Kuroko felt that today's events were, to put it in a way, disturbing.
It was nighttime; Onee-sama should be currently sleeping peacefully within her bed... but she wasn't. Kuroko was quite worried about her, as her Onee-sama was prone to adventuring outside at night doing something, something Kuroko didn't know about.
That bothered her a bit too much. Shuddering, she really tried not to contemplate on the possibility of her Onee-sama spending too much time with a boy. Right now, she had something else to concentrate upon.
During her years of working for the Judgement, she had rarely met criminals and unruly citizens who bested her in battle. Sure, she had her difficulties, but she managed to defeat most of them through sheer effort, will, and intelligence. Teleportation was a versatile power. Even in Academy City there were only a handful of people whom she considered more powerful than her.
But him—he took advantage of her lack of intel on his powers and completely overwhelmed her. And he walked away, just like that. What was his name again? Haruto Tachyon?
Switching her tabs, she began to do a web search on the words "Haruto" and "Tachyon". Haruto was just a common name but Tachyon, millions of hits came up with various results. Some from company websites, some from information networks, and etc, with various different sources. She clicked on the first link that came up.
... Tachyon is a hypothetical particle that will always travel faster than light, with an imaginary mass...
… In the paper that coined the term "tachyon", Gerald Feinberg studied Lorentz invariant quantum fields with imaginary mass. Because the group velocity for such a field is superluminal, naively it appears that its excitations propagate faster than light. However, it was quickly understood that the superluminal group velocity does not correspond to the speed of propagation of any localized excitation (like a particle). Instead, the negative mass represents an instability to tachyon condensation, and all excitations of the field propagate subluminally and are consistent with causality. Despite having no faster-than-light propagation, such fields are referred to simply as "tachyons" in many sources.
… One curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, E approaches zero when v approaches infinity. (For ordinary bradyonic matter, E increases with increasing speed, becoming arbitrarily large as v approaches c, the speed of light). Therefore, just as bradyons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below...
...Because a tachyon would always move faster than light, it would not be possible to see it approaching. After a tachyon has passed nearby, we would be able to see two images of it, appearing and departing in opposite directions. The black line is the shock wave of Cherenkov radiation, shown only in one moment of time. This double image effect is most prominent for an observer located directly in the path of a superluminal object (in this example a sphere, shown in grey). The right hand bluish shape is the image formed by the blue-doppler shifted light arriving at the observer...
To most people all this information would go right over their heads. However, Kuroko was currently attending one of the most prestigious schools within Academy City: Tokiwadai Middle School. Her school had the goal of creating world leading talents and thus taught very advanced curriculums. She had experiences with theoretical particles before.
But the information given did not support the actual physical fight that had occurred. The surveillance camera recordings she retrieved from the Judgement records gave her no additional clues. All she saw was the exact same repeat of what had transpired: him, impossibly appearing behind her while his doppelganger was still pinned to the ground.
His name matched with no results within Judgement Records. The facial recognition feature did not recognize him. Perhaps it was because the Judgement records had few holes here and there (not having the highest security clearance), but even so that made things more mysterious. Watching the fight she had with him in an infinite loop did not help her conundrum; it didn't depress her much, but it sure didn't make her happy either.
She needed to figure out his secret, something that she could use to neutralize him the next time they met. Kuroko pondered while burying her face within her arms over her desk. Who was he? Where did he come from?
...Well.
It appeared that someone had stolen his mining pod.
He was currently examining a large hole in the ground, previously used to secretly store his mining machine. Now, of course, it was empty.
Standing up, Haruto scratched his head, extremely annoyed at this event.
I swear, whoever took my freaking mining pod...
Well, there was not much he could do at the present moment. He was basically an illegal alien waiting to be found as he entered the Academy City in an improper way. Haruto grinned for a brief second; that Judgement girl would have a field day with that information...
Haruto gazed upward, taking a good look at the night sky. It was nighttime, yet the stars were entirely blocked out by the city lights. Shame, really. He enjoyed a good star gazing. All that aside, he really needed to find a place to rest. Now that his temporary shelter was stolen, he had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep.
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." Haruto muttered. He supposed that he could rent out a hotel room; that would have been better than sleeping within a cramped pod, at any rate. On the other hand, he needed to keep a careful watch on how he spent his wealth. The amount of cash was not the issue, but if he needed to spend more than the physical cash he had on himself, he would require ATM's, and that would lead to his discovery. And, there still was the question of whether hotel rooms required identity verification. What should he do then?
At his wit's end, Haruto sat down at the ground, contemplating his next course of action.