The Life of a Half-Yokai
You've heard those stories, haven't you?
"They say Admiral Yi Sun-sin's statue starts moving at midnight!"
"I heard our school was built right on top of a graveyard?"
"Out of the way. At our school, someone actually saw the anatomical model get up and run!"
Stories of horror, by horror, for horror.
But what happens when they stop being stories?
Click. A flare of light.
"…."
The bathroom light, which had been behaving itself just fine, began to flicker. Did this school have it out for the breaker box? The thing seemed to fail every chance it got.
"Ugh."
I let out an irritated sigh and started to stand—only to find that the toilet paper, present and perfectly ordinary a second ago, had vanished without a trace.
"Here we go again."
The moment I narrowed my eyes, the bathroom lights died completely. Then came a grotesque scrape of metal.
"Blue paper… or reeed paper…?"
The voice was coming from beneath the toilet I was sitting on. I sighed and looked down.
"Could you maybe not show up while I'm taking a dump?"
The thing went by a simple name: the Blue Paper, Red Paper Ghost. An urban legend spun out of rumor—and an anomaly. Whichever choice you picked, it was a kind of water ghost that dragged you down into the bowl.
"Heeheehee… huh?"
The metallic rasp under the toilet cut off. Our eyes met. Through a curtain of long, dripping hair, its gaze crossed mine.
What the water ghost felt was fear. In those violently trembling pupils, fixed on my face, a pair of azure eyes burned with a cold, searing light. And then—
"KYAAAAHHH!!!"
With that short, final scream, the Blue Paper, Red Paper Ghost passed on. Whether the phrase suited something that had already been dead was a question for later.
"Yeesh."
I stepped out of the stall and washed my hands. Only then, as if the barrier over the place had finally lifted, did the stalls beside mine open. Out came students in the same uniform as mine. They glanced at my stall, saw the dead anomaly, and broke into cheers.
"That's our number one! I knew we could count on you, damn it!"
"God, what a relief. I really thought we were done for—grabbed and turned into water ghosts ourselves…"
"Thank god Bi-hyung was in the next stall. Pretty sure I just burned through a whole year's luck."
I did my best to ignore their shining eyes and walked out of the bathroom. My stride looked easy enough, at a glance. Inside, it was anything but.
God. This is way too much pressure.
The way the exorcists looked at me. Every time I felt it, I was forced to think again about the position I was in.
It's not that I'm some genius at catching anomalies. It's just…
Just that I was a half-yokai, and the anomalies surrendered on their own.
If the exorcists ever caught on, they wouldn't let it slide.
Not that I had been a half-yokai from the start. I had been an ordinary guy, same as anyone my age—graduated high school, then fell into despair the moment I learned that a heart-pounding campus life was not, in fact, waiting for me.
Why did I have to go and play that game…
I had stumbled across a game, and spent the middle of my twenties with it: a game about an exorcist who hunted every kind of anomaly and brought them to heel. I was dropped into that world.
…As half a yokai.
A yokai was still a monster. From an exorcist's point of view, wasn't it something you were meant to hunt all the same? Holding on to that one thought, I gave today's performance everything I had, so I wouldn't be found out.
This is the story of a half-yokai living among exorcists.