The Seven Wonders Of Inumaki Toge

No. 3 Cursed Spirits

Rumor has it that Inumaki Toge can find cursed spirits where ever they are. Rumor has it there are many of them wide in the open, and they're not easy to beat, especially when near a crowd.
Yet, Toge is left to fight against them on his own.

~~~~~

Toge fights cursed spirits.

Sounds absurd, right? That's what Maki thought at least, when a couple of years ago Toge started talking to her about the dreams he'd been having. In his dreams he was fighting against cursed spirits along a talking panda and Maki herself. They basically were saving the world in his dreams.

Back then, in middle school, she still thought this to be entertaining; she had a best friend with badass and very vivid dreams, ones he remembered the day after.

But during their last year of middle school it stopped being fun.

This was because Maki had to witness her best friend living one of his dreams in real life. He nearly got run over by a truck when he decided to carelessly sprint onto a freeway, because of what he claimed to be a grade one cursed spirit.

Maki still remembers that to this day; how she, with her small fourteen-year-old body had just barely been able to pull him out of a truck in time. Sure, she practically leaped him up against a four-person car, and had to spend multiple days in the hospital, but he wouldn't even be alive if she wouldn't have been strong enough to pull him away.

She thought for all that time that this would be Toge's wakeup call; he nearly died.

But it wasn't.

Instead, he only started hallucinating more and more. His personality become less and less like the guy he used to be when they'd just started middle school. And his sanity slowly started slipping away.

In the middle of summer, Toge showed up at Maki's house in the middle of the night; he was hurt and weakened and refused to speak in normal words. He was having a massive hallucination or delusion; one in which he had been fighting a cursed spirit all night. One where he broke his arm in so many places that the doctors weren't even sure that they would move it again.

Maki called an ambulance and Toge's mother, and after that she didn't hear from his for four weeks. She thought she wouldn't ever hear from him again, until he suddenly showed up in her class. He wasn't anything like himself and he showed up to school bruised and bloody more than once a while.

But at least he was speaking normally, until he relapsed badly again at the start of this year and started talking gibberish again. That's when Maki decided to back away from her former friend; she couldn't stand being around him.

Now, after keeping that up for almost an entire year, her new friends suddenly asked Toge to sit with them on the Friday before this weekend. All because he showed up on time for lunch for the first time this school year, which is, believe it or not, already almost over.

Maki still feels the pain and anger of when Yuuji started feeding and encouraging his delusions. It made her more than a little mad. Her other friends must've noticed, because after lunch Nobara texted her to apologize for Yuuji's behavior.

Maki told her she didn't mind, not even a bit, but she also knew she did mind.

Nobara knew this too, probably, because she didn't take it as an answer and told Maki she wanted to make it up to her. That's why today, on Sunday afternoon, they're walking in one of the biggest shopping streets; or at least, the biggest within a walking distance from their homes.

"I saw this amazing tank top online," Nobara says, even though she's already gotten herself four bags filled with clothes within just half an hour. "I think they have it in the store too, can we go there?"