“Everyone’s here today.
With the class full, we shouldn’t be getting any more transfer students, so let me repeat what I didn’t get to say yesterday.”
The homeroom teacher was a lean, tall man who looked to be in his forties or fifties, wearing rimless glasses and never cracking a smile; from the state of his crown you could tell this was a teacher brilliant to the point of baldness.
No smile, no light in his eyes, bald—all traits that made him look exactly like the seasoned corporate drone who shows up so often in anime.
His name was Gao Hongsheng.
Behind his back everyone called him Old Gao, or else…
ghs.
“Since we’ve had a few transfer students these last couple of days, I’ll say again what I’ve told you countless times—don’t get sick of me droning on.
“I don’t care whether you’re seeing someone.
When it’s the dead of night, if you can stay in, stay in.
This city’s public safety ranks in the single digits from the bottom across the Federation.
People even call it Little Beika.
Last year plenty of crimes got pinned on a certain elementary schooler in black-framed glasses.
See the cameras on the streets?
More than half are broken…
And don’t think having a superpower makes you safe—you might just end up dying worse for having one…”
A considerable share of ordinary people hated espers.
A century ago, a swarm of meteorites from beyond the sky came crashing straight down onto this blue planet.
The feeble technology of the time was nowhere near enough to intercept them, and the result was a large-scale rearrangement of the world’s landmasses—along with a fresh workload of redrawing the world map.
The surviving humans naturally huddled together, forming the embryo of the Federation.
Even if, internally, there were still open and covert struggles over the ownership of so much as a loaf of bread, fortunately the world is never short of excellent leaders, and everything developed in a good direction.
Until the appearance of the first mutant.
He was an esper who could spew flame from his palms.
Nobody at the time knew why it happened—perhaps God had granted humanity’s survival a little cheat code.
He appeared, he got full of himself, he grew unbelievably brazen, and then he blew up.
Physically blew up.
By which theorem of the Pythagorean, who knows—at any rate, right as he was using his flame trick to threaten the Village Chief into swapping out the toilet at his house for a new one, his body began to explode, starting from his palms.
According to experts later on, he’d failed to control his ability well, and that was why he blew up.
Blow up he did—the force so great it shattered Widow Wang’s courtyard wall next door, exposing her improper relationship with Eunuch Li to the whole village.
Even though their accomplice Mute Zhang tried to defend them frantically with his outstanding eloquence, he was still no match for the sharp eyes of the folks in that village of the blind.
This was only the beginning.
After that, one esper after another cropped up whom science could not explain at all—ones who manipulated time, ones who did spirit photography, ones who fired the Emerald Splash, and so on.
Likewise, those who couldn’t control their superpowers well weren’t just one or two, and those who used the force to satisfy their own desires were surely no fewer.
The mutants of the ages had already done too much damage.
The worst instance even directly threatened all of humanity, and was called by later generations the LV5 Great Destruction Event—though humanity was, admittedly, already far fewer than it once had been.
Even today, plenty of espers still inadvertently bring tragedies about.
It’s unavoidable.
Anyone, in their adolescence, has that one-percent chance of becoming a mutant, just like in a certain X-Men.
It was as though nature had bestowed evolution on a dwindling humanity—and there is no so-called “cure” that can prevent this evolution from appearing.
Certain extinct animals aren’t coming back.
Humanity, meanwhile, through several hundred years of renewed development and struggle against mutants, slowly recovered its strength, rebuilt its resources, population, technology, and homes, and only thus arrived at the seemingly peaceful present.
Fanzui City—that was this city’s name.
Because it lay on the fringe of the Federation and in a relatively remote location, public safety here had grown bad to an unimaginable degree.
Recently a gang calling itself “Carry Out Heaven’s Justice” had been steadily wrecking the whole city’s surveillance, driving up the crime rate, so that everyone else called this place Beika.
As for why public safety was so bad and yet so many students traveled great distances to study here—it was because this high school was one of the very few opened specifically for mutants.
Its main purpose was to help students better control their abilities; learning was only the secondary aim.
“We divide the danger of abilities into five levels, high to low—A, B, C, D, E.
Don’t misunderstand: this ranking isn’t there to show your strength, but your risk of losing control.” The homeroom teacher pushed up his glasses.
E meant no chance of losing control, or an inability to harm anyone even if control were lost.
D meant a chance of losing control with harm to others.
C meant possibly losing control and harming others over a wide area.
B meant possibly losing control and causing wide-area destructive harm.
A meant possibly losing control and dealing, in an instant, a blow that could annihilate a city.
“If you want to grade your own strength, it’s Lv1 to Lv5, low to high.
But don’t map this strength onto A Certain Scientific anime, and don’t map it onto wuxia novels either.
It’s only a standard we judge by evaluation—there’s no such thing as breaking through by cultivating.”
Seeing no reaction from the students below, Old Gao rubbed his bald crown a little forlornly.
“Do none of the young people these days know A Certain Magical Index anymore?”
The two systems above could correspond to each other.
For instance, a Lv5 with a risk of losing control would absolutely be Danger Level A—though one could, of course, control it well enough to be only an E-level danger—but a Lv1 esper could never possibly be Danger Level A.
As for these two ratings, Mi Xiaoliu’s examination report was blank on both, because she refused to cooperate.
“If you see a classmate wearing a red-letter badge on their chest—cruel as it is to say—I’d advise you to stay away from them as much as possible, because only classmates at Danger Level D, D included, and above are required to wear one.” The homeroom teacher pushed up his glasses.
Ordinarily, even after being warned again and again by family to stay away from anyone wearing a red character on their chest, most people still felt such a thing wouldn’t turn up anywhere near them.
Mutants, after all, made up only a minority of humanity’s total, a Danger Level D didn’t necessarily scare people off, C’s were rarer still, and only in a city that had established a mutant academy did one have a chance to see so many mutants at once.
Before becoming a mutant, people rarely even bothered to learn what these danger levels actually meant.
Now, though, they were insiders.
Some words they might normally let go in one ear and out the other now had to be taken in.
So after Old Gao finished that sentence, some of the class’s newcomers secretly sized up the classmates around them, trying to find the one in the class wearing a badge—but the only one in the whole class with a “C” was Mi Xiaoliu, who’d refused the physical.
The school’s approach was to manage students at Danger Level D and above in a group.
A highly dangerous decision, yes, but it also spared them the cold looks of the rest of the class that might trigger an emotional loss of control.
The main purpose of the so-called esper academy was to help these students shed their badges as soon as possible.
Like most high schools, the esper school didn’t require uniforms—precisely to keep students from being regarded with strange looks by others on their way to and from school.
“That’s all I’ll say about esper danger levels.
Next…
last week a murder occurred at the Sunshine Residential Complex south of our school.
The killer hasn’t been caught yet, so those of you living nearby, remember to shut your doors and windows tight at night.”
“How dangerous.” Mi Xiaoliu’s brows knit slightly.
Turning left right out her door on the way to school led straight to that complex.
It really did leave one feeling unsafe.
“Master, the killer in that murder case is you.”
“Oh.”
Oh, never mind then.
With everything that needed saying said, what came next were the dull, dreary lessons.
“What level is my ability?” Mi Xiaoliu asked in her heart.
“That…
Master’s ability has some defects, and it’s never undergone an official test.”
“Mm.”
At the two words “official test,” an instinctive aversion rose in Mi Xiaoliu’s heart.
“Old Six, is something wrong with your body somewhere?” Jim poked Mi Xiaoliu’s arm with his pen.
Mi Xiaoliu turned to look at him, saying nothing.
“Since yesterday, two people in our class keep glancing at you every now and then.” He raised his textbook and, with a gaze he thought inconspicuous, looked over at the girl in sunglasses—only continuing once he’d confirmed her sunglasses were still on.
“That one over there with the sunglasses is fine—her ability is Mind Reading.
But that boy at the far right of the front row…”
“Jim, do you think you’re very clever?” At the lectern, Old Gao pushed up his reflective glasses without expression.
“Sorry!” Jim hastily set the book down.
Little moves like that were plainly obvious in a teacher’s eyes, especially in a class of only fifty-odd.
After class, before Jim could pick the topic back up, the little angel named Yiwen spoke to Mi Xiaoliu first: “Hey, is your ability Self-Healing?”