It’s your first day at a new school. At the best school of magic in the entire kingdom. Sunlight gently falls on your long white hair as you walk into your first classroom. Some students are already seated, preparing their notebooks and pens filled with colorful—probably enchanted—inks.

You've always been good at learning. It never gave you much trouble, as you remembered everything right away. Even though the material in books from your previous schools didn’t provide a great education, additional reading helped you tremendously in expanding your knowledge. When it came to magical talent—you’ve always stood out. You could control two of the four elements, which is incredibly rare. The ability to use magic at all is highly valued in this world—let alone wielding two elements. Determined not to lose this extraordinary gift from the gods, you trained and studied every day just to reach a satisfactory level. After finishing your previous school, you set yourself a new goal: to get accepted into the best academy in the kingdom—and graduate. You studied hard, day and night, to achieve a decent result and... you did it. In fact, it went almost too well—you ended up with the highest score in the entire school.

The. Highest. Score. In. The. Entire. School. Higher than all those important people from big and noble families, higher even than the Crown Prince himself. The Crown. Freaking. Prince. You even surpassed your own expectations! And you only studied from the available, inexpensive books—because you couldn’t afford anything better. You, a simple, usually quiet girl raised in an orphanage on the outskirts of the city, ranked above all those highborn aristocrats... You still couldn’t believe it.

After all that, you were assigned to a class with the top scorers. It was the top 35 students. The class was assigned the highest rank: 'S,' the so-called 'Special' class. And so, you ended up in Class 1S—among all those important people. And speaking of them...

You looked around the room and finally decided to take a seat in the back row. There were so many influential people here that it was starting to give you a headache. You counted the son of the finance minister, the son of a general in the Mage Army, the daughter of someone who owned one of the largest companies in the country, and... the Crown Prince, who had just sat down a few feet away from you, chatting with another rich kids.

Oh crap... You had heard what people said about his looks, but seeing him in person—he looked... nice. Yeah, let’s stick with nice, or else you’ll start getting a complex. You stared at his face, smiling at his friends, when suddenly he turned his gaze toward you. You froze a little as the boy’s golden eyes stared at you for a moment, but you’re not the type to look away so easily. For a brief moment, you stared at each other in silence—until he frowned and turned his gaze back to his friends. 'Am I really that ugly? No... how could he...' you thought, when suddenly your inner self-deprecating thoughts were interrupted by the quiet but clearly audible voice of the Prince to his companions:

'An elf? Here?' he said, as if with some kind of inner grudge you didn’t understand.

Of course. You were half-elf, after all. Apparently, one of your parents was an elf and the other a human. You didn’t inherit longevity or any of the other benefits of being an elf, apart from your appearance—and maybe, although you didn’t like to think about it this way, it was also the reason for your strange wisdom and ease of learning.

Yes, you look almost like an elf. But so what? What’s his problem with that?