"Listen, dad," I called out to my father, not taking my eyes off the TV screen, where the anchor had already moved on to the weather forecast. "There's another attack on the Blue Line. Looks like I'll be late for school, the subway is blocked."

  My father, standing by the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, sighed heavily and looked at the wall clock.

  "Oh, damn it... Again? Third time this month. Alright, son, get ready quickly, I'll drop you off in the car. The last thing we need is for you to get a reprimand on your first day of senior year."

  I nodded and slung my backpack over my shoulder. We stepped outside. Yokohama in 2015 looked like it usually did: people hurrying to work, among whom you could catch glimpses of pointed elf ears or the stocky figures of dwarves in business suits. The city lived its own life, trying not to notice the red police tape at the subway entrances.

  We got into the car. The old Toyota purred its engine familiarly. I looked in the side mirror at the retreating residential blocks. The last year of high school. The home stretch.

  "Well, son," my father spun the steering wheel, pulling onto the main road. "First day. Are you... are you still set on this Exterminator Corps of yours?"

  I felt everything tighten inside me. We had talked about this hundreds of times.

  "Yes, father. My decision hasn't changed."

  "Leon, you do realize..." he glanced away from the road for a moment, and a shadow he was trying to hide flickered in his eyes. "It's dangerous out there. I just worry. You're the only one we have."

  "You see the news yourself, dad," I tried to make my voice sound firm. "They're having a hard time. The Kaiju are crawling out more and more often, there aren't enough recruits. If everyone just 'worries' at home, we'll all be eaten right in these cars soon."

  My father smiled sadly, braking at a traffic light.

  "Wow... I raised too good of a son. A hero," he shook his head, but his voice held not pride, but a quiet sense of doom.

  "Don't worry," I said quietly, turning to the window.

  He focused on the road again, gripping the steering wheel tighter. I felt curiosity familiarly itching inside me. Just for a second. Just to check.

  I fixed my gaze on the back of his head. Click.

  "...he's only seventeen... he doesn't understand what he's getting into... I don't want to lose him the same way..."

  I abruptly severed the connection. My heart was pounding, a familiar sour lump rising in my throat. If I linger for more than ten seconds, I'll throw up right on the dashboard.

  You're probably asking, what was that just now? I'm a telepath. I don't know how or why, but this damn ability awakened in me at the age of four. At first, I thought I was going crazy. Imagine: hundreds of fragments of other people's thoughts, desires, fears—and all of it screaming in your head simultaneously.

  My parents were terrified. Doctors handed out diagnosis after diagnosis: from schizophrenia to severe psychosis. I was stuffed with pills that turned me into a drooling vegetable, but the voices didn't go anywhere. They just got quieter and angrier.

  It was only at five years old that I realized: it's not a disease. It's the people around me. I heard their true faces, hidden beneath masks of politeness. And believe me, it's not a gift. If you knew what vile, selfish, and frightening thoughts swarm in the heads of those who smile when they meet you... you wouldn't want to have such a power.

  Truth be told, I have very little power. More than ten seconds at a time—and my body triggers an emergency reset. Vomiting, wild migraines, sometimes nosebleeds. Training helps; over the past year, I've wrestled another couple of seconds from this ability, but I still remain "flimsy" by the Corps' standards.

  Of course, sometimes it's overpowered. Cheating on exams? Easy. Figuring out where an opponent will strike in sparring practice? A piece of cake. But in a real battle, where every minute counts, my ten seconds seem like a pathetic joke.

  "We're here," my father's voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

  The car stopped in front of the school gates. I saw a crowd of students, and among them—a bright poster on the gym wall: "WE NEED YOUR HELP. ENLIST IN THE EXTERMINATOR CORPS."

  "Good luck, Leon," my father said, trying to smile.

  I got out of the car, feeling hundreds of eyes on me. Noise, dirt, and lies—welcome to my world.

  I walked into my classroom. There were exactly twenty-five of us—a standard group for the senior year. Looking around, I caught myself thinking once again that I'm a bit of an outcast here. Well, you know, it's when you seem to have friends, you say hi to everyone, and can even exchange a few words, but on each classmate's list of "important people", you're standing somewhere at the very bottom. It didn't upset me much—less attention meant less unnecessary noise in my head.

  It was already 7:40. There were twenty minutes left before classes started, and the room was gradually filling with life.

  Over there, in the corner, a trio was arguing loudly about something: Mark, Ramde, and Durv. Mark was a typical product of our time—a mix of elf and dwarf. Stocky, broad-shouldered like a wardrobe, but with fine facial features and pointed ear tips. No one is surprised by such combinations anymore—pureblood races haven't existed for a long time. Everyone mixed: elves, dwarves, demonoids... Someone's great-grandfather was an elf, someone's grandmother was a demon, and in the end, you get an ordinary guy in a school uniform who just wants to pass his tests.

  There was a lively hum in the classroom. Everyone was discussing the summer, bragging about how they had changed and where they had been. I sat down at my desk, trying not to turn on the "receiver" unnecessarily. I had learned to control it—now I only read thoughts when I want to.

  The bell rang. First period—higher mathematics.

  As soon as the teacher opened his mouth and announced the topic, I realized how terrible this world is. Higher mathematics... I was sick of it last year, and now it seems it decided to finish me off completely. I looked at the blackboard, covered in formulas, and understood absolutely nothing.

  At the same time, I even felt a little sorry for the teacher. What a dubious pleasure it must be—to spend the whole lesson talking your heart out, putting your soul into explaining a topic that absolutely no one in the room understands. It's doubly hard being a teacher: studying for so many years to become a pro, only to end up looking at twenty-five pairs of empty eyes.

  Finally, this hell ended, but the joy was short-lived. Math was replaced by heavy artillery—physics. And not just physics, but theoretical and nuclear. And it all repeated again: the teacher talks about splitting atoms and energy formulas, and I'm a complete zero at it.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I sat there, propping my head on my hand, and thought: "And I have to study THIS for a whole year until I get into the Corps?"

  But for now, my main enemy wasn't monsters, but a textbook in which I didn't understand a single word.

  Lunch at last. Not that I was absolutely thrilled about the food, it was just a legal opportunity to close the textbooks for a while.

  I sat at the table alone, picking at rice with my chopsticks. Looking around at the noisy groups of classmates, I caught myself thinking that I felt genuinely sad for some reason. What a hermit I am, after all. Not exactly an outcast who gets bullied, but not one of their own either. Just a shadow somewhere on the periphery of their fun lives.

  Finishing my food, I trudged to the locker room. The next lesson was physical education—the only place in school where I was actually anticipated. In basketball, I was useful.

  On the court, I gave it my all. For most, it was just a game to skip theory, but for me, it was training. I forced myself to sweat buckets, anticipating the opponent's every next step, every swing and turn. And most importantly—I did it "dry", making it a point not to turn on mind-reading. If I want to survive in the Corps, I have to learn to foresee the enemy's actions.

  True, against Mark, all my efforts often went down the drain. His ancestral heritage had gifted him four arms—and that, honestly, was complete cheating. Try getting past a guy who sets a block with two hands, while two more are already reaching for the ball behind your back.

  "Why did you freeze, Leon?" Mark chuckled, easily intercepting my pass with three palms at once. "Not enough speed!"

  I just gritted my teeth. It was frustrating, of course. Nature had endowed them with strength, extra limbs, or armored skin, while I only got a pathetic human body. But I didn't give up. Every jump, every dash across the parquet brought me closer to my goal.

  For them, it was basketball. For me—preparation for war.

  At one point, when Mark went in for a ram, I almost lost control. My temples itched—I wanted so badly to peek into his head for a fraction of a second to find out which way he'd start his pivot. My hand reached for the invisible toggle switch of my power on its own.

  "No," I stopped myself, dripping with sweat. "Ten seconds are for monsters. I'll handle Mark myself."

  I sharply cut to the right, narrowly missing one of his lower arms, and sent the ball into the hoop with a jump.

  "Nice one!" someone from the team shouted.

  I landed on jelly legs, wiping my face with the edge of my t-shirt. It was hard. Physically, I was still weaker than many, but this thrill... it was what made me believe I had a chance in the Corps. Even if I'm "empty" when it comes to magic, and even if I don't have four arms.

  The first day flew by surprisingly fast—only four classes. Usually, we were tortured for six or seven hours, but in honor of the start of the year, they decided to cut us some slack. However, during the last lesson, the classroom door opened, and the teacher, noticeably nervous, announced:

  "Listen up, everyone. We have representatives from the Exterminator Corps here."

  Three men in strict black suits entered the classroom. They didn't look like heroes from TV. More like grim debt collectors or secret service agents. Heavy glares, rigid posture, and some unnatural silence that filled the room along with their appearance.

  One of them, with a scar on his chin, stepped forward.

  "You are in your final year of study," he began in a dry, colorless voice. "Ahead lies a choice: university, an office job, or your own path. But we are here to offer you an alternative. The Exterminator Corps."

  He started listing: high salary, full state provision, the best physical training in the country, career growth. It sounded like an ad for some elite academy, if not for the context.

  Mark, sitting at the back desk, crossed all four of his arms over his chest and snorted loudly.

  "Yeah, it's all cool. You just forgot to add that in your Corps, people rarely live to see thirty."

  The class froze. The teacher turned pale, and the other two men in suits didn't even flinch. The one who had been speaking slowly shifted his gaze to Mark.

  "That is true," he answered calmly. "Our work is dangerous. By joining our ranks, you could die on your very first day. Kaiju know no mercy, they don't care about your salary or your ambitions. This is not a path for the weak."

  He paused for a second, then added a bit quieter:

  "But the cities are being attacked more and more often. And if no one joins the Corps, then none of you will live to see thirty—whether in uniform or without it."

  Honestly, his speech was mediocre—neither here nor there. Dry facts, frightening statistics, and no pathos. But while my classmates exchanged glances with obvious doubt and fear, I felt that very same fire flaring up inside me.

  I looked at these men in black. I didn't need their money or "career growth." I wanted to see what was hidden beneath their jackets.

  I couldn't resist. Just for a second.

  Click.

  I peeked into the head of the one with the scar.

  "...fourth school today... kids... they think it's a game... and in sector 5 there aren't enough people left to even just clean up the corpses... when will reinforcements arrive..."

  I instantly "slammed" the connection shut, feeling a familiar cold rising to my throat. He wasn't lying. The situation was much worse than what they said on the news.

  The man in the suit frowned for a moment and swept his gaze across the room, lingering on me. For a second, it seemed to me that he felt something—some strange discomfort in the air. But he just adjusted his tie and placed a stack of brochures on the teacher's desk.

  We were handed glossy brochures, and the men in black left the classroom as silently as they had entered. The teacher, swallowing hard, tried to return our attention to history, but no one in the room was listening anymore. Everyone was secretly examining the pictures of powerful exoskeletons and the heroes of the Legions.

  I turned the brochure over in my hands, looking at the retouched photos of smiling soldiers. "At this rate, they won't recruit anyone," I thought. Now everything fell into place. It made sense why the news only broadcast the triumphs of the Third Legion and praised their efficiency. It was just PR. They needed to drag the youth into this meat grinder, throwing the dust of glory in their eyes so they wouldn't notice how, behind the scenes, there weren't enough people to even just clear away the corpses.

  Creepy. It was all genuinely creepy.

  After classes, my father was waiting for me in the parking lot, as promised. I got into the car, still clutching this brochure in my hands.

  "How was your first day, son?" he asked, pulling out of the schoolyard.

  "It was fine," I replied, looking out the window.

  My father glanced at the brochure in my hands, then at the road. For a while, we drove in a silence broken only by the rustle of the tires.

  "Still... why are you so eager to get into this Corps?" he asked suddenly. His voice no longer sounded reproachful, but held a kind of sad curiosity.

  "Dad, I've told you a thousand times..."

  "I just want to hear it one more time, Leon."

  I sighed and leaned back in the seat.

  "You remember what happened in Tokyo fifteen years ago, right? We used to live there, before that invasion. I was only about two or three years old then."

  My father's face darkened. His fingers gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

  "Yes. You were very little."

  "I remember it in fragments," I began, and the frames that hadn't been erased over the years surfaced before my eyes. "I remember how you grabbed me in your arms and ran from the house as fast as you could. Everything around was crumbling. That Kaiju... it was just walking through our neighborhood, destroying everything in its path. Our house turned to dust in seconds. But I was looking back over your shoulder. And I saw him."

  My father remained silent, listening.

  "I never found any information about him in the archives. He wore a mask, but I still remember his hair—white as snow. And his eyes. Piercingly blue. He appeared out of nowhere. With one blow, he blew the head off that monster chasing us. And then... there was another one, a huge one, the main one. That hero destroyed it too. Also with one blow."

  I paused, catching my breath. This memory always made my heart beat faster.

  "That was the first time I saw a real hero. A person who saves hundreds of lives while his own hangs by a thread. I don't want to just hide and wait until we are thrown out of our home again. I want to be there, on the front line. Like him."

  My father was silent for a long time. We drove a couple more blocks before he finally smiled—sadly, but genuinely.

  "Well... if you really feel that this is your place..." He put his hand on my shoulder. "Then prepare yourself well. Don't quit your training. Train every day, Leon. Until you drop. Understood?"

  "Yes," I answered firmly, feeling warmth spreading inside me. "Understood, dad."

  As soon as we arrived, I immediately changed clothes and went out into the yard. No slacking off. If I want to survive where elite soldiers barely make it to thirty, my muscles have to become steel.

  70 push-ups in three sets—my arms were shaking, but I forced myself to fully extend. Then abs, three sets, until my stomach started burning as if I had swallowed coals. Pull-ups, 15 times. The last reps came out with a wheeze, my knuckles turning white as they dug into the bar.

  Yes, it was hard. And I still had a run waiting for me tomorrow morning. But I knew: the Corps doesn't take just anyone. The pretty words from the brochures are for the masses, but on the internal tests, they will turn you inside out.

  Finishing with physicals, I sat down on the grass, wiping the sweat from my forehead. It was time for the hardest part.