“Okay, calm down. Calm down!” Samuel mentally shouted, frantically looking around.
The coolness of the stone wall he had pressed himself against helped bring him back to his senses a bit, but he was still far from calm.
His gaze wandered lost around the dark room, while all sorts of random thoughts churned sluggishly in his head.
“She’s not worth it, huh?” he groaned internally.
“And what am I supposed to do now?”
He had no doubt at all about who was responsible for his current situation.
*”Let’s imagine for a second that I’m an all-powerful goddess and I can send you to any world and give you one interesting perk within reason.
Where would you go and what would you ask for?”*
The melodic voice of the girl he had “saved” yesterday surfaced in his memory on its own.
Who knew that answering that question would bring so many problems?
He had never really thought about it before.
What a waste of time.
And even though Samuel had no idea why he had been so honest at that moment, the answer he had given without any conscious thought matched perfectly what he would have said if he had really considered the question.
Why the world of My Hero Academia?
Because it’s light.
You can stay out of most conflicts if you want.
There’s no world-ending threat like in Naruto or Bleach.
Plus, modern civilization has all the perks.
On top of that, Accelerator’s abilities weren’t the strongest Samuel knew, but he definitely liked them more than any others.
They were original and almost conceptually powerful.
At that thought, his gaze fell on the wooden blocks lying on the table.
His mind clicked.
‘Wait… does that mean I have superpowers now?’
With that thought, almost all the anxiety in Samuel’s eyes vanished.
He jumped up from the bed instantly, ran to the table, and picked up one of the blocks.
Even though the boy’s abilities were weak and the simplest manipulations came at the cost of a nasty headache, they were superpowers, damn it!
What guy growing up in the twenty-first century watching anime doesn’t dream of getting something like that?
‘How did he do it again?’ Samuel tried to remember what the boy in the dream did to activate his powers.
Accessing those memories was blocked by a strange sensation at the edge of his perception, something vaguely reminiscent of a blinking notification.
‘Huh?’
Focusing on the anomaly mentally, he froze in confusion for a few moments.
A simple instruction manual seemed to download into his head.
He felt like someone who had seen a video game for the first time and had just finished the tutorial.
You know the kind: basic stuff like “move with WASD, jump with Space, look around with the mouse.” Not the best analogy, but it’s what he had.
After zoning out from the strange sensation for a couple of minutes, the guy snapped out of it.
“There it is!”
The boy from the dream’s abilities weren’t weak.
He was just using them wrong.
Samuel stared at the block in his palm.
The abilities of espers from A Certain Magical Index aren’t based on vague concepts like “feel the force, Luke” or anything like that.
They’re built on science and calculation.
And what could a guy who barely learned to read know about that?
Samuel focused on the colorful block.
The world froze.
From the “manual,” he already knew that along with Accelerator’s vector manipulation abilities, he had also received the computational skills of that not-so-stable character.
The world around him went gray, and the colors faded.
What is the brain of a Level 5 esper like?
The anime didn’t give it much attention, but what was shown was enough to form some picture.
After getting shot in the head, which was a kind of fix for an overly strong character, Accelerator was hooked up to the Misaka Network’s computing system.
That’s just under ten thousand minds, each with computing abilities slightly exceeding those of an ordinary human.
And even then, Accelerator could only use about fifty percent of his power.
That means that when he was healthy, the anime anti-hero’s brain worked more efficiently than the combined computing power of twenty thousand people.
Those are some crazy numbers, but that’s how it works out.
And now Samuel was about to experience what it meant to be a walking supercomputer.
The anime didn’t show how an esper’s abilities worked.
Viewers could only see the end result, not the method.
But the “manual” gave him that knowledge.
What was the boy in the dream doing to activate his abilities?
Now, with a more complete understanding of the nature of these powers, Samuel could answer.
He was breaking physics over his knee.
He wasn’t subjugating it through mathematical calculations.
He was just brute-forcing it.
A stupid, almost completely ineffective approach.
Like buying a car but instead of driving it, you push it from one part of the city to another.
Samuel wasn’t going to make that mistake.
He wasn’t a mathematical genius, but he had graduated from university, where he had managed to get some knowledge.
And now, with the ability to apply it, he wasn’t going to mess around.
In the gray, seemingly frozen space, an equation formed.
It wasn’t complicated.
A simple linear function with three variables.
A moment, and it moved directly onto the block.
Another moment, and Samuel seemed to open some kind of internal metaphysical gate, from which a trickle of some otherworldly force poured out.
This force pushed the equation from his gray personal reality into objective reality.
A slight mental effort, and the world regained its colors (though they were still mostly gray for now).
The block, as if it had only been waiting for that moment, shot off his hand with the speed of a cannonball.
It crashed into the stone wall and shattered into many small splinters.
Feeling his palm sting slightly from where the toy had grazed it on takeoff, Samuel smiled a smile that would have made even the most hardened maniac wet himself with fear.
“It works. It works!”
Though not quite the way he had imagined.
It turns out that Accelerator couldn’t set vectors himself.
He could only change and redirect them.
But that wasn’t a big problem.
It just so happens that in our world, there are no stationary objects.
Any object has at least one vector pointing down.
Yes, gravity.
Accelerator, and now Samuel, can redirect that vector and amplify it by channeling that mysterious energy.
The limits of amplification aren’t clear yet, but they are clearly very high.
And that’s not all.
As they say, everything in our world is relative.
It just so happens that our planet isn’t stationary either.
It’s constantly rotating, and all objects on its surface move with it.
At the same time, the Earth moves around the Sun, which orbits the galaxy, which orbits the center of the universe, which also rotates somehow.
Now imagine an imaginary, objectively stationary point in space.
Then consider what vectors that same block would have relative to that point.
Samuel remembered reading somewhere that Accelerator managed to slow down the planet’s rotation with his powers.
Even if he had no idea how to achieve something like that yet, it was enough to send him into ecstasy at the possibilities opening up.
“And all this is mine?” he asked the space around him in an unbelieving, joyful tone.
The question of isekai no longer came to mind, which wasn’t surprising.
The human brain has an interesting ability to instantly switch from unpleasant things to something good, or at least neutral.
It took Samuel some time to finally calm down, but he wasn’t panicking at all.
He wouldn’t have respected himself if he panicked in this situation with such a heavy piano in the bushes.
On the other hand, it wasn’t clear what to do next.
The memory of the body’s previous owner hadn’t transferred completely.
Almost all faces were blurry, and he didn’t remember a single name.
Not even the name of his new body.
At the same time, he was presumably in some underground villain lair, where local bad guys were researching the strange phenomenon of the boy’s Quirk.
Of course, it was more of a side project for these amateur vivisectionists.
They had some other unclear goal.
As for their numbers, Samuel couldn’t say exactly.
He could only say with certainty that there were more than ten.
At least because different people took him from his cell quite often.
So, what to do?
Option one: go in guns blazing.
With his current abilities, Samuel could easily take down the metal door and, taking advantage of the general confusion and the fact that they severely underestimate him, get out of there.
Option two: wait.
He could assess the underground base with fresh eyes.
After all, the guy wasn’t tortured so badly that he couldn’t sit still for an extra day.
Maybe he could figure out some kind of layout and get an approximate count of the enemies.
But this idea didn’t seem very good to him.
Not only because the local strange scientific instruments might notice the changes in the boy, but also because playing the patient victim with such Mary Sue powers seemed like the height of blasphemy.
Option three: a mix of the first two.
Simple.
Don’t charge straight in, but buy as much time as possible.
Spend it studying his abilities, and only then make a loud escape.
This option seemed the most promising to Samuel.
The first thing he decided to focus on was recreating the most imbalanced ability of Accelerator.
“Hopefully I have enough knowledge to cobble together a vector shield,” he whispered into the space around him, then retreated into himself.
The world stopped and lost its colors.