The bluish dawn light of six in the morning stabbed into my eyes.
The moment I forced my eyelids open, what came into view was neither the familiar molding of my room nor the cold-textured ceiling of the Ryukyu Hero Agency, but pastel sky-blue wallpaper and an adorable cloud-shaped pendant light.
Like the opening cliché of some third-rate mass-market web novel, an intensely “unfamiliar ceiling” greeted my blank, unfocused gaze.
"...?"
As my consciousness surfaced, the computational circuits in my previously shut-down frontal lobe began rebooting with a ferocious roar.
The chilling confession of possessiveness we had shared atop Tokyo Tower.
The instant I had been about to fold space-time and take Nejire home. The blue-haired fairy’s eyes as she clutched the hem of her clothes tightly, cheeks flushed, and said, "I don’t want to go home today..." And then, after we entered a nearby building, the midnight turbulence that had tangled us together with the heat of an active volcano, hot enough to make the black inverted-cross piercing in my earlobe boil over.
"...Huh."
Like an unoiled tin robot, I creakily turned my head to the side.
Rustle.
Beyond the white bedsheets lay Nejire, her tousled blue wavy hair spread wide across the bed as she breathed softly in her sleep.
The smooth, pale line of her shoulder and collarbone, furtively exposed beyond the blanket, bore distinct red marks.
On the bedside table, the black inverted-cross piercing I had removed from my left earlobe and the matte [3x3 Cube] lay quietly side by side, radiating residual heat.
"..."
The brain cells that had been twisting every law of physics froze solid as they spat out a perfect error code.
...You really went and caused an irreversible, catastrophic accident.
A reality log of the greatest disaster of my life, one that easily surpassed Aunt Ryukyu’s Dragon Breath and my parents’ back-smashing slaps, was pounding heavily against my skull.
As I stood there blankly, frozen in confusion, the calendar algorithm sleeping in my mind flashed like lightning and threw up a blazing red alarm.
...Wait. What date is it today?
A head-on charge two days before the entrance exam, yesterday’s department-store fashion show and Tokyo Tower date, followed by the storm-like turbulence that had continued until dawn.
The moment I counted back and worked out the date, my heart dropped.
...It’s today?!
The internal scheduler of an examinee who had mistakenly believed it was the day after tomorrow, or at least one day away, had become completely tangled. Today, at 8:30 a.m., was the assembly time for U.A. High School’s regular Hero Course entrance exam.
The current time was 6:10 a.m.
When I glanced to the side, Nejire had her face buried in the pillow, breathing deeply in a profound sleep, apparently having exhausted all her stamina during the night. She was in such a perfect state of sleep that even shaking her would not show the slightest sign of waking her.
What the hell do I do...?
An unprecedented Marine Corps—no, a hundred-minute debate unfolded inside my frontal lobe at nanosecond intervals.
• [For]: "Get your ass to the test site right now. You need to pass at the top and get your license before using teleportation for your commute becomes legal!"
• [Against]: "Are you insane? You took a girl’s first time, and if you run off and leave her alone in bed when she wakes up, you’re not a Hero—you’re a criminal piece of trash that even Villains would reject!"
I clutched at my hair and swallowed bloody tears.
No matter how much of a smooth-talking, shameless-faced genius I was, my conscience as a human being simply would not permit me to abandon the person who had become my lover like that.
But it was also an undeniable physical reality that if I missed the U.A. exam, my parents’ dragon-class spinal pulverization and Aunt Ryukyu’s savage beating awaited me.
In the end, after a hundred-minute debate, I tearfully arrived at the best possible compromise.
Silencing even the sound of the sheets rustling, I carefully slipped out of bed.
I picked up the slacks and shirt lying on the bedside table and put them on, then fitted the black inverted-cross piercing into my left earlobe. I floated the [3x3 Cube] fifteen centimeters above my left shoulder, swept back my tousled black hair, and picked up the smartphone beside the bed.
Then I gave the softly sleeping Nejire a light kiss on the forehead and typed out a long message with trembling fingers.
[Nejire. I was going to wake you, but you were sleeping so soundly that I left you be. Today is that damn U.A. entrance exam, so I’m heading out first. I’m absolutely not running away, so don’t misunderstand—sleep well and wake up when you’re ready. I’ll crush the exam in 0.1 seconds, take first place, buy both hands full of delicious things you like, and use spatial movement to come back to the hotel room, so wait for me, okay? I love you. ❤️]
After pressing send, I carefully set the smartphone down beside Nejire’s pillow.
"...Hah, Yujin. Your life really is spectacular."
Biting down hard on my lip, I lightly flicked my thumb.
• Target coordinates: A point five hundred meters from the front gate of U.A. High School.
• Maximum-output consecutive leaps via spatial compression [Fold Step].
Fsssh—
Leaving the cold air of the room behind, I folded space-time and leaped like lightning toward the exam site. Just as I landed five hundred meters from U.A. High School’s front gate and began searching through my pockets, cold sweat streamed down my back.
"...Oh, right. My exam ticket."
My head had been so completely filled with Nejire, whom I had left in the hotel room bed, and the pink-colored turbulence from the night before that I had left the most important thing—my exam ticket—sitting right on the desk in my room at my family home.
Ha. One intense romance, and my brain’s basic memory has been formatted clean away.
In the end, I had to run a heavy cooling loop through the black inverted-cross piercing in my earlobe, fold space to leap to the desk in my room at home, snatch up the exam ticket, and return to U.A.’s front gate in an absurd 0.1-second round-trip mishap.
And just as I finally crossed the crosswalk in front of the gate with my exam ticket in hand—
"Yujiiiin—!!"
A familiar, eardrum-shredding roar at a perfect right angle struck from behind me.
Thud, thud, thud!
A boy came charging at me, swinging his arms at precisely measured ninety-degree angles—Iida Tenya, his Somei Middle School uniform buttoned neatly all the way to his throat. Through his glasses, he shot fiery disciplinary rays from his eyes and blocked my path.
"I repeatedly told you that we should go together on the day of the exam, yet why exactly did you not come to school yesterday?! An unexcused absence the day before the entrance exam! Your fundamental qualities as an examinee aspiring to U.A. are sorely lacking!!"
A right-angled hand-chop bombardment that cut through the wind.
But after the intensely heated incident last night and this morning’s catastrophe, the school-rule nagging of that by-the-book class representative felt lighter than a gentle breeze brushing past my ear.
I gave the matte-black [3x3 Cube] orbiting fifteen centimeters above my left shoulder a little spin, swept back my tousled black hair, and scratched the bridge of my nose with the world’s most shameless, exhausted expression.
"Ah, Class Rep. Could you keep the engine noise down this early in the morning? Yesterday... this big brother was going through some major ‘real-world physical turbulence’ in life, so I didn’t have a spare moment to attend school."
"P-physical real-world turbulence...?! What suspicious thing have you been getting up to now—?!"
Iida clutched the back of his neck and screamed at the incomprehensible sophistry, while I shoved both hands into my pockets and let out a long, leisurely yawn.
Amid the campus, where examinees gathered from across the country were walking in with pale faces taut with nerves, the two boys with utterly opposite temperatures began walking side by side toward the enormous auditorium where orientation would be held.
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