Asakami En had been an utterly ordinary man in his previous life.
He had been born into an ordinary family, gone through school like everyone else, found an ordinary job after graduation, married, had children, grew old, and eventually died.
His entire life had passed without any great upheaval. He had never suffered some terrible tragedy, nor had extraordinary fortune ever fallen into his lap. There had been no miraculous surprises waiting for him, but neither had disaster ever come crashing down. His parents had passed away peacefully. He had raised a son and daughter of his own, and in the end, he too had died quietly with his children beside him.
Some people might have called that anything but ordinary. After all, he had lived a genuinely happy life.
Yet deep down, Asakami En had always felt that his existence had been painfully unremarkable.
In the final few seconds before his death, he looked back over his entire life.
Then a voice asked him a question.
Was he satisfied?
"An ordinary life. Nothing worth talking about. Just one uneventful day after another."
[Is that really how you see it? Compared with most people in your world, you were fortunate. You married a loving wife and raised two devoted children. Your son never became anyone famous, but he found steady work at a respected company and earned a good living. Your daughter's online business flourished, and she built a happy family of her own.]
[Compared with the vast majority of people, that isn't mediocrity. That's a life many would envy.]
"And yet it still felt ordinary to me."
[Then what was it you actually wanted?]
Asakami En opened his eyes.
He rubbed his temples, which ached faintly, then sat up and pulled open the curtains beside his bed.
Opening the window, he took a deep breath.
The familiar scent of concrete, steel, and the city outside filled his lungs. Slowly, the tension in his body eased.
He had dreamed about the past.
About his previous life.
[Host, the evolution was a complete success.]
[You've officially reached Level 6.]
[Actually, calling you an esper isn't entirely accurate anymore. You've become what Academy City once called an Absolute Ability user, an earthly angel capable of imposing your personal will upon the world.]
Asakami En could feel the power inside him.
If he wanted to, he could split apart, reshape, or destroy the entire island beneath Academy City within an extremely short span of time.
And it wasn't limited to the island.
Even a continent could now be manipulated as easily as wet clay in his hands.
It was a level of power his former self could never have imagined.
The kind of power that once belonged only in mythology.
And now it resided inside the body of an apparently ordinary teenage boy.
This was what people called the extraordinary.
Yet Asakami En showed almost no excitement.
He simply stared at his hands in silence, remembering things he had nearly forgotten.
At some point in childhood or adolescence, nearly everyone passed through a phase where they imagined themselves as special.
They dreamed that they had been born different from everyone else.
That some hidden power slept inside them.
That one day they would reveal themselves before the world, transcend ordinary life, and become something greater.
Then reality arrived.
Again and again, it crushed those fantasies.
The world made it painfully clear that they were just one person among billions. There was nothing inherently exceptional about them. No hidden gift was waiting to awaken. No destiny promised that they would ever become the person they imagined themselves to be.
Eventually, most people left those fantasies behind.
They called it maturity.
They learned to live with their feet planted firmly in reality, and the stories they once created so easily in their own minds gradually faded until, one day, they could barely imagine them at all.
Once the soul became too grounded, it stopped reaching for the impossible.
Asakami En had been one of those ordinary people.
Just as he had said, his previous life had been completely mundane.
At least, that was how he had seen it.
But somewhere deep inside him, the child who longed for something impossible had never truly disappeared.
Reality had never managed to kill that part of him.
Perhaps it was precisely because his first life had been so peaceful and uneventful that the desire remained intact.
He wanted something beyond the ordinary.
He wanted the supernatural.
He wanted a life unlike everyone else's.
And now, he had achieved exactly that.
With the body of a mortal, he had stepped into the realm of angels.
The body that looked so fragile from the outside had long since become as heavy and unyielding as the earth itself.
Gunfire of any caliber meant little to him. Missiles and explosions could tear craters into the ground, but they could not truly destroy the land beneath his feet.
And now, Asakami En was much the same.
He had gone far beyond ordinary humanity.
The vast majority of people on Earth were no longer capable of threatening his life.
Naturally, that assessment excluded the truly abnormal monsters lurking in this world.
It also excluded the Magic Gods, who barely qualified as human at all.
Even so, his second life had only lasted a little over a decade, and he had already reached this point.
He saw no reason to believe those beings would remain beyond him forever.
"This is the life I wanted."
Asakami En looked down at his hands.
"This is what it means to live beyond the ordinary."
"This is what I've always wanted."
His desire was simple.
He wanted extraordinary power.
Beauty, wealth, authority, fame, status, and everything else that power could offer held little appeal to him.
He did not care about those things.
What he wanted was power itself.
Power was proof that he was no longer ordinary.
That was enough.
It was also one of the reasons his System had chosen him, beyond his natural compatibility with his ability.
His desire for strength was unusually pure.
Otherwise, in a world like A Certain Magical Index, he could easily have taken advantage of his knowledge of the story to pursue any number of attractive women who played only minor roles.
It was an anime world, after all.
Even background characters tended to be unfairly good-looking.
Before long, it was time for school.
Despite having reached Level 6 and possessing the power of an earthly angel, Asakami En had no intention of dropping out.
He calmly put on his uniform, picked up his school bag, and left for class just as he always had.
As he'd already decided long ago, he didn't care what power could give him.
He only cared about the power itself.
Halfway to school, he spotted a familiar spiky-haired boy crouched beside a storm drain, staring into it with the hollow expression of someone whose day had already gone terribly wrong.
"Touma."
Asakami En stopped nearby.
"Looks like your luck hasn't improved at all."
The ground around the drain rippled faintly.
A moment later, a set of keys that had already been washed away somewhere underground rose through the pavement as though the solid earth were water.
"En!"
Kamijou Touma snatched up the keys with obvious relief.
"See? Maybe I'm not completely unlucky after all. I actually ran into you at exactly the right time today!"
The boy smiled brightly at him.
Kamijou Touma, the protagonist around whom fate itself seemed determined to revolve.
And one of Asakami En's oldest friends.
They had grown up together.
(To be continued.)
Check out my new book, Marvel/DC: The Emotion Farmer, it's a solid read. Trust my pick, like I always say 😌. Direct link in the author's thoughts.