School was over, and she was banging her head on the bathroom stall. Idiot. Moron, even.
Be Suzushina Yuriko.
Leading expert in move-bitch-move; the current and only analogue to Accelerator in a new reality.
You blew up a park and played ball at the beach.
You start to feel, deservedly, quite cocky.
Decide to make yourself invincible, after all, you are the expert.
You reflect almost everything. 'Almost everything' includes air.
You nearly die a level 1 vector crook, instead of the level 5 mafia boss you have every right to be.
You get a pity cheesecake.
All things considered that wasn't the worst possible conclusion. The worst part of that whole interaction was realising for the first time just how nice Itadori Yuji was. She wondered if the black-haired variant in her home reality had also been. She had always assumed, because he was so well-liked, that he couldn't possibly had been a good person. Well-liked by people who had spread lies about her. Well-liked by people who dumped food in her hair, to make it black like it should be.
She'd been wrong about him, and now she felt conflicted because she hated being wrong. Yuriko, the girl who despised the prejudiced had been rude to a boy because she pre-judged him. After he'd helped her. Now she was mortified because there was just no way, Itadori hadn't overheard the...unpleasant conversation between the nurse and her father. Yet that look in his eyes.
That look that wasn't pity; that wasn't blame. She couldn't define it. No one had ever looked at her like that before—there was no data to compare it to, but she knew from that look alone...He couldn't possibly have been a bad person.
She shooed her musings away, it was time to focus on the things that mattered!
Accelerator, or One-Way Road, was both the name of the character, and a sobriquet of the ability he wielded. It operated under the principles of vector transformation: the process of mathematically changing a quantity that had both a direction, and a magnitude. The signature utility of One-Way Road was Accelerator's passive reflection barrier. Though, it was more accurate to call it a reality warping field that wrapped around his body, stretching out to about one millimetre above his skin.
Accelerator would calculate a whitelist of every vector that was essential for survival (air flow, certain frequencies of light, the acceleration caused by the curvature of space-time) and reflect everything that wasn't on that list. In the anime, it had been near infallible. Almost any kind of attack would carry itself harmlessly away from him. Even UV radiation was unable touch him— giving him the skin tone of the average League of Legends player.
When her experiments had confirmed for her that she was indeed using the same power as Accelerator, her excitement hit a fever pitch. The realisation that she was in some warped version of the reality she was born in had exacerbated the issue. She began to treat everything like she was in a lucid dream, already forgetting that she had nearly died before her REM cycle.
So, in a moment of cockiness, in a place no other student would be, she'd tried it. But her whitelist hadn't been thorough enough. Gravity pulled her off the ground, as she'd fallen upward. Air had no pathway to her lungs; light had no pathway to her eyes. She couldn't see, for there was nothing to see. She couldn't feel, for there was nothing to touch. She couldn't even hear. It was like she had been abandoned by life itself. She must have been moments, a mere instant away from death when she felt it. A little poke against her shield that was keeping out the world.
Her mistake on the roof had been a wakeup call. She knew now that if she wasn't careful, if she didn't respect it, her incredible power would tear her apart.
Yuriko sighed, internally grateful that there wasn't any interaction between her newfound capabilities and the Higg's field. Instantaneous nonexistence didn't sound like a fun way to go.
But it worked, her ego brayed, it worked. To some extent, the barrier had held. Had it not, the fall would have injured her. Fatally. All she needed was a better understanding of the human body. Once she was intimately aware of the forces that kept the average person alive, she could adjust them to her specifications, then calculate her own whitelist.
Onto the present.
Yuriko closed her eyes. She felt around for that unpleasant thing that was present in other people; the last few signatures were leaving the building. The last human signatures.
They came out in the twilight hours, when she was the only soul around. Yuriko hadn't slept well this week despite the shelter the school provided. Because when the day ended, and the sun was setting, the school provided another challenge.
They crawled out of cracks in the walls. They crawled out of toilets; out of desks. They were spiders skittering out of closed books.
On her first night, she had been ambushed by a monkey-thing. It had ooh ooh ahh ahh'ed about missing homework, before she backhanded it through a row of desks. That was the last time she slept in a classroom.
Then she tried the teacher's lounge, but then the creatures were whinging and moaning about taxes, and mortgages and daughters that wouldn't speak to them anymore.
She concluded— based on the broken speech— that the creatures were distributed in areas with frequent human activity. Which was how she ended up sleeping in the laundry room. The smell of the spare uniforms and PE jerseys led her to believe that the laundry room wasn't used nearly often enough for it to be a problem. And it hadn't been.
Until a sentient(?) sock had tried to strangle her in her sleep.
Luckily, the disgusting sensation she felt—whenever those creatures were around— was just as strong when she wasn't conscious. They registered like a swarm of flies directly above her ears, even from halfway across the school. The chances of a successful ambush on their part were titchy at best. So, she had done her best Heracles impression and choked that bitch to sleep.
God, she wished that were her. Eye bags were even more noticeable on pale skin.
All of that, however, lead her back to her first issue. She needed to get invincible, fast. In the light novel, Accelerator's barrier—before circumstances extenuated—was a passive ability, which meant (paradoxically) that it was active all the time. While he was eating, brushing his teeth; walking across the street with a one-year-old middle-school girl firing a .50 calibre rifle at him.
It even worked when he was sleeping. In almost any circumstance, if something wanted to touch him, it required his consent. If Yuriko could figure that out the calculations needed, she would use that incredible defensive field, that had no sold attacks stated to have city and even planetary levelling potential, to get one good night of rest.
To the library with her. Yuriko opened the stall door, grabbed her bag, and started to creep her way through the deserted halls. She crouched into shadows; scrutinised ever potential flash of light. It didn't hurt to be cautious.
It also felt really cool, but that naturally didn't factor into her decisions.
Yuriko mounted the stairs in a calculated gait, that was just a step away from a crawl. If anyone was nearby, the bannisters would shield her from view. She rolled past the last camera on the landing (never mind that it had been jammed), before pulling open a door and stepping in.
Sugisawa's library boasted a fairly respectable collection of, well, books. Shelves lined every squared centimetre of wall; computers sat on tables that surrounded support beams. The shelves held everything from young adult novels, to encyclopaedias, to academic journals that were perhaps just a little bit too advanced for high school.
Yuriko put on some latex gloves, which she had liberated from the nurse's office, and leafed over book covers until she'd found one on human physiology. Out of habit—though, was it a habit if you'd only been doing it for four days— she also freed an encyclopaedia of World Records from its shelf. She set them both down on the wood of a computer table.
On her second night of squatting at the school, Yuriko had been thinking of that game on the football (soccer) pitch: about the casual nonchalance at Itadori's superhuman display, and that got her thinking. Was it only superhuman from her point of view? She had pored through the book, vaguely aware of what some of the records were supposed to be. Many details remained consistent; until she started looking at Olympic records.
Damn, more of them had been held by Japanese people than she remembered. Some of the athletes she had never even heard of. Usain Bolt had still won the hundred metre sprint in the twenty-twelve Olympics, but the actual record for World's Fastest Man was held by some dude in Japan, who had apparently later gambled his way into debt and obscurity. It had been when she'd read this and double checked her sources on the internet that she decided she was in another world. She couldn't ignore the signs anymore. Couldn't claim insanity, she felt very sane after all, but she supposed she would in any case. Her most damning piece of evidence was the altered Light Novel — its ISBN leading...wait, it didn't even have one anymore.
World Rejecter was a very specific alteration to have made, and it fit. Nobody remembered the black-haired Itadori, and more importantly, nobody remembered the existence of the fourth highest grossing Light Novel of all time. There could have been many explanations, and perhaps defaulting so soon to the clique was just an example of cognitive bias, but she felt it so surely in her gut: she could have only been in a parallel world.
Yuriko shook off the existential crises as she opened what was now the fourth textbook on human anatomy. It had only been thirty minutes since she'd started, but knowledge came easier to her now. Sense made itself agreeable. She couldn't help but marvel at the ease at which her brain digested information now. The toxic glow of the monitor flickered as she sped through articles. It was almost laughably easy— establishing a baseline for the average person. Now for the hard part.
There was a reason the scientists at Academy City had dubbed their vector manipulator as Accelerator. It wasn't just a bad pun. What they meant was particle accelerator. No, it wasn't that his ability was particularly particle accelerator adjacent. It was because it allowed him to intuitively deconstruct various phenomena by describing the interactions of almost everything by their direction and their magnitude. The analytical powers of his vector manipulation, coupled with his supercomputer brain, were what made Accelerator the strongest level five in the story. He could, with time, eventually understand how everything worked.
Yuriko didn't need to do all that just yet. So, instead she closed her eyes and found a memory.
They pull at her hair. They riddle pain into her scalp. They tug, and they tug, and a little white comes loose—
Shame drew out the energy inside her; she let it shroud her like a body bag. Her heartbeat; the pressure exerted on her. Yuriko took in a breath, letting the acrid smell of chemically cleaned wood hit her nose. No, she wanted only the atmospheric potion of life-giving air to go in; or maybe just enough of the other stuff to know it was there without causing long term harm. Reflected.
The particulates in the air registered as soft pings against her energy field, before fading into the background. The last time she had breathed air so clean was at the countryside, when her mother had taken her to her home village.
She opened her eyes and glared back at the screen until she could see it with perfect clarity. Reflected. All the excess light pinged off harmlessly. It was almost like she was reading a book in neutral lighting, instead of a screen in the darkness of a library. She let the calculations seep into her energy field, and the world responded accordingly.
Yuriko felt like she had just downloaded Life 2 and set the difficulty to 'story mode'. She felt like a new creation. Her blood pressure slightly adjusted itself; the air flowed smoother into her lungs. Her ears popped faintly as they reached a new and comfortable equilibrium. Even her weight became intentional, she could make herself as heavy as she needed; her centre of gravity could be anywhere. Yuriko no longer felt the gnawing pain of the stiff chair beneath her.
She tapped the table with her index. Once. Pause. Then twice in quick succession. There was the sensation of contact. She tapped the table harder, and it shook as though something a lot heavier than an index had been dropped on it. The sensation of contact, but no pain. She was redirecting the counter force of her finger back into the table. The math settled in. Subconsciously. Effortlessly.
It wasn't perfect. After all, Yuriko only had a light novel as a reference, where Accelerator had had Kihara Amata—goodness, she did not envy him. She could already feel that there were kinks, gaps and redundancies—that her power (the wriggling thing that played to her emotions) fell away from her as surely as tropical rain fell from the sky.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a start.
Yuriko fished out her mother's Walkman from her bag and slipped in a cassette. By the time she wore her headphones, she was also wearing a clumsy smile.
"This is where the fun begins."