Exorcising the Yapping Spirits

〈POV: Riku〉

Late afternoon sunlight looked chill enough, but my aching back certainly didn't agree. I leaned back against the safety rail, watching Mari's tiny frame with my smart glasses strapped to her face. That oversized white hair ribbon of hers swaying left and right in sync with her hands as she gestured wildly in midair to steer the drone.

「I'm telling you, Mari, just let Proxima run the automated patrol script and save us the headache.」

No sooner had I said it than Proxima chimed in: 「Boss has a point. This is a complete waste of system resources. Do you have any idea how many abstraction layers this manual control has to go through?」

「Zip it, Proxima! That goes for you too, Riku!」 Mari swatted at the air. 「Flying manual is how the VP demonstrates true skill!」

To emphasize her point, she executed a jerky zigzag that came within inches of totaling the machine against a rooftop vending machine. I sighed and shifted my weight to ease the stiffness in my back.

「The school is empty at this hour anyway. Who's sticking around to do shady stuff on their AR glasses now? Out of all the times to run a scan, you pick rush hour when everyone's heading home.」

Mari let out a superior huff, adopting an air of profound wisdom. 「Childish thinking. This is reverse psychology. The perpetrators assume the Student Council has already gone home, drop their guard, and show their true colors.」

She paused, her voice shrinking down to an embarrassed murmur. 「And honestly... I just need to look busy so Arisa-senpai won't get on my case...」

So that was the real motive. Even our iron-fisted Shushō knew how to put on a show just to keep her supervisor happy.

「Look at that. Even you know how to be lazy.」

「It's called selective energy conservation, alright?」 Mari shot back defensively.

She kept buzzing the drone past the clubroom windows. Through the feed relayed from the glasses to my smartphone, the sights were thoroughly unremarkable: the athletic teams tidying up the training grounds, and scattered clusters of students glued to brainrot clips, laughing like utter simpletons.

After about five minutes, Mari let out a massive yawn. She brought the drone down onto the rooftop with a harsh scrape, stripped off the glasses, and shoved them back into my hands with her hair a bit of a mess.

「Our school is suspiciously well-behaved today.」 She dusted off her hands, acting totally nonchalant—not that anything had actually happened anyway.

「All yours, Proxima. Take over.」 I slipped the glasses on and ordered the system to run a few routine rounds along the campus perimeter before auto-docking.

「Understood, Boss. What a relief to do real work instead of rendering whatever eye-bleeding flight path that was.」 Proxima slipped the savage burn directly into my earpiece without missing a beat.

I tuned out the AI and shifted my gaze to Mari. 「Didn't you give that massive speech at the assembly? Why are you abandoning your post after barely lifting a finger?」

Mari pouted, shooting me a disdainful look as if pitying my complete ignorance of how the world worked. 「Who said anything about quitting? It's just that this whole drone routine is… tedious. I have a method that's way faster.」 She trailed off, letting out a world-weary sigh. 「Too bad I can't write that one down on paper for Arisa-senpai.」

That stopped me in my tracks. 「Did you already forget what you promised Yuria? If she catches you using cheats, she'll crucify you without a second thought.」

At the mere mention of Yuria's name, Mari flinched. She made a frantic cut-throat gesture, practically begging me to shut up while nervously checking every shadow, as though that little Heretic was crouching behind the water tank.

「Hush! Keep your loud mouth shut!」 Mari snapped through her teeth. 「The agreement was that I'd persuade Emi-nee to lift your internet ban, wasn't it? It's a Covenant, get it? A sacred Co—ve—nant!」

I mean… she had me there. It was literally life or death.

「Yeah, yeah, whatever, I didn't say a thing.」 I clicked my tongue, watching the dusk slowly settle over the horizon. 「Still, I have to admit Yuria goes overboard sometimes. You're literally God. Not letting you flex even a fraction is honestly kind of ruthless.」

Beep!

「Anomalous gaze-tracking signal detected in the vicinity of the old storage shed beside the athletic field.」 Proxima buzzed in my ear.

Curling my lips into a self-satisfied grin, I turned to unleash my rehearsed gloating: 「What did I say? Trusting the automation saves us—」

Wait, what?

Empty air. I gaped, did a double-take, and hung halfway over the roof railing. Far below, that petite menace was already hauling ass toward the shed like a lunatic.

「Holy hell, when did she even take off?!」

I scrambled to flip the control toggle, taking over manual piloting. The drone dived straight off with an air-cleaving hiss, tracking Mari from an overhead chase angle.

She reached the shed and didn't even tap the brakes. Leaping clear off the earth, she whipped around in a gloriously extra 360-degree roundhouse kick and smashed her heel right through the entrance.

BAM!

The battered sheet-metal door gave way instantly, flying open with a violent shudder. Highly cinematic to be fair, but that stunt was going to cost us a brand-new door.

Inside the shadows, two voices squealed: 「KYAAA!!」

Checking their uniform ties, they were a couple of first-years—one boy, one girl. Yet right after their screams, realization seemed to dawn on them that the intruder was none other than the Student Council Vice President.

「S-Saved at last! The latch seized up right after classes ended—」

Mari dragged a hand down her face, sighing from the absolute depths of her soul. The drone's directional mic relayed her voice crystal-clear to my headset:

「We're in 2041, and kids are still recycling the 'locked in the gym shed' trope?」

She stepped across the threshold, eyes darting to their nametags: 「Hoshino Arata... Kaneda Hitoha...」

Her eyes narrowed to slits. She jabbed a finger at Hitoha's face, then flicked it back to her own eyes with unmistakable authoritarian aggression:

「Hitoha-chan, your glasses have been broadcasting a sustained stare signal for way too long. Don't tell me you two were taking advantage of the situation to get up to something illicit in the dark? Because the penalties are severe.」

「I was just scanning the lock's pins and the door frame!」 Hitoha waved her hands in frantic denial. 「I was looking for a leverage point to break the door down!」

「It's true, Senpai!」 Arata piped up beside her. 「It's pitch black in here, the optics need a prolonged gaze lock to auto-focus and map the dimensions!」

Hovering overhead, the camera caught Mari folding her arms over her chest. Naturally, their excuse sounded perfectly sound. But knowing our Shushō, there was no way in hell she'd accept such an anticlimactic conclusion.

「Can't prove it, so I'll let the whole trope slide for now.」 Mari drawled. 「But since the glasses are right there, hand them over. Student Council's doing random device audits.」

Hitoha's face went bone-white. Like a criminal with a guilty conscience caught red-handed, her finger instantly shot up to tap the frame.

SNAP!

The status LED flared brilliantly alongside a crisp shutter effect, practically shouting to the world: See? Law-abiding student here! All safety lights and audio cues functioning properly!

Mari let out a weary breath, holding her hand out. 「Save the performance. You have my word as Vice President that I have no interest in dredging through your camera roll or browser history, so quit panicking.」

The air in the storage shed fell dead cold. Ten agonizing seconds dragged by in complete silence. Yielding to the inevitable, the girl finally surrendered the glasses into Mari's palm.

Mari lifted the glasses to eye level and pushed the trigger herself.

Silence. No LED. No shutter chime. Nothing.

I could guess what was going on, that whole flashy display earlier had merely been an independent script, completely decoupled from the actual camera pipeline. An amateurish decoy crafted to fake compliance.

「Unauthorized device modification.」 Mari said, shaking her head with zero emotion.

「P-Please wait, Senpai!」 Arata pleaded, throwing his hands up in sheer desperation. 「We're members of the Astronomy Club! During nighttime stargazing expeditions, we have to minimize light and sound pollution at all costs, so we only modified them to log our observations!」

Having heard the boy's plea, Mari slowly lowered the frames. She raised both hands and randomly broke into English: 「Listen. Listen. Listen... Listen.」

She paused, jabbing a finger straight at her own baby-faced cheek. 「Take a look at my face... do I look like a child to you?」

To seal the deal with logic, Mari grabbed Hitoha's hand, shoved the frames back into her palm, and used the girl's own finger to click the switch.

SNAP!

The LED blazed with light, and the shutter tone rang out loud and clear.

「See that?」 Mari's voice through the drone mic was icy. 「Not only did you break tech regulations, you also get an extra strike for fabricating fake evidence to mislead an official on duty.」

The two first-years stood paralyzed, looking like ghosts.

「B-But even if we told you what we were actually doing, you'd never buy it!」 Arata grabbed at his hair, scrambling for one last desperate out.

Mari raised her chin with supreme confidence. 「Go on. There is nothing under the heavens beyond my capacity to accept. State your case.」

Arata gulped, scanning the dark shed like the walls were listening, then lowered his voice to a whisper.

「We're... we're tracking an actual supernatural anomaly involving Izumo Asahi from Class 1-B!」

Izumo again? The girl was certainly racking up quite the reputation lately.

「Supernatural what now?」 Mari raised an eyebrow.

「It's true, Senpai!」 Arata leaned in, emboldened by the chance to finally vent. 「We've caught her doing it multiple times! Whenever she clears a partition or rounds an obscured hallway turn, she materializes on the opposite end in a split second! It's completely beyond human capability!」

Far from being rattled or genuinely curious, Mari's features slipped into that telltale mode she always adopted when gearing up for a debate.

「Listen to me. What you two observed was just the phenomenon. And from one single phenomenon, you can deduce dozens of completely different underlying essences.」

Mari held up an index finger, launching into a lecture: 「What if she simply wants to get home as fast as humanly possible, but is mortified by the thought of people seeing her sprint like a madwoman? The moment she enters a blind spot, she breaks into an all-out sprint, only to drop back down to a poised stroll whenever she's in plain view. Ever heard of Occam's Razor? When multiple hypotheses compete to explain an occurrence, the one that relies on the fewest absurd assumptions is usually the correct one.」

She tapped her temple with a knowing smirk. 「Furthermore, relying on my experience, that girl is just ninety-nine percent social anxiety. 'Supernatural' nonsense. You're just psyching yourselves out.」

「Oh, and by the way...」 Mari's lips curled into a smile so sickeningly sweet that both first-years instinctively shrank back a step.

「Thanks a ton, Arata-kun, for willingly confessing to stalking another student on school grounds.」

「Wait... what?!」 Too late, he had just dug his own grave in the most stupid way imaginable.

「Even if Izumo was a literal ghost, aren't there dozens of legitimate methods to investigate her?」 Mari folded her arms, her eyes brimming with sheer contempt. 「Did you feed your research ethics to the stray cats? If you're behaving like peeping toms as first-years, what next? Hacking dorm feeds when you get to university?」

She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out her smartphone. Her thumb navigated straight to the Student Council app.

Ding! Ding! Two identical notification chimes echoed through the close air of the shed.

「Done. Two disciplinary strikes each.」 Mari put the phone away and dusted off her hands. 「Report to the Student Council office for self-reflection and submit your written apologies to Arisa-senpai before noon tomorrow. Dismissed!」

・・・

Once we retrieved the drone and made our way down to the front gate, Mari and I found Tetsuya and Yuria already lingering by the pillars, their shadows stretched out endlessly behind them in the dying golden light.

Seeing Mari bounce over with a triumphant bounce in her step, Tetsuya gave her a fond look. 「I take it you achieved some monumental victory?」

「A victory built on the shattered dreams of two first-years...」 I clicked my tongue, pushing my glasses up my nose. 「Not gonna lie, watching that poor girl sniveling with wet eyes made my conscience twitch.」

Yuria brushed off some imaginary lint with an indifferent flick of her wrist. 「One person's suffering is just another's amusement. It's the law of the universe. What's there to pity?」

「Hear, hear.」 Tetsuya agreed with a nod, before his sharp eyes swiveled around to lock onto me like a missile. 「Since when is Riku so sensitive? And toward girls, no less. Come clean—who's the target? Do you have a thing for tearful little underclassmen?」

This bastard was on the verge of leaking classified state secrets. 「Shut your damn mouth! I don't go for that type!」

「Ah...」 Tetsuya tapped his jaw, playing the part of a scholar unlocking cosmic truths. 「So you like the serious, no-nonsense ones, huh?」

「Well... yeah, that type isn't terrible.」 I mumbled defensively before catching myself and yelling: 「But I literally told you there's no one! Stop stuffing words down my throat!」

THWACK!

Yuria brought her palm down hard on the nape of Tetsuya's neck, scowling at him with absolute disdain. 「You have ladies standing right here and you're casually ranking girl types in broad daylight?」

Tetsuya's expression didn't so much as waver, but Mari bristled on his behalf like a cornered terrier. She took a fierce step forward, jabbing a finger at Yuria: 「Hey! Hands off my Tetsu! You're just salty because you're hopelessly single and hearing about romance makes you insecure! Blehh, virgin Heretic!」

「You little—」

Before Yuria's retort could leave her mouth, a glossy black town car glided silently to the curb, coming to a halt directly at the entrance. The tinted passenger glass glided down, and the Kanda family's chauffeur bowed his head politely toward his mistress.

Deciding against wasting further rhetoric on the pint-sized Deity, Yuria ducked inside, the door slammed it shut and the car peeled away.

The car had only rolled a short distance when Mari took in a lung-bursting breath, cupped her hands around her mouth, and bellowed after the exhaust:

「SINGLEEEEEEEEEEEEE!」

Yuria definitely caught every decibel.

From the descending passenger window of the departing car, two arms suddenly thrust outward into the open air. One hand clutched a gleaming silver crucifix, while the other furiously sketched rapid crosses in midair, likely to perform an emergency exorcism to purge the screeching demon named Mari until the vehicle cleared the turn and sped away.