Honkai: Man(Sludge) From Future

'I often wonder what would happen if I didn't finish my work on time.'

Shirogane Miyuki started out just looking for a safe haven, but now he had genuinely grown to enjoy researching these things.

This change was not only due to the results he achieved in his studies time and time again, but also because the research institute was producing results relatively quickly at this stage, and he was getting a good cut of the pie.

If this continued, Shirogane Miyuki even suspected he might be able to make a down payment on a house in Academy City.

Life's ups and downs had all fallen on the head of his good friend, Hikigaya Hachiman. Shirogane Miyuki had probably only made it this far in his life through hard work and some talent.

Now, Shirogane Miyuki felt like he had gotten lucky back then. The research institute was short on young labor at the time and lowered its requirements to bring him in.

See, that was luck.

It was just that Hikigaya Hachiman's luck seemed exceptionally outrageous, as if he were using cheat codes. If it weren't for the stronger and more ridiculous Herrschers and the leaders of Schicksal and Anti-Entropy at the forefront, Shirogane Miyuki would have started to suspect that Hikigaya Hachiman was the protagonist of some novel.

But to this day, Shirogane Miyuki still hadn't seen any tendency for Hikigaya Hachiman to start a harem or engage in shipping wars. The author must be a guy with a twisted sense of humor.

He had definitely set his friend up for a doomed-to-be-single ending.

Marriage was a difficult thing. It was like when you met someone you liked, the first thing you thought of might not be how good or beautiful she was.

Instead, it was the thought that you might disappoint the person you liked, that feeling of crushing, desperate heartbreak...

Wait a minute, isn't this a near-future worldview? So I don't have to think about things like marriage and having children anymore?

Never mind then!

Shirogane Miyuki leaned back on the bench, reminiscing about the little things in his past life.

However, he wasn't without friends in Academy City. For example, Hikigaya Hachiman's sister could be considered a friend, and Kaguya-sama, who had failed to seize power after transitioning and was then kicked out to Academy City to experience the life of a commoner, could barely be considered a friend.

So far, Shirogane Miyuki's life was going according to a set route.

He didn't care much about the situation outside Academy City, because the inside and outside were almost two different worlds to him.

"Dr. Maki, you're on duty again today?"

The person on duty was none other than that troublemaker Maki. He was now a living dog-headed beastman, looking just like a werewolf, wearing a large, ill-fitting white coat.

"I just don't know where to go back to..." Dr. Maki's mood wasn't great. After all, not many people could be in a good mood after being turned into a dog-headed man.

Shirogane Miyuki was one of the few who didn't look at these beastmen with discriminatory eyes.

Because he himself had once been shaken and considered running away with these materials from Academy City during a time of chaos. You couldn't force a high school student who had been drafted to have a good impression of the local government organization, right?

'If I were that guy Hikigaya and became the Chief of Judgement, I could also pledge my loyalty to Academy City, but I'm not, am I?'

Shirogane Miyuki believed in taking on responsibilities commensurate with one's position. If you didn't have that position, you should just do your own job well.

"If you don't know where to go back to, you can just stay in the Academy City artificial prison dormitory."

Shirogane Miyuki had always found the rules of Academy City to be very outrageous.

The legal punishments in Academy City didn't include confinement or physical labor, only one type of punishment—the deprivation of rights.

For example, a guy who bullied someone would be publicly announced, and his right to self-defense would be stripped for a certain period. A guy who attempted murder would similarly be stripped of the right to call the police for protection.

What did this mean?

If a person attempted murder, the public order would renounce its protection of that person's human rights. Then, after publicizing the person's information, they would be thrown into Academy City to live as they pleased.

No matter how others beat or killed him, Academy City would not dispatch police forces to protect him.

To put it bluntly, if you used your own force to violate someone else's sphere of rights, Academy City would equally strip the Academy City administrative body's protection of your corresponding sphere of personal rights.

Then, based on the severity of your violation of others, the length of this punishment would be determined.

Clearly, Dr. Maki was one of these people whose rights had been stripped, and he was thrown back into society for re-education in the law of the jungle.

The freedom of Academy City lay here. If you had the force to protect your own sphere of rights, then Academy City wouldn't interfere. Whether you lived or died was up to fate.

Therefore, most beastmen would "imprison" themselves.

In a steel jungle society without protection, not having a prison was better than having one.

The right that Dr. Maki was deprived of was the protection of his own intellectual property. His punishment was for twenty years, plus the protection of his personal property from theft. Fortunately, this guy hadn't really killed anyone in Academy City. Given that he wasn't the direct mastermind, his right to life safety was not deprived.

So Dr. Maki never dared to keep any stored data in his room, and he didn't dare to keep anything on his person. Even if he had any inventions, they would be immediately snatched away by the research institute staff.

He was like a mental laborer without human rights protection, without even a chance for a reduced sentence. Stealing other people's intellectual property and belongings was a crime, but stealing Professor Maki's things was not.

This included Dr. Maki's physical property.

To be honest, Shirogane Miyuki found this kind of punishment a bit terrifying.

But when he thought of the chaos that had occurred in Academy City back then, he suppressed that excess pity. At least Shirogane Miyuki didn't have much sympathy for these chaotic individuals who had harmed his friends.

He urged Dr. Maki to go back to the prison early out of kindness, because that was the last place of self-protection for this group of "criminals."

At least, they had not been deprived of their political right to freely organize.

Academy City didn't seem to care about these things. They were playing a very new kind of social punishment system, even if these "criminals" would hold banners and protest.

"I understand, I know... these are all sins I should bear. With rights come responsibilities. For how much damage you do to others' rights, you should be stripped of that layer of rights by the public organization to feel the same pain as the victim."

A complex emotion seemed to show on Dr. Maki's ferocious dog head.

The leader of Academy City might not be a good person, but he must be someone who had a profound understanding of the dark side of the human heart.

'Is it Otto? I never thought he had such a side to him.'