His glove abruptly stopped quivering. The little tremors dissipated. All of a sudden, he realized he was holding something heavy.
Slowly, he opened his hand. There was a small iron ball sitting in his palm, shiny enough to reflect Naomi’s face.
“Sensei! Sensei!”
Naomi rushed over to his teacher, who was sitting on a log nearby. He’d been reviewing some sort of data for a while and hadn’t been paying attention. Looking over the fruits of Naomi’s labor, he murmured, “Hmm, look at that.”
“This is incredible! Look, it’s iron! It’s real iron!”
“That it is.”
Sensei made a circle with his fingers and peered at the ball through it. It was a gesture he made on a regular basis. He’d explained that he could call up all sorts of information displays this way.
“Nice and dense, too. Not many impurities…”
Naomi couldn’t suppress a smug chuckle of satisfaction at that assessment. He’d worked hard to pull this off. Harder than Sensei knew, in fact.
In the three weeks since they’d met, Naomi had practiced with the glove first thing in the morning every day. These training sessions with Sensei were intense and difficult and rarely earned him any praise. He’d been eager to surprise the man at least once, so he’d started practicing in his bedroom late into the night.
Naomi pictured the periodic table poster hanging in his room. Fe was atomic number 26, and its density was relatively high. Creating it had proven more difficult than he’d imagined, but after ten long days of solo practice, he’d finally managed to create it from scratch all on his own.
“This is pretty amazing, right? Don’t you think?” he asked Sensei, grinning happily. He felt like he deserved a few more compliments for pulling this off, in all honesty.
Sensei responded with a warm smile and by pointing into the air. Naomi looked up to see dozens of giant shiny iron balls floating in the sky—and then, suddenly, they shot down directly at him.
“Eeeek!”
I’m dead!
Throwing his arms over his head, Naomi huddled against the ground. There was no way he could ward off those enormous balls of iron. He was going to die.
Just as that thought crossed his mind, the barrage of iron balls hit the ground without a sound. They piled up there for a moment, and then disappeared all at once.
Oh. Right…
“They’re only illusions, kid. I told you I can’t interact with this world, didn’t I?” With a perfectly serious expression on his face, Sensei approached his cowering pupil.
“Next time, deal with it instead of freaking out. Make a nice thick ceiling for yourself, or dig a tunnel into the ground. Whatever. There’s all sorts of options.”
“I can’t just improvise something on the spur of the moment!”
“Oh? You can’t?” Sensei’s voice dropped in tone. It was suddenly almost hostile. “Is that what you’re going to say when her life depends on it?”
Naomi looked up at Sensei’s face. He could feel those words, colder and heavier than iron, pressing down on his shoulders.
Sensei was talking about the incident—the bolt of lightning that would hit the riverbank, claiming Ruri’s life, and their attempt to save her from that fate.
Failure wasn’t an option. They’d only have one chance.
“No matter how precisely we recreate the original events, my presence here will have an impact,” Sensei continued. “There’s no telling whether the accident will occur exactly as recorded. We can try our best, but there are no guarantees.”
Sensei paused to look Naomi straight in the eye.
“That’s why you need to be capable of protecting her, no matter what happens. Even if things take a totally unexpected turn, you need to find some way to succeed. And that means you need to become capable of doing anything.”
Fighting the urge to avert his eyes, Naomi let the words wash over him. He needed to be capable of anything? Did this man expect him to become some kind of god?
“The God Hand is powerful enough to make that possible, at least in theory.”
Naomi already knew that. Sensei had explained the glove’s potential when he gave it to him, how it could rewrite the fabric of the world. Once you learned how to use it, you could do almost anything. It did seem almost divine.
In other words, if he fell short—
“It all depends on how you use it.” Sensei gave him the answer unprompted. Unable to endure his steady gaze, Naomi looked away. He’d finally bent under the pressure.
His eyes, searching for something else to focus on, settled on his own hand. A vague sense of anxiety was bubbling up inside him, growing larger by the second.
Can I really pull this off?
He had a magic glove that could do anything, and the best he could manage with it was creating a little ball of iron. Was he really capable of playing his role competently?
It felt like there was a great weight pressing down on his heart. This was a very familiar feeling. His subconscious mind was telling him it was time to run—to get off the path he was on before the moment of truth arrived.
To the best of his ability, Naomi avoided taking risks. He didn’t like challenging himself unless the outcome was predictable. These were the rules he’d lived by for fifteen years, and they still bound him in place. He couldn’t just reinvent himself all of sudden. He’d spent his middle school years avoiding everything that made him uncomfortable; he wasn’t going to shake that habit in a day.
And yet—
He had gone out and bought himself that book, hoping he could change.
There was a pile of books sitting on Naomi’s desk in his bedroom. They were thicker and larger than his usual paperbacks—these were introductory texts and reference books for various scientific fields.
Naomi enjoyed studying. When you put more effort in, you would reliably be rewarded for it. It was one of the few things he could focus on without getting anxious.
So, he’d picked up a habit of studying when he was feeling nervous. He could just hit the books until his fears faded. It was his only real coping method, and in the face of this new dilemma, he turned to it once again.
First, he worked his way through a chapter of a physics text. Then he switched over to a chemistry book. He decided to skip biology; living things were supposedly too complex to mess with, after all.
In a corner of his mind, Sensei’s words of advice played on a constant loop.
“The most important thing you can do is foster your power of imagination.”
Putting down his book, Naomi stepped out onto his balcony. It was better to be out here, in case he screwed things up. Squatting down on the concrete in his sandals, he tensed his gloved hand in anticipation.
“Convince your mind that you can make iron in the blink of an eye, and then demonstrate to yourself that it’s true.”
Air began to turn to metal in the palm of his hand.
I can do this. I can do this in a second. It’s easy, he repeated to himself, but the process still moved slowly.
Come on! Faster! Faster! he thought impatiently.