Any resemblance is purely coincidental
At twenty-seven, I received the most absurd assignment of my life: pretend to be a high school student.
Xianzhi, an all-around special forces champion from Country A, is skilled at marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, and high-altitude skydiving, as well as playing a twenty-seven-year-old trying to pass himself off as a fresh-faced teenager. I was blessed with good looks, and among high schoolers I didn’t look out of place at all. I could even pass for “handsome and refined.”
Mission requirements: hide my identity and abilities, and keep a low profile.
The once-legendary warrior of the battlefield became the bottom-ranked student at an elite high school. I carefully controlled my scores on the placement exam to claim the last spot in my grade; in boxing class, I choreographed my own defeat and put on a convincing look of pain; in the shooting elective, I set the school’s only record for missing the target, with a stance so awful even the coach couldn’t bear to watch.
By day, I was the most timid attention-seeker in class. Even younger students could order me around to take out the trash after class. At night, I climbed over the wall and carried out my real missions on the other side of the city: sniping, infiltration, rescue, all the dirty work that had to stay in the shadows.
I thought I was doing a great job.
Until three years later, on the day my discharge report was approved, my gentle homeroom teacher, Miss Lin, cornered me in an empty classroom.
“Xianzhi,” she called me by my assumed name, but her eyes seemed able to see right through everything. “Your disguise really is perfect.”
My heart tightened.
“But I’m your counselor.” Smiling, she pulled a thick file folder from her bag. “For three years, every ‘performance’ you gave, every strained smile after you got hurt, every time you came back to school exhausted in the middle of the night, I’ve recorded it all.” She looked at me. “So, are you going to keep pretending?”
