ISEKAI EXORCIST

Drawn on the floor of the bedroom with the Blood Chalk, was a circle with two overlapping triangles within, which together formed a hexagram. Master Owl had given me a single Black Tallow Candle, which I placed in the centre of the ritual.

I took a step back, after ensuring that the lines matched the drawing in the Encyclopaedia, then pulled the staff from my belt loop and extended it to its full length, before taking up a sturdy stance, holding the book in my right hand so I could read the summoning litany.

I paused. “Don’t we need to light the candle first?”

“No. It’s not that kind of candle.” Owl answered.

I doubted that I wanted to know what the candle was made of, but my imagination definitely didn’t do me any favours…

“Alright, hurry up and do this. I want to be able to get some sleep soon.”

I gritted my teeth. He had just spent twenty minutes explaining how important it was to not rush a ritual, as a mistake could be costly. I pulled in a deep breath through my nostrils, then exhaled out my mouth.

“Observer in the sky; thou whose gaze sees all; I beg thee pluck out an eye and gift it to me in exchange for my reverence and adulation; thy eyes can see my soul and know my worth; I pray thee judge me worthy.”

Master Owl had explained that the sort of Pact that relied on being ‘judged worthy’, required an A-tier in the Soul Attribute or higher. Apparently, it was a low-stakes type of summoning, as a rejection from the entity that was entreated with would incur no harmful effects on the Invoker, unlike some of the more involved types that required an offering of blood or a physical manifestation of the entity.

A strange sort of pressure came over the room and the temperature dropped significantly, with my breath coming out as a mist. Then the black tallow suddenly sprouted a dancing blue flame and, to my goggled eyes, a stain appeared in the air, like an inky spill. The inky spot expanded, before, from its centre, a goat’s eye grew into place. Unblinkingly, the eye stared at me.

The bells atop my staff began to reverberate slowly, although my hand was firmly locked on its shaft. I followed the instructions Master Owl had given me and used the Pact of the Familiar ability, by imagining that the energy in my body, that light which Harleigh had taught me to sense, pooled into my chest and reached out like a formless hand to the entity that floated in the air.

In exchange for your sight, I give you an offering of my bountiful essence and my undying reverence.

The moment that my reaching essence touched the Watcher entity, I was overcome by a stinging headache that forced me to blink. I opened my eyes and was then suddenly seeing myself from the entity’s singular eye.

“Name it,” Owl instructed and I focused on the name I thought most fitting.

Then I blinked again and my vision was returned to normal.

Before me, the ritual candle had gone out and the creature was gone.

“Now that your familiar has been named and bonded to you with a Pact, you can utilise the Summon and Banish abilities to bring it out or make it go away. You probably don’t need instructions on how to do it. Unlike your other abilities, it should feel fairly intuitive.”

“I feel very restless,” I told him.

“That’s the manifestation of the familiar wanting to be summoned.”

“Do you want to know what I named him?”

“No. You should keep your familiars’ names secret, unless you want someone to use them against you. By the way, have a look at your Guild Card, you should see a change to it.”

“Wait, our Pacts are visible to anyone who looks at our Cards??”

“That’s right. I recommend you don’t show anyone your Guild Card.”

“Why not?”

“It contains your strengths and your weaknesses, and as an Exorcist you are already feared and despised, so you don’t want to give people the upper hand. Imagine what someone’s first impression will be if your Card is full of things that mention the sort of spirits you have contracted.”

“Is that why you won’t show me your Card?”

“You might have the notion that revealing it to people is something that garners trust, but you’re wrong. In this world you have to hide your true self and conceal your strengths and weaknesses, lest someone exploits it. You have been lucky until now that no one has taken advantage of your naivety, but one day you will find yourself scalded by misplaced trust, so while you may not believe me now, eventually you’ll come to see the truth in my words.”

“I had no idea that it was a bad idea to trade such info,” I replied.

“How many have you seen thus far?”

“Three,” I told him. “Rana, Harleigh, and Æmos have shown me theirs.”

“Æmos did?” he asked, surprised. “Did you notice the affliction he has?”

“Affliction?”

“The ‘Nightmare Feeder’ on his list of abilities.”

I remembered it well. “What does it do?”

“It feeds him nightmares, obviously. Maybe when you get stronger and more experienced, I’ll tell you how to help him get rid of it. It’s no bad thing to have a Genius owe you a favour.”

“Why haven’t you helped him if you know about it and how to fix it?”

“That guy won’t give me the time of day.”

I wanted to say that it was no surprise, given Owl’s personality, but it did in fact surprise me, as Æmos had seemed very easy-going and kind.

“Alright. I’m going to use the bed. You can sleep on the floor after you clean off the chalk, or use one of the leaning chairs in the main room like Rana. Also, keep the candle, you can use it again.”

I frowned and began wiping the hexagram away with a cloth from a nearby drawer, while the old man dumped his chubby body on the large bed, the frame of which squeaked worryingly in response to his weight.

After sticking the candle into my bag alongside the other tools Owl had given me, I blew out the lantern he had used and went out to where Rana was leaning in a chair, watching the door and window. She was still awake, despite it being late into the evening. A tiny bit of moonlight falling through the shutters made it possible to see where I was stepping.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked her.

“They’re still out there,” she replied. “It makes me uncomfortable knowing they’re just watching us, sizing us up like predators. I saw another man earlier, as well as a woman, so there’s at least four of them.”

I thought about it, as I took a seat in the other leaning chair that stood closer to the corner of the room, furthest from the window.

At least four… I mused, as I looked at the many glowing footprints on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Then I began counting every pair, before counting the different handprints.

“There’s eight,” I said with utter certainty, having double-checked both the number of hand and footprints to make sure.

“Just like the number of disappearances,” Rana replied.

There was a beat of silence, then she turned in her chair and looked at me and I looked at her.

“Just like the disappearances,” I echoed, feeling as though this was an incredibly important piece of the puzzle.

Although she had sounded certain that she wouldn’t fall asleep, Rana eventually dozed off. She had stayed awake during the carriage ride and been on guard the entire day, so it was obvious that she had to be exhausted.

I watched the window while she slept, catching glimpses of the human-like creatures as they passed by outside and occasionally looked into the dark house with their glinting eyes. At one point I could hear one crawling up onto the roof, as though looking for a way in. I also heard a rattle from the backdoor of the house, where one tried and failed to open the door.

For now, the Sacred Corpse Ash served as a strong enough barrier to keep the creatures out, but I wondered how long it would last. Master Owl’s blind faith in the stuff was almost reassuring, if not for the fact that he kept so many things to himself, which made me constantly wonder if I was being tested or if I was actually safe.

As I sat sleepless in the darkness, I whispered the name of my new familiar and it appeared in the air before me, the inky splotch of its body like a condensed piece of night that no light had the power to illuminate.

“Sumi, I want you to watch the house from outside and show me what you see.”

The most bizarre sensation washed over me, as the familiar lifted into the air and passed clean through the ceiling. It felt like fingers were tapping the back of my brain where it rested in my skull, and then the sight of my left eye went black for a moment, before being replaced by a grainy dark-grey view of the world outside of the house as seen from up high in the air.

The split view of my eyes was quickly starting to give me a devastating headache, so I put the palm of my right hand over my right eye, which let me focus exclusively on what Sumi was showing me.

Watching from five metres above the rooftops of the villages, I saw the forest and the clearing within which the village sat, cast in that bizarre shadowless grey light. I spotted a few animals in the distance, which were wandering around searching for food, one of which was a fox digging by the foot of a tree, having perhaps caught the scent of a rodent in its burrow.

Then some movement just below my familiar’s vantage point caught my attention and I wished that it would turn downwards to observe it. Surprisingly, Sumi responded to my desire and tilted its gaze, such that it was looking almost directly down at the house I was in.

A man with a bald head was crawling around on the ground on all fours, moving his head around like an animal smelling the scents on the air. He moved up to the front of the house and stood up, and I instinctively moved my right hand away from my eye and saw the moment he looked through the shutters with his glinting eyes, but then the headache started building again and I put my palm back over my right eye.

Although there was a deep terror from knowing I was being observed by this not-quite-human creature, it was comforting to pretend that I was far up in the air, looking down at it from above, rather than inside the house it was stalking around.

I saw as it crawled up onto the roof and moved towards the window to the bedroom in which Master Owl slept, before leaning over the side of the roof to look through the window up-side-down.

For a while, I manipulated the eye of my familiar around to watch the animalistic humanoid, but didn’t notice any of his fellows around, despite both Rana and I having spotted several. Then it went around a corner and disappeared from my view. A moment later, the little girl I’d initially seen emerged and continued acting in the same way as the bald man.

I sent Sumi down to look at the area where I’d lost sight of it, but there was nothing there. I was about to send it to follow after the girl as she ran off towards the tree at the centre of the village, but then a deep exhaustion came over me, and I knew that I’d overexerted my spirit by using the familiar too much.

That’s enough for now, I told the familiar in my mind, dismissing it.

Darkness overcame the vision of my left eye, before the familiar moonlight-stained interior of the house was made visible to me again. I removed my hand from my right eye and sat in the darkness, contemplating the things I’d seen.

“Rise and shine,” Master Owl said, waking me from my slumber. At some point during the night I must’ve fallen asleep, and I quickly sat up straight in the leaning chair, a pang of soreness in my neck making me wince.

Rana sat near the door and was in the middle of oiling up her blade and shield. Through the window shutters I saw that a warm golden light lit up the village and reflected off a thousand beads of morning dew covering the grass.

“I watched the creatures last night using my familiar,” I told him.

“And? Did you come to any conclusions about its true nature?”

“I haven’t yet,” I told him, “But I have narrowed down my guess to a Revenant-type.”

Owl nodded. “And your reasoning?”

From what I’d been able to read about the apparitions that fell under the Revenant-type, they tended to be humanoid in appearance while often displaying animalistic tendencies, such as territorialism, aggressive temper, and insatiable hunger. Their causes were generally due to curses or dreadful murders where the victim wasn’t buried with the proper rites. But the main thing was how they moved about.

“From watching the creatures through the window and with my familiar, I have come to the conclusion that it is permanently manifested into the world.” A lot of entities were unable to maintain permanence, only sporadically appearing to attack, but the ones Rana and I had seen were closer to the zombies in the movies I’d seen back home, never seeming to fade into a mist and disappearing or anything like that.

“Anything else?”

“There’s eight of them. There’s a little girl, two women, and five men. But…”

“But?”

“Only one of them appears at a time,” I added.

Owl grinned. “And why might that be?”

I thought back to some of the revenants I’d read about. They were able to take on the shape of the people they devoured or stalked, and then it clicked for me.

“Because there’s only one entity, but it is able to change shape!”

Owl nodded eagerly. “A very good hypothesis. But can you prove it?”

“I… no. It is only guesswork based on the entries in the Encyclopaedia.”

“So, what do you think would be your next move?”

I thought about it for a while, before coming up with an idea based on the patterns I’d observed and gathered from the description of the Quest. “It seems to be sticking to this village for some reason and I read that quite a few types of Revenants go to a nest or return to their graves when not active. Given that this thing seems to be mainly active at night, it may be hiding somewhere in the village during the day. After all, we checked the village, but we did not check all the houses.”

“We’ll go take a look around then,” Owl said. I suddenly realised that we had to leave the safety of the house and felt incredibly apprehensive. “Rana, you will go catch us something to eat while we search the village.”

The Vanguard nodded and got up from her seat and left out of the door, seeming to have no apprehensions about venturing out into the monster’s domain.

I got up from the chair and took a few leaden steps towards the open door. I noticed that, despite the faint breeze coming into the house, the lines of ash remained undisturbed, as though much heavier than it ought to be.

Owl pressed a strange quartz-like stone into my hand and I looked at it uncomprehending for a moment.

“It’s an Energy Stone,” he said. “It responds to pockets of concentrated energy by emitting a faint pulsing light. The brighter the light and the faster the pulse, the closer you are to something of significance. They’re generally best used to find objects closely related to a spirit, such as a memento that might keep it bound to this world, but it can perhaps be of use here.”

He reached into a pouch and took out a little rectangular wooden box with a sliding lid, as well as a small golden bell. “I may as well give you these too.”

I took the box and opened the lid, inside were incense sticks that gave off a faint vanilla-esque scent.

“That there is Gravebloom Incense, which attracts most spirits to you, although it has the opposite effect on a few entities.”

“And the bell?”

“It’s a Blessed Golden Bell,” he stated, handing it to me after I put away the incense. “It generally has the opposite effect of the Incense, in that it weakly repels spirits. But, again, it may attract some types of apparitions.”

I frowned. “How am I supposed to figure out which entities respond in which way to these?”

“Study the notes in the Encyclopaedia and then trial-and-error for the rest.”

Now that he mentioned it, I had seen the words Gravebloom and Bell used on a few entries, though had not known what to make of the terms at the time. From what I’d managed to memorise about Revenants, most of the subtypes had no response to the Bell, except for the Bloodfiends which actively attacked anyone carrying them. All of them did seem to seek out the Gravebloom Incense though.

I drew in a deep breath, then released it out my mouth, before pulling my staff from its belt loop and extending it to its full length. With Master Owl behind me, I walked out of the open door.