“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Just take a look at the annual physical examinations, will you? My level is zero, and yours is five, the highest! Go ask the people walking around over there, and they’ll be able to tell you right away which is better!”
Science was used for Academy City’s Ability Development. Things like pharmaceutics, neurology, and cerebral physiology. Even without any talent, if you made it through the standard Curriculum, you’d at least be able to bend a spoon with your mind.
However, Touma Kamijou still couldn’t do anything.
Academy City’s measurement devices had verified a complete lack of talent in him.
“Zero, huh?” the girl repeated, turning the words over in her mouth. Her hand dove into her skirt pocket for a moment, only to reemerge holding an arcade token.
“Hey, do you know what a Railgun is?”
“Hm?”
“It’s some sort of battleship weapon that fires metal shells using superpowered electromagnets. The principle’s the same as a maglev train.”
Clink. The girl flicked the token into the air with her thumb.
It whirled through the air before landing back on her thumb.
“…It’s apparently something like this…”
Precisely as she spoke…
An orange beam of light lanced right past Kamijou’s head soundlessly. It was actually more of a laser beam than a lance. He only realized it had come from the girl’s thumb because that’s where he saw the tip of the ray of light.
A moment later, a thunderclap sounded as if lightning had struck. The shock wave of air being torn apart inches from his ears threw off his sense of balance. Shakily, wobbly, he glanced behind him.
The moment the orange beam collided with the bridge’s pavement, the asphalt had been blown inward the same way water is when an airplane crash-lands on the ocean’s surface. Having spent its destructive energy in that straight thirty-meter line, it faded into an afterglow, searing its image into the air.
“Even a coin like this has massive power if it’s flying at three times the speed of sound. Although it does melt after about fifty meters because of air friction.”
Iron and concrete swayed violently as if the structure were an unreliable suspension bridge. The metal bolts holding it together clinked and clanked and shot out of their moorings all over its scaffolding.
“……!!”
Kamijou felt a chill, as if someone had thrown dry ice in his blood vessels.
He thought for a moment that the effect would boil all the moisture out of his body. “Y-you…Don’t tell me you used that to get rid of those guys!”
“Don’t be stupid! I don’t use this on just anyone. I don’t plan on turning into a homicidal maniac, you know,” she answered, her brown hair scattering sparks.
“For those powerless Level Zeroes…This was more than enough to get rid of them!”
Suddenly, a pale blue spark flew from the girl’s bangs like a horn…
…and a spear of lightning blasted straight at him.
There’s no way I can dodge that. It was a bolt of electricity fired from a Level Five esper’s hair. It was the same as trying to elude a light-speed lightning strike unleashed from a dark cloud—but only once you saw it coming.
Thoom!! The sound of the explosion hit him a moment later.
He’d immediately covered his face with his right hand. When the electric spear collided with it, the blast not only violently dispersed through Kamijou’s body, but it scattered in all directions, blanketing the bridge’s steel framework in sparks.
…At least, that’s how it looked.
“So, tell me. Why the heck don’t you have a scratch on you?”
Her words sounded nonchalant, but she was glaring at Kamijou, baring her teeth in frustration.
The high-voltage current that had splayed around him was strong enough to burn through the bridge’s steel frame. But even though it had struck his right hand directly, it hadn’t blown the appendage off the rest of his body…there wasn’t so much as a singe.
Kamijou’s right hand had dispelled the few hundred million volts of the girl’s electric attack.
“Jeez, what is that power supposed to even be? It’s not in Academy City’s data banks, that’s for sure. If I’m 1/320,857th of a natural, then you’re probably the city’s only 1/2,300,000th of a natural disaster,” muttered the girl resentfully. He couldn’t respond. “If you go around looking for fights with that anomaly, then I’m gonna have to crank up the voltage a bit.”
“…Yeah, says the one who always loses.”
Her reply came in the form of another “Lightning Spear,” approaching him at Mach speed.
But once again, the moment it struck his right hand, the current discharged in every direction as if it were nothing more impactful than a water balloon.
This was Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker, the death of illusions.
It was the laughingstock of daytime television—but in this city, supernatural abilities had been derived by mathematical formula. If anyone employed such “abnormal power,” even if they took the form of divine miracles, he could cancel the abilities without a trace.
As long as it was this abnormal power, even this girl’s supernatural ability, her Railgun, was no different.
However, Touma Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker could only be used against “abnormal powers” like these. Simply put, it could block an esper’s fireball, but it wouldn’t block the concrete shrapnel the assault pulverized in the process. In addition, the effect only extended from his right wrist to his fingertips. If the fireball hit him anywhere else, he’d be drowning in flames, so…
I thought…I thought I was…I thought I was really dead! Ahh!
He mustered up his calmest, most composed demeanor. Even if his right hand could completely nullify a Lightning Spear traveling at the speed of light, the fact that it had actually struck his right hand in the first place was nothing but a total coincidence.
His heart beat furiously in his chest. He had to summon every shred of his strength to compose a mature grin.
“Man, so unfortunate…such rotten luck, huh?”
With a single sentence of lament to the world, he brought an end to this day, July 19th.
“You really are unlucky.”