The three of them simply stared at Pei Liang. The room was deathly silent.
They had always thought she was nothing more than a lecherous scumbag. Now, though, they felt they had seriously underestimated her.
An ordinary pervert simply could not come up with something so incomprehensibly insane.
Arnold was the first to recover. Smiling, he stepped forward and hooked an arm around Pei Liang’s neck, casually picking up a scalpel from a toolbox on a nearby table.
The Imperial Military Academy trained soldiers, so naturally its regimen was brutal. In fact, the infirmary’s facilities were no worse than those of the finest private hospitals outside.
Students were injured all the time during classes, especially combat training. Pei Liang had apparently ducked into a room where, not long ago, some unlucky student had likely gotten a weapon fragment lodged in their flesh and had needed a doctor to remove it.
That was why the tools on the surgical tray had not yet been put away.
Holding the scalpel in one hand, Arnold wiped both sides of the blade on a towel. The bloodstained scalpel became spotless once more.
Then he aimed the blade at Pei Liang’s throat and traced it down along the curve of her body, stopping at her lower abdomen.
With a smile, he said, “What’s the point of just talking? Why don’t you cut it off first? Show this Omega how determined you are, and then try persuading him.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than she curled her fingers into a claw, reached behind her neck, and plunged them in. With a casual tug, as if pulling out a single hair, she yanked something free.
A bloody chunk of unmistakably human tissue came out in her hand. She tossed it onto the surgical tray beside her.
Then she looked at them expressionlessly. “There. Removed.”
The three people in the room had gone from looking at her as though she were some unfathomable lunatic to looking as if they had just been struck by lightning.
Teresa and Arnold were both Alphas. Naturally, they could empathize with this even more intensely. The backs of their necks went cold, as though the organs that marked their sex had just been torn away too.
“What the fuck—” Arnold was completely dumbfounded. “You idiot, what did you just do?”
Even though he had never liked Pei Liang, their recent training together had made him recognize her strength. And the forthrightness she had shown, so completely unlike the person he had imagined her to be, had quietly changed his opinion of her.
Whatever else he might think of the current Pei Liang, he certainly was not happy to watch her castrate herself.
Arnold quickly snatched up the tray holding the gland. “A doctor—where’s the school doctor?”
“They should be able to reattach it, right?”
“They definitely can. They can regrow severed limbs, for fuck’s sake. Even if glands are a little more delicate—”
Teresa’s face twisted despite herself. Suppressing her shock, she said in a low voice, “I’ll get a doctor.”
But Pei Liang herself burst out laughing and waved them off. “No, no. Even if you brought a doctor back, I wouldn’t have it put back.”
“What, do you think I’ve got shit for brains? Maim myself on purpose, then crawl back begging to have it reattached?”
Arnold bristled like a black panther with its fur standing on end. “Shut up!”
“I swear I’ll never use this to mock you again, all right? Teresa and this Omega won’t run their mouths either. Don’t do something this fucking stupid just because you’re too proud to back down.”
“You’re amazing. You win, okay? You’re the real Alpha—the Alpha among Alphas.”
Because who the hell was crazy enough to joke around with one of the most important parts of their body?
Pei Liang looked at Arnold, a smile appearing in her eyes.
Her tone, therefore, was unusually serious. “Other than flaunting one’s genetic rank and coercively destroying an Omega’s self-control, this thing means nothing to me.”
“In fact, I think its very existence is a hidden danger with no benefits at all. Under the influence of an Omega’s pheromones, it causes the mind to regress, provoking the urge to mate to the greatest possible extent.”
“Look at the two of you.” Pei Liang pointed at Chu Xingyu. “You don’t even know him, yet you were still drawn here by his pheromones.”
“What were you planning to do before you started following him?”
Arnold felt as if his insides were on fire. “Is any of that important right now? This is not the time for that. Save the philosophizing for class.”
“No, it is important.” Pei Liang looked at them, her gaze stern. “What were you planning to do before you followed him?”
“Go to the cafeteria and eat,” Teresa said.
“I remember Teresa skipped breakfast this morning,” Pei Liang said.
The two of them were roommates, so naturally she knew such things. Another roommate had suffered a sudden medical emergency that morning, and Teresa had helped take them to the campus clinic.
She had even been a few minutes late to morning drills and received a small punishment from the instructor.
“By now, you should be starving. What made you ignore your hunger and follow a complete stranger instead?”
Teresa frowned. “Because we caught the scent of an Omega. Omegas aren’t supposed to be in a military academy, so—”
“Is that really all it was?” Pei Liang cut in sharply. “If this weren’t a military academy, if you were anywhere off campus, would you have done the same thing?”
The two fell silent. They wanted to say no. They were well-bred gentlemen, not perverts who would harass an Omega for no reason.
But in the next instant, their hearts supplied a different answer.
They would have.
Because of the pheromones. Even now, they still found themselves craving the pheromones that Omega had released earlier. It was only because the suppressants had taken effect, and because their self-restraint was far greater than that of most people, that they had not lost control.
But no Alpha could resist the pheromones of an Omega in heat. The only difference was the degree of compatibility.
Unless an Alpha already had a spouse. In that case, pheromones from Omegas other than their partner would lose much of their appeal.
Yet the Omega before them—without even testing him, they could tell how powerfully alluring his pheromones were. For an Omega, pheromones were an even more important measure of charm than appearance.
He was a very captivating Omega.
Seeing that they had reached their own answer, Pei Liang spread her hands. “See? There’s your answer.”
“My gland makes me, when faced with an Omega’s pheromones, act regardless of the setting and against my own will. It drives me to do things that were never part of my plans, even at the cost of trampling on the moral principles and respect for the law I’ve spent years building.”
“Why would I keep something like that?”
“But Alphas being attracted to Omegas is simply natural,” they said. Something they had regarded as self-evident since childhood had been interpreted from an entirely different angle.
Perhaps Pei Liang’s act of removing her gland had been too shocking. Her words did not sound hollow in the least; instead, they left both of them deeply shaken.
“An Alpha’s duty is to protect Omegas. It’s our instinct.”
“But he doesn’t need protection.” Pei Liang looked at Chu Xingyu. “Do you?”
The disgust on Chu Xingyu’s face was undisguised. “No.”
“I’m an Omega. Though I was born in the slums, if I wanted to, I could reveal my secondary gender and enter the Central District immediately.”
“But I know what Omegas taken in by the Central District are like,” Chu Xingyu said.
“Yes, they never have to worry about food or clothing. They receive an excellent education, spend every day learning flower arrangement and cooking, and enjoy afternoon tea after class. They can have a perfect life.”
Omegas were precious and rare. There were countless people like Hill, struggling desperately for even a chance to squeeze into the Central District, while an Omega could escape a life at the bottom simply by virtue of their gender.
But Chu Xingyu gave a mocking laugh. “After they graduate, they’re ranked according to their grades, appearance, and the strength of their pheromones—like carefully cultivated merchandise.”
“Then they’re offered up for selection to Alphas who aren’t necessarily powerful or influential, but who have military merit or have made other outstanding contributions. It’s considered a reward.”
“That’s not true,” Teresa immediately refuted.
Chu Xingyu nodded. “Of course. You call it matchmaking.”
“Isn’t that kind of life a good one?” Teresa had an Omega younger sister himself. She was innocent and adorable, and he had sworn that he would protect her and ensure she lived a carefree, happy life—until he found an Alpha he approved of, someone to whom he could entrust her.
“To stay far away from chaos and poverty, and live a prosperous, peaceful life—isn’t that good?”
“Any Alpha qualified to be matched with an Omega is bound to be exceptionally capable. They can protect you from harm for the rest of your life.”
Chu Xingyu looked at him. “Then why can’t I be the capable person who rises to a high position?”
Teresa fell silent.
The values the two young Alphas had built their lives around since birth could not be overturned so easily.
Yet they had both seen, clearly enough, Chu Xingyu’s determination and his defiance of fate.
Seeing him pick up a scalpel, apparently ready to make the cut—
Arnold hurriedly cursed at Pei Liang, “Hey! Do you even understand how serious this is? Never mind inciting an Omega to castrate himself.”
“As for you—your body as a 3S Alpha is Imperial property. If that bastard Richter finds out, you’re in for it.”
Pei Liang said indifferently, “What the Empire needs is my combat ability and superior genes. Why should it care about that thing?”
“That thing?” Arnold was so enraged by her nonchalant attitude that his liver ached. “Let me put it this way: once you walk out of here, you’ll learn what real cruelty is.”
“From then on, everyone will see you as a eunuch—a useless cripple incapable of marking an Omega. If you ever fall for an Omega, you won’t be able to mark them, and you’ll have no way to intimidate other Alphas. Every Alpha eyeing your Omega will laugh at you for being impotent.”
Pei Liang looked at him as though he were insane. “Why should taking possession of a living person like a hormone-driven bandit be proof of one’s ability?”
“Don’t worry. Even without pheromones, I’ll still be irresistible. Alpha, Beta, or Omega—they’ll all be crying and begging to marry me.”
After all, over all those lifetimes, the number of people who’d wanted to marry her could probably be counted in the tens of billions.
Pei Liang had never doubted her own charm. If anything, relying on pheromones to act like a thug was an insult to her appeal.
But to the native inhabitants of the ABO world, that sounded less like confidence and more like the ignorant, narcissistic rambling of someone talking big.
Arnold was so angry he actually laughed. Then he suddenly realized something. “Wait. Why are there Alphas too?”
Pei Liang looked at him in confusion. “Teresa didn’t tell you? I’m only interested in male Alphas. As for what you just said about not being able to mark an Omega and getting mocked for it—I don’t agree with that, but I can’t exactly prove it to you, because I only make moves on Alphas.”
Arnold’s burly body shook. His expression was so stupid that it was almost painful to look at. He turned toward Teresa, desperately hoping she would confirm that Pei Liang was only running her mouth.
But Teresa’s complicated expression was already the clearest answer he could have gotten.
“Could she be lying to you?” Arnold asked, unwilling to give up.
Teresa’s face flushed. “Probably not.”
Arnold: “……”
Why the hell were you blushing? Was there something else going on here that he didn’t know about?
Even Chu Xingyu looked at Pei Liang with renewed wariness.
At least now it was clear that she truly had no designs on him, an Omega. On the other hand, Hill really was in danger.
Especially since that woman had already shown signs of recklessly pursuing her goals at any cost.
Arnold was still stubbornly trying to argue. “Even if you want to mess around with Alphas, you don’t have any pheromones suppressing them now. How the hell are you supposed to do anything?”
The instant he finished speaking, he wished he could bite his own tongue off.
Because Pei Liang’s gaze suddenly filled with meaning.
She leaned close and whispered in his ear, in a voice only the two of them could hear, “Even without pheromones—and even without what’s down there—I could still make you cry.”
Arnold’s face instantly turned red, so red that even his complexion couldn’t hide it. Within moments, his ears were visibly burning and practically smoking.
“Whoever keeps worrying about you is the idiot. You fucking pervert!”
With that, he bolted out of the room. Teresa knew from his reaction what had probably been said this time—something shameless, no doubt.
Still, she asked one last time to make sure. “You really don’t want it put back?”
Pei Liang demonstrated her resolve with her actions. She picked up the gland and crushed it in one hand. Powerful Alpha pheromones spread through the room, but this would most likely be the last time she could release them.
Teresa gave her a long, searching look before finally turning and leaving as well.
Pei Liang felt thoroughly refreshed. She was just about to lie down in the medical pod and have the wound on the back of her neck repaired when she turned around and saw Chu Xingyu flushed bright red again, breathing heavily.
Pei Liang hurriedly said, “Hey, hey! Why don’t you take the day off? This time it’s hitting you pretty hard. I can’t believe one suppressant didn’t work.”
Chu Xingyu glared at her furiously, panting as he said, “The suppressant didn’t work? Which idiot just crushed the gland capsule?”
He had a point. The concentration of Alpha pheromones filling the entire room was now more than a hundred times stronger than when she had worked herself into a sweat during training.
Naturally, it sent the poor little Omega into heat right where he stood.
Chu Xingyu shoved the knife in his hand toward her. “Quick. Help me cut it out.”
Pei Liang took the knife. “Have you thought this through?”
“I made up my mind a long time ago. It’s just a pity I didn’t think of this before enrolling.” Chu Xingyu’s voice was resolute. “I never intended to date or get married in the first place, and I hate being controlled by pheromones. My lifelong ambition is to fight the Zerg.”
Previously, constrained by his gender and the ingrained assumptions he had always taken for granted, he had been unable to figure out the answer. But Pei Liang’s words had just untangled the question that had long baffled him.
If he could not escape the shackles of gender, then why not discard gender altogether?
Why had he failed to grasp such a simple line of reasoning until now?
It was not entirely Chu Xingyu’s fault that he had never considered it. After all, no matter how much an ordinary person might hate having been born the wrong gender, unless they had self-destructive tendencies, who would ever think of castration?
Her hand was steady and swift. Chu Xingyu barely felt any pain before Pei Liang pressed him into the medical pod.
A regenerative beam swept over him, and the wound at the back of his neck healed at a visible rate.
When he got up, Chu Xingyu had not fully processed what had happened. Yet the changes in his body were unmistakable.
Pei Liang’s pheromones still lingered in the room, thick enough to be impossible to ignore, but his body no longer reacted to them at all.
A look of relief appeared on Chu Xingyu’s face, soon replaced by an even fiercer determination to realize his dream.
Pei Liang then repaired the wound at the back of her own neck as well. Returning with that thing still attached would cause an uproar.
For now, it was best to keep the matter secret—at least until after the tournament.
But at that moment, two heads popped around the doorway.
It was Teresa and Arnold, who had supposedly already left.
They stared at the discarded Omega glands lying carelessly nearby. “You really cut them out?”
“We did,” Pei Liang said.
“Then what will he become afterward?” the two asked.
“I did a bit of research,” Pei Liang said with a smile. “It’s a good thing. It’s not unheard of for Omegas to suffer gland damage in accidents.”
“Other than the benefits I mentioned earlier, he’ll simply grow larger, gain more muscle, develop a deeper voice, and become stronger and more agile. There’s no downside.”
The two Alphas felt their stomachs twist. For an ordinary Omega, that would be a devastating catastrophe, wouldn’t it?
But then they looked at Chu Xingyu’s expression, and—
He actually seemed rather eager.
Well, never mind. As long as they were happy.
Teresa said, “Handle the glands properly. And find a way to clear out the smell in here—actually, forget it. We’ll help.”
As the two rolled up their sleeves, Teresa looked at Pei Liang again. “Still, no matter how you try to hide this, you can only keep it under wraps until after the tournament at most.”
Once the tournament ended, every competitor would have to undergo a routine physical examination. Teresa could already imagine the expressions on the faces of the school, the military, and the Pei family when the time came.
Perhaps because they now shared the same earth-shattering secret, the four of them suddenly felt much closer.
After cleaning up the medical room, making sure the remaining pheromone concentration would not lead anyone to suspect a gland explosion, and completely disposing of both their glands, the four finally left.
*
The fact that Pei Liang was a 3S was not widely publicized. Other than the teammates and instructors who trained with her, the rest of the students still believed she was merely an ordinary S-rank.
Changes to the confirmed roster prompted several of the top military academies to investigate further. They discovered that Pei Liang was the niece of the Pei family’s head. Though she came from a respectable family, she had no notable achievements to her name, so they assumed it was some kind of strategy on Imperial Military Academy’s part.
They were all busy analyzing Richter’s motives. Few of them paid Pei Liang herself much attention.
Still, since Pei Liang was competing, the academy naturally assigned her a new mech.
Her original mech had been S-class, and the newly ordered one was the same. She could handle it with ease, of course, but its limitations were still obvious.
After receiving the 3S-class mech the academy had specially prepared for her, Pei Liang experienced firsthand the vast difference between them.
A 3S-class mech wasn’t something you could simply order on short notice. Given the time constraints, Pei Liang was now using the mech once piloted by the former headmaster of Imperial Military Academy—the emperor himself.
Its previous user had been Chairman Richter.
In the days leading up to the league’s opening, Pei Liang spent all her time getting used to the new mech. The academy’s top mechanics stayed by her side around the clock, making adjustments and modifications to ensure it was tuned as closely to her needs as possible.
By the day the league began, the teams from the other military academies had already arrived from distant planets several days earlier. They had been training alongside Imperial Military Academy’s team for days.
Pei Liang had been getting used to her new mech elsewhere, so she hadn’t crossed paths with them yet.
On opening day, Pei Liang stood with her team, waiting to go out, when she heard a taunting voice beside her.
“Has Imperial Military Academy really run out of people?” The speaker was a tall Alpha with blond hair and blue eyes, though unlike Teresa, whose beauty was as dazzling as gold, he was a burly, heavily muscled man who looked old enough to be in his thirties.
His face twisted with scorn and malice. “Since when did an S-class get to compete as a full-fledged member of the team?”
“Just last year, most of Imperial Military Academy’s reserves were 3S-class. In the space of a year, you’ve fallen this far. It’s almost pitiful.”
He pointed toward the teams at the back. “I thought only third-rate schools couldn’t scrape together a decent lineup and had to fill the spots with S-classes.”
That remark insulted every other military academy present. Aside from the handful of top powerhouses, how could every school possibly field an all-3S-class team?
At most ordinary academies, an S-class cadet was already the cream of the crop.
But the gulf in strength was cruel. Every S-class in the room had just been insulted, yet no one dared speak up.
They were afraid of drawing his ire and becoming a target for retaliation during the competition.
It wasn’t as though there had never been a precedent. The man’s name was Brian, a competitor and team leader from Ares Military Academy, as well as the top student in his third year.
He had performed brilliantly in last year’s league, at one point nearly forcing Imperial Military Academy’s team into a disadvantage. Teresa and Arnold had eventually turned the tide, which was why Brian paid particular attention to those two second-years.
As the leading academy, Imperial Military Academy naturally drew close scrutiny from every other school.
Ares Military Academy had long known about Pei Liang. Every member of the team had read her file, and Brian knew exactly who she was as he watched her talking with Teresa and the others.
He was merely looking for an excuse to pick a fight; in truth, he did not particularly care about Pei Liang.
Yet after he spoke, neither Teresa nor even the hot-tempered Arnold showed any embarrassment or indignation. They merely glanced at him as though he were an idiot.
Then Pei Liang pointed at him and asked Arnold, “Isn’t Ares Military Academy cheating?”
“Could it be they’ve gone mad with wanting first place? Keeping a student from graduating for more than a decade, insisting he stay until they win the championship?”
“Pfft—” Arnold burst out laughing. The Imperial Military Academy team members, and even their supervising instructor, all struggled to suppress their laughter to varying degrees.
One particularly sarcastic fellow even asked Brian with a look of concern, “Has Ares Military Academy been forcing you to stay? Would you like me to write a complaint on your behalf? At over thirty, you should already be serving in the military. Ares Military Academy is costing the Empire a valuable talent by keeping you enrolled against your will.”
Brian, along with Ares Military Academy’s teachers and students, went dark with rage. They wanted to take on these arrogant Imperial Military Academy elites, but this was not a place for starting trouble.
Brian fixed Pei Liang with a sinister stare. “Pei Liang, is it? I’m looking forward to the match.”
