The 0.1% Event
“Are you mocking me?”
“I am entirely serious. The higher you look among candidate heroes, the more of an absolute sausage fest it becomes. No joy in watching them, no thrill in nurturing them. A girl is a rarity in and of herself.”
In other words: had she been a boy, she would only have passed after breaking out wand magic, but since Orknodi was a girl, this degree of physical strength was plenty to earn a passing grade.
“Do you understand now?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“It matters not whether you understand. A blade takes an edge best when fed a bit of blood from time to time. Draw, if you wish. Though the young lady you serve might weep.”
Butler Jona glared daggers at Mihael before turning on his heel.
“…Forget it. It was foolish of me to expect a sensible answer from an eccentric.”
Relaxing his grip, the butler strode back toward the inn. Mihael lingered, his hand still tucked inside his robe with lingering regret.
“A pity. It has been quite some time since I came across someone so worthy of cutting down.”
A Double Number ticket was an honor reserved strictly for the timber of the next generation of heroes. But the one making that judgment was the examiner. Mihael’s true evaluation criteria were disarmingly simple:
Can this person grow into someone delicious to cut down within ten years, or not?
The “young lady” had that potential. It was as simple as that.
“Back to another tedious day, then.”
With Mihael departing on Butler Jona’s heels, the insects in the courtyard finally resumed their chirping.
I had gotten my hands on a bizarre ticket.
“Hmm. Hmmm? Hmmmm.”
“My Lady. Does the ticket trouble you?”
“Nope. Well… that’s a lie. It actually does.”
In the game, tickets never had colors. A ticket was just a ticket. I had never heard of lore like “Triple Numbers” or “Double Numbers” either.
Is it because this is reality now instead of a game?
The whole reason I had stubbornly endured five full days of his whimsical trials was to snag the hidden reward: the reputation title Talent Recognized by Mihael. Examinees bearing this title mysteriously received glowing evaluations in the entrance exams, along with a slew of positive stat modifiers once enrolled.
An applicant acknowledged by a titan like Mihael? Sugoi! Better keep an eye on her. That was likely what ran through the heads of the professors.
Boosting Mihael’s personal favorability was a massive boon in its own right. Down the line, when he made his guest appearance as a guest lecturer at the academy, having his goodwill locked in would undoubtedly be a colossal help in securing top marks.
Yet, back when I cleared the hidden route playing as a musclebound male character, Mihael had never reacted with anything resembling this level of favor.
Could it really be because I’m a girl?
I promptly shook my head at the absurdity of the thought. The Fair Nobleman Mihael? As if. With a face like that, he could step onto the street any night of the week and have his pick of women to take to bed. Moreover, when Mihael returned in the future as a guest lecturer, he was renowned as one of the most impeccably fair and impartial instructors in the entire academy.
Granted, on that particular playthrough, my class had consisted solely of men. Regardless, I couldn’t imagine him being the sort of sweet-talking fantasy gentleman who practiced blatant gender favoritism.
“Mr. Jona.”
“You called, My Lady?”
“What did you and the examiner talk about out there?”
Jona feigned total ignorance with a deadpan face. “Nothing of consequence.”
Looking at the butler, a sudden realization struck me. Hadn’t things diverging from game canon started all the way back with his whistle? Seeing how the hidden route still functioned during this qualification exam meant not everything had changed, but significant discrepancies had clearly crept into the finer details. Even so, this was already a massive takeaway.
Using veteran gamer techniques to bypass pure RNG, leveraging sheer mechanics and game sense to conveniently claim the top rewards—that alone is incredible enough, isn’t it?
Still, one nagging question refused to leave my mind. Mihael’s hidden route. Its difficulty escalated depending on how long you stalled. From day six onward, veteran gamer or not, clearing it was flat-out impossible. But at five days, it was barely manageable—provided you employed wand magic in tandem with swordsmanship.
I had secretly prepared for that, even steeling myself to incur the butler’s wrath, yet the evaluation had concluded before I could even draw on my wand techniques. For that matter, even his passing dialogue had been completely different from the game.
Why? Back then, he sneered that this level of strength was the bare minimum for a man and never once praised my power.
Setting the puzzle aside for now, I stretched with the ticket clutched in hand.
“The entrance exam is the real deal anyway. I haven’t actually passed yet.”
“A most commendable mindset, My Lady.”
“Please arrange our transport!”
It was time to depart the inn. Our next destination: the entrance examination grounds. The final barrier standing between me and my long-awaited entry into the academy.
While the butler was away securing our transport, Giselle the black market broker approached me.
“I truly didn’t expect you to pass.”
“I won the bet, didn’t I?”
“I concede.”
Beholding the Platinum Ticket, Giselle offered his sincere admiration.
“Do you understand the difference between tickets?”
“More or less.”
Orknodi was originally a player. She had enjoyed Graduating the Academy on Pure Luck as a virtual game. But this other world was now living, breathing reality, and the gaps between game mechanics and reality inevitably bred a sense of dissonance. The colors and grades of the tickets fell squarely into that divide.
10 Gold Coins — Ticket (30% chance of a defective ticket)
100 Gold Coins — Guaranteed Ticket
Cheap tickets where cutting corners risked pulling a dud. I knew now that those duds were actually Iron Tickets, which got you disqualified before you even crossed the threshold, or Bronze Tickets, which could leave you barred from testing if applicant quotas overflowed. By contrast, a Platinum Ticket was treated as an exceptionally lucky drop, though in the game—where tickets had neither colors nor tiers—its true nature had never been clear. Even perks like Triple Numbers and Double Numbers were concepts completely foreign to her.
The noble house that raised this child must have stopped at nothing.
Yet she possessed a rough grasp of the ticket system. Giselle concluded that such knowledge could only be the product of rigorous aristocratic grooming.
Gift Academy. Countless noble houses sought to place their scions into the continent’s preeminent academy. To that end, children subjected to training bordering on child abuse—or conversely, targeted with torment bordering on torture by rival factions scheming to block their admission—were as numerous as the noble houses themselves.
“Little lady. If I may ask, what is the name of your house?”
“Don’t know.”
“There is no need to fret. The butler who mistreated you is off securing transport, and the maid is guarding the table, so she cannot eavesdrop on our conversation.”
“I really don’t know.”
“…Do you truly not even know the name of the family that bore and raised you?”
Orknodi made a troubled face.
“Don’t speak ill of my servants. They aren’t bad people. They feed me well and let me train in great facilities!”
“What of your social debut?”
“I don’t need useless events like that.”
“Tea parties with young ladies your own age?”
“Do they serve lots of food at those?”
Hopeless.
This was no child raised in a normal noble household. No matter how one looked at her, she was a tool bred purely for admission, a life sacrificed to magnify her family’s glory, a wretched creature ignorant of both childhood joy and womanly pleasures. The mere fact that such a child existed evoked a pity so profound it felt like an indictment of the world itself.
At this rate, even if she entered the academy, she would never escape being a marionette dancing on the strings of her family’s ambitions.
“I have made up my mind.”
“About what?”
“This entrance exam. I will take it as well.”
Orknodi’s eyes went wide.
What on earth is this old guy talking about? Only applicants aged twenty and under are eligible to take the entrance exam.
“Mister, you’re way too old.”
“Haha. Age can easily be forged.”
“Even setting aside whether you can fool them, pushing yourself to get in will only make fitting in a nightmare, you know?”
The academy’s brutal schedule was far beyond what any ordinary person could endure. Giselle was hardly ordinary, but stamina inevitably wanes with age. If one lacked the stamina to pull all-nighters grinding through assignments and prepping for exams, no amount of razor-sharp wit or flashing brilliance would ever see them through to graduation.
“Besides, you only passed the ticket exam by throwing money at it. The entrance exam won’t be that easy!”
“How innocent. Unlike the world our little lady knows, reality is a vile place. Through the underhanded schemes of rotten adults, the impossible becomes possible, and the certain turns to dust.”
Does he plan on bribing his way in? It wasn’t my problem, so whatever, but I had to respect that brazen audacity.
Is it really fine for a black market merchant to abandon ticket scalping and take the exam himself?
This was an event that had never occurred in the game. I wondered if this was truly okay, but it wasn’t like I could stop a man who wanted to test his luck by telling him to stay in the sticks and peddle tickets for the rest of his life. Above all, the fact that this event had never existed in the game carried a profound significance.
The 600:300:99:1 Law.
Common branches were 600 and 300. Rare branches were 99. Unique branches were 1. An event that only triggered after dodging the 60%, 30%, and 9.9% odds to hit the jackpot on a razor-thin 0.1% chance. It meant I had struck an extraordinary probability. Of course, probability was just numbers. Whether this was an incredible stroke of fortune or an absolute disaster remained to be seen.
Giselle had approached our contest in earnest. He had accepted the outcome without complaint. Despite his occupation as an underground ticket broker, the man possessed surprisingly decent character.
“It’s like a midlife dream, right? I hope it works out for you!”
“…A midlife what? That’s not—”
“I’ll be cheering you on! Fighting!”
Taking one of the unsold tickets in his possession, Giselle headed upstairs to Mihael’s room. A short while later, he strutted back down, ostentatiously waving a single Platinum Ticket. His zeal to enter the academy and achieve academic success at such an advanced age was honestly impressive.
“They say it’s never too late to learn! Do your best!”
“You little brat. You’re really begging for a knuckle sandwich.”
“Why?!”
I offered genuine encouragement, and all I got was an earful of abuse!
“Just whose fault do you think this is…” Giselle muttered, only to clamp his mouth shut the second his eyes met the maid’s.
“Mister, do you like Leaf?”
“……”
“I can introduce—ouch!”
I got bonked on the head.