The red color was already getting on his nerves.
The inkblot-stained purple sky had become quite tiresome.
Six thousand three hundred eighty-one.
Again, the girl.
Same uniform.
Same appearance.
Same bulky device, lying in fragments somewhere off to the side.
This time, all her bones were broken.
Moreover, the main character of the dream, looking at the girl, felt that she had still been alive throughout the entire process of being “ground down.” But this fact evoked no emotions.
Just the same boredom.
Only mild curiosity about how the next one would be killed.
Turned inside out?
Crushed by the multiplied vector of gravity?
Maybe the unknown killer had enough skill to completely stop Brownian motion around the young body?
Well, why not?
The movement of microscopic particles in a gaseous medium is also expressed in vectors.
He had already grown accustomed to this endless road littered with corpses.
Accustomed to finding around every corner another identical dead body of the same girl.
The thought that not so long ago this girl had been alive seemed somehow strange and incomprehensible.
Nonsense.
Flash.
***
‘Another strange dream,’ a lazy thought drifted through Ryota’s mind as he stretched lazily and got out of bed.
Over the past couple of years, the intensity of the unremembered dreams had waned.
He had them barely once a week now.
The unpleasant sensations that had plagued him upon waking in the early days had faded away just a few months after arriving in the world of MHA.
And yes, Ryota had long since grown accustomed to his new name.
He even called himself that in his mind.
No point clinging to a past he couldn’t get back.
Rolling out of bed, the guy began his exercises without bothering to get dressed.
Eight years of careful, rather thorough work on himself hadn’t been in vain for his appearance.
Not very bulky, but quite defined muscles, especially for his age, rolled smoothly under his skin, responding to the load he created.
He didn’t spend much time on his warm-up.
He just loosened up his muscles and ligaments a bit.
Then he threw on a t-shirt and shorts and went outside.
The sun hadn’t yet risen to its full strength, so semi-darkness still reigned outside.
But despite the early hour, occasional rare passersby hurrying about their business could already be seen here and there.
Putting earbuds in his ears and turning on his player, Ryota tossed the device into his pocket, zipped it shut, and began jogging lightly along his usual route.
Running out of the dormitory gates, barely nodding to the night-shift security guard (who was already used to seeing the guy running out of the area), Ryota headed toward the nearby school.
And yes, his place of residence was no longer the orphanage where he had ended up eight years ago.
He had lived there for only five years.
Essentially, just to finish elementary school and get all the necessary documents confirming his mental stability.
After that, he submitted a request to transfer to the dormitory.
It was approved quite easily.
Not surprising.
All the teachers, to the last, spoke very positively about the guy, especially noting his “non-conflict” nature.
And who was he supposed to conflict with?
The children?
Hah, not even funny.
The teachers?
There was no point. This story is hosted at g.com.
Besides, those same checkmarks in his personal file, confirming his mental stability, were necessary to Ryota.
If only for the same transfer to the dormitory and, consequently, reduced supervision.
Only after that could the guy breathe easy.
A new place, new people, and, most importantly, the opportunity to “go out for a walk.” At a speed of a couple of Mach, yes.
The ability to be anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds had an extremely positive effect on the teenager’s character and temperament.
From that moment on, Ryota had been everywhere.
America, China, Russia, the Netherlands, Spain.
He didn’t hold back.
Constant “trips” to other countries had an extremely beneficial effect on his language learning.
By now, he could quite legitimately call himself a polyglot.
Also, the ability to fly anywhere without hindrance helped the guy develop his ideas for using vector control.
Some of his inventions definitely could not be tested in densely populated Japan.
The boundless ocean was perfect for that.
However, there were some problems in terms of developing his abilities.
Some of the canonical Accelerator’s tricks just wouldn’t work, no matter what.
In particular, the same ability to influence things at a distance.
No matter how much he racked his brains with complex equations, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t even toss a coin lying on the floor a couple of meters away.
Actually, that’s not quite right.
He could toss it.
Indirect influence wasn’t canceled.
A light tap of his foot on the floor, and the impulse of applied force, spreading in waves across the surface, was quite easily directed by vectors and released at the desired point, tossing the accursed coin into the air.
But Accelerator did that with a damn stuffed animal.
And he even managed to make it float in the air.
Ryota spent many months trying to understand how that guy did what he did.
He was about to give up, loudly declaring that the Accelerator spin-off wasn’t canon and that the author himself didn’t understand what he was writing about.
Then, suddenly, realization dawned.
Accelerator was a psycho.
Unbalanced, with constant outbursts of aggression and all that.
However, using an esper’s abilities requires a cool head.
Think about it yourself.
You’re seething with rage and want to tear your opponent apart.
You sink into your Personal Reality, and there…
Mathematics.
In the case of vector control, it’s damn mind-boggling mathematics.
By the time you come up with the type of influence, pick the right pattern, and calculate everything with all the variables, you’ve already calmed down against your will.
But that obnoxious anime psycho somehow got around this issue.
Or he was too psychotic for something as trivial as solving a linear function of differential topology in sixteen variables to shake his rage in the slightest.
That example, by the way, was taken from that same coin-tossing experiment.
Ryota didn’t really believe the “too psychotic” option.
So that meant Accelerator was doing something different.
Memories of how the previous owner of his body, straining with all his might and radiating emotions, made a twig in his hand jump involuntarily came to mind.
The simplest application of force, breaking physics.
The very thing Ryota had unknowingly renounced within the first hour of his arrival.
Not the smartest decision.
Luckily, the problem was noticed quickly, and he approached its solution with due diligence.
He managed to find out that the forceful pressure of the AIM field on objective reality could significantly distort the phenomenon.
After that, Ryota spent many dozens of hours selecting all possible configurations of pressure with interesting effects.
And, most importantly, cultivating (ahem) his AIM field, as strange as that might sound.
To be more precise, he developed the “conductivity” of his body and his Personal Reality, so that he could influence vectors without entering a frozen world state. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
It wasn’t easy.
For almost three months, an annoying headache and slight weakness became his constant companions.
Then things got easier.
Either he got used to it, or something else, but he still devotes time to these exercises every day.
Besides, after just two years, he managed to replicate the long-range influence trick.
The logical continuation would have been an attempt to influence vectors by conducting the impulse through the air.
But here, Ryota hit a significant wall.
It seemed like just a difference in the density of the conducting medium.
But delivering vectors packed in a “container” of a crude AIM field configuration through stone and earth was quite easy.
Through the air, however…
It felt like the limitation was almost at the hardware level.
Still, the guy didn’t despair.
His training continued to bear fruit.
To use an analogy, the computational power of an esper is like a car engine, and the energy of the AIM field is the fuel.
No matter how good the engine, you won’t go far with bad fuel.
And even the best fuel won’t reach its full potential in a non-working junker.
So Ryota was improving the quality of the “fuel.”
After running a couple more laps around the school fence, he turned back toward the dormitory.
It wasn’t far away and wasn’t very big.
A three-story building.
Most of the first floor was occupied by the cafeteria, a gym with showers, and various administrative offices.
Only the second and third floors were reserved for the residents.
The rooms weren’t large, but they were single-occupancy and had their own bathroom.
After washing off the sweat from his run, Ryota went down to the cafeteria, which was slowly filling with people.
All sorts of ages, but no older than eighteen.
Mostly either orphans or children from the provinces where education wasn’t great.
But there weren’t many of the latter.
After all, the school to which the dormitory was attached had considerable authority and didn’t take just anyone.
After finishing his morning routine, Ryota popped back into his room for a minute.
Then, grabbing his phone and a more official-looking sports uniform, he left the dormitory again.
Here, a question would be appropriate: “Where did the money come from?”.
The issue of his own financial support arose quite quickly after his arrival in the new world.
Not urgent, but still, the guy wanted to have personal belongings and some kind of financial cushion just in case.
The logical question was: how do you earn money as a child?
Without any starting capital or anything like that, of course.
But he did have periodic access to a computer, a supercomputer in his head, and some programming skills.
The latter came not from nowhere but was a direct consequence of graduating from university with a degree in Information Systems and Technology.
Not to mention that the image of a hacker-programmer was quite romanticized, and Samuel (then) devoted considerable time to this field of knowledge.
In the new world and a different country, the fundamentals were somewhat different, as were the programming languages.
But the teachers at the boarding school were quite supportive of their pupils’ hobbies.
The same Kageyama-sensei, the math teacher, was the head of the computer club and enthusiastically embraced the interest of his “genius” student.
And Ryota lived up to his expectations.
It’s understandable.
He was his own compiler and interpreter, his own programming environment, his own linter.
Riding the wave of success, Ryota was given access to a computer without any problems.
Money from freelancing began to flow into his e-wallet in thin streams.
And he didn’t do all this just for the money.
Programming gave him a lot of inspiration for using his own abilities.
Not to mention it was just for fun.
In short, he had quite eventful years.
Leaving the dormitory grounds again and nodding to the guard who had already changed shifts, Ryota hurried to the bus stop.
Today, he had the entrance exam for U.A.