Canelo Academy, as already established, sat in the Central region. That made it one of the academies exclusively populated by students from financially comfortable backgrounds.
Worth noting, the odds of someone from the Slums getting accepted into Canelo Academy through the evaluation and special admission pathway were incredibly slim, barely scraping five percent.
Not without reason. Plenty of factors played into that. One of the biggest, of course, was simple perception, students from the Central region always saw themselves as inherently better than anyone from the Slums.
If Canelo Academy kept letting in new students from the Slums, how far would their reputation fall, and how uncomfortable would it make the actual Central students?
Impossible to predict exactly, but the direction was clearly negative.
And today, Canelo Academy had officially added one of "them" to its ranks.
Kina walked into the classroom, passing through a gauntlet of stares from a whole crowd of students, every one of them loaded with complicated emotion. It wasn’t a new feeling for her, so Kina ignored it and kept her focus on herself.
"As I’m sure most of you already know, we have a new student joining us today, from the Slums."
The professor, a woman, explained as soon as she spotted Kina walking in, then asked her to introduce herself.
Kina nodded and smiled. "Hello~ I’m Kiena, nice to meet you all!"
Naturally, the response wasn’t quite what Kina had hoped for. But that was fine, it didn’t bother her one bit.
"Wow, she’s from the Slums? She actually looks decent though?"
"Yeah, but still, who knows what kind of germs she’s carrying around on that body of hers. Don’t get too close just because she’s kind of pretty."
"Did she just smile... ugh... she’s acting way too friendly."
"She probably sells her body for money, just to afford skincare."
Hearing those whispers, Kina couldn’t help but let out an irritated sigh. She hid it well enough, but her expression couldn’t quite lie.
’This is so damn annoying...’
The professor coughed a few times to settle the noise down. "Good, Kiena, you can take any empty seat."
"Yes, professor~"
Obediently, Kina made her way to the last remaining empty seat, all the way at the back. She hesitated for a moment, then noticed that the desk and chair she was sitting at looked far worse than everyone else’s.
Covered in scribbles, writing, and a number of crude drawings. It made Kina’s brow furrow.
’This wasn’t meant for me, was it?’
She glanced at the seat next to her, empty. Nobody there at all, but seeing all these old markings made her think someone must have actually sat here once.
’Bullied out of ever coming back to class? Poor thing...’
Kina let out a small sigh. Whether it was the elite region, the Central region, or the Slums, everything seemed to run on the exact same formula underneath it all. Nowhere was genuinely any better or worse.
’...I can only hope I don’t end up going through something similar. Given my position, I can’t afford to act recklessly. Whatever I do could end up causing trouble for Master.’
But that thought itself was hopelessly naive. The moment class ended, exactly what Kina had been dreading happened, just seconds after the professor stepped out of the room.
"Oops... my bad."
Kina jolted in her seat, feeling a bottle of water dump straight onto her head, spilling over and soaking through her academy uniform and books. She froze, then turned toward the culprits with a look of pure displeasure.
"...."
The culprits, two boys and a girl, three of them, stared back at her, laughing.
"Hey, don’t look at us like that, that’s scary~"
"Right, I said it was an accident! Besides, that whole area smelled like trash anyway, so, well..."
"Pfttt...!!"
Worse still, the other students around Kina just looked away, indifferent, some laughing along, others simply choosing to leave the room altogether.
Kina clenched her fists. ’Damn it, should I just cut all their heads off right here?’
The thought crossed her mind for a moment, then vanished just as fast.
’No... I need to be patient. I really can’t afford to cause trouble for Master.’
If Kina tried fighting back, these were the kids who’d gotten in through the normal admission process, kids with standing and connections far beyond anything Kina had, coming from the Slums as she did.
Chances were, the Academy would side with them over Kina without a second thought.
And if that happened, her Master would probably get thrown out of the Central region too.
’Ugh...’
So, Kina spent a good chunk of her time simply enduring it. She kept holding on, studying and pushing her skills forward as fast as she possibly could. Because the only way to break this chain was to become strong enough to sever it herself.
But the bullying itself only got worse once they realized Kina was letting it all slide without pushing back.
What started as just throwing trash at her escalated to ripping up her notebooks, harassing her during meals, and slowly, they started turning to actual physical violence.
Two weeks passed like that, but Kina held on through all of it.
"Ahh... it’s finally quiet again."
Kina let out a breath of relief. She looked up at the moon hanging in the night sky, surrounded by scattered stars. The night air felt cool, genuinely refreshing to Kina after everything she’d been enduring under all that bullying.
Well, not that she was really that stressed about it. Compared to what her own family had put her through, all of this was basically child’s play.
"Tch, because of those brats, I’ve barely had any time left to train."
Irritated, Kina wandered through the garden. She reached a particularly quiet spot, one she’d stumbled onto by accident about a week ago while looking for somewhere peaceful to eat lunch. Ever since that day, this hidden corner of the garden had become her regular training spot.
The place was simple, surrounded by dense foliage and trees. Each plant had been trimmed neatly into tall, narrow rectangular shapes, with one especially large tree standing at the center.
That’s where Kina trained. She carried a single book in her arms, sat down against the tree, leaned back, and began reading.
’Since I can’t just rely on One Slash forever, I need other Skills to learn too.’
But Kina’s access to skill books was extremely limited, given how low her Talent registered. With a Talent that weak, mastering even an F-Grade or E-Grade skill would normally take months of struggle.
And yet, strangely enough, that wasn’t how it played out for Kina at all. So she’d poured everything she had into it recently, and, as luck would have it, she’d finally managed to get her hands on her very first skill book about three days ago.
Since then, over these past three days, Kina had been reading through it, setting aside roughly three hours a day to study, and she’d proven every single one of them wrong.
Kina flipped through page after page, her mind automatically working to understand every structure, every mechanism behind how the skill functioned.
The visualization formed on its own inside her mind, and in less than fifteen hours of studying that skill, Kina closed the book, looking up at the translucent system screen that appeared before her.
[Skill Learned]
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