I Became the Academy’s Hidden Skill Master – Chapter 1

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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Shio
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Would you believe that there were people who searched for shit to eat?

They lived just fine on Earth and at a glance, acted no different from ordinary people.

“Ah, fuck! Does this make any sense?”

Their biggest characteristic was that they lived off eating the aforementioned shit.

Of course, it wasn’t real feces.

“What kind of shitty game mechanics are these!”

These were the people who deliberately suffered playing games that made you doubt they were really meant to be played—so-called “shit games.”

They were called “shit eaters,” for short.

I prided myself on being at the very top among such shit eaters.

From games with low ratings to ones the developers thought of as a dark history and hid away—

I thought my mentality had been trained by playing countless shit games, but this time I just couldn’t stand it.

“No, this is seriously fucked up, isn’t it!?”

Final Destiny, abbreviated as FD, was an RPG that mixed academy, fantasy, hunter, status window, and visual novel elements.

As evident from the title, it was one of those games where the protagonist prevented the final destiny—in other words, the destruction of the world.

The advantage was that you could enjoy the game by playing not only the protagonist but also various characters.

The disadvantage was everything except the advantage.

“I absolutely can’t give up…”

I usually wasn’t the type to talk to myself this much, but this was the only way to soothe my infuriated heart.

I had spent eight years of my life enduring a chaotic worldview, innumerable bugs, and an incomprehensible storyline.

No matter how much I wanted to quit the game, I couldn’t throw away the time I had spent.

“Seok-hyun! Hang in there! Please, just hang in there!”

On the screen, my character Lee Seok-hyun was moving, fighting against a massive shadow.

Lee Seok-hyun, called the worst character even within the shit game Final Destiny.

I had vowed to get the ending with Seok-Hyun no matter what, just because this character had the same name as me.

‘Was this game really made to be cleared?’

Seok-hyun was a character with even fewer advantages than Final Destiny, with everything set randomly.

When creating the character, all stats were set randomly, and aside from the main skill, everything related to the status window such as nature and reputation had to be left to luck—an insane difficulty.

Of course, I hadn’t known this fact.

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have done it.’

I only found out four years after playing exclusively as Seok-Hyun.

When I was searching for information, wondering why the game was so difficult, I learned about it in the community.

I felt incredibly empty and furious then.

Anyway, that wasn’t what was important right now.

The point was, having endured all those situations, I was finally right before the ending of the final stage.

Right before the pixel art Seok-Hyun could act, a selection window popped up.

This was already the 6th selection window.

‘Using the main skill is the worst choice.’

It was a stretch to even consider Seok-hyun’s main skill useful.

No, Seok-hyun himself was a useless character to begin with.

He was the only intelligence-based character in this chaotic world.

But the problem was that the game creator’s intelligence wasn’t that high.

‘A character smarter than the creator can never appear.’

Following this age-old unspoken rule, Seok-hyun was utter trash.

The pinnacle of this was none other than the main skill [Find DingDongDaeng].

‘Does this make any sense?’

Since the option window didn’t have a time limit, I sighed while trying to understand the description of the main skill.

No matter how many times I read it, the skill still made no sense at all.

‘Even the difficult situation part and the solution are all vague explanations.’

So while playing as Seok-hyun, I had only used the main skill exactly once.

The description was so vague that I just roughly used it on anyone, but nothing happened, and after that, I never used the main skill again.

But now, the situation was a little different.

“What kind of boss ignores all hidden skills, disregards all items…Talking doesn’t work and you can’t run away?”

The result of choosing all options except 1 was failure.

Since my HP decreased by 1/6 each time I failed, it was virtually the last chance.

And I had to mark that last moment with this useless main skill? This was crazy.

How was it any different from my four years of effort going to waste?

“Please let me clear it, okay? I worked hard, I really worked so hard. I did my best, please…please…FD…”

Even with only [Find DingDongDaeng] left to choose, I was reluctant to select it.

Even if it suggested a solution, all it did was provide a hint—an ultimate skill with zero utility.

To think the day would come when I would have to press this with my own hand.

Four years staked on a shitty RNG skill in an RPG.

This was crazy.

“…”

But sometimes, crazy things were necessary.

In the end, I closed my eyes tight and clicked option 1 with my mouse.

The system kindly asked if I was really insane enough to do this.

I was so grateful I could cry.

Click.

My legs trembled so violently that my desk shook, as if I was using up all the luck in the world.

“Something… something is happening…!”

A promising atmosphere emerged as the background music quickly shifted.

The melancholic melody gradually transformed into a heartbeat-like rhythm—a rhythm that stirred hope and made adrenaline surge.

It was an implicit sign that the tides were about to turn.

“Here it goes…He’s moving…Lee Seok-Hyun with a storm of will is moving.”

My legs trembled, lifting the lower half of my body slightly as I began to fidget.

A once-in-a-lifetime situation.

If I managed to clear this game, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there was no game in the world I couldn’t beat.

“Fighting!!!”

The Seok-Hyun on the screen seemingly rummaged through his clothes, as if searching for something.

…It looked like he was tidying up his appearance before dying, but I tried my best to ignore that.

If I had such ominous thoughts and that really happened, I might actually go crazy.

“Let’s go for the FD ending!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Seok-hyun drew a shining object from his clothes, and with a determined expression, valiantly rushed toward the Despair of Destiny.

And, he met his death.

“Huh?”

What?

“What the hell is this?”

They couldn’t do this to me.

People said your brain froze when you were really surprised, and that’s exactly what happened to me.

It felt like everything was going to work out perfectly, and then they killed him off? Why? How?
“…”

My legs, which had been shaking like a mad dog, finally stopped, and my lower body settled back into the chair.

The reason I had been so desperate to clear the game, and had prayed with my soul for Seok-Hyun to succeed—

That was because FD adopted a rogue-like format.

Once you died, you lost everything.

In other words, with that one message just now, four years of my life had just gone down the drain.

“…Don’t kid me.”

They couldn’t fucking do this.

As I viciously shook the innocent monitor, denying reality, the screen began to change bit by bit.

“Huh?”

The shining object in the dead Seok-Hyun’s hand was still glowing despite his death, and that glow was rapidly intensifying.

“Wh, what the…”

At first, it was just the game screen getting brighter, but it worsened until the monitor radiated a scorching light.

Blinded by the room’s brightness, which was incomprehensible for 2 a.m.,

I noticed a message window appear.

“Oh sh…”

I tried to run away, but the light had already engulfed the entire room, and just like that, I lost consciousness.

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[Hey everyone, Shio here~! I hope you all enjoyed the first chapter of Academy’s Hidden Skill Master.

Honestly, I was hooked right from the start! How about you? Are you excited for what’s next?

Note:

1: The skill “DingDongDaeng” is not a translation error. It’s based off of a Korean children tv show called “Ding-Dong-Daeg Kindergarten,” and in it they say “Find Ding-Dong-Daeng!” The children also say “Ding-Dong-Daeng” when they get the correct answer in the game.

Seeing as how it’s a catchphrase from the show, I believe that this is just something from the author’s childhood that they wanted to implement into their novel. I apologize if this breaks immersion, but this is indeed the correct translation.]