By the time the unprecedented EMP incident that had blacked out the entire city for ten seconds—and the welts Ryukyu’s tail had left across my spine as its price—were beginning to heal after agonizing physical therapy, the conclusion I had reached was clear.
Connecting the bioelectric currents in my frontal lobe directly to external electromagnetic waves with my bare body is insane.
If the black inverted-cross piercing on my ear was an exhaust vent that drew heat away from my brain, then I desperately needed a substation-cum-external interface that could safely synchronize with outside computing networks and filter out excessive pulse backflow.
After three days of racking my brains day and night at the workbench in the corner of my room, with a nano drill and microscopic laser tweezers laid out before me, a new piece of support gear was finally complete in my palm.
Click.
The object resting in my hand was a matte-black cube, just over five centimeters on each side. At a glance, it was the spitting image of an ordinary 3x3 cube one might find in any toy store.
Inside it, however, high-density superconducting nanocircuits, a frequency phase modulator, and a micro-electromagnetic field buffer had been packed together without a single gap.
"Let’s run a test."
With a light flick of my thumb inside my pocket, I injected microscopic gravity and magnetic-levitation algorithms into the cube’s core.
Whiiir—
The black cube, which had been resting obediently in my palm, silently rose into the air. Then, like a satellite orbiting its master, it settled fifteen centimeters behind my left shoulder and began floating there lightly.
• Device Name: External Phase Synchronization Interface [3x3 Cube].
• Bluetooth-grade bioelectric-current pairing complete with the black inverted-cross cooling device on the left earlobe.
• External communications network/electromagnetic signal distributed-computing proxy link standing by.
I glanced at the black cube floating beside my shoulder in the mirror. Black hair slicked back with pomade, rimless glasses perched on my nose, a black inverted-cross on my earlobe, and a cybernetic cube object hovering over my shoulder.
"Heh... as expected, a genius wears equipment on an entirely different level."
I stroked my jawline and pulled my lips into a crooked grin.
As long as this cube was floating beside me, I could activate it and use the city’s computing network as an external hard drive without overloading my frontal lobe. My preparations for battle were complete: the ability to control All Might-level output down to the nanosecond.
Of course, it was only me who had become safer, not Tokyo’s computing network, so intermittent blackouts and exploding servers would probably be unavoidable.
Feeling the cube’s blocks quietly rotate beside my shoulder as they calibrated themselves to zero, I shoved both hands deep into my pockets and began the final countdown to the entrance exam.
.
.
.
The atmosphere in the classroom exactly one week before the U.A. entrance exam was like walking on thin ice.
Thick error notebooks and collections of past exam questions were piled atop every desk. As everyone snapped mechanical-pencil leads with bloodshot eyes, squeezing out every last point, suffocating silence filled the classroom. Iida, in the seat ahead of me, was especially intense. His massive back was held ramrod-straight at ninety degrees as he recited explanations for U.A.’s past written-exam questions like he was memorizing scripture, practically radiating grim killing intent through his glasses.
And at the forefront of that brutal entrance-exam war, in the very back seat—
Scritch, scratch.
At the very bottom of the [Final Mock Exam Scoreboard] posted on the bulletin board beside the blackboard was one utterly unrivaled result.
[240th out of 240: Yujin — 0 points in all subjects (absent due to unauthorized early departure)]
A miraculous dead last, achieved by the guy who routinely took first place in the entire school after bailing in the middle of the exam. But I couldn’t care less about the disastrous score sheet.
Instead of a workbook, I had spread the latest issue of a glossy fashion magazine across my desk, resting my chin on one hand as I lazily turned the pages.
Fifteen centimeters behind my left shoulder, the newly completed matte-black [3x3 Cube] levitated soundlessly while slowly spinning, and the black inverted-cross piercing in my left earlobe carried a cool chill.
So oversized blazers are the trend in menswear this spring. I’ll need to have my uniform jacket altered one size up too, if I want the fit to work.
With a quiet scoff, I idly touched the rimless glasses on my nose with the tip of my index finger.
Then I suddenly remembered Nejire’s blue eyes from this fall, when she had ruffled my hair in the waiting room for the Miss U.A. Contest and said I looked a hundred times better without glasses while holding me in her arms.
"Hmm..."
I slipped the temple arms from around my ears and set the glasses down on the desk.
My bare face reflected in the window. The instant the sealing device known as glasses was gone, the combination of my sharp, cool eyes and slicked-back black hair was downright lethal.
I ran a hand down my jawline and pulled my lips into a crooked grin.
"Definitely... maybe I should go without glasses on exam day, just like Nejire said. The third-year middle school brats coming from all over the country to take the entrance exam will already be so nervous they’re pale as ghosts. If I hit them head-on with the sheer radiance of my face too, their minds will break and they’ll lose the will to fight before the practical exam even starts, right?"
It was an unmistakably narcissistic monologue, but it was also the hundred-percent sincere result of my calculations.
The moment that insolent soliloquy reached his ears, Iida’s shoulders began to tremble as he continued solving his workbook without moving from the seat in front of me.
As if he had finally reached his limit, the menacing pressure pouring off his huge back gradually began heating the air at the rear of the classroom.
"You... do you seriously have a brain or nottt—?!"
Bang—!
At last crossing the breaking point, Iida sprang from his seat like a coiled spring and slammed his desk.
His eyes bloodshot behind his lenses, he chopped the air repeatedly with the edge of his hand at a perfect right angle and screamed loud enough to tear apart the classroom ceiling.
"There is only one week left until the entrance exam! You achieved the unprecedented feat of coming dead last in the entire school with zero points in every subject on the final mock exam, and instead of reflecting on yourself, you are reading a fashion magazine and obsessing over your looks!! What exactly do you think the U.A. entrance exam is?!"
The nearby students flinched and turned to look, but I merely flipped another page of the magazine and let out a snickering laugh. The matte-black [3x3 Cube] floating over my left shoulder gave a light tick, tick as it rotated.
"Calm down, class president. Don’t make your brain cells do too much cardio. If you’re that anxious, why not throw me a problem you got stuck on?"
"What did you say...?! Fine! I’ll smash that arrogant nose of yours to pieces!!"
Grinding his teeth, Iida snatched up a high-level advanced mechanics mock-exam sheet from his desk and slammed it down right in front of my face.
"This is an ultra-high-difficulty physics wave-convergence question jointly produced by Tokyo University and U.A., one that even the nation’s top examinees cannot touch! It is among the most difficult problems that even I have spent an hour wrestling with over my error notebook! Go on, solve this too—"
"Sigh, class president."
Without even looking over the paper, I let out a low sigh with my chin still propped on my hand.
"If you wanted to see me agonize over something for even five minutes, you should have brought me a classical-literature passage asking me to infer the author’s feelings instead."
With a crooked, self-satisfied smile, I picked up the fountain pen from my desk.
Scratch, scratch, tap.
The calculation in my frontal lobe was complete in 0.01 seconds. In just three seconds, a four-line compressed derivation formula and the perfect numerical answer flowed onto the exam sheet’s margin in a single sweeping stroke.
"...?!"
Iida’s eyes widened as though they were about to pop out.
The vicious killer question he had agonized over for an hour, substituting every formula he knew, had been demolished in only three seconds—and mentally, at that—with a shortcut formula that went far beyond standard textbook methods.
"Th-this... in three seconds...?"
As Iida stood frozen with his mouth hanging open, an intensely familiar sense of déjà vu flashed through his mind.
Wait... this guy, right after doing flawless mental calculations... don’t tell me...?!
"Well then, good work this week too."
Before Iida could recover from his mental collapse and reach out an arm, the black inverted cross on my left earlobe and the cube over my shoulder emitted a brief blue-white gleam.
• Ground friction coefficient constrained to zero (0).
• Localized spatial compression at an altitude of fifty meters beyond the classroom window.
Fsssh—
"I’m leaving early without permission to inspect my fashion choices."
Leaving behind only the lingering trace of my uniform in midair, the figure of the school’s dead-last delinquent vanished in the blink of an eye.
"Yu-Yujiiiin—!! Leaving early without permission again?! Come back here right nowww—!!"
One week before the entrance exam, Iida Tenya’s blood-boiling cry echoed through the skies over Somei Middle School as he wailed at empty air.
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