Dropout Exorcist Part 1 Chapter 4

 Chapter 4: Encounter

"Yep, perfect weather for exorcising!"

After transferring trains and riding a bus for about two hours, they finally arrived at their destination: a privately owned mountain somewhere in a certain prefecture.

"Is there really such a thing as perfect weather for exorcising? Come to think of it, I guess a clear afternoon really isn't great conditions for a youma."

As a general rule, youma, evil spirits, vengeful spirits and the like grow stronger at night and the later it gets, the stronger they become. In broad daylight under a clear sky like this, that strength really did get suppressed. That said, the effect only really applied to youma at Minor Rank or below. Once you got to Mid Rank or above, they were tough opponents day or night.

"So let me check one more time, this youma we're after this time..."

"Yeah. What got reported to me is a Low Rank small-fry youma which is shaped like a boar. It's been prowling the mountain night after night, tearing up other animals, fields and livestock. If a trap is set, it gets destroyed along with everything else. Lock it in a cage, and it breaks out. No matter how you slice it, that's no ordinary boar, right?"

"Yeah. Definitely a youma. But it's got enough power to smash a cage to pieces and it's still classified Low Rank?"

"Could be Mid Rank, honestly. But even if it is, I can handle it easily which is why the job came to me."

"And you're planning to just dump the whole thing on me?"

"I keep telling you, this also counts as an experience. And if it gets too dangerous, I'll step in and back you up all the way."

Akane genuinely meant to give Shinya real experience. If Shinya had been alone, a job like this would never have come his way in the first place and if it had been some other exorcist, bringing along a failure like him wouldn't have meant giving him experience but rather they will be treating him like a bag carrier.

And if things went wrong, the blame wouldn't fall on Shinya alone; it would reach whoever had put him in charge. In fact, the one who'd assigned him would bear the heaviest blame of all. That was exactly why even within the Hoshimori, people who'd already given up on Shinya had no interest in taking him under their wing.

But Akane declared boldly that she'd take full responsibility for anything that happened and arranged real combat experience so Shinya could grow stronger.

This had happened a few times before Shinya went to the other world too. Normally the Hino would have assigned her some escort or another as a precaution but Akane always pushed back stubbornly, insisting a friend was coming along with her and refused the escort outright. That was the history behind bringing Shinya along like this.

(Shinya's spirit power is low but his fundamentals aren't bad at all. So if he builds up experience, even with low spirit power and without offensive spirit arts, he should be able to make it as an aide or a rear-line practitioner. Add a track record on top of that and with a word or two from Father, he could make a real go at it as an exorcist!)

Akane had all kinds of plans in motion which aims to raise Shinya up into a full-fledged, respectable exorcist.

"So Shinya doesn't need to worry about a thing, he can just have a go at it, exorcise away, actively and freely, bang bang!"

"That's a pretty dumb way to put it."

Shinya let out a wry laugh but knowing there wasn't a shred of ill will in her, he couldn't bring himself to brush her off either.

"So, how do we even find this youma?"

"With our feet!"

"Through this whole mountain?"

"That's right? I mean, I'm not exactly great at search-type spirit arts and you couldn't use them in the first place. Ah but I did received proper info on the spots that it's shown up most often and I've got a map too! So let's just go the slow, steady way and search!"

Shinya's cheek twitched at Akane's words. She wasn't exactly wrong but wasn't this a rather inefficient way to go about it?

(Guess I'm not great at search-type arts myself either...)

Unleashing his trump card would change that but with his abilities as they are right now, he couldn't hope for too much.

"Also, let's see... At the spots it shows up most, maybe I could release my spirit power and use it to lure it out by baiting it? Apparently my spirit power's supposed to taste pretty good to youma so it might work well as bait. It seems to be nocturnal but if something tasty-smelling like my spirit power tempts it, it'll probably come out even during the day, right?"

"Do that, then. Wandering around wasting our energy for nothing would be pretty dumb."

Though honestly, he'd had his doubts in the first place on finding a nocturnal youma in broad daylight but if Akane could lure it out instead, then there shouldn't be any problem.

(Besides, I want to get a feel on just how much it takes to handle a Low Rank youma.)

He'd confirmed that attacks through spirit talismans worked against bodiless beings like evil spirits but he'd wanted to test just how far he could go against a youma whose malevolent energy had materialized into an actual, physical body.

(In that sense, Akane's invitation came at just the right time. Whatever else happens, I know her well enough to trust things won't turn out too badly. As long as I don't unleash that power, it shouldn't turn into much of a problem.)

Watching Akane mutter to herself over the map while working out what to do next, Shinya felt that he really was back on Earth.

As the war in the other world entered its final stages, the fighting grew more brutal than ever. Friend and foe clashed in relentless battles and by the final showdown, death was everywhere.

The Hero's Party launched an all-or-nothing assault on the Demon King's Castle was supported by a massive diversionary operation. Out of the fighting force humanity had thrown into that battle, just how many had actually come out alive?

Not every member of the Hero's Party escaped unscathed, but the fact that they all managed to somehow cling to life and return without losing a single comrade was nothing short of a miracle.

Compared to that, this youma extermination job felt laughably easy by comparison.

(The Demon King would've counted as Divine Rank by this world's system, but in the end, he summoned an evil god and fused with it to became something even above that: High Divine class.)

Divine Rank, the high-end class above even Sovereign Rank. It was in a territory that no human could do a thing about it anymore, it was the domain of gods in the most literal sense. Cornered in the final battle, the Demon King of that other world had climbed a rung even higher.

The despair of facing a Demon King who'd already defeated every hero before him and growing stronger still, was beyond measure. The fact that they'd managed to bring him down at all could only be called the miracle-working strength of the hero's own will. Of course, that had only been possible with help from his companions, Shinya included.

(As things stand now, if a Super Rank youma showed up, rare as they are even in this world, I bet I could put up a decent fight solo. At the very least, I could handle a Special Rank with room to spare.)

"Hey! What are you spacing out for! Come on, let's move!"

"...Yeah, yeah. Got it, so don't rush me."

Her hair swaying, Akane took the lead up the mountain and Shinya kept pace, careful not to fall behind.

And then, Shinya sensed the presence of other people somewhere on the mountain.

(Fellow exorcists? Even so, what is this presence? It's tense as hell, kind of, or maybe closer to being bloodthirsty.)

Shinya's search-type abilities were lacking but as they went deeper into the mountain, he could sense keenly, that the presence was steadily growing stronger.

"What's wrong, Shinya?"

Akane asked him, seemingly puzzled.

"Hey, Akane. For this youma extermination job, is there anyone besides you who took it on?"

"Huh? No way there is. This is a job I took directly from the Hino house, you know? I haven't heard anything about backup or other people helping out so there's no way anyone else could be involved."

"I see. Then we might be about to get mixed up in something troublesome."

"What do you mean by that..."

Just as a question mark rose over Akane's head, the other party arrived at once.

"What are you two doing here?"

The one who called out to Shinya and Akane was a boy about their own age, with unruly blue hair and glasses on. He wore the standard black uniform worn by exorcists today. Behind him stood several other people, dressed in similar clothes, who looked like practitioners.

"That's our line. What are you doing here, exactly?"

Akane asked the question warily.

"Actually, who are you, anyway? You look like an exorcist and your spirit power reads like one too. Also, I'll introduce myself first. My name's Hino Akane. I'm a daughter of the Hino main house."

"I know that. That's exactly why I'm asking. What you're doing here."

"We're here on a job to exterminate a youma. This land belongs to our client, you know? Aren't you the ones trespassing here? And besides, I introduced myself so you'd better introduce yourself too!"

Jabbing her index finger sharply at him, Akane raised her voice in anger.

"...You don't know who I am?"

He adjusted his glasses and asked Akane, sounding irritated.

"Huh? Nope, no idea."

At Akane's words, the boy's temple visibly twitched. Watching the scene unfold, Shinya fought desperately not to burst out laughing.

"What's so funny? Having the Hoshimori failure laugh at me is downright unpleasant."

It seemed his effort to hold it in hadn't gone unnoticed after all.

"Hm? My bad, my bad. No, I just couldn't believe this one here was actually saying that to you."

"What? You know him, Shinya?"

"Sort of, from a while back. But hey, Akane, you're a member of the Hino main house, one of the Six Houses of exorcists. You should at least know the heir of another one of the Six.

"The heir of one of the Six Houses? Wait, which house?"

"The Hino don't exactly get along with them, so I guess it makes sense you haven't had much contact. Still, it's something you should know. You've probably had some kind of gathering between the families before, right? Come on. One of the Six Houses, the water specialists of the Mizunami family. Their candidate heir, Mizunami Ryuki."

The Mizunami clan was one of the foremost families specializing in water spirit arts. Standing before Shinya and Akane was none other than Mizunami Ryuki himself, the son of the clan head and its candidate heir.

"Wait, he's the next head of the Mizunami clan?"

"Wait, you seriously didn't know? He's a pretty well-known exorcist. They call him the Mizunami family's prodigy, one of their top five practitioners despite his age."

"...Ah, I see. Sorry. I'm just not really up on that kind of thing. And when it comes to those family gatherings, it's usually my uncle, the head of the main house and my cousin who attend. I don't really go myself."

Looking away, Akane let out an awkward, dry laugh.

"Hmph. The Hino clan really has fallen far, hasn't it? To think someone like you still counts as a member of the main house. And to top it all off, you're running around with the Hoshimori failure. That tells me everything I need to know about your caliber as an exorcist."

"Excuse me!?"

"Nah, I don't think you've really got much of a comeback to that one, Akane."

"You too, Shinya!? Whose side are you even on!? Besides, he's insulting you too, you know!?"

"I'm just giving an objective opinion here. And as for me, it's true, isn't it."

"You could at least get a little angry about it!"

For some reason, she seemed angrier about him being insulted than about herself, or was that just Shinya's imagination?

"Hmph. There's no point saying anything to him. His spirit power's low on top of everything and he even failed to summon and contract a guardian spirit beast, the Hoshimori's own secret technique. What would you call that, if not a failure?"

Ryuki said it mockingly. Shinya let out a wry smile at the words.

The Hoshimori's secret technique. His failure to master it had sealed Shinya's reputation completely.

The Hoshimori's secret technique was the art of summoning a spirit beast or phantom beast lurking in another realm into this world and forming a contract with it as a guardian spirit beast.

It resembled an onmyoji's shikigami contracts. The famed Abe no Seimei, it's said, once commanded twelve shikigami known as the Twelve Divine Generals (or the Twelve Heavenly Generals), every last one of whom wielded a terrifying degree of power.

After Abe no Seimei's death, the Twelve Divine Generals were lost and it was said no shikigami master who could surpass him would ever appear again.

But the Hoshimori had inherited this very power of Abe no Seimei's shikigami contracts. And what set it apart from the shikigami other exorcists formed through spirit arts, or the contracts made with already-existing beings, was that there was no upper limit to the strength of whatever they could contract.

An ordinary exorcist could only make a shikigami out of something below their own level, or at best, on par with or slightly above it.

But the reason the Hoshimori were called the strongest wasn't just their strength and spirit power as exorcists; it was, above all, that they could form a contract with and command a guardian spirit beast whose strength vastly exceeded the practitioner's own.

A spirit beast or phantom beast contracted as a guardian spirit beast would descend into this world at its contractor's call and unleash its power. For a high-ranking phantom beast, that power alone could match, or even surpass, a Special Rank youma.

The very first head of the Hoshimori was said to have possessed a guardian spirit beast on par with Sovereign Rank in youma terms, and every head since had contracted with a being at least Special Rank or above. What's more, even after the contract, a guardian spirit beast's power would grow along with its contractor's, and there were apparently cases where one that started out low-ranked grew from Top Rank to Special, and from Special all the way to Super Rank.

The current head, Shinya's father, had contracted with and now commanded a Super Rank guardian spirit beast.

But Shinya, far from forming that contract, hadn't even been able to summon anything at all. A failure among the Hoshimori's direct bloodline was something that simply shouldn't have been possible, not once in the clan's entire history.

"...But that doesn't mean you get to look down on Shinya."

"But it's the truth. Someone without power calling themselves an exorcist is presumptuous. What an exorcist needs is strength, built on inborn talent and high spirit power. Someone who has neither will only lose their life sooner or later if they stay in this world. So wouldn't it be kinder to give them their last rites early?"

"Excuse me!?"

"Cut it out, Akane. He's not wrong."

"Shinya! Are you seriously just going to sit there and take it!?"

Akane made no effort to hide her anger at Ryuki's words, as though they'd been aimed at her instead.

"Hmph. I don't recognize you as an exorcist. If you're an exorcist, you have to be strong. An exorcist who can't fight means nothing at all."

"Harsh. Well, not wrong, though."

"And on top of it, you're defective and can't use a single offensive spirit art. Having someone like that hanging around right in front of me makes my skin crawl. We'll handle the youma on this mountain ourselves. So quickly get lost."

"Don't screw with us! We're here on an official job! And this land belongs to the client who commissioned the Hino house! You're the ones who need to leave!"

Boiling with anger, Akane let loose a rapid-fire torrent of complaints.

"In this case, Akane's actually got the reasonable argument. And Ryuki. You still haven't answered. What you're doing here."

"...It's none of your business."

"It's plenty my business. Well, I don't know the details but not saying it means either you don't want to say it or you can't say it. Which means, content-wise, it's either something not too flattering for the Mizunami clan or something genuinely dangerous, right?"

"...You'd do well not to indulge in cheap curiosity. And don't go digging around either."

"That's what I'm saying, quit talking nonsense! You're the trespassers here! If this went to a real dispute, we'd be the ones who win! And the Hino house could file a formal complaint against the Mizunami over this, you know!?"

Between individuals, maybe it wouldn't matter much, but if it escalated into something dragging the whole family in, that wouldn't play out well for the Mizunami at all.

Ryuki, for his part, wore the face of someone who'd just bitten into something bitter.

"Ryuki-sama..."

"We're falling back for now. We don't have time to waste standing around here."

"Understood."

That said, it didn't mean they were leaving the mountain. They were only putting distance between themselves and the two of them.

"We'll withdraw from here for now."

"Hey, wait a second! At least explain what's going on before you leave!"

"There's no need for that. There's nothing here you need to know...!?"

Ryuki abruptly turned his face toward the top of the mountain.

As if drawn along by it, the other practitioners and Shinya, a moment behind them, all turned to look the same way.

"Eh? What's wrong? ...!?"

Akane alone seemed to be a step behind, glancing around in confusion but she caught on soon enough too. Something was closing in on them from up near the mountaintop.

GRRRRRRRRRR!!!

Suddenly, a beast's roar echoed across the mountain. A voice from something that shook the trees and made the very air tremble.

"It's here! Everyone, brace yourselves!"

The instant Ryuki shouted, the other Mizunami practitioners took up their stances. Flattening trees in its path, the thing came straight at them.

"An... An oni!?"

It was a massive humanoid being nearly three meters tall. A vicious face. A body of steel-hard, bulging red muscle, with a tiger-striped loincloth covering its lower half. Sharp, jagged teeth jutting out past its lips. A face twisted into a terrifying expression. A being with two horns growing from its head.

A youma known as an oni.

"Damn it! It noticed us and now it's coming right at us instead!"

"GRRAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Threateningly, the oni's ear-splitting roar tore through the air around them.

(I see. So that oni's what the Mizunami were after. My guess: some oni the Mizunami were managing or had sealed away broke loose and these guys came chasing after it. But isn't that that oni's strength at upper Top Rank at least? No matter how talented Ryuki might be, even working together with those attendants of his, isn't taking that thing down going to be tough?)

By Shinya's read, Ryuki was really strong. Without a doubt, his strength put him among the Mizunami's top five. But what stood before them now was on a level that vastly exceeded that.

Ryuki alone could probably handle up through High Rank. He might even be able to manage a lower-tier Top Rank opponent but that oni clearly exceeded even that ceiling.

"Impossible! A red-faced oni should only have had power around mid-High Rank! And it grew all the way to Top Rank in this short a time!?"

There are several factors that make a youma grow stronger.

One is devouring fellow youma or humans. To a youma, a human being is an extremely nutritious meal. Eating a single human provides far more nourishment than devouring ten other creatures.

And among humans, someone with high spirit power is worth several, even dozens, of ordinary people. A high-ranking exorcist, in particular, could be worth more than a hundred ordinary people, nutritionally speaking.

The more humans a youma devours, the stronger it grows. With fellow youma, devouring one above its own rank spikes its power all at once. But the odds of two youma even crossing paths in this world are low and there aren't many of them to begin with, so it's an inefficient path.

The second is lingering for a long time in a place where malevolent energy, the source of a youma's power, is thick and absorbing large amounts of it. But this carries its own risk and some youma end up unable to withstand it and self-destruct.

But neither path could account for explosive growth in such a short time. The more likely possibility left was devouring multiple high-ranking exorcists, but if that had actually happened, it would have set off a huge uproar throughout the exorcist world.

And judging by Ryuki's reaction, this sudden growth clearly hadn't been something he'd expected.

"Ryuki-sama! Please, flee!"

"Don't talk nonsense! I can't just leave this thing loose here! I'll bring it down here, no matter what it takes!"

"GUOOOOOOH!"

"Water Blade!"

Ryuki swung his right hand, and a blade of water shot out from it. Like a water cutter, the blade sliced sharply through anything it touched, with enough force to cleave a Mid Rank opponent clean in two without trouble.

But the red-faced oni took the attack head-on and simply nullified it.

"Wha!?"

"Ryuki-sama! The rest of you! Put up a barrier and support Ryuki-sama!"

The other Mizunami practitioners likewise threw up barriers, both to keep the oni from escaping and to keep the fallout of the fight from spilling outward, then unleashed water bullets and spears at the oni, but every last one of them was stopped cold by its unyielding body. It wasn't only that the oni's body was tough either. The malevolent energy wrapped around it was killing the force of every strike.

"Don't underestimate me! Come forth! Water Sovereign Whip!"

As Ryuki shouted, spirit power condensed into his right hand. There, a whip that looked as though it were made entirely of pale blue water appeared.

Why were the exorcist Six Houses so famous, in the end? It wasn't just their spirit power or their long histories. It was because, like the Hoshimori, each of the Six Houses possessed a secret technique granted to them alone.

It was the ability to materialize spirit power of the element symbolic of their clan. Naturally, not everyone could pull it off. Spirit power above a certain threshold was required. So was the talent to wield it.

Without both of these, it would be impossible to pull it off and even many who possessed both had still failed to manifest it. The result was called a spirit armament and depending on its element, it will be called like a fire spirit armament or a water spirit armament.

What's more, the average age for manifesting one was somewhere in the mid-twenties. Ryuki had manifested his at fifteen.

"Face my water spirit armament!"

The whip lashed out. Faster than the speed of sound, it cracked against the oni's body again and again.

"GAAAAAH!?"

"Haaaaaaah!"

Ryuki fought at a fixed distance, while the red-faced oni was unable to move at all after being battered again and again by the whip.

Shinya and Akane could only watch as the tide of the battle played out before them.