A sleek, azure luxury sports car roared down the pristine four-lane highway leading into District 7, weaving effortlessly through afternoon traffic.
"You really are something else, Yuuya... possessing the executive clearance to pull a high-security suspect straight out of detention without so much as a bail hearing," Kiyama Harumi remarked from behind the wheel, glancing sideways at Yuuya lounging casually in the passenger seat.
"Just standard perks of my position," Yuuya replied with an easy smile, twirling a high-end pen between his fingers. "Broadly speaking, my operational authority in Academy City easily trumps that of an ordinary Board Director. Even the General Board has to tread lightly around me. I can bypass bureaucratic red tape whenever I see fit."
In this city, the only entity whose machinations required genuine calculation was Aleister Crowley himself. Before his capabilities reached their current tier, Yuuya might have felt a shred of caution regarding potential retaliation against the people around him. Now, that concern had been reduced to zero.
With his sensory perception and spatial authority spanning the immediate future, he could effortlessly crush any hostile board member before their plots even left the drafting table.
"That certainly explains it," Kiyama murmured, her grip tightening slightly on the steering wheel. "A power like yours would terrify anyone in governance. To materialize fully functional, high-precision matter straight out of thin air... it completely spits in the face of the first law of thermodynamics."
Her scientific mind still struggled to rationalize how Yuuya had materialized this high-performance sports car just outside the facility gates. While mass could be converted into astronomical amounts of energy via E=mc^2, spontaneously condensing ambient energy into complex, macro-scale physical matter was deemed scientifically impossible—a phenomenon akin to Kakine Teitoku's Dark Matter.
"After all, I have already touched the threshold of Level 6," Yuuya said, his eyes narrowing into a calm, enigmatic smile. "A being who is not a deity, yet steps into the territory of God. With a mere flick of my wrist, I can alter their physical reality on a fundamental level. It's only natural the board fears me."
Snap.
Yuuya casually snapped his fingers.
BUZZZZZZ—!
In an instant, the brilliant blue summer sky above District 7 warped violently, shimmering with an ethereal, translucent emerald hue. The dimensional distortion rippled across the horizon, freezing pedestrians and drivers alike as they looked upward in sheer bewilderment.
Hearing the term Level 6, Kiyama's pupils contracted violently.
The reality before her felt suddenly alien. She stared in breathless awe at the high schooler beside her, who was merely propping his chin on his hand while looking out the window.
Level 6: Those who, with a body that is not divine, attain the understanding of the Divine Will.
It was a theoretical, god-like state of existence that countless researchers had dedicated their entire lives—and sacrificed thousands of human test subjects—just to glimpse. To them, Level 6 was the ultimate "Truth" behind Academy City's creation.
Snap.
With a second snap of Yuuya's fingers, the localized atmospheric anomaly snapped cleanly back to normal. A quiet, confident smirk played on his lips.
Through the integration of the Triangle Core and his calculation link to the Artificial Heaven, he could now directly manipulate the local Phase, rewriting the baseline physical laws of the surrounding space.
In esoteric cosmology, standard "Phases" were subjective, conceptual layers painted over the primordial world by the Magic Gods (Majin). Every Phase applied to reality altered the universe's baseline physics like a colored filter.
However, the Artificial Heaven constructed by Academy City's global AIM network was entirely unique: it was rooted in the fundamental laws of pure physical science. Once fully deployed, it possessed the terrifying property of isolating and nullifying every magical Phase in existence.
That was Aleister's ultimate masterstroke against the Magic Gods: construct an absolute, scientific Phase, lure the gods into the physical realm, sever their connection to their respective Phases, and eradicate them while they were stripped of their omnipotence.
'A truly insidious trap layered within countless contingency plans,' Yuuya thought, amused. 'Aleister really treats the entire cosmos like a game of three-dimensional chess.'
"So that's the truth..." Kiyama breathed out, her voice trembling slightly. "A Level 6... No wonder you were granted complete autonomy by the Chairman to govern the city's underground."
She paused, looking at him with intense academic curiosity. "Tell me, Yuuya... what does the world look like from the perspective of a Level 6?"
"How should I describe it?" Yuuya mused, tilting his head back against the leather seat. "It's a complete transition into a higher-dimensional state of life. To a Level 6, observing the three-dimensional physical world is like a human looking at a flat, two-dimensional illustration on a screen."
That had been the exact sensation when his consciousness briefly intersected with the Artificial Heaven—the profound awareness that with a single localized vector inversion, he could halt the rotation of the Earth or deconstruct District 7 at the molecular level.
"At that tier, an individual can execute absolute manipulation on both the subatomic Planck scale and the macroscopic cosmic scale," Yuuya explained smoothly. "You could disintegrate a living human into individual cellular components and reconstruct them instantaneously without a single error. Furthermore, cognitive consciousness detaches from biological wetware entirely; the physical brain is no longer the primary container of the mind."
He gave a light shrug. "At that point, the boundary between cutting-edge science and pure theology completely dissolves. As the old saying goes: the ultimate culmination of science is indistinguishable from divine authority."
"A living god walking the mortal realm..." Kiyama whispered, completely captivated. Hearing the sheer depth of his understanding, the last remaining thread of anxiety regarding her students finally vanished.
District 7 — Central General Hospital
The sports car pulled smoothly into the hospital's private circular driveway and came to a stop.
Yuuya and Kiyama stepped out and navigated through the sterile, white corridors until they reached the intensive care ward in the neurology wing.
Inside the private room, the renowned Heaven Canceller—the kind, frog-faced physician renowned across the city for performing impossible medical miracles—looked over the vial containing the First Sample that Yuuya handed him.
"Fascinating... So this crystallized AIM residue was the missing neurological catalyst," the doctor murmured, his skilled hands operating the lab equipment with inhuman speed and precision.
Within minutes, the doctor synthesized a stabilized, liquid neurological counter-agent and administered the intravenous injection directly into the central port of the primary life-support capsule.
BEEP... BEEP... BEEP...
The erratic, flatlining brainwave readouts on the central cardiac monitor began to steady, gradually synchronizing into a healthy, rhythmic alpha frequency.
"Nngh... mmm..."
A faint, soft murmur escaped from the bed.
Kiyama's breath caught in her throat. Her lips parted, her hands trembling violently as she stepped toward the bedside. Tears immediately flooded her bloodshot eyes as she watched the small girl on the bed slowly flutter her eyelids open.
After years of drowning in self-loathing and despair... the nightmare was finally over.
"Looks like the treatment was a complete success," Yuuya smiled warmly, looking at the little girl waking up from her multi-year slumber—Edasaki Banri.
"Sensei...? Takahashi... onii-chan...?"
Banri blinked her large, sleepy eyes, looking in mild confusion at the two figures standing above her bed. Her young mind struggled to reconcile their current appearance with the memories from years ago.
"Yeah, it's me, Banri. Your big brother Takahashi," Yuuya said softly, patting her small hand.
"Sensei... why do you have such big, dark circles under your eyes? And your hair is so long..." Banri asked innocently, tilting her head. "And Takahashi-onii-chan... you look so much taller and mature now."
Tears spilled freely down Kiyama's cheeks, but a radiant, genuine smile—the first true smile she had worn in years—broke across her face.
"That's because... Sensei has been very busy working on a very special project," Kiyama wept softly, gently cradling Banri's small hand against her cheek.
"Haha, yeah," Yuuya chuckled, his eyes softening as he watched the teacher and student reunite. "We've all been pretty busy."
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Give me powerstones.
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