We continue the arc at the school and as the group begins trying to exorcise the spirits, Masako stands by the idea that there are no spirits at all. Mai is caught up on the fox fires she saw in her dream. It’s still completely undeniable that something is going wrong at this school and after a lot of investigation, Naru comes to the conclusion that there are multiple hexes at work. Usually dolls, areas or people are cursed and people with already heightened spiritual senses could be messed up by such a high concentration of hexes, such as the girl who felt as if she was possessed by a fox.
Naru even becomes the target for one of these hexes, a ghostly woman coming down and looking at him with malicious intent.
The teacher who viciously denied and hurt Chiaki gets into a car accident after having a run in with her. These hexes and the spirits caused by them are not strong enough to finish off their target in one go. So they instead keep tormenting the person over and over until it does eventually cause death. The only clear connection between any of this is Chiaki and the supposed curse that she put down upon the school and yet Mai seems to be convinced of her innocence.
Something in her behavior doesn’t match up to what you would expect of someone who was cursing such a large amount of people.
Once they figure out it’s the dolls, they begin searching the school for them. The first one found in the desk, the second in the track team locker room. Yet the rest could honestly be buried anywhere and would be much harder to locate, they have a decent chance of perhaps finding the one that is targeting Naru because the earth that was used to bury it would still be freshly dug up. Yet ones for someone like the teacher would probably be under already settled earth and thus much harder to find.
At the end of episode eight, Masako falls victim to one of the hexes and is pushed down the stairs. She is fine, but it was a close call. She’s taken to the hospital by John, leaving Ayako, Monk, Naru, Lin and Mai to continue the investigation.
The next one to be cursed is Mai. While she is out looking for the dolls, she hears a child crying down in the sewer and goes to investigate. As she is going to climb down, Naru comes and questions what she is doing. She says she’s going to help the child, but when she looks, the child is gone and a spirit is trying to drag her down. Naru runs over to help try to pull her up, but the ladder breaks and her fall pulls them both down into the sewer.
While they are down there. Naru tries to keep Mai’s spirits up by doing what she thinks are magic tricks. Though after a bit this seems to exhaust him and Mai thinks that he looks pale, they are attacked by the ghost that threatened Naru in the previous episode but Naru remains convinced as long as they remain calm. They should be fine. The ghost vanishes as Lin shows up and finds them, looking in the sewer they find all the dolls including the ones for Naru, Masako, the teacher and Mai.
Though as they are back at base, making plans to burn the dolls, Naru collapses. This could be from lack of sleep, the curse, or something else entirely. That’s where the cliff hanger leaves us off and we enter the After School Hex part 4 next week, this saga is actually pretty long.