With the bags he had already packed last night, Yuto called out to his grandfather, Sumazo.

''Grandpa!　I have to go!　Are you listening to me?

　In the living room, Sumazo is lying down with his back to us, propping his head up with one hand and focusing his mind on an adult magazine with a relaxed face.

'Oooh, go on, go on, go on. Good luck.

　He doesn't even look back at us, but raises his hand on the upper side of his body and responds with a flutter. He seems completely uninterested in the fact that his grandson is about to live a harsh life alone.

''Not at all...''

　Yuto sighs and is about to leave, but when he looks at the mailbox in front of the gate, he puts his package down for a moment and checks the last piece of mail.
　Most of them are advertisements, and he notices an advertisement for a new high-rise apartment building in front of the station. It was clearly unsold and that the price had already been reduced.
　Yuto's shoulders trembled with a wannabe, and he gulped and relaxed.
　........It's no use saying that now.
　Yuto returned home without strength and threw the useless advertisement into the trash can.
　Then an A4 sized envelope with no sender's note on it fell out between the ads. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a fine paper envelope.

'What's this?'

　Yuto picked it up and took a closer look at it, only to find the WIO symbol on the back side.

''WIO!　Huh?　I'm pretty sure it's the World Authority for Powers!　What is it?　And ... it's addressed to me!

　Yuto carefully opened the envelope and took out a few documents inside. The documents were written in English and Japanese, and as he continued to read them, the contents were apparently the invitation for this year's rookie rank exam.

''I would like to announce this year's newcomer rank examination to the families who inherited the different abilities, their bastards, and those with abilities certified by the WIO. --------''

''This is a guide to the new rank exam!　We're not told that our family is also recognized as a family of abilities!

　Yuto had heard that there was an ability agency. However, the role of the Dou Dou Dou family was to keep it a secret, and they were supposed to have avoided involvement with other people with abilities as much as possible.
　Naturally, I've heard that they've also kept their distance from the ability agencies.



　Yuto looked over the document seriously. As he pondered whether to report it to Kazura, one possibility came to mind.
　In Yuto's imagination, this probably had something to do with either his father or his mother.
　When I was little, I don't remember it well, but I've seen my father, Ryoichi, go off a few times, saying he was going to go earn some money.

(Dad seemed to have interacted with other gifted people as well... Maybe that was a request from the ability agency.

　However, it was unlikely that my father would let anyone know about the family's affairs. This may have something to do with the perennial problem of the Du Du family's financial woes.
　In other words, the last resort, or perhaps the last excuse "to preserve our livelihood" of the Dou Dou family finances is the most likely one.
　Perhaps he was not from a family of gifted people, but registered as a natural gifted person, a sudden expression of ability. And I wonder if he had some idea and had registered himself as well.

'A rank test........ I wonder if I can take it too?''

　Last night, my grandfather Kazura told me with an unusually serious look on his face.

He said, "Since you are leaving home, you have the right and responsibility for all your choices. There are no exceptions to that. You do everything at your own risk.

　Yuto thought that if he could get a rank.......then he would get a job and be much more comfortable with his finances. He remembered the amount of money in the bank book his parents gave him in the past.

'........maybe I can make it without a part-time job?



　The World Irregulars Organization (WIO for short, or simply called WIO among psychics) is an independent organization for the management of psychics and other gifted persons around the world.

　The main purpose of the organization is to prevent pseudo-capable persons from defrauding their clients and to improve the social credibility of gifted persons all over the world.
　For this purpose, a system, which is one of the features of this institution, was established.
　It is a strict rank recognition system that is implemented for people with abilities.

　The ranks are divided into nine ranks, from SS (the top rank) to S, AA, A, B, B, C, D, E, and F.
　These ranks have the advantage of giving a rough idea of the fees paid by the client and the trustworthiness of the ability of the person who received the request, depending on the rank.

　In other words, this is customer focused.
　This is a customer-focused agency that aims to win the trust and confidence of the market (people suffering from spiritual phenomena, etc.) by eliminating any ambiguity about the financial aspects or the level of ability of the person with the ability.
　However, this agency is not well known to the public. Those who do know are the state agencies, the business community, some religious people and a few ordinary people. Contracts are made with the promise of strict secrecy and sometimes the use of force to manipulate memory.

　This is because modern society is not yet ready to accept such people with these abilities, and they are at risk of causing social disorder if they go public.
　However, the long-cherished desire of the gifted institution was to eventually raise its status to that of a public institution, even if it took some time.

　The race of gifted people had existed since ancient times. There was a time when their existence was respected.
　However, over time, as human society developed through the slice of science, their existence gradually began to be considered bizarre and denied. Naturally, along with this, the social status of the gifted began to decline.
　Perhaps it was inevitable that the gifted were also sensitive to that social atmosphere and began to hide their abilities.

　However, there was definitely a time when their abilities were needed.
　For that reason, the ancestors of the gifted people tried to pass on their abilities to the next generation. That is the family lineage of the current gifted people.
　Those families also thought that by doing so, they wanted to be part of society and play a role in it.

　However, it didn't work out so well....
　Needless to say, the other side of the story was the reality of a family of gifted people who were persecuted by the awe of the people around them.
　For this reason, the gifted were always hesitant to show off their existence to society. This is also the history of the conflict of how to relate to society.

　In such a situation, it was the powers that be and their patrons at the time who covered up the existence of the abilities for fear of it being made public.
　It was more convenient for the patrons to control the people with abilities who have different abilities for a living.
　This made it difficult for the people with abilities to stand on their own and show off their existence to the world.
　However, there are still many cases where the people with abilities are also called heretics by the public. If that is the case, they are ruled by their patrons and authorities, but they also receive protection, so they take advantage of that situation.

　However, this World Organization of Gifted People was set up as an institution run by independent gifted people.
　Considering that, the establishment of a world organization of gifted people, away from state power and some patrons, was a landmark in terms of the history of those gifted people.

　Before the establishment of the agency, with the exception of a few influential families of gifted people, the business reality of the gifted were basically self-employed and their lives were not stable.
　In addition, it was not uncommon to see cases where abilities were not passed down well, and there were cases where people lost trust in the family when they were asked to do something with very weak abilities, or the family itself was displaced.
　As such cases spread, there was a growing tendency even among influential people who were supposed to be patrons to distrust or refuse to acknowledge the existence of gifted people.
　In fact, when most people hear about people with abilities, they will assume that they are scams, bad rumors, or pranks.

　Some gifted people, concerned about their own future, established the Guild of Gifted People, the predecessor of the current World Organization of Gifted People to break this trend.
　After that, through energetic recruitment and persuasion, they succeeded in convincing most, but not all, of the world's leading gifted and talented people to join them, and the present World Organization of Gifted and Able Persons was established about eighty years ago.

　Even now, the abilities are basically self-employed, and WIO recognizes this.
　However, the rank holders of the gifted institution have the exclusive right to receive job offers from the institution. With that, the life of the rank holders has become much more stable.
　Exceptionally, there are times when requests are made to people with abilities outside of the institution, and in some cases, compulsory requests are made to rank holders.
　Otherwise, they would only accept the work that is convenient for them, and this is because the situation would not be resolved at the stage of sorting the requests.

　Of course, agencies also try to select competent people depending on the nature of the job.
　This is what they had to do, from the standpoint of customer focus and rationality.
　But in order to do so, we needed to know the attributes, abilities, and capabilities of each person.
　From this perspective, it was decided to establish a rank test.

　Prior to the establishment of the test, only excellent and proven ability holders were sometimes asked to take part in the test in order to win the trust of society.
　As a result, there was some dissatisfaction among the gifted persons belonging to the institution due to the unevenness of the work requests.
　However, after the start of the rank certification test, it became possible to allocate tasks to each ability holder according to the difficulty of the task, and it became possible to evaluate them objectively to some extent. As such, these complaints have been ringing off the hook, though not all of them.
　Some of them have also abolished self-employment and direct institutional competence.

　There is a rank exam every year, and those with the ability to obtain a rank can try as many times as they want.
　Of course, there are also a number of rank-holding abilities who take the exam to obtain higher ranks.
　In addition to this, the institution's philosophy of improving trust in all abilities has led it to inaugurate an educational program for those abilities that cannot obtain a rank.

　And among those rank exams, there was a special quota, the Newcomer Rank Examination.
　It was a test for boys and girls who had already been confirmed as gifted in the family lineage of the gifted person or before that (regardless of family lineage, mutated gifted persons were called natural gifted persons).
　It is administered to those who have reached the age of fifteen to sixteen. Incidentally, the ability holders who took the rookie rank test together to obtain a rank are called synchronized.
　Yuto looked through the documents, remembering the stories he had heard about the institution before.

(I've heard it's quite difficult to obtain a rank, though...)

　Yuto looked at the bottom of the invitation letter and saw that the deadline for applying for the rookie rank exam was written on it, and it was due to arrive at the Japan Branch next weekend. All he had to do was put the required documents in the small envelope enclosed inside and send them back.
　The first thing you need to do is to send back the documents. He was still engrossed in an adult magazine, reading it without hiding his tight face.
　It's a very good idea to have a good idea of what you're looking for.

　Yesterday, with an unusually serious expression on his face, Sumazo told him that if he were to live alone, he would be responsible for everything. But he also included that in exchange for that, you have the freedom to make all kinds of decisions.

　Everything is up to me.........

　Yuto left the family home.