"Yujin!! If you’re going to put U.A. High School’s Hero Course as your first choice, then please fix that arrogant habit of yours of breaking school rules first—!!"
It was the final career counseling season of my third year of middle school.
The instant I stepped out of the faculty office, Iida’s straight-chop roar tore through the hallway and struck my ears. Looking at the hand with which I had neatly scrawled [U.A. High School Hero Course] in the first-choice field of my application, he wailed as if he were about to shed tears of blood through his glasses.
"Class president, could you stop making your brain cells do cardio? You can nag me after I get accepted."
I lightly tapped the black inverted-cross piercing in my earlobe, then folded space with a casual stomp and slipped out through the school gates.
As always, the place I headed straight after school was Ryukyu’s agency.
When I threw open the director’s office door and walked in, my aunt, who had been idly rolling a pen amid heaps of paperwork, sharply furrowed her brow and raised her golden eyes.
"...Did you crawl in here again the moment school ended?"
"Director, I’m not here to play air-conditioner shuttle or slack off today."
With both hands buried deep in my slacks pockets, I pushed my rimless glasses up the bridge of my nose with one finger. Then, adding a spoonful of genuine computational gravity to my usual glib manner, I spoke.
"Now that application submission is over, it’s about time I laid some groundwork with physics calculations for the U.A. entrance exam. Could you reserve the hero-only training facility in the agency basement for me?"
"The training facility?"
My aunt set down her teacup and carefully looked over her nephew’s youthful yet sharp features.
"Yes. If I practice my Quirk outside and warp public property again, you’ll end up with your head on the police station floor. The agency’s underground training facility has perfect soundproofing and impact-resistant construction, so it’s just right, isn’t it?"
"...You’d be less aggravating if you kept your mouth shut. The moment you exceed the property-damage limit, every last cent comes out of your allowance. Got it?"
Even as she let out a deep sigh, she casually tossed me a master key card. With a crooked grin, I snatched the key from the air.
"Just as expected of my aunt. Thank you for the generous support."
With winter approaching in Tokyo, the full-scale zeroing process for the spacetime perturbations that would blast straight through U.A.’s Hero Course was about to begin.
.
.
.
Booom—!!
Kraaaash!
Deafening explosions erupted one after another at the center of the underground training facility, lined with impact-resistant titanium alloy. Dozens of steel spheres suspended in midair as mock targets were caught in an instant of spatial distortion and mass compression, crumpling like sheets of paper before being slammed into the floor.
"Whew..."
I pulled my hands from my pockets and swept back my black, slicked-back hair, damp with sweat.
The instant I shut off the calculation switch in my frontal lobe, the vicious distortions of gravity and inertia filling the training facility settled into calm all at once. Destructive power, precision, and reaction speed.
The calculation algorithms running through my head and my ability to twist the laws of macroscopic physics had practically reached completion.
"As expected... even the word genius hardly does me justice."
I let out a self-satisfied chuckle, a crooked smile tugging at my lips. In terms of power and variation in technique, there was no room left for improvement. Naturally so, when my innate brain put out computational power in the top 0.001%.
But that satisfaction lasted only a moment.
Sizzle—
The moment I absentmindedly reached for my left earlobe, I froze at the touch of metal beneath my fingertips—a metal that should have been cool.
"...Ow, hot."
It was hot enough to burn me the instant I touched it. The black inverted-cross piercing, fitted with the superconducting core I had taken from that pink psychopath, was sizzling with such intense heat that it had begun to glow red.
"Hah... so it’s a processing-capacity problem again in the end."
I drank some cold water and leaned against the wall.
Whenever I raised my output past seventy percent and folded multiple coordinate systems continuously or bent several laws of physics at once, the heat generated in my brainstem and the computational load far exceeded what this tiny device could handle.
The current cooling piercing could handle most battles, but if I ever faced an All Might-class monster or a disaster-level crisis head-on, my brain cells would burn out first, and I would self-destruct in a spray of nosebleed.
But I could never tolerate dangling larger cooling equipment all over myself and ruining the fit of this perfect face. That left only one answer.
A massive computational network capable of handling my brain’s processing load in real time.
Of course, there was no external hard drive in existence capable of synchronizing with a human neural network and solving spatial-perturbation equations by the nanosecond.
Fanning the black inverted cross on my earlobe to cool it down, I gave a quiet, hollow laugh toward the training facility ceiling.
"Hah... wouldn’t it be nice if some godlike computational network that could handle all these insane physics formulas for me just dropped out of the sky?"
Clicking my tongue at the ridiculous fantasy I had muttered to myself, I shoved my hands into my slacks pockets and left the underground training facility.
.
.
.
One day during winter break, with the U.A. entrance exam just around the corner.
Third-year middle school examinees all across Tokyo were throwing themselves into libraries and gymnasiums with blood-spitting determination. Even Iida, the by-the-book class president who sat in front of me, was surely getting up at five in the morning every day to service the mufflers on his calf engines and fighting through past mock-exam questions until calluses formed on his fingers.
Yet in the heart of that desperate admissions war, my daily life was so peaceful it had practically rotted away.
"Mm, nice weather."
With two pillows stacked behind my headboard, I lay there in loose training clothes, lazily swiping through my smartphone screen with my thumb.
The written exam? For a frontal lobe that habitually ranked first in the entire school, middle-school-level written questions were arithmetic on the level of the multiplication table.
The practical exam? I had already perfectly zeroed in my spacetime-distortion calculations, which wrung mass and inertia dry, down in Ryukyu’s agency training facility. Studying any more would be a grave waste of noble brain cells and an abuse of resources.
Instead, I was lying in bed exploring the abyss of social-media algorithms, idly browsing short-form videos to kill time.
Then an old clip from a classic sci-fi film caught my eye from one corner of the feed. Onscreen, an elderly professor with white hair tapped a blackboard and lectured in a grave voice.
"Humans ordinarily use only ten percent of their brain capacity. But what if... some catalyst were to activate one hundred percent of the brain?"
Then came the highlight of the film itself.
A female protagonist exposed to a special drug gradually raised her brain usage to twenty, forty, then sixty percent—and the moment she finally reached the realm of one hundred percent—
The screen filled with her reading electromagnetic signals with the naked eye, controlling gravity and mass with a single gesture, and ultimately synchronizing with every information network humanity had built, ascending to the realm of an omniscient, omnipotent god transcending time and space.
"..."
The fingers holding my smartphone froze as I lay there, and the screen’s bluish light illuminated my sharp, cool eyes beneath my slicked-back black hair.
It was a B-grade sci-fi premise loaded with cinematic exaggeration and fiction, but a lightning-bolt idea flashed through the brainstem circuitry that had been stalled against the wall of computational load.
The idea of using the world’s information networks and electromagnetic signals themselves as a massive external hard drive for my frontal lobe.
Staring at the fantastical scene onscreen, I let a glib smile curl across my lips.
"That... is a hypothesis more tempting than I expected."
On a languid Tokyo afternoon, another vicious mental simulation far beyond common sense began to run inside my idly spinning mind.
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