Tokiwadai Middle School, a prestigious all-girls academy, carried quite a reputation within Academy City.
It wasn’t just that the school was home to plenty of high-society young ladies the average person might never meet in their entire life; its real clout as an elite esper school was impossible to ignore, too.
Not a single student here had an ability below Level 3, and above that, there were even two top-tier espers who’d reached the dizzying height of Level 5: the Railgun and Mental Out!
As a prestigious school, Tokiwadai Middle School was at every moment a microcosm of upper-class society.
Here, the young ladies banded together into cliques just like the world outside, or, to put it more elegantly, factions, though in Yurika’s eyes this whole arrangement really wasn’t any different from gangs in the underworld forming alliances.
These factions naturally formed around the school’s biggest focal points.
Among them, Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki, as Tokiwadai’s two pillars and Level 5 espers, naturally headed up two of the largest factions in the school.
Yet the one who formed a three-way standoff with these two, like the three legs of a tripod, was another figure with no especially powerful ability at all: Tenshouin Yurika.
“Yurika-sama should be in my group.”
“No, she should be in mine!”
“I’m the class rep, so you should all do as I arrange!”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You think we don’t know? You just want to keep Yurika-sama all to yourself!”
Tokiwadai Middle School today was as peaceful as ever, and the area around Yurika was, as ever, a clamorous racket.
Today was Tokiwadai’s outdoor sketching day.
For the young ladies of Tokiwadai, abilities were certainly important, but the school motto wasn’t about turning this flock of girls, who should be living out their youth, into a batch of inexplicably savage, mass-destruction human weapons.
So things like tea ceremony and flower arrangement were also required courses at Tokiwadai, and painting was one of them.
At Tokiwadai, outdoor sketching meant splitting into groups, and that was precisely when Yurika’s headaches began. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The classmates from her own class were fine, since they were usually around Yurika during regular lessons anyway, they took the attitude of “there’s plenty of chances to be near her normally” and wouldn’t join the competition.
But the students who normally weren’t in her class were a real problem; finally getting one chance to take a class with Yurika, they’d all naturally gather and start fighting over her.
Listening to all the noise from the students around her, Yurika felt her head was about to split.
In the past, she could’ve just turned and walked off without bothering with them, finished the outdoor sketching assignment alone, and left this den of trouble behind.
Generally, when this happened, the teacher would understand Yurika’s predicament and turn a blind eye to her not joining a group, letting her pass without issue.
And this behavior of hers didn’t cost her any points in others’ estimation; if anything, it drew in a crowd of inexplicably more fanatical followers.
But today was different from the old days.
The current Yurika was the kind of kid who could only keep studying at Tokiwadai thanks to her esper subsidy, so right now she had no spare cash on her, not even money for food.
And these girls competing to team up with her were all, without exception, holding a bento box.
(These people are absolutely doing this on purpose…) Yurika looked at the young ladies clutching their bentos in front of her, caught between laughter and tears.
She wasn’t worried they’d cook up a pile of inedible monstrosities; after all, cooking was a course at Tokiwadai too, and while these young ladies’ culinary skills couldn’t be called top-chef level, home-cooking level was no problem at all.
It seemed this bunch was well aware of her predicament, of having no food to eat now that her family’s conglomerate had gone bankrupt, so they’d zeroed in on that exact weakness and brought bento boxes to invite her into their groups, leaving her no opening to slip away halfway.
And in fact—
Yurika knew full well what these girls were scheming, but the trouble was, she was an easy mark for exactly this kind of thing.
Looking at the assorted bento boxes in their hands, she really couldn’t bring herself to take a single step away.
But just as Yurika was still agonizing over whether to abandon her dignity for food or starve for the sake of her dignity, the girls around her suddenly underwent a change.
“Pi.”
The familiar sound pulled Yurika’s attention back.
Whether it was the girls who’d just been competing to team up with her, or the teacher and passersby watching from a little ways off, every one of them had turned doll-like, as if they’d lost the ability to think.
“This is… Shokuhou Misaki…”
The muscles in Yurika’s face twitched a few times, and then, with a rather helpless look, she turned toward where that sound had come from.
Sure enough, there stood the blonde Shokuhou Misaki, a small remote control in hand, smiling at her with charming grace:
“Looking surprisingly cornered, aren’t you, Yurika.”
“What do you want this time? Shokuhou Misaki…”
Yurika would rather face a hundred overly aggressive girls than deal with Shokuhou Misaki, the scheming type.
Thanks to her Mental Out ability, Shokuhou was conniving to the absolute extreme; when it came to manipulating people’s emotions, if this girl claimed second place at Tokiwadai, no one would dare claim first.
“As I recall, your class isn’t part of this outdoor sketching session, is it?”
“If I weren’t here, would you have a better way to get rid of this crowd of students with no trouble?”
Though Shokuhou could sense the thread of wariness in Yurika’s tone, she kept that unchanging smile on her face and completely ignored the subtext.
Then she lifted the thing she’d been holding all along and asked Yurika,
“Want to eat together? I brought a bento.”
“…”
She really wanted to say no, but Yurika’s stomach honestly let out a most ill-timed growl.