Awkward Adaptation
"Lee Kwan-yong is getting disciplined... and you're saying that's my fault?"
"Huh? I didn't mean it like that. Did it sound that way? Sorry."
In truth, that was exactly what I meant. The guy's got decent instincts, at least. Lee Hyun-woo. That bastard is the protagonist of this novel. He's the one who takes down not only the final boss but countless monsters along the way. Some of those creatures can only be defeated by him. I'd ended up giving him some tough love, but the guy needed to get stronger. I hoped he'd realize that, though I wasn't sure if he actually got the message.
"..."
Lee Hyun-woo walked off toward the training center with an expression like a crumpled tissue. He glanced back at me and muttered something under his breath, but it wasn't my problem.
In fact, even though it was Lee Hyun-woo, I had enough problems of my own to make my head pound. I didn't have the mental bandwidth to worry about him right now.
"You must be a transfer student. There's no way I wouldn't remember a pretty student like you."
The female clerk at the uniform shop spoke gently while taking my measurements, but I had nothing to say back. Having nothing to say, I simply stayed quiet. After she finished measuring and filling out the paperwork, I looked at the price tag... how many zeros was that? This had to be a joke. Why the hell was a school uniform this expensive? The parents were going to snap their spines paying for these. Even here they were sticking to gritty realism...
In reality, the academy's uniforms had to be expensive because they were made of special materials. I bought a total of three sets. Two of them were subsidized, but the third one came straight out of my own pocket.
The next day. It was finally my first class in this body.
"Why the hell is this so short, fuck."
My first impression of the girls' uniform was how breezy it felt between my legs. And this skirt length. I grabbed the hem with both hands and tugged it down hard. Yeah, it was insanely short. It looked fine when other people wore it, but now that it was on me, it seemed ridiculously revealing. Of course, it wasn't actually a smaller size. It was the standard one everyone else had. Still, my pale thighs stood out way too much. My legs looked longer than my height suggested.
"Hoo~ Whatever. Let's just get this over with."
I pulled my socks up again and slipped on the supplied loafers. The issued shoes had surprisingly high heels. I'd have to fight in these too... Maybe I should buy separate combat boots...
Original setting had no female combatants, after all.
There were some, but none among the cadets. Women had far lower VP values than men when it came to combat roles, so the ceiling was obvious. Plus there was the much more advantageous path of becoming an operator—a role only women could fill. That's why they didn't choose to be combatants.
But I had to go the combat route. It was what the academy had offered me... and as a combatant I had more freedom to maneuver. For someone who knew the novel's plot, the combatant side gave me way more opportunities to make use of that knowledge.
I took a deep breath and stepped out of my dorm room.
-Click
Yet another familiar face appeared right in front of me. Why did I keep running into this guy? This time I spoke first.
"Hey."
"...Uh, hey."
As expected, I stood out like a sore thumb. Some guys just stole glances. Others didn't stop at staring—they actually came up and talked to me, which was even more annoying.
"Lee Hyun-woo... who's that next to you? No way... you, Kang Jae-hee?"
I answered.
"Yeah, that's what happened."
The one talking to me was Gu Jun-young. He was one of the elite cadets who harbored a quiet rivalry with Lee Hyun-woo. Incidentally, this guy had also been deployed during the last sortie.
"Kang Jae-hee... you're really Kang Jae-hee?"
He was supposed to be a cool-headed type, yet his mouth still fell open. It was a natural reaction for anyone who knew what the original Kang Jae-hee looked like. The gap was just too massive...
I went through this kind of thing over and over afterward. It got so irritating that I finally snapped.
"What are you looking at, you assholes? Is there a show going on?"
But even to my own ears, the voice didn't sound very threatening. How to describe it... like a girl's sharp, shrill tone? Why the hell did I sound like that?
Damn it, why does my voice come out so small? Next time I'll have to speak louder.
I felt like absolute shit.
The academy's giganoid pilot training program was broadly divided into two categories: parts related to piloting giganoids and parts unrelated to them.
...Explaining it that way probably doesn't make much sense, so let me go into more detail.
The parts related to giganoid piloting included piloting techniques, sync training, and team tactical drills that assumed you were actually inside a giganoid. Since the academy had far more cadets than actual giganoids, most of it was done through simulators. Of course, there were real deployments like the last sortie, and even outside of live combat there were quite a few sessions where we boarded actual giganoids.
The unrelated parts covered hand-to-hand combat techniques performed without a giganoid, knowledge about gates and dungeons as a hunter, and standard military regulations and general knowledge as a soldier. This side was also quite important for the cadets because not everyone who graduated would be appointed as a giganoid pilot. It was like how graduating from the Air Force Academy didn't automatically make you a fighter pilot.
Giganoids were strategic assets. Both grades and connections mattered, so only a portion of graduates actually became pilots. Among the lower-ranked cadets, some had already given up on becoming pilots and were preparing to become regular hunters instead.
As for me—Kang Jae-hee—I was set up as top-tier. You could tell just from the fact that I'd been deployed as a reserve combatant in the last sortie, which was decided by grades. Kang Jae-hee's particular strength had been in syncing with female operators. In that area, he'd even surpassed Lee Hyun-woo.
But now...
I was sitting inside a simulator shaped almost exactly like a real giganoid cockpit. I cleared the assigned tasks one by one while seated inside it. Yet I couldn't shake this alien feeling. There was no way the results would be good.
"Kang Jae-hee, you're at about fifty-five percent. That's too low... Well, given what's happened to your body, it's hard to stay relaxed, but try to loosen up a bit. Turn off both sustain and damper and start over from the beginning."
It was the sync instructor speaking.
Fuck. The one thing Geum Taeyang had been best at was gone.
I tried several more times after that, but my average was fifty-four. My highest was around fifty-seven percent. Sync was overwhelmingly influenced by innate talent—the Virile Performance value, or VP for short—so there was a clear limit to how much training could improve it. For reference, the other cadets averaged around seventy percent. Right now I was the undisputed dead last. Fuck. These scores weren't confidential. They were released to the other cadets too. I doubted there were that many people with nothing better to do than check everyone else's numbers, but at the moment I was the center of attention in every possible way.
"Kang Jae-hee, what happened? You used to brag about it nonstop."
"Isn't fifty percent a failing grade? Even people who've never piloted a giganoid before can hit that much, I heard."
The place was full of guys watching instead of doing their own training. It was so annoying I wanted to say something, but before I could open my mouth the instructor warned them.
"Hey, you lot. Back to your stations. Don't slack off just because you're done. Ten more minutes."
Then he spoke to me.
"Kang Jae-hee, let's wrap it up here. It's your first time, so no need to push yourself. Take a break and head to the next training area."
It was the instructor's way of being considerate, but...
The problem didn't end there. I was sitting on a toilet in the bathroom stall. Before sync training we were required to drink a lot of special fluids. Normally most of it would be sweated out to prevent dehydration, but.
In my case, because my sync rate was low, not enough had been excreted.
-Psssssssshhhhhh
Fuck...
The sound of the stream hitting the water seemed unusually loud. Clear liquid flowed out from between my legs in distinct strands. The stream made embarrassing noises as it created bubbles. I wanted to stop it quickly, but... the humiliating sound continued.
Before I'd entered this stall, I'd run into some other guys. They'd been startled at first, then snickered and stepped aside. But instead of leaving after they finished their business, those bastards were still hanging around outside. I could hear their quiet laughter. Even so, I couldn't yell at them. My current situation was far too ridiculous for that. So I had no choice but to stay seated in the stall until every last trace of them disappeared.
I felt extremely, extremely shitty, but I couldn't let them win. I'd memorized every single one of those bastards' faces.
"Goddammit!"
I kicked the bathroom door open and headed for the training ground where the next class would be held.