Undercurrents Stirring

"Uchiha, come up and solve this problem."

During the fourth-period math class that morning, the female math teacher standing beside the blackboard called on Uchiha Naruto. She was twenty-five or twenty-six, with shoulder-length hair and a cool, aloof beauty.

Uchiha Naruto stood at his desk and studied the problem on the blackboard. a3k, a3k+1, a3k+2... each group of three terms in the sequence satisfied the relationship above... each group of three numbers could contribute a remainder of 1... a3 through a2022 made exactly 677 groups...

Then the approach to this problem should be...

Only after thinking for over a full minute did Uchiha Naruto walk up to the blackboard and write out his solution and answer.

"Correct, Uchiha, but don't doze off in my class again. There are still a few omissions in your working. Here, you should..." The math teacher picked up a piece of chalk and began writing on the board.

Having trained too late the night before, Uchiha Naruto had struggled to stay awake. He had only closed his eyes for a moment before the eagle-eyed math teacher caught him.

Before long, the bell rang. Math was the last class of the morning, and the students were already hungry. The teacher had no intention of keeping them late and dismissed them immediately.

Living on his own, Uchiha Naruto did not even make breakfast, let alone a packed lunch. He headed to the cafeteria with Tanaka Hikaru.

Uchiha Naruto ordered a beef set meal, rubbed his ravenous stomach, then added a large bowl of tonkotsu ramen.

The beef set came with stir-fried beef and onions, a fried egg, a bowl of miso soup, and a bowl of rice. The large tonkotsu ramen was topped with two thick slices of pork and heaps of minced garlic, chopped scallions, and bean sprouts, giving off the rich aroma of animal fat.

The meal cost Uchiha Naruto 1,200 yen. Eating outside school would have cost even more.

Tanaka Hikaru sat across from Uchiha Naruto with his tempura set meal. Seeing how much Uchiha Naruto had ordered, he remarked in surprise:

"Uchiha, so you're a real carnivore! You can really put it away!"

Practicing chakra and ninjutsu had increased Uchiha Naruto's appetite considerably. He first picked up the ramen bowl and polished off the pork, then slurped down mouthful after mouthful of noodles. Only after finishing the noodles and taking the edge off his hunger did he speak:

"Maybe I'm growing faster now that I'm in high school. I've been eating a lot more lately. Half this much used to be enough."

"Growing... heh heh. You were dozing off in Ms. Inoue's class just now. Were you up last night...?"

The expression on Tanaka Hikaru's face was something else.

"Don't assume everyone's as sleazy as you. I just stayed up a little late playing games and didn't get enough sleep." Uchiha Naruto looked as though he could not be bothered to argue further. He continued shoveling down rice, eating his beef set meal with the broth left over from the tonkotsu ramen.

I nearly embarrassed myself in math today. I can't keep training so late that it disrupts my daily routine. I can't neglect my studies either, which means I'll have less time to train. Uchiha Naruto swallowed a fragrant, juicy piece of beef and licked his greasy lips.

Although he had awakened his Sharingan, Uchiha Naruto had no intention of abandoning his studies.

His standardized academic score was quite good. Judging by his entrance exam results, he still had a long way to go before reaching a top institution like the University of Tokyo, but he felt confident about getting into a top-ten university.

Uchiha Naruto was not particularly clever. Achieving those results had taken considerable effort.

The Island Nation was also an exam-driven country with fierce academic competition. At a private school like Jinguji High School, the academic pressure was intense. If his grades suddenly plummeted after entering high school, the school would certainly contact his parent.

Studying was like rowing against the current: if he did not move forward, he would fall behind. Maintaining his grades meant spending time studying, but that might delay the awakening of his three-tomoe Sharingan.

Uchiha Naruto drank the last mouthful of pork-bone broth, still feeling a little unsatisfied. He had demolished both meals, leaving only a bowl of miso soup.

He was not used to drinking the stuff and could not understand the Island Nation's fondness for miso. Unfortunately, every cafeteria set meal came with miso soup. The only difference was that Cafeteria A served tofu miso soup, while Cafeteria B served kelp miso soup.

Meanwhile, Tanaka Hikaru, who was scrolling through his phone as he ate, seemed to find an interesting news story and read it aloud:

"A gas pipe explosion in an old apartment building in Shimono Nakano caused a major fire. This footage from the scene is pretty interesting."

"Tokyo's huge, with more than ten million permanent residents. Gas explosions and fires are hardly unusual," Uchiha Naruto said without betraying anything.

"An ordinary fire wouldn't be much of a story, sure, but take a look at this video."

Tanaka Hikaru handed over his phone. The video resolution was not very high; it had probably been recorded by a nearby surveillance camera.

The first room on the second floor of a shabby, cheap apartment building suddenly exploded violently. Even the wall was blasted open, leaving a huge hole. Flames poured through the breach and soon engulfed half the floor, blazing toward the sky.

Had the video ended there, it would have been nothing more than ordinary fire footage. Strangely, however, the flames then curled backward into the room as though in a special-effects shot, and the fire disappeared.

"How did the fire just pull itself back inside? It doesn't look like they reversed the video. Must be edited, right? Editing technology's really something these days," Tanaka Hikaru marveled.

As they spoke, the progress bar reached the end. Tanaka Hikaru was about to play it again when the video displayed a notice saying it had been deleted.

"Huh? Where'd the video go?"

At the same time, in Room 201 of the cheap apartment building where Ogura Miyui had been murdered, a handsome man in glasses and a black suit asked a technician beside him:

"Have all the online videos been removed?"

Swiping across a tablet, the technician replied, "Yes, Superintendent Uchiha. The technical division has blocked access using the websites' source-file links. Our official explanation is that aging gas pipes caused the explosion. We're very familiar with this procedure by now."

Had Uchiha Naruto been there, he would have recognized the handsome man in the black suit as Uchiha Senmon.

Behind them, a group of sharp-looking uniformed police officers swept Room 201 with an assortment of complex, precision instruments.

Suddenly, an instrument resembling a metal detector in one officer's hands began beeping.

Uchiha Senmon's expression shifted slightly. "We're detecting an anomalous response. It seems the report sent by Officer Kanbara of Nakano Police Station wasn't entirely false."

"Superintendent Uchiha, the autopsy report for the perpetrator in the earlier case is out as well. Would you like to take a look?"

Uchiha Senmon quickly took the tablet from the technician.

The cause of death was typical mechanical asphyxia. The autopsy had found no other potentially fatal medical conditions. Comparison confirmed that the marks on the deceased's neck matched his own hands exactly. Skin particles collected from beneath his fingernails contained only his own DNA, making it possible to conclude that no second person had been involved in his suicide.

The perpetrator really had strangled himself. His death had not been a murder staged as a suicide.

"So it really is another supernatural death? It's only April, and this year's death toll has already surpassed previous years."

Uchiha Senmon took several more documents from the briefcase he carried. They included Yuuji Kanbara's incident report, a series of subsequent interview transcripts, and even a psychological evaluation of Yuuji Kanbara.

Frowning, Uchiha Senmon read through the report over and over, word by word, his expression growing increasingly grave.

"An evil spirit that manipulated shadows, and a monk who could breathe fire using magic, took all the flames from the scene and vanished on the wind. It sounds like a madman's fantasy..."

Uchiha Senmon did not doubt the existence of evil spirits. Both his personal experiences and official records contained things even more incredible than this.

But the mysterious monk named "Chiriku," described in the latter half of the report as being able to breathe flames, was a little harder to believe.

If this were true, it would shake the upper echelons of the Island Nation, even though the existence of certain nonhuman entities had been all but confirmed fifteen years earlier.

This might be the first confirmed human Superhuman!

Ever since the first supernatural incident had been observed in Heisei 19, or 2007, all manner of bizarre, mysterious supernatural events had occurred one after another. The Metropolitan Police Department had even captured unusual beings suspected of being "yokai."

Starting the following year, the Metropolitan Police Department had secretly conducted exhaustive investigations of temples and shrines across the country, hoping to find the legendary spell-wielding practitioners who could subdue demons and exorcise evil—Buddhist masters, onmyoji, and other Superhumans.

In the end, they found nothing.

Later, they expanded their search to the general public and investigated many renowned mediums and psychics. Unsurprisingly, every last one turned out to be a fraud.

This time, however, things seemed different.

Uchiha Senmon told the technician, "Bring up the surveillance footage."

Staring at the tall monk's slightly blurred face in the video, Uchiha Senmon issued his instructions. "Tell the technical division to enhance the monk's face and run facial recognition against our database. See if they can establish his real identity. Also, pull all surveillance footage from the surrounding area. Start with his appearance at the apartment building and work backward until you find the earliest location where he appeared."

"Tell the intelligence analysis division to check the lists of registered monks at every temple in Tokyo. Even if they can't find anyone with the Dharma name Chiriku, they should try to identify his sect and temple from his clothing."

"And this Officer Kanbara—has he been secured? Send him to the Metropolitan Police Department in Chiyoda. I want to speak with him personally. Have all the information compiled and delivered to me before eight tonight. I'll report to the higher-ups!"

One instruction after another was passed down in an orderly fashion.

Uchiha Senmon knew very well what a stir his investigation report would cause once submitted.

"After yokai and evil spirits, is it finally time for Superhumans to appear? None of this damned stuff existed when I was young. What is this country going to become?" Uchiha Senmon rubbed his brow and murmured to himself.