I Got an Omnipotent Angel - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: I Came Face to Face with an Evil Spirit

TL/ED – Miso

When a person holds a religion from before they are even born, it’s called cradle faith.

It means someone who has lived a life of faith since the womb, tagging along with their parents to church or temple.

I was a textbook case of that cradle faith, but was I a devout believer? Ehh… hard to say?

Just a guy who went to church because his parents did. That was the full extent of my religion.

Not that attending church from a young age had left me with fond memories.

My parents were remarkably zealous believers.

Zealous enough to drag a kid barely into elementary school along to every single dawn prayer meeting.

Smack!

“Huh? Mom?”

“Who said you could doze off during dawn prayer? Wake up!”

Good grief. Dragging a little elementary school kid to dawn prayer, then slapping him across the face for dozing off.

Surely no other parent out there would do that.

Isn’t that seriously going too far?

Still, I had to keep going.

What could I do, when they’d made it clear that if I wasn’t going to church, I could get out of the house?

“God our Father, protect Your child Baek Yohan from wicked specters–”

It happened one day while I was receiving laying-on-of-hands prayer, same as always.

Oh, laying-on-of-hands prayer is when a pastor places his hand on a believer’s head and prays over them.

The pastors would usually come around and pray for people during the prayer time at dawn prayer meetings or regular services.

In my case, the presiding pastor always prayed for me, but that day was a little different.

“This is the boy?”

When I cracked my eyes open and lifted my head, another pastor was standing beside the elderly Pastor Park.

The most famous star pastor at our church.

Something about his prayers packing a miraculous punch, or so they said.

Not exactly the kind of phrase to pin on a pastor, though.

But this pastor didn’t do the laying-on-of-hands prayer; he just stood there staring at me for a while.

What’s going on?

I kept my eyes closed and waited for a while, but the sound that reached me was nothing like a prayer.

“Maaan…….”

What I heard wasn’t the sound of prayer but an exclamation.

More precisely, an exclamation closer to a lament.

When I finally opened my eyes and looked up, the pastor was grinning down at me.

“You’d better attend church diligently, kid.”

“Sorry?”

“If you don’t like church, go to a temple, at least. Man, your fate is a rough one.”

What is he, a shaman? What’s with all this talk about fate?

“Come now, Pastor Kim. Is that any way for a pastor to talk?”

“A life is a life. We have to save him.”

There was something off about what he said, but the takeaway was to attend church diligently, so, well.

Pastor Kim’s meddling didn’t end there.

“Hey, Yohan. C’mere a sec.”

“What is it, Pastor?”

“Nothing much. Here, take this.”

What the pastor handed me was some old scroll.

Bound with a cord, sealed with a lead stamp… a parchment that somehow looked crusted with old, dried blood.

“What is this?”

“Ah, that’s the Book of Enoch. The original pseudepigrapha, excavated in Ethiopia. I swiped it.”

“…….”

That sounds like an extremely dangerous confession.

“Figured our Yohan needs it more than I do. Keep it safe.”

At any rate, since he said it was a precious item he’d gone all the way to Ethiopia to obtain, I kept it safe.

My life of faith continued after that.

It seemed like it would keep on going.

Until my parents passed away.

It was a car accident.

The kind of accident that happens every single day; utterly, painfully common.

It didn’t feel so common once it happened to me.

Both my parents were orphanage-raised with no relatives to speak of, so I nearly couldn’t even arrange the funeral, but people from church came and handled it in my stead.

I hadn’t known funeral proceedings were that expensive.

Later, during the shrouding and the cremation, the tears I’d been holding back finally poured out.

Ah, my parents are really gone now.

For all their pestering about going to church…….

They were parents who had lived giving their all for their only child.

After all the proceedings ended, I think I spent a while just drifting.

I got fired from my part-time job for asking for three days off, and then came sorting the inheritance and debts, the death registrations and closing of accounts. Pensions and insurance, real estate, the car… true to a capitalist society, there was no end of money matters.

My head was a mess and I was busy, so for the first time, I skipped church that weekend.

And the next week.

And the week after that.

And the week after that one.

A whole month passed by in a daze like that.

“I’m hungry.”

It was the small hours, so the only place worth going was the convenience store.

I was picking up a boxed meal and some buy-two-get-one-free canned colas at the convenience store when I saw something on the clerk’s shoulder.

At first I thought it was a shadow.

But shadows don’t ‘stream down’ like that.

Wondering what it was, I lifted my head, and saw black hair.

Long hair, limp and dripping wet, flowing down along the clerk’s neck.

And a face.

Tilted at an angle, ‘staring’ at me.

There were no pupils.

And yet there was a gaze.

Did our eyes meet? Does it know I saw it?

Thud–

My heart gave a single violent lurch.

“Shall I ring you up?”

The clerk smiled like nothing was wrong.

Can he not see it? Am I the only one who can?

I hurriedly lowered my head.

Even as I set the boxed meal and cola cans on the counter, I forced my eyes to stay down.

Don’t meet its gaze.

Never. Never, ever meet its gaze.

A warning to myself.

I tried to pull my card from my wallet, but I couldn’t get a grip. My fingertips kept slipping right off.

In the end, I only managed to pry the card out by digging in with a fingernail, hard enough to leave a mark in the faux-leather wallet.

Beep–

The sound of the card reader seemed unusually loud.

“Oh, sir, would you like a bag?”

At those words, I nearly lifted my head on reflex.

Don’t look up.

I mustn’t look up.

Just as I was barely holding myself back with that inner warning.

The thing entered my field of view.

How?

I didn’t even lift my–

The thing slid its face out over the boxed meal I’d set on the counter and looked up at me.

Griiin

A smile splitting open like a tear.

Still no eyes, yet a smile spread across its mouth.

It saw.

It saw.

It saw me.

My heart, pounding like mad.

I bolted from the convenience store without a backward glance.

Sir–?!

I heard the clerk’s voice, but behind that voice, ever so low–

wet breathing overlapped it.

Along with a gaze that seemed to cling, sticky, to my back.

I hurried home and locked the door first thing.

If what I’d just seen was really what I suspected, I doubted a lock would mean anything.

I locked the door and dove straight into bed.

I pulled the covers over my head and heaved gasping breaths.

Each breath tore its way up my throat, but I couldn’t stop.

Because that gaze kept surfacing in my mind, those empty eye sockets, that skin-crawling smile.

It was while I was trying to calm myself down like that.

I felt the edge of the covers over me shift slightly.

It’s not my imagination.

It’s not a mistake.

A slow, unmistakable slither. Someone was tugging at the covers.

My breath stopped.

My body froze.

I couldn’t move so much as a fingertip.

“…….”

My throat locked up before I could even make a sound.

And then, once more, the covers were yanked hard.

No.

I clung to the covers for dear life.

As if this blanket were my last line of defense, I clamped both arms around it, tight! And held on.

I could hear breathing.

It’s right on the other side.

Wet breath brushing past from somewhere very close.

I shook and shook.

My whole body trembled; my teeth chattered together audibly.

A ghost.

An evil spirit?

It had seen me and followed me home.

In a situation like that, there was only one thing I could lean on.

“Lord… Jesus, God… p-please help me…….”

A voice breaking apart.

A sound that could have been prayer or scream leaked out of me.

“GodJesusplease…….”

Just as I traced the sign of the cross with my fingers.

A low, viscous voice burrowed in.

【What’s your cross, then?】

My heart plummeted.

【What’s it made of?】

That question, digging in relentlessly.

My answer to that question would decide my fate.

A cross.

A cross.

Gold? Silver? Iron? Wood?

I pictured shape after shape, but none of them was in my hand.

I was holding nothing at all.

【Where’s your cross? You don’t have a single one?】

Do I really not have one?

Right now, in this moment, is there not one cross that can save me?

Gritting my teeth, I searched for an answer to throw back at the ghost.

With a cracking voice, with desperation in my heart.

“My cross–”

Push it all the way.

“is the faith and belief in my heart!!”

At that moment, light poured out inside the room.

For a second I thought it was the ceiling light. It wasn’t.

Never in my life had I seen a golden light so brilliant, so radiant.

And as that almost miraculous radiance came flooding down–

Crrrack!

There was the sound of something yawning wide open.

【KYAAAAAAAAAAAAH!】

An unearthly shriek nearly tore my eardrums.

It wasn’t that eerie voice meant to instill terror.

It was a scream, pure and simple. The pain-warped scream of a horror-movie victim facing death might sound like this.

Crunch! Cr-crunch!

Ominous sounds came one after another, and the force that had been dragging at my covers vanished.

Through a gap in the covers, I saw legs dangling in midair.

Then again, it’s a ghost, so maybe floating is normal for it…….

【Keek! Keeeeeek!】

Guessing that the ghost’s voice was unmistakably a scream twisted by pain, I peeked out from under the covers.

“Huh.”

The evil spirit was caught in something’s ‘bite’.

It was a huge mouth.

A human… no, a mouth so huge that the only creature I could think of with a mouth that size was a whale.

A pitch-black maw was chomping away at the evil spirit.

It was real in a way that no slasher-movie monster I’d ever seen could touch.

The crunch-crunch of chewing grated at my ears, and I could see the evil spirit thrashing inside.

So different from when it had been hunting me, the evil spirit, contorted with shock, dismay, pain, and terror, flailed and reached out a hand.

As if begging me to save it.

【KYAAAAAAAAAAAH–!!】

But before I could do a thing, the fiend’s torso was severed by those teeth.

The spirit body being chopped apart looked like a mass of smoke being sliced away.

But the maw didn’t let even the dissipating smoke escape.

Chomp!

It swallowed it all in an instant.

Survival had already become a bad joke the moment the thing was bitten in half, but as if even that weren’t to be permitted, the maw ground it down fine, chewing thoroughly, meticulously, and ate every last bit.

All I could do was stare blankly.

The thought of running never even occurred to me. My legs were shaking too hard to move at all.

Coming face to face with a ghost was surreal enough, but a maw that devoured that ghost?

How on earth is anyone supposed to run from something like that?

Clack! Clack clack!

Having chewed the ghost to bits, the maw then clacked its teeth at me.

“O-Our Father which art in heaven hallowedbethyname–!”

Clack! Clack clack!

“Thykingdomcome thywillbedone inearthasitisinheaven!”

Clack clack clack!

“Forgive us our trepasses aswe forgivethose whotrepassagainstus! Andleadusnot intotemtation butdeliverusfromevil forthine isthekingdom andthepower andtheglory foreverandever!!”

Clack clack clack clack!

Why is it completely unfazed?

“Amen! Amenamen!!”

Clack clack!

The maw drooled and drooled as it rubbed its enormous rows of white teeth against me.

I was shaking with terror, but then I noticed the ‘white wings’ sprouting perkily from that maw.

Six white wings, holy-looking even, utterly out of place on the pitch-black maw.

No way.

It can’t be.

Right?

With those visuals?