Shizunomiya is a mid-sized town with an urban commercial center and an undeveloped seaside. Its high school uses an unusual system: students are sorted by lottery into "action squads" that complete various challenges together throughout the year. Kazuma Tachibana is a new student who can read thoughts and emotions—an ability that sounds useful but is actually chaotic, since he cannot reliably identify who a thought belongs to when multiple people are nearby. His randomly assigned squad includes Sakura Yukimoto, Moka Momozono, Natsuki Kazama, the self-professed psychic Saya Kurotsuki, Yuriko Ootori, Yoichi Kitagami, and Shunta Takanaga. The group barely functions as a unit. Then a theft occurs in the girls' locker room, and Kazuma finds himself being treated as the only person on campus who might be able to solve it.