Kamijou froze.
He hadn’t spotted her sooner—there wasn’t a single light source on this bridge—but a lone girl was standing about five meters ahead of him in the direction from which he’d come. She wore a gray pleated skirt, a short-sleeved blouse, and a summer sweater. She had every bit the appearance of a completely normal middle schooler.
Staring into the night sky, Kamijou seriously considered just falling backward onto the ground.
It’s the girl who was getting hassled at the restaurant.
“…So is that it? Does this mean those guys stopped following me because…”
“Yeah. They were being a pain, so I fried ’em.”
He heard the sound of electricity and saw a pale blue flare.
No, the girl wasn’t holding a Taser. Every time her shoulder-length brown hair shifted, it buzzed with sparks, as if it were some kind of electrode.
An empty plastic shopping bag fluttered along on the wind, passing in front of her face. Immediately, the bluish-white sparks eradicated it. It was akin to some sort of automatic interference system.
“Whoa.” Kamijou grunted tiredly.
Today was July 19th. That was why he went into a bookstore and bought a comic book that was obviously crap, why he went into a restaurant when he wasn’t even hungry, and why he’d recklessly opted to jump in when he saw a middle school girl getting harassed by clearly wasted thugs.
However, Kamijou hadn’t been thinking, I should rescue that girl.
His only thought had been saving the boys who’d crossed her path.
He sighed. The girl was always like this. He’d been seeing her around for almost a month now, but neither knew the other’s name. In other words, they weren’t striking up a friendship.
She was the one always coming up to him all haughty, saying she’d reduce him to a heap of trash, and Kamijou’s job was to shrug it off. There were no exceptions; he stood undefeated.
She’d probably cheer up if he could make it look like she’d won, but he was a pretty bad actor. He tried faking it once before and had subsequently spent the rest of his night getting chased around by what could only be described as a monster.
“…Wait, what did I do again?”
“I will not allow a stronger human than me to exist. That’s enough of a reason.”
That was all she said.
Even characters in fighting games these days have better fleshed-out setups than her, Kamijou thought.
“I’ve had enough of you making me look like an idiot. I’m a Level Five esper, got it? Do you think I’d really use my full strength against an incompetent Level Zero? I know plenty of good ways to cook weaklings, you know.”
This city, unlike others, didn’t follow the traditional scenario where street thugs were the toughest. Those delinquents earlier had been complete nothings—they were Level Zero espers, Impotents, who’d dropped out of the Curricula designed to “develop” their superhuman abilities. The truly strong in this city were people like her: honor student–level espers.
“Um, about that. I already know you have a 320,857th of talent, but you should quit talking down to people if you want to live a long, healthy life, all right?”
“Shuddup. Those guys stoop to gross stuff like injecting drugs directly into their veins and physically shoving electrodes onto their brains, and they still can’t bend a spoon. If they’re not completely talentless, then what are they?”
“…”
Yes. This is the kind of place Academy City is.
Academy City’s other face was somewhere that Brain Development—using more palatable names like Mnemonics or Memorization Techniques—was quietly included in the student Curricula.
However, it wasn’t like every single one of the 2.3 million “students” in the city quit being human, like the hero of a comic book. If you looked at the city’s population as a whole, a little less than 60 percent were only at a level where they could bend a spoon if they strained their minds to the point where the blood vessels in their brains exploded. They were all just useless Level Zeroes.
“If you want to bend a spoon, you can just use pliers. And if you want fire, you can just go buy a lighter for a hundred yen. We don’t need telepathy; we have cell phones. Superpowers aren’t all that special.”
This was coming from Kamijou, who carried the stigma of having been labeled a “useless” esper by the Sensors during a citywide physical examination.
“They’re all wrong in the head. You’re just bragging about some by-products called supernatural powers. Wasn’t the entire goal to try and go beyond that?”
The girl, one of only seven people in Academy City considered to be a Level Five esper, turned her lips down in response.
“Huh?…Right, that. How did it go again? ‘Man cannot measure God; therefore, we must first obtain a body beyond that of man, or we can never arrive at God’s answers’?”
She snickered.
“It’s just ridiculous. What on earth is this ‘intellect of God,’ anyway? Hey, have you heard? They’re developing some military-grade little ‘sisters’ for me, based on my DNA, that they can use in the army. I guess the by-products were sweeter than the ultimate goal, huh?”
She stopped, her spiel ending abruptly.
The air changed silently.
“…Well. That’s what strong people would say, isn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“Strong people, strong people, strong people. They don’t understand how much of a struggle it is to try and accomplish anything because they happened to be born with natural talent. What you just said sounded exactly like a line from the hero in some comic book, oblivious and cruel.”
Whzz. zz. zz. He heard a freakish whirring emanating from the river beneath the bridge.
There were only seven espers of her caliber in Academy City. How much of their “humanity” had they had to sacrifice to get there…? A dark flame flickered at the end of the girl’s words, hinting to him of that fact.
Kamijou rejected that.
He denied it with singular resolve, by never turning back.
By never losing.