3. Please Do Not Fight the Convenience Store Clerk

Somewhere dark in Tokyo, a notification popped up on large screens in a room inside a government building. It could have been an earthquake warning, but no, it was far worse. This was the notification that would dictate a new era for the metropolis, the one in which state bureaucracy finally discovered that the apocalypse came disguised as a pay stub and a convenience store discount.

Alpha Priority

Classification Event Recorded

Location: [MinouseMart: Convenience Store, Shibuya District]

Time: [3:41 AM JST]

Entity Classification: [Completely Failed]

Attempts: [147]

Successful Attempts: [0]

Analysis of Used Technique: [Incompatible]

Method Used: [Unknown to System]

Power Level Used: [Power exceeds measurement parameters]

System Recommendation: [Observe carefully]

Secondary System Recommendation: [Never attack or be aggressive toward the entity.]

Tertiary System Recommendation: [Seriously, do not do that.]

Alert: [The process has been flagged for review by Management.]

All the screens in the room emitted a whistling sound—it was a notification. That high-pitched whistle could just as easily signal the end of the world as the start of a condo board meeting. This government building wasn't on any map of Tokyo, which actually made some sense because its finance department chose to spend most of the cartography budget on second-hand underwear vending machines instead of investing in the building's location.

This was a distinct room, naturally jittery, a national monitoring room—potentially claustrophobic, comfortably stuffy, and lit only by the ghostly glow of monitors casting the ideal light to induce dark circles under the eyes and ruin the morale of two underpaid interns.

Inside the room, a woman approached the screen and set her coffee cup on the desk, so slowly it seemed like a dramatic attempt to test Earth's gravity. The woman's name is Director Tanaka. Actually, Tanaka really is her name, but after working at WID for 12 years, her given name had chemically fused with her job title from being uttered so often; it functioned like a life sentence without parole.

This government division had two essential functions: responsible for the integration of awakened beings and for classifying all magic powers in Japan. Up until now, these had been easy tasks.

The Director had seen S-class adventurers before; she had analyzed dossiers on entities whose very existence caused natural disasters and distorted the shape of reality, not to mention monsters whose egos rivaled the state budget. She had also supervised containment protocols for rare creatures that couldn't be killed under any circumstances—creatures the Japanese army had given up on killing out of sheer exhaustion, eventually concluding that they could only be managed. But one thing was certain: Tanaka had never seen a classification fail, let alone by such a striking number—147 times. Yes, that is the number: 147 times and 0 successful attempts. She stared at the screen, still processing the information bit by bit. The Director was so stunned she was going to need help.

At the back of the room, a agitated voice sliced through the silence. "Director!" It was Analyst Hayashi—young, fresh out of university, almost constantly nervous, neurotic, and competent whenever he remembered to breathe. The young man. With trembling fingers, he pulled up the corresponding footage, which showed the famous Class-B rift located in the parking lot in the Shibuya District. Tanaka grabbed her coffee cup and took another sip, likely trying to numb her soul with caffeine.

"The Rift was closed before an anomaly response team could be deployed to the site," stuttered Hayashi, pointing at the chart. "The closure time was exactly 2.2 seconds, Director."

Tanaka didn't let Hayashi continue; she couldn't stand listening to what the young man was saying anymore. She immediately set her coffee cup aside on the desk. "That's impossible, Hayashi. It's impossible for anyone to close a Class-B rift in the time it takes a human to blink."

Hayashi could barely look the Director in the eye, beginning to doubt what kind of answer he could give. Then enlightenment struck, and an idea emerged. "I know. Director, look, I'll play the video." He stepped closer to the screen and clicked the play button.

The two stood watching the footage like people waiting to see a cheap Hollywood action movie in theaters for the first time. But to their disappointment, the quality was very low—it looked like the video had been shot on a potato.

The footage began playing from the parking lot next to a convenience store at three in the morning—completely ordinary for a Wednesday night in Tokyo. Now and then someone walked by to enter the store, someone else hit up a street noodle cart, or the night bus rolled through the early hours, occasionally stopping at the bus stop with no one getting on or off. Three-something in the morning: this playback was the perfect illustration of a cheap surveillance system, though clear enough to make out the location.

That was when the man walked out of the store slowly, purposefully—average height and average build, utterly mundane, as banal as a typical convenience store worker making minimum wage who had long lost faith in humanity. He stood about five meters from the rift, raised his hand, and the Rift simply evaporated from reality.

The Director blurted out impulsively, "Again. Play that crap again, but slower this time, frame by frame." Tanaka pressed her nose against the monitor. The night-shift worker's hand rose, and his movement didn't even look like a normal gesture—it resembled a joint physical therapy exercise for arthritis.

He simply made the thing cease to exist. The rift could have collapsed slowly, or its edges could have sealed with a proper, methodical technique, like some kind of dimensional rift stabilization pattern known in WID protocols. The guy simply made that anomaly vanish out of pure boredom.

"Director, the System can't identify what he did," said young Hayashi with some hesitation, his fingers still trembling. "There's no recognition of any technique being activated; no mana signature was detected. There's nothing like it in our records, Director. It's as if... he asked reality to repair itself, and..." Tanaka looked at Hayashi and finished his sentence with her usual bitterness. "Right, and reality obeyed like a well-trained dog wagging its tail."

A deathly silence settled over the room, broken only by the hum of the monitors.

The Director's patience evaporated like a nuclear disaster. She stared wide-eyed at Hayashi. "Hayashi, I want everything on that place. Did you hear me? I said everything!"

Hayashi immediately grabbed his tablet and started hammering away at the screen to jot down what the Director wanted. "I want the employee records, I want all the security footage from the past year. Everything, Hayashi! I don't care if we have to analyze expiration dates on cup ramen!"

Hayashi hesitated, his voice trembling. "But Director, there's more." Tanaka swallowed the rest of the demands sitting on the tip of her tongue ready to be dictated. "The System tried to classify the person responsible and failed completely, Director. An unprecedented number: 147 times."

Now, reinforced by the young man, the number started spinning in her brain like a bureaucratic roller coaster. "And in the end, the file just concludes with: Never attack or be aggressive toward the entity."

Tanaka furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes at the same time, asking aloud, "Since when does the System make any kind of recommendation, Hayashi?"

"It doesn't." Tanaka immediately followed up, "Or rather, it didn't, apparently, Hayashi." She stepped up to the screens and opened the notification. "Seriously? There's still a tertiary note, Hayashi?" Tanaka couldn't stop herself; she began reading the notification out loud, chewing on every word: "Seriously, do not do that."

Silence crushed the room once again, accompanied by butterflies in their stomachs.

Tanaka stood mouth agape, staring at that surgical notification for precisely 42 seconds. Hayashi stood frozen, watching his boss, looking for any sign of life from the Director. But the authoritative trance eventually broke.

"In 12 years, Hayashi, I have never seen the System add an editorial comment to any classification whatsoever, let alone a notification that sounds like an existential panic attack. What on earth is this freak's name?"

Hayashi placed his hands on the control panel and pulled up the night-shift worker's file. The photo showed a man in his 30s with straight, dark hair, dark eyes, fair skin, and a completely neutral expression. It was clearly the face of someone who put titanic effort into not being remembered—the perfect prototype of that guy in the background of family photos who nobody knows, whom nobody can explain why he's there, or if he's actually breathing.

"Soren Vonesdar is his name," Hayashi read, his voice wavering between horror and absurdity. "Night-shift employee at the MinouseMart store. He's been working there for three years... exactly three years since he started living in Tokyo."

Another dramatic silence stretched between the employee and the Director. "Director, there are no earlier records. The guy has no birth certificate, no tax debts, not even school records—no history whatsoever, Director. It's as if he appeared out of thin air in 2021 already wearing a red apron."

"Hayashi, nobody appears out of thin air, kid." Hayashi snapped back to attention, standing erect like a soldier before his general. "I know, I know, Director. But anyway, that's precisely what the file says." Tanaka pressed her face up to the photograph—the man who had just wiped out a Class-B rift in 2.2 seconds. A physically impossible record. The same man who caused a supercomputer to fail classification 147 times and, in turn, triggered an existential nervous breakdown in it. "Damn it, he's a convenience store clerk. It can't be possible," Tanaka vented.

Awkwardly, the Director issued another order. "Hayashi, get on the secure line and set up a meeting right now."

"With whom?" the young man asked in shock, dreading his boss's answer.

"With whom, Hayashi? It sure as hell isn't with the Holy Trinity. With him, kid—that Mr. Vonesdar." Hayashi couldn't believe what the Director was planning to do. Stuttering, his voice failing miserably, he said, "W-what if he refuses, Director?"

Tanaka averted her eyes from the photo and looked back at the video. The footage looped endlessly in terrible quality, from the gesture he made to the closure of the rift: an utterly casual, even lazy gesture at an unreal speed. And most impressive of all, a complete absence of effort, like someone waving to an acquaintance across the street before walking away to go back to restocking the ramen shelf.

"Hayashi, people who close Class-B rifts in two seconds don't refuse meetings," Tanaka said, stepping over to the desk to retrieve her coffee cup. "Trust me." She took another sip of coffee. The coffee was completely cold, but the bitterness of the caffeine was the only thing keeping her sanity awake. "He just hasn't been invited properly yet, Hayashi." She flashed a small, predatory smile at the young analyst.