I froze, watching a sparrow hopping along the fence. I tried to "dive" into it. Animals were always a problem. They don't think in words or logical chains. All I caught were flashes of instincts: Hunger. Fear. Warmth. Movement. It's like trying to make out a picture on a TV showing nothing but static.

  It's a bit easier with cats and dogs—their thoughts are more formed, more emotional. I practiced most often on the neighbor's Labrador, who was constantly staring at me through the chain-link fence.

  I fixed my gaze. One second. Five. Ten... My consciousness began to swim, blood pounding in my temples. Eleven!

  "YES!" I exhaled, severing the connection.

  I swayed, the familiar lump rising in my throat, but I just clenched my fists in victory. Eleven seconds! Three weeks of training, and I had finally pushed back that damn barrier. Ten seconds used to seem like an insurmountable wall, beyond which lay only darkness and nausea, but now I had won back another moment. This is progress. This is a real chance.

  After washing my face with ice-cold water, I slumped into my room and buried myself in my phone. In 2015, the internet was jam-packed with forums and articles about the Legions.

  I scrolled through the lists. There are five main Legions in total. Each guards its own sector. Tokyo and Yokohama are mega-cities, so they are split between two Legions each. The First and Second are stationed in Tokyo. Here in Yokohama, we have the Third and Fourth.

  The Third Legion is run by an old wolf, Mon Fun. He has been leading the group for ten years—a tenure that seems impossible for this job. He's pushing forty, and the forums say he'll retire soon... if he lives that long, of course.

  The Fourth Legion, however, is the exact opposite. Their leader, Ari Nor, is quite young, only twenty-six. But she's been in the Corps for eight years and has over a dozen confirmed Kaiju kills to her name.

  "Powerful," I whispered, looking at her photo in the news feed. A stern gaze, her bio-suit fitting like a glove.

  Every Legion leader was a living legend. People who look death in the eye every day and force it to back down.

  I put my phone away and looked at the stack of textbooks on the edge of my desk.

  "Yeah... And now I have to do homework."

  All my drive evaporated instantly. A hero who can read minds and dreams of exterminating monsters has to sit and solve higher math equations. It's so annoying!

  I opened my notebook, staring at the blank page. If a Kaiju attacks the school right now, at least I won't have to finish this paragraph.

  This week turned out to be surprisingly quiet. While I sat in biology class, the latest news played in my head all on its own. There hadn't been any global attacks above the Tiger level, and that was scary. Usually, such a lull means no good.

  I started recalling the classification they had been drilling into us since elementary school. It's simple and brutal:

  Level 1-2: Small creatures, cannon fodder. Loners.

  Level 3-4 (Tiger): When levels 1-2 start gathering in packs. That's exactly what happened in the subway.

  Level 5-6 (Snake): A serious threat. Massive specimens capable of leveling a city block single-handedly. In the last four years, these have appeared in Japan three times already.

  Level 7-8 (Typhoon): Catastrophe. What happened in Tokyo 15 years ago was a Typhoon. After something like that, cities take decades to rebuild.

  Level 9-10 (Dragon): The end of the world. Wipes countries off the map.

  The experts on TV grumble more and more often that if things keep going this way, Japan will have to ask its neighbors for help. Although they aren't doing any better. A year ago, Korea actually had a Dragon. There was absolutely nothing left of the city it swept through. Help from China and Japan arrived, but it was too late—there was no one left to save.

  "Leon!" the biology teacher's sharp voice pulled me out of my thoughts. "Are you even still in class? Or are you already fighting in the Legion?"

  I flinched and focused my gaze. The teacher was standing by the blackboard with an anatomical poster, his arms crossed over his chest. A chuckle rolled through the classroom.

  "Yeah, I'm here," I muttered, adjusting my collar.

  "Since you're here, then show us on the diagram where the pancreas is located. And point out the diaphragm while you're at it."

  I stood up and walked over to the poster. Fortunately, biology isn't higher math. The topic was easy, and I knew the internal anatomy of hybrids quite well, if only because I was always curious about how we differ from those very monsters.

  I confidently poked at the right spots. The teacher snorted, clearly disappointed that he couldn't trip me up, and told me to sit down.

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  'If you knew what I was really thinking about, you wouldn't have called me to the board,' I thought, returning to my desk. At that moment, almost mechanically, I "opened" the receiver for a second and caught the teacher's thought: 'He's got his head in the clouds again...'

  I chuckled to myself. Let them think what they want. While they study the structure of the diaphragm, I'm preparing so that this very diaphragm doesn't burst from fear when I see a real monster face to face.

  Two weeks passed. The first wave of exams was behind us, and honestly, I only survived by a miracle. Higher math: 80 out of 100. It wasn't for nothing that I trained my telepathy; copying answers from the heads of top students without giving myself away was quite the quest. History: 83 out of 100. I pulled almost all of that off myself; my memory rarely fails me. But physics... that was hell. Even the biggest nerds in the class scraped by with a maximum of 75. I got my 70 out of 100 and exhaled—I walked right along the edge of the cliff. The rest of the subjects were easy; I passed them without much stress.

  It all happened during PE class. We were battling it out in basketball as usual, the squeak of sneakers on the parquet and the thud of the ball filling the gym. Mark was just raising the ball over the hoop when the school literally exploded with the wail of sirens.

  [ATTENTION! EVACUATION! THREAT LEVEL 5: SNAKE]

  "All passen..." the announcer stumbled, and the voice switched to the live, trembling voice of our principal. "Urgent! Everyone proceed to the school shelter! Teachers, evacuate the students immediately! This is not a drill!"

  In that same second, everyone's pockets vibrated—hundreds of smartphones simultaneously received an emergency notification. "Minato Ward, Yokohama. Kaiju activity Level Snake. Take cover in the nearest bunkers."

  "Quickly! Form up in threes!" the PE teacher shouted, his face turning gray from tension. "Just like in practice, run!"

  We reacted on autopilot. In this world, we are taught from kindergarten where to run when the siren starts wailing. Almost all government buildings have been equipped with deep underground bunkers. We went down into a cold concrete hall lined with benches and crates of water.

  Barely had the heavy hermetic door been sealed behind us when the walls shuddered. A dull, powerful crash that sent dust raining from the ceiling. Something massive had rammed into the school building right above our heads at full speed. Somewhere up above, the chatter of automatic cannons crackled, explosions were heard, and then... silence. A heavy, muffled silence, in which you could only hear the frightened breathing of twenty-five people.

  An hour probably passed before the long-awaited words came over the intercom: "The danger has passed. Cleanup crews are working. You may come out."

  When we went back up and entered the gym, I froze. A huge, jagged hole gaped in the wall right above the basketball hoop. Concrete blocks had been uprooted entirely. It looked like the creature had been brutally slammed into here during the fight.

  In the middle of the gym, among the rubble, lay a carcass. It was a specimen about six meters long—a monstrous mutant, vaguely resembling a tiger, but its skin was covered in bony growths, and instead of front paws, it had powerful, jointed blades.

  I stepped closer, unable to tear my eyes away. Its eyes... huge, dead orbs, in which the reflection of its final fury was still frozen. At that moment, a coldness pierced through me unlike anything I had ever felt in my life. This wasn't a picture on TV. This was real death, which had just been a couple of meters away from us. My legs turned to jelly; I stood rooted to the spot, unable to even take a breath.

  "Hey, kid! Why are you standing there like a statue?" a gruff voice snapped me out of my stupor.

  A man in a gray jumpsuit with the Cleanup Crew emblem walked up from behind. He held a massive circular saw connected to a portable battery.

  "Get out of here, now! You're in the way of the work."

  I watched as his partners, acting with a frightening indifference, began to hack the monster to pieces. The screech of the saw biting into the bone armor, the smell of black blood and formalin...

  I turned around and quickly walked away, trying not to look at my feet. The school continued to live; teachers were counting the kids, someone was crying, someone was filming the hole in the wall on their phone. But the fear... that primal, icy fear of the mutant tiger's dead eyes remained in my heart.

  I realized: my training, my push-ups, and my eleven seconds of telepathy—they were child's play. The world is much scarier than I thought. And if I want to one day meet that white-haired hero from the past, I'll have to learn to look into eyes like those without freezing in terror.

  Two months passed. During that time, Yokohama was shaken once more—another Snake level. The city was starting to get used to this madness, like a lingering flu epidemic.

  The internet was boiling. You only had to go on any social network or forum, and tons of posts would dump on you. People in 2015 had learned to turn tragedies into content: selfies against the backdrop of destroyed buildings, streams of Cleanup Crews at work, and endless arguments about which Legion is cooler.

  The popularity of the Legions skyrocketed. The group leaders—Mon Fun and Ari Nor—became true rock stars. Their faces were everywhere: on billboards, on magazine covers, in viral videos. But behind this gloss hid a growing irritation. The comments increasingly read: "These Kaiju blocked the road again!", "Because of the Snake level, I was late for a date, when will this end?". People began to perceive the monsters not as a mortal threat, but as an annoying nuisance that prevents them from living their normal lives.

  I, however, didn't stand still. My life turned into an endless cycle: school, home, training, sleep. If I wasn't hunched over textbooks, I was wringing every last drop of energy out of my body.

  My stats went up. Now my limit is twelve seconds.

  Only a one-second difference for two months of grueling work. Some might say it's nothing, a trifle. But for me, it was a massive breakthrough. Every new second in the "noise" was won with a fight. It was like trying to hold a red-hot coal in your hands: the first ten seconds you endure it, on the eleventh the skin starts to smoke, and on the twelfth the pain becomes almost unbearable.

  But I held on. I felt the "wall" in my head getting stronger. Now, when I dived into other people's thoughts, I saw the pictures more clearly. I wasn't just catching snippets of phrases anymore; I was beginning to feel emotions—the sticky fear of passersby, the hidden malice of teachers, the fake enthusiasm of classmates.

  "Twelve seconds," I whispered, wiping away the blood that was flowing from my nose again after evening training. "It's still not enough to survive. But it's enough not to die in the first few moments."

  I looked at the calendar. There was less and less time left until the end of school. The world around was becoming more and more nervous, Kaiju were crawling out more often, and the popularity of those who kill them grew along with the fear.

  I understood: the lull before a real Typhoon wouldn't last forever. And when the sky over Yokohama turns black again, I have to be ready.