"Kaizer Lunin!"
At the back of a well-decorated classroom sat a young man of eighteen years. He was quite a handsome young fellow, clearly very well-groomed and fit thanks to his slicked-back black hair and broad shoulders that stretched his clothes out a bit.
His skin tone was a vibrant shade of ivory, while his high nose and thin lips gave him a hint of feminine beauty amidst the masculinity. Even seated like this, one could tell he was an impressive 6'1", which was inherited from his father.
However, what made this young man truly striking were his bright blue eyes, which looked almost fake if he hadn't repeatedly proven them to be real. Even as he sat there looking out of the class window towards the park, those blue irises seemed to glow slightly, as if there was a certain power in them.
Despite this, the young man's entire aura gave off a certain feeling of coolness and alienation, as if he were an iceberg that had no intention of thawing. Even hearing his class teacher howl his name with fury, he did not bother to tear his eyes away.
He simply stood up and spoke casually. "You were explaining the relationship between the formation of the social contract and the growth of the socio-economic factors that promoted the rudiments of the initial society system."
He sat down after that, leaving his classmates in some level of awe while the teacher felt like their lungs were burning up… because he was right!
This was what he hated most, always seeing this brat looking so bored as if he were spewing rubbish, yet he was paying attention the whole time! Brat, can't you at least give me some face and pretend like what I am saying is interesting?!
In the end, the teacher sighed and went back to explaining in a sullen tone, making many of the students smirk with schadenfreude.
Hehe, that's what you get for those horrible tests that cause us to pull our hair out!
Kaizer did not pay attention to this as his mind wandered once more. Ever since he had hit puberty, he had noticed something strange about himself, and that was the fact that he had a vague feeling of… connection. It felt like his mind could passively connect with certain things and feed him back information.
His first experience was when he walked by a barking dog that was howling at him through the bars of its gate, and after he glanced at it, he could tell that the young fellow was cursing him and telling him to put 'em up if he was a man.
Infuriated, the young Kaizer naturally opened the gate, but the dog howled and begged for mercy on the spot, calling him a supreme elder and the greatest being alive.
Speechless, he ended up leaving and not taking the event to heart because he knew this was normal behavior for such creatures, but this became more bizarre when he had an argument with another kid in his middle school class about an anime.
While both were arguing, Kaizer felt like he could tell what the fellow was going to say next, and ended up countering him before he could even speak, leaving the fellow stifled as if he had eaten a bucketload of dung.
A man can be beaten, but he can never admit that his GOAT is inferior!
These were positive examples of this weird ability.
In fact, the negative ones were far, far more.
His first negative experience was when he was 11 years old, and happened to pass by a crime scene. A woman had been kidnapped by a group of thugs and severely abused sexually by them for hours until someone phoned in the missing persons case.
It was when the crooks were trying to dump her in an alleyway after using her that they just so happened to pass by a patrol car, and the ensuing battle was short since one side was armed and the other wasn't.
As a curious kid, Kaizer decided to check out the commotion and saw the yellow tape as well as the police blocking the scene. Family of the woman were leading her away from the area and to the hospital, and in that moment, Kaizer happened to lock eyes with her.
In that moment, whatever boyish naivety and simplicity disappeared as he felt the weight of her hatred, pain, and suffering. It would be an exaggeration to say that he replayed the entire events of her suffering from her point of view, but he certainly felt the aftermath, that void of emotional darkness.
He was silent the entire way home and had not spoken for an entire week, scaring his parents silly as they took him to multiple counselors. In the end, Kaizer realized that this couldn't go on and decided to act somewhat normal, but his demeanor changed henceforth from that day.
Since then, he hadn't been encouraged to get better as he encountered situation after situation where he realized that the world he lived in was bright on the surface but exceedingly dark underneath.
They called this kind of thing hyper-empathy, right? Kaizer always had a feeling it was something more than that, but he never explored it or tried to push it further precisely because of the damage he had suffered from it inadvertently.
Now, practically a young adult, he had mastered the ability to not use it, which allowed him a semblance of normalcy in his daily life. If he had to know what everyone around him was feeling all the time, he would have been driven insane by now.
But the reason he suspected there was more was a situation just like now. Being able to sense the emotions of others, even to a strong intensity, should not be able to tell him the answers to the question the teacher asked, or even let him know what the teacher was going to ask before he said it.
But Kaizer knew. Somehow, he just knew.
"Alright, class dismissed." The teacher reluctantly ordered as the bell rang, glancing at the wall clock nearby.
The students practically cheered as everyone began chattering with one another about various topics like anime, music, gaming, and especially the upcoming finals that would see them graduate. The buzzing noise in the class was not enough to annoy, but sounded rather endearing in a way, filling one with life.
Kaizer though, was not into it. He simply stood up, slung his expensive Gucci men's bag over his shoulder, and walked out of the classroom without even saying farewell to anyone, something his classmates were used to by now.
As he walked out of the school grounds, he happened to see a group of girls coming over, numbering about eight in total. The girls themselves ranged from pretty to average, overweight to very skinny, and you could find one of every type in this group.
What did make them stand out, of course, was the stunning young woman who stood in the center of them, like a star in which a bunch of satellites orbited, attracting all the attention from passersby onto herself.