Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Biohacker Chapter2 (section)

===Part 2===

Tokiwadai Middle School was known as a prestigious esper powers development school.

The girls who attended had to be at least Level 3 and the school was having an especially fruitful year since they now had two students at the effective upper limit of Level 5.

Level 5.

That was this girl’s goal, yet she found herself unable to attain it.

“Phew.”

Fluffy-haired Mitsuari Ayu was not fond of the Curriculum she was put through. Her Mental Stinger affected people’s minds and it did not work on animals like monkeys or dogs. So no matter how safe the experiments were, they had to be ''human experiments''.

(I have heard that espers with telepathy and mind reading powers have similar worries.)

The school counselor was of course aware of these troubles, but Mitsuari was a specialist in manipulating people’s minds. The adult counselor tried to resolve her problems by following the arrows on the flow chart in some manual, so it was as meaningless to her as watching a magician when you knew how all the tricks worked. Whether or not it was effective, there had to be a bond of trust established first.

“Red,” she said softly while feeling blue.

She sat across from a Tokiwadai teacher who was assessing her power. The cards in the woman’s hand were held so Mitsuari could not see what color they were, but she continued regardless.

“Yellow, red, red, blue, red. Oh, and that is right to left from my perspective.”

“Splendidly done.”

The teacher smiled brightly while turning the fanned-out cards so the girl could see.

“A perfect score, Mitsuari-san.”

Mitsuari did not have a remote viewing power. Her phone did have an external lens attached, but not for that purpose.

The power to control people’s minds was so broadly defined that the user sometimes had to clearly define what they were doing in order to use their power properly. That may have been exacerbated by the fact that the power had no visible component, unlike the power to produce fire from the hand.

So in her case, she had to start by aiming with her phone.

All she was doing was breaking through the barrier of the teacher’s mind, slipping inside, and stealing away the images of what the woman was seeing, but did the teacher really understand what that meant? She may have been so delighted to have found such an excellent student that she did not care that her mind was being read, but she also might have had other intentions hidden somewhere deeper.

The teacher put on a perfect smile and spoke even more politely than an ATM.

“We can compare the data on our brainwaves later. Are they synchronized, or are they drastically different? We should learn a lot from that.”

“R-right.”

“I have been interested in Mental Stinger for a while. If you ask me, the final frontier for research is not the farthest reaches of space; it is the human mind. In that sense, I am so glad you were placed in my care.”

A veil of mystery hung around the adults in Academy City.

Looking purely at abilities, they should have been easily overthrown, yet that never happened for some reason. The majority of the population were the students in the schools, but the small minority of supposedly powerless adults remained in control.

The teachers encouraged a spirit of competition by telling the students they could stand at the top if they increased their Level and grew stronger, but the adult teachers themselves were outside that entire framework.

“Um.”

“Sensei, there’s something weird with my data.”

Just as Mitsuari started to speak, someone else cut in.

Yes, this special classroom contained around 30 girls hooked up to the measuring equipment on the desks in front of them.

The teacher turned around with a bright smile.

“Yes, yes. I will be right there. Remote viewing is such an interesting power. There is no actual organ reflecting or absorbing the light, yet somehow you can establish a fictional viewpoint in 3D space. If you ask me, the final frontier for research is not the farthest reaches of space; it is…”

The teacher started a very familiar spiel.

Her praise was a canned thing that could apply to anyone once she filled in the blanks. Mitsuari felt a twinge of self-loathing for letting that come as a shock. It meant she had let herself trust one of those creepy adults.

She sighed.

Sitting by the window had been a mistake. The fluffy-haired girl glanced outside and allowed her mind to drift from reality. The air conditioning was perfect and the special glass was thin but solidly soundproofed, so she could not even hear the cicadas crying in the outside world.

Some adults in work jumpsuits were holding something like monstrous bug-catching nets. Had a dog or a cat gotten on the school grounds again? That was the usual explanation when people were wandering around in jumpsuits designed differently from the usual cleaners and janitors.

''You have such a promising future. You are an excellent student. You are sure to reach Level 5.

She snorted as those words came back to her.

She toyed with her phone and muttered to herself.

“If that were true, we would be doing this one-on-one in an individual room, not in this big room full of other students.”