Infiltrating the Superhuman Training Girls’ School of the Republic of China!

My chest burned terribly. My breathing quickened, and all the muscles in my body felt heavy. It was such intense pain that even I, trained to withstand considerable torture, momentarily lost control of my consciousness and fell to one knee.

It felt like my bones were shrinking and the muscles in my body were burning up and disappearing. I was certain that something in my body was changing, but I couldn’t tell if my body was recognizing this as a poison or if I had actually been poisoned.

I looked up at Marilyn Jefferson with reproachful eyes and mumbled. My tongue was twisted and I couldn’t speak properly, and my ears were ringing so I couldn’t hear, but I could tell that the voice coming from my throat sounded strange somehow.

“Did you… poison me…”

“No, no. That’s absurd.”

Jefferson immediately denied it.

“Why would the organization do that to such a valuable asset like you? The drug is real. I’m sure of it. I can’t say it’s… safe, but it’s just about as dangerous as your usual missions.”

“So you’re saying I might die.”

“But look. You didn’t die, did you?”

She was right. As the momentary pain that had crushed my entire body disappeared, I felt the burning heat subside and my mind clear.

The suit draped over my body had become loose and baggy, and my pants, no longer properly tightened, slid down on their own.

Startled for a moment, I tried to pull up my pants and noticed that the hair on my shins had visibly thinned.

“Ah…”

“What are you doing not pulling them up? You look quite cute right now, but it’s still a bit indecent, you know?”

“Um, ah, I was just confirming that the drug was real.”

And of course, there was something more important than leg hair. It wasn’t just that the underwear I was wearing hadn’t fallen down thanks to the elasticity of the waistband. Anyway, there wouldn’t have been much difference between just the pants falling down or the underwear falling down with them. At least not for me.

I could somewhat overlook the fact that my originally muscular legs had become strangely plump. Of course, if you think of them as women’s legs, they were still quite muscular…

Let’s say the same for my slightly lowered field of vision and slightly thinner arms. But thanks to my pants falling down as soon as I stood up after drinking the drug, I could clearly feel the effectiveness of this drug.

It was gone. What I originally had was definitely gone.

“Yeah, it looks like it’s definitely working to me too.”

Agent Jefferson confirmed that what I was seeing wasn’t an illusion. I pulled up my pants with the feeling that what was bound to happen had finally happened.

“I know that spies often sacrifice their lives for seemingly trivial matters,” I said, tightening the belt of my pants to fit my newly acquired waist circumference. The awkwardness of my voice being too high, sounding as if it wasn’t coming from my throat, was something I would have to get used to from now on.

“But having sacrificed something no less significant than my life, I hope this mission is truly important.”

“If we trust the informant, Chen Yayuan’s words, it’s actually worth that much.”

“I’d like to know more details. What kind of information does she want to tell America so badly that she’d contact us?”

“She said it’s information that could potentially cause another Great War.”

I paused in the middle of rolling up my shirt sleeves, which were now too long for my arm length, upon hearing her words. I asked,

“A Great War?”

“A World War, Jae-won. No, we should give you a new name now, right? Jae-won is a male name, after all.”

“It can be used as a female name too. But putting that aside. A World War, what on earth does that mean?”

“Washington wouldn’t send an excellent superhuman agent into the heart of China, even going as far as gender reassignment, for something trivial. It’s because Chen Yayuan made such a statement that we feel the need to look into it. And when I say World War, I mean it literally.”

World War. The largest war in human history that took place in Europe even before superhumans appeared in the world. The war that broke out in 1914, triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Empire, ‘was’ the war that claimed countless lives and left the biggest mark in human history. After the Versailles system was permanently overturned in the 1920s due to Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition, the National Revolution, where China, the Soviet Union, and Japan engaged in all-out war, is often considered an even more important historical inflection point than the Great War.

However, despite this, since the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, there hasn’t been another war of global scale where so many countries became entangled and slaughtered each other. Even the Northern Expedition War of ’28 only took place in China, Korea, and Japan.

In this world, there are hydrogen bombs that can take tens of thousands of lives with a single explosion, and powerful superhumans who demonstrate tremendous destructive power even in small-scale wars, rendering all sorts of conventional weapons useless.

A World War is absurd. If an nonsensical event like a Second World War were to occur, the entire human race would perish, or only superhumans with extremely strong survival abilities would survive.

“At the very least, it would be a significant achievement just to confirm that she doesn’t have such information by contacting her.”

“Right. Isn’t it worth sacrificing your balls for?”

“I sacrificed my rod too, Operative.”

“Let’s consider that exchanged for your newly acquired genitalia.”

“By that logic, I exchanged my testicles for two ovaries.”

“Good thinking, agent. Look at it that way, and you haven’t lost anything at all, have you?”

There’s no point in continuing to talk back to a superior like this. Besides, having drunk the drug without hesitation, it’s something I’ve already prepared myself for.

The only thing I could complain about is that they didn’t warn me beforehand that ‘taking the drug would be extremely painful’. But for a CIA black ops agent to complain about pain would only make me look ugly. As people whose job is to torture others, we should always be prepared to be tortured ourselves.

“…I’ll listen to the detailed mission overview first.”

“Ah, first, your new identity. What do you want to name yourself?”

“Don’t joke around.”

I said irritably, slightly annoyed. Perhaps my brain hasn’t yet adapted to the hormones of my newly changed body.

“I know very well that you wouldn’t have given me the drug without having prepared such things in advance. Just give it to me. Where are the documents?”

“As expected of an organizational elite who’s been in the game since a young age. Here you go. Memorize all the contents of this file by today, Agent Shin Eun-young. You need to know it well enough to answer naturally even if someone asks you unexpectedly.”

“Shin Eun-young?”

“That’s your alias, agent.”

I took the stack of documents, about 500 pages thick, that Marilyn Jeffrey handed to me and looked at the clock on the wall. 8 PM. Not nearly enough time to memorize 500 pages from now.

“Can’t it be until tomorrow? My head is spinning, maybe because of the drug…”

“Well, there’s only 4 hours left in the day. Alright, I’ll let it slide. By tomorrow, think of the contents of this document as your life story and memorize it perfectly. I’ll be conducting surprise checks every day until the entrance exam in June.”

“Understood. Then, let’s put aside this complicated personal information document for now…”

Usually, not all missions require such complex memorization. But I understand that this level of preparation is necessary for infiltrating one of the world’s superpower’s top-secret facilities, especially a boarding school. Honestly, I’m not confident I can memorize it perfectly by tomorrow, but I think I can grasp the general outline.

“Ugh…”

I’m trying to act calm, but it’s still awkward. I hope the background setting isn’t full of settings that are too difficult to adapt to. For example, a background that would make it understandable if some of my behaviors were described as masculine… No, is that too much? The fact that the U.S. government possesses this drug probably means that China could have a similar drug too. If I show behavior that could make me suspect as male, the drug I took to avoid suspicion might actually raise more suspicion…

“You need to prepare properly. There’s a rumor that there are many big shots in this year’s foreign student class.”

Right. I learned that both Guangzhou and Beiping gather first-year foreign students in a special management class, separating them from Chinese students. It’s a policy to monitor them with the instructors’ eyes for a year to check for any problems, due to frequent security issues, and then allow them to take classes with domestic students from the second year. In other words, to monitor Chen Yayuan, who is currently a second-year student, I’ll have to mainly take classes with foreign exchange students for at least a year.

Considering Huangpu’s status, foreign students could come from any country. Except for communist countries like the Soviet Union and Japan, that is.

“Are they celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Generalissimo’s birth or something?”

“It might unintentionally turn out that way. The daughter of a German National Assembly member, the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough… While she might not have succession rights, an awakened superhuman from an English noble family is certainly newsworthy. Well, something along those lines…”

“I know. I saw both of them on the news. BBC was faster than our intelligence.”

“The organization knew earlier. It just didn’t reach you.”

“From now on, similar news will come to me first, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s how it’ll be.”

Does this mean my security clearance has gone up a level for taking on an important mission? I wasn’t particularly happy about it.