Exorcist Servant: Demon Hunter

John made a sharp turn off the interstate and came to a stop opposite the abandoned house, his tires squealing in protest.

Several cars were already parked there: a sedan without a police badge, and a large black van with a prominent logo embossed on its side—"Supernatural Spirit Strategic Control Center①," or SPECTR for short.Detectives in hazmat suits stood around, though there were unlikely to be many onlookers at three o'clock in the morning.

①Original writing: StrategicParanormalEntityConTRol, this is a fictional law enforcement agency of the US government. Spectr has the meaning of ghost or supernatural.

Especially in this neighborhood because of the firefights and sirens almost every night.

John finished his cup of bad coffee from the gas station, unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out of the car.

He grabbed his black nylon work bag from the trunk and walked across the road to the abandoned house.

He stomped on shards of broken glass, partly from vandalism, partly from shattered smoking pipes and medicinal glass tubes.

He wished that at least one of his police calls had been to a luxurious mansion with crystal chandeliers and no smell of garbage.

Damn it, he didn't have to be on duty yet, Sean was the exorcist on duty tonight.

But when the boss calls, a smart agent gets out of bed and gets in the car, no matter how late or early it is.

As he approached the line of officers, he pulled out his badge. "Come in, Special Agent Starkweather," said the guard after a cursory inspection.

Sion was waiting near the ruins of the collapsed porch.Crime scene investigators are looking at some still-new tire skid marks.Someone was in a hurry to escape from here just now.

"You always take me to the best places," John said as he walked towards him.

Sean dropped the cigarette butt and crushed it out with his heel. "Thank you for coming."

"You know, I'm always ready to wipe your ass." John winked at him, even though Sean wasn't his type at all, let alone straight.

It was their regular routine, like it was when they were in state school for psychics.But Sean didn't say his usual "lines" today.

"What did Kania tell you?" instead, he asked directly.

John took a good look at his friend.His uniform was rumpled under his dark wool overcoat, and the bags under his eyes suggested that he'd been up all night and was now desperately sleep deprived.

He smelled much stronger than usual, as if he had been smoking for hours.

"Not much," John shrugged. "She just yelled out the address and told me to come to the scene, as soon as possible. Then hung up. Luckily for her, I didn't think it was a dream and went back to sleep."

"Kania is like this." The district chief's unfriendliness is well known.

"It's just... well, it's fucking weird, that's all. Around sixteen, there was an emergency 911 call from around here.

"A woman called for medical attention, claiming there had been an accident and her brother-in-law had fallen downstairs. Not breathing, no heartbeat. The operator started teaching her to do CPR.

"A few minutes later the screaming started. By the time the ambulance arrived, the caller had left. But the possessed brother-in-law was still there, terrified and screaming so hard he nearly knocked his head off. .”

"His clothes were torn and there was blood all over him. But by the way, he didn't have a single scratch on his body."

From this point of view, this is not typical, to say the least. "What are we dealing with? Wendigo? Orcs?"

②Wendigo, an ogre demon in Native American myths and legends.

③therianthrope, often refers to a god who is half-human and half-animal. Here it refers to a demon with animal characteristics, such as the "wolf-changer" in the following.

"vampire."

Not a very funny joke, but it's three in the morning, and Sean's clearly been on nicotine and nerves to get by now. "very funny."

Sean took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one and lit it. "I'm not kidding. Vampire, or another name, Dracula—if you want it to sound high."

It's not like Sean to make such a big joke. "Vampire? You mean the thing that possesses dead bodies all over the world and drinks blood everywhere? Did you sleep through the class 'Introduction to Inhuman Spirit ④'? Vampires don't really exist."

④The official version of the fictitious supernatural life form in this article that has personality but is not human, that is, "demon", is abbreviated as NHE in the original text.

Sean shook his head, staring at the ground in front of him, hands deep in his coat pockets.

"I don't know what else to call it. The victim claimed he wasn't a Faust, but was possessed against his will. He said he came here with others to find the inhuman spirit because it was taken from the funeral parlor. stole his brother's body."

⑤In the setting of this article, people’s common names for people who actively summon demons are taken from Goethe’s fantasy poem "Faust", in which the hero of the same name is a doctor who summons demons in exchange for power.

"Steal corpses to eat, of course." Ghouls steal corpses all the time, and all funeral homes and mortuaries must be under 24-hour surveillance and put through a hotline to the local SPECTR.

"No, the victim said the body escaped and saw surveillance footage. Guess what we found in the attic? An autopsyed body, dead for a while, with his head chopped off."

"Impossible," John said as they walked toward the partially crumbled porch. "Non-human spirits must possess a living body. They don't have enough energy themselves-they need to get it from the host. This must be a scam."

"Is this your professional opinion, Special Agent Starkweather?" a calm, grim voice asked.

A tall woman stepped out of the shadows of the porch, her hands behind her back in deliberate indifference.

The district chief, Indira Kania, wore her black hair tightly tied back, revealing her angular features, as if to better show the four pale scars that ran across her bronzed skin.

"It must be so, sir," he said, shrugging.

"That's not what Agent Pittman said."

Damn it, Pittman is Kania's right-hand man and the top love reader in the southeastern United States⑥.If he says the possessed person is not lying, then the person must be telling the truth as he understands it.

⑥Empath, that is, a person with superpowers who can perceive other people's emotions.

"Continue to report, McNamara." Kania nodded to Sean and continued.

"The possessed person said that he grew fangs and bit the woman on the phone. By the way, he has no fangs now."

"Then he is crazy." The non-human spirit body needs time to change the body shape of its host, and if the host is unwilling to be possessed, the change will take more time, a few hours is not enough.

Sean laughed, but laughed and coughed because he smoked too much.

"That guy is crazy. He's talking about hunting, bloodsucking, demons, and I don't know what else it is."

"I think as soon as I get the possessing thing out, whatever it is, no matter how it got in, once he's rested in the psychiatric unit at the hospital, we can figure out what happened."

"Then why is he still here?"

"The inhuman spirit inside him ignored me as if I wasn't there."

John flinched in embarrassment.Yes, Sean didn't get No. 1 in school -- John got that distinction -- but he didn't get picked either.

The inhuman spirit had only been forcibly possessed for a few hours, but Xien failed to expel it from the involuntary host... How to put it, this is as embarrassing as bringing a hot man home but not getting hard.The only difference is that it happens in front of your boss and all your colleagues.

"Everyone has an off day," he said, patting Sean on the shoulder. "Listen, I'll take care of this, and then we'll get some coffee and some breakfast."

Sean's mouth tightened. "I'm serious, John—I've never seen anything like it. In my opinion, we should drop a bomb on this place and forget we saw it."

Damn, is Sean scared?John glanced at Kania to see if she noticed, but she didn't even blink.

All right, tit for tat. "What do you think, Chief?" he asked.She was also an exorcist, and he had every right to ask her opinion of the situation.

In the dim light, nothing leaked from her dark eyes. "McNamara was right. We've had unusual circumstances."

"So I'm giving you two options: walk in now and perform the exorcism, or we'll wait for the Emergency Containment Force to deal with this. Oh, and one more thing before you decide, the possessed person's name is Caleb Jason."

"Jason? Same last name as Ben Jensen?"

"His brother. Upstairs is Ben's body."

It's not logical. "Ben Jensen was killed by an early stage werewolf.

"I've checked the body myself, and there's not a single trace of psychic energy left on it." He couldn't be wrong, and he couldn't be wrong about ordinary werewolf injuries.

Hell, now his reputation is hanging by a thread. "I can handle it, sir. There's no need to call emergency control."

Kania took the gun out of her shoulder holster to check the ammunition. "I support you."

Well, now Kania is scared too. "Yes, sir. Please have the processing team on standby."

Kania went into the house and disappeared.John started to catch up to her, but Sean grabbed his arm.

"One day your luck will run out, too, John. One day you'll find yourself faced with something you don't know how to solve. What will you do then?"

John held back a sigh.This thing, whatever it was, had messed poor Sean's head.But John never encountered an inhuman spirit that he couldn't deal with, whether through an exorcism or a bullet.He saw no reason for the situation to change.