It happened at a market stall I'd stopped at while out doing some shopping.
"Hey, wait up, you little brat!"
A kid bumped into me as I approached a fruit stall, then took off running out of the market.
"Out of the way, boy! Dammit — he got away!"
The shopkeeper, who'd come charging out from behind the stall to catch the kid, collided with me too, and in that gap the child vanished into some back alley.
The kid didn't look well-off — tattered clothes and barefoot.
Probably couldn't even afford food for the day.
Maybe from the slums?
Though, wasn't there an orphanage run by the church?
The shopkeeper grumbled at me while I was mulling this over.
"Tch, this is why failure skill brats are... Acting all high and mighty even though the gods have abandoned them and they're nothing but worthless trash."
Oh, now that's something I can't just ignore.
Teresa had told me that the Holy Cruel Church actively persecuted failure skill holders.
Could it be they weren't even allowed in the orphanage?
◇◇◇
Even in the Lazing Kingdom, failure skill holders were oppressed among the nobility.
They said the church declared them abandoned by God, but it really seemed more like the nobles just couldn't get the abilities they wanted from them.
Commoners weren't persecuted as badly — Sophia had gotten a normal job at the Commerce Guild, after all.
Something about this just isn't right.
So I used "Perfect Research" to track down the kid I'd run into earlier and went to the location it showed me.
◇◇◇
I arrived at a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town.
The roof had holes in it, and the floor was falling apart.
Inside were three children.
The kid I'd run into seemed to be the oldest of the bunch.
But whether it was from poor nutrition or what, they were all tiny.
They'd been sharing some fruit they'd stolen earlier.
"What do you want? Don't tell me that guy from the stall sent you to come take it back."
The kid I'd run into glared at me.
"No, nothing like that."
"So you came here to look down on us because you've got a useless skill too? The moment our 'Awakening Ceremony' at the church when we were ten revealed we had skills we couldn't even read, we got thrown out of our homes — you know that?!"
Wow.
"Uh, I've actually got a dud skill myself."
"Liar! There were plenty of people who tricked us and then in the end—"
"mocked"
"us! Why the hell would we trust anyone?!"
Can you blame them for not trusting anyone?
Well, can't be helped. There's a spell I've got whose purpose I don't really understand, but let me give it a shot.
"'Status Open'"
Letters floated in the air before me.
They read "Reverse" in Japanese, but someone from this other world couldn't make them out.
Normally there'd be no point showing off your status so brazenly to others, and on top of that, it's practically worthless magic that's hard to acquire as an advanced appraisal skill—but I had it display everything except Reverse.
"No way… a skill you really can't read? But why…?"
"If some kind of trigger comes along, you might awaken to it and figure out its true use, but judging by the look of things, that hasn't happened yet."
Hearing my words, the kids nodded.
"How do you awaken it?"
"In my case, it awakened when I got kicked out of my family."
◇◇◇◇◇◇◇
When you think "other world," there's roughly a fifty-fifty chance the opening move is a Status Open.
Skills: [Reverse], [Divine Eye], [Sword God], [Fist God], [Spear God], [Scorching Magic], [Frost Magic], [Tempest Magic], [Stone-Iron Magic], [Holy Magic], [Dark Magic], [Space-Time Magic], [Thunder God Blade], [Phantom Thief Gentleman], [Ninja Master], [Truth Seeker], [Monstrous Strength], [Pain Dampening], [Complete Status Ailment Resistance], [Dark Spirit's Protection], [Super Intuition], [Heaven's Gate], [Abyss Contractee], [Magic Hand], [Treasure Search], [Seduction], [Eloquence], [Great Luck], [Tenfold Growth Rate]
Rank: Orichalcum
Thank you for reading!