In the early morning, the sun that had just risen over the horizon was gray and hazy.
Sunlight pierced through the clouds and woke the entire city.
Inside an old yet tidy rented room in a rundown residential complex, a young girl rubbed her sleepy eyes and slowly climbed out of bed.
Heavy dark circles under her eyes and a bloodless face made it clear she had not slept well the night before.
“Another nightmare…” The girl’s voice was soft and sticky-sweet, a quality so cute she herself had not even noticed it.
She got up and walked to the bathroom, stopping in front of the mirror.
She glanced at her messy hair and half-lidded sleepy eyes.
She wet her face with water to wake herself up, then picked up her toiletries and began fixing her appearance as she always did.
She tied her hair into a neat single ponytail and put on the uniform issued by the association—a style that looked similar to a suit yet not quite the same.
White shirt, black uniform jacket, and black straight-leg trousers.
This set was the standard uniform the association issued to male staff.
The overall size was correct, but many of the details had been designed according to male body proportions, making it clearly ill-fitting on a girl.
The most obvious problem was that the chest and hip areas felt uncomfortably tight, while the waist did not follow her body’s curves at all.
The girl did not seem to care much.
She simply checked the time and then left the rented room.
“Aunt Chen, one cup of soy milk and a tea egg, please.”
“Morning, Miss Su Bai. Same two things again today? Why not eat a little more? You’ve gotten thinner lately, and you’re still growing.”
This was a breakfast stall near Su Bai’s home.
Business was decent.
Ever since she had moved into the area a month ago, she had become a regular customer.
The woman busy in the kitchen was surnamed Chen.
Su Bai usually called her Aunt Chen.
Because she came so often, the two of them had quickly grown familiar.
“No need, this is enough. Thank you.”
Aunt Chen scratched her head.
Seeing that Su Bai remained stubborn, she could not help but sigh.
After eating quickly, Su Bai hurried to the bus stop to catch the bus.
“Look at her. She’s really pretty, and her figure looks good too. It’s just that the clothes don’t fit her well.”
Two girls who looked like students and were also waiting for the bus whispered to each other while looking at Su Bai.
“She looks really familiar. Isn’t she that Su Bai?”
“You mean the one who got banned by the Magical Girl Association?”
“It seems like it. Online they say he’s a cross-dressing pervert. We should stay away from him.”
The two girls had originally been looking at Su Bai with appreciation.
The moment they connected her to the online reputation, they wanted nothing more than to keep their distance.
“So disgusting. She even dresses like a woman on ordinary days? Even though the clothes look male, that figure doesn’t look male at all.”
“The internet says she took medicine. Who knows if her body is padded. There’s nothing a cross-dressing fetishist wouldn’t do.”
Su Bai kept the same posture the entire time.
She had noticed the situation, yet she never spoke up.
Things like this happened to her every two or three days.
The incident had been blown far too large.
Videos both real and fake had spread everywhere, and the internet was filled with almost uniform online violence directed at her.
In the end the government and the association had issued a handling statement and taken the videos down, which finally calmed the online flame war.
Yet the statement had been vague, and their actions only made things more suspicious.
Rumors and videos continued to spread.
Traces of her former teammates could be found behind much of it.
At least the online violence had not yet affected her real life too badly.
That was already fortunate.
After all, the association would never tolerate online violence that damaged its own image.
She simply glanced down at her own body.
The chest binder needs replacing again. I’ve developed further. The clothes are starting to not fit.
Those novels are all lies. Just put on men’s clothes and a binder and you can pass as a man?
Even an idiot could tell the gender.
The bus was crowded.
Su Bai leaned into a corner, avoiding any direct contact with others.
She hated this kind of crowding.
“Association Headquarters Station. Please take your belongings and exit the vehicle.” The announcer’s emotionless synthetic voice rang out.
Su Bai pushed her way off the bus.
She walked quickly into the headquarters building and headed straight for the elevators.
A group of colleagues was already waiting.
They looked up at Su Bai, then cast contemptuous glances and moved away from her one after another.
She entered the elevator and kept her head down, staring at her phone, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible in the crowd.
Ding-dong.
Su Bai’s floor arrived.
This was the thirteenth floor—the workplace of the lowest-level clerks.
This was the very bottom of the massive machine that was the association, and she was one of the most insignificant little gears on it.
She clocked in.
She had arrived half an hour early, yet no one cared.
She walked to her desk and began the day’s work.
She had barely sat down and warmed the seat when her superior called out.
“Su Bai, come to my office.”
Inside the office, the woman before her was Su Bai’s current superior—a retired D-rank magical girl who now served as the department head.
“Su Bai, how many times have I told you? The association wants traffic. It wants exposure. Look at what you wrote. What’s the use of this?”
The supervisor directly tossed a document in front of Su Bai.
It was an introduction piece Su Bai had written for a newly promoted magical girl, filled with objective evaluations of the girl herself.
The supervisor tapped the desk and glared at Su Bai, her voice growing louder without any regard for face.
“Who’s going to read this kind of cliché nonsense? Magical girls need their own distinctive style. They need packaging. Our department spent a lot of resources promoting this magical girl, and this is the attitude you take?”
“I… Supervisor, I’m sorry. I’ll take it back and rewrite it.”
“I’m not just saying this. Since you came here, you should do the work properly. The association was magnanimous enough to give you a living. It’s not so you can put on airs, still thinking you’re that Super S-rank.”
Su Bai remained silent, her head lowered even further.
She wanted to argue back, but the words stuck in her throat and refused to come out.
When you live under someone else’s roof, you have to bow your head.
Much of what the woman said was not wrong.
Her current public reputation was practically social death.
What company would want her?
For a single meal, for the sake of continuing to live, she had to endure it.
“Get out already, you piece of trash. There’s still more work. Don’t drag your feet and dilly-dally.”
Su Bai walked out of the office in a dejected state.
She still had a mountain of work to do.
Her colleagues watched her with open schadenfreude.
Ever since Su Bai had joined this department, their lives had become much easier.
All the work had been piled onto her.
The others even had time to brew tea, chat, and fuss over their manicures.
As for Su Bai, who would care about a pervert like that?
Besides, as a man, what was wrong with doing a little extra work?
Most of the staff in the Magical Girl Association were qualified women.
Only a small portion were men.
In the world of magical girls, what mattered was rank and strength.
Right now, Su Bai’s evaluation was nothing more than the lowest F-rank consumable.
She sat down quietly, opened the document, and placed her fingertips on the keyboard.
Crisp yet muffled tapping sounds rang out, sounding especially lonely in the noisy office.