.’
... He cursed inwardly.
While he was at it, he cursed all of Chairman Kim’s little bastards, who took after the chairman in how brutally they treated their subordinates.
‘Bastards playing magician with copies of grimoires the chairman gave them...’
They thought they were some kind of great magicians.
Kim Miryeo looked down at the bowed Manager Kim, that stupid ordinary man, and clicked her tongue before issuing an order.
“Tsk. Forget it. Father said he’d use it for the party. Just take the meat here.”
She gestured with her chin toward the corpses on the operating tables, their heads split open and their brains removed.
Manager Kim cautiously straightened up.
“... Understood.”
He wasn’t really in a position to think this, considering he took their money to work for them, but these bastards never stopped doing sickening things.
After having Manager Kim remove the corpses from the operating room that doubled as her workshop, Miryeo extracted the pineal glands from the removed brains. Following the grimoire’s instructions, she mixed them with various ingredients and human flesh to make elixir pills.
Then she parted her red lips and swallowed a pill to open her third eye and heighten her mystical power, just as the copy of <Cultes des Goules> instructed.
The drugs mixed into the pill made Miryeo’s body shudder, and for a moment she saw hallucinations.
“...”
... But it wasn’t enough.
To kill her siblings, who were siblings in name only, and her father, who had lived far too long, she needed a real grimoire, not a fake like this.
According to the Special Response Section’s intelligence, a grimoire had definitely appeared in Korea.
And yet...
‘Why won’t it appear before me...!’
She had never failed to get anything she wanted in her life. Irritation welled up, and she ground her teeth.
* * *
Yohan was currently on a mountain.
He hadn’t come to hike, but to train Grizzly to control its strength.
After following the hiking trail for a while, I turned off onto a side path and walked carefully until I found a secluded spot. Then I took the grimoire out of my bag and called Grizzly.
“Grizzly, come out.”
“Gyaaah~.”
Although the clustered trees cast patches of shade, I quietly watched Grizzly emerge into the sunlight.
According to <Mysteries of the Worm>, Grizzly was an Invisible Vampire. But unlike the vampires of folklore that burned to death in sunlight, Grizzly merely yawned as I watched.
“Gyaaah~.”
From what I’d seen, it preferred nighttime to morning, but could still be active during the day.
‘... Is it because its body is transparent?’
I hadn’t read this in a specialist book, only in a comic, but we see an object’s color because it reflects light.
And the higher its transmittance, the more light passes straight through instead of reflecting, so we can’t see the object.
That was why a transparent glass wall looked transparent. Although even glass didn’t have one hundred percent transmittance.
If Grizzly’s body had one hundred percent transmittance, that could explain why it was invisible...
“... No, let’s stop.”
As I thought about it, I realized it was pointless and gave up.
Trying to explain a magical creature through science was ridiculous. Besides, it was magic precisely because science couldn’t explain it.
“...”
I quietly watched Grizzly.
It had been a while, but I recalled the words the boogeyman had poured out before dying at Smith’s mansion.
The one who turns stones into bread. The one who wears Solomon’s crown.
I figured those two were simply the boogeyman flattering me as a magician.
But the last thing it had said bothered me a little.
“... The master of a beast from the stars, huh.”
“Gyaa?”
Feeling my gaze, Grizzly tilted its head.
“Hah. Never mind.”
I chuckled at the sight. After stroking and scratching Grizzly’s head—
“Prrrr~.”
—I decided to get on with what I’d originally come to do.
I found a tree with a reasonably thick trunk and demonstrated by lightly tapping it with my fist.
“All right, Grizzly. Try hitting this hard, like this.”
I knew Grizzly was strong enough to lift and knock away a grown man with ease, but I had no idea roughly how strong it actually was.
So before training it to control its strength, I decided to find out how much power it had.
The moment I stepped away from the tree—
BANG!!
The trunk exploded. It didn’t break.
The spot Grizzly struck literally burst apart with a bang.
The tree exploded under Grizzly’s punch, and the severed trunk toppled sideways.
THUD! CRACK! CRASH!
The broken tree collided with the others, sending a tremendous noise echoing through the mountain.
I was so startled that I yelled, “Mother—fuck! Let’s get out of here!”
“Gyaa!”
Calling for a mother I didn’t have, I took Grizzly and fled down the mountain.
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Once I was off the mountain, I caught my breath and checked my phone.
A message had arrived confirming my reservation for a livestock-farming experience at a farm I’d found while looking for a source of sheepskin.
[Weekend Farm – Experience Livestock Farming]