Editing Internet Shrine Maiden Tsugumi-chan:Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 10===

Night had fully fallen.

Yahirodono Tsumugi and Betsuzaki Rainy had arrived at Movable Bridge #38 – Overlook Bridge. However, few people knew its official name. Most people knew it better by a different name.

Mincemeat Drawbridge.

The gyaru sister was already cowering and trembling. Her hands were tightly clasped to the online shrine maiden’s arm. A failed attempt at forcing a smile was frozen on her lips. This shifted the shoulder of Tsumugi’s clothes, so she really wished she would stop.

“W-wow… Is that meant to set the mood?”

“Why are you even here?”

“The shrine maiden outfit! I-I’m talking about the mood that sets!!”

It was true these were Tsumugi’s work clothes, so they naturally had a certain aura to them. And there was nothing at all odd about the pure red and white outfit when she was on her way to battle a Malign Spirit. In fact…

“Why are you dressed like that? You had plenty of time to change before we met back up.”

“A girl’s ultimate gear is her school uniform. Got a problem with that?”

Tsumugi had a headache. What was with that heavily modified uniform that left her navel uncovered? Tsumugi couldn’t even imagine what kind of bizarre items she might be carrying in that boxy school bag she was forcibly carrying on her back by passing her arm through the handle.

Well, going for lightweight and nimble over heavy and defensive was actually the correct choice.

“D-don’t worry, don’t worry! I-I can be useful! I-I-I-I-I mean, we live in an age when I can find photos of useful power spots on my phone if you ask me.”

“I can just use a voice command to run an image search. Besides, I doubt your phone will work anyway.”

Tsumugi breathed an exasperated sigh. Rainy must have found that comment curious because she pulled her phone from her short-sleeve sailor shirt’s breast pocket to check and found the screen frozen. Worry rapidly covered her face. Her phone wasn’t working and tapping at it with her finger failed to bring up any of the usual services. That was enough for her eyes to wander around erratically. ''The loss of what she took for granted'' had disturbed her mental equilibrium.

A phone was just an electronic device. But having that one ordinary item taken away was enough to isolate people from the world and make them mistrustful of everything around them.

A shrill ringing sound passed from right to left.

No…

“That’s the Groan.”

Tsumugi said nothing more.

For those in the know no more explanation was necessary and those not in the know shouldn’t have been here.

(Too late for that.)

Rainy had gathered her resolve. She was set on saving her classmate Chatty. Which meant thoroughly destroying the Malign Spirit haunting Mincemeat Drawbridge.

“Bwoah!? O-o-o-oh, it’s just a seagull. Don’t scare me like that, jeez!!”

“…”

She had gathered her resolve, hadn’t she?

“Anyway, isn’t this a touristy area? It’s a high-tech computer-controlled bridge. H-how does that became all creepy and haunted?”

“A drawbridge is an intersection between a land route and a sea canal. Which is something like an extra-large version of a railway crossing. That makes it a dangerous and possibly deadly location.”

For now, Tsumugi walked across the drawbridge to check it out. There were the occasional halogen lights like in a gym, but the shadows were deep. The gyaru sister asked a question while clinging tightly to her.

“Can we even see ghosts? I-I don’t even know that.”

“I’ll be using this.”

She didn’t know anything, did she? The online shrine maiden pulled a bundle of incense sticks from her large sleeve. She lit them with a well-worn oil lighter and slowly waved them side to side. Smoke with a sickly sweet scent thinly spread out.

“If they aren’t visible under ordinary circumstances, we just have to make them more visible. You know how the sun shining in through the gap in the curtain looks like a streak of light when it hits the dust in your room? It’s like that. …Of course, it seems to me a shrine maiden using incense sticks is the result of shinbutsu-shugo, or of inverted honji suijaku theory.”

“I don’t get the joke.”

“That wasn’t a joke.”

“S-so you’re saying there will be a real ghost here? We’ll see one? Ugh, that is not the kind of rainbow LR I want to pull…”

“No one can defeat it without finding it first.”

The railing on the outer edge of the sidewalk was a chain-link fence, but something was stuck between the wires. And not just one. The countless objects were all cheap origami dolls. Their age differed. Some were brand new while others were half dissolved by the rain and wind.

Rainy looked puzzled.

“Wh-what are these? Oh, they must be talismans to ward off the evil spirit! Now that’s considerate design. They’re like ammo in a zombie game. We have an unlimited supply of exorcism items in this haunted location, or HL for short!!”

“I wouldn’t look too closely if I were you.”

Tsumugi tried to stop her, but Rainy still took a look and then stiffened.

The origami dolls all had small writing on them.



“My target” “I beseech thee to kill” “I soaked this in a drop of my boss’s blood” “His soul is yours” “It was all his fault” “Kill, kill, kill” “Please kill this villain” “Revenge” “This is a just act, great ghost” “Crush” “Necessary evil” “I can never forgive that scum”



To repeat, there wasn’t just one.

They covered the entire fence alongside the 50m bridge’s sidewalk.

“A-are these praising the ghost and treating it like a hero? To take the revenge they can’t take themselves!?”

“Malign Spirits are not so useful.”

Tsumugi was exasperated. Attempting to utilize imagined commonalities and rules was a common point of confusion. And with no scientific basis and thus no guarantee anything would even happen, people felt no guilt in trying it out.

“The Malign Spirits who wield their power for people simply are not that convenient…”

She saw fire in her mind’s eye.

A giant blazing torii and a woman’s silhouette standing below it.

“What’s wrong?”

“…Nothing.”

“So that…Groan thing? It must emit some kind of waves. I’ve been feeling a headache, but I barely hear anything.”

“Apparently the people who can’t hear it don’t hear anything at all. And since I can hear it here, the information from the job list I received must be accurate. There really is ''something'' here.”

“Wait, are you saying I could hire a real live battle shrine maiden and use her for anything I wanted!?”

“So what if you could?”

“Where………………is………………?”

Something shrill enveloped the world.

Even the primitive halogen lights that didn’t use semiconductors flashed irregularly and Rainy grimaced. They were less than a meter apart, but their voices couldn’t reach each other.

It moved in and out of her audible range, but even when it was silent, there had to be something there. Something was definitely rattling the electronics.

There was no time. The girl in the shrine maiden outfit clicked her tongue and pulled a few fireworks from her large sleeves. These fireworks looked like the center tube from a roll of plastic wrap and launched either a single large firework or twenty smaller ones. Rainy widened her eyes as Tsumugi shoved one of the more powerful ones into her arms. Needless to say, Rainy was in the most danger here. The odds of her death had just skyrocketed.

“The incense sticks may not mean much at this point, but…”

Tsumugi trailed off there. She was annoyed with herself. Rainy wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the shrill Groan, so why was she bothering to speak?

She slowly waved the bundle of lit incense sticks side to side.



Something

:::::impossible.

::::She saw something

::she shouldn’t have seen.



The light of the flashing halogen lights tangled with the thin smoke, bringing something else into view. Vaguely and intermittently.

There it was.

“The Single Dread Star Ghastly Crusher!!”