Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

The forest clearing on the scrying orb shifted again.

The broadcast, enchanted to highlight high-profile engagements, zoomed closer. Details sharpened. Mana signatures flared.

Another figure stepped into view, just beyond the broken grove where Lucavion stood.

The girl moved like smoke wrapped in silver—her cloak trailing behind her in measured, dancer-like motions. Twin daggers gleamed at her hips. Mana flickered at her fingertips, wrapping her in layered illusions, so fine they barely disturbed the world around her.

Above the projection, gilded script unfurled in brilliant arcane letters:

Candidate: Elayne Cors

Title: Blade of Nothing

A ripple of noise passed through the salon.

Whispers. Murmurs. Sharp inhalations.

“Elayne Cors… she’s here.”

“The Blade of Nothing, they call her.”

“She defeated three ranked candidates on the first day without so much as a visible spellcast.”

“A phantom with blades.”

The nobles shifted forward in their chairs, suddenly paying far closer attention.

The easy, dismissive chatter from before was gone, replaced with a sharp, almost greedy focus.

“Now this will be a real duel,” someone muttered under their breath, excitement trembling beneath the words.

Valeria sat straighter in her seat, though her movements were unhurried, composed. Her gaze never wavered from the scrying disc.

She watched Lucavion.

Still standing.

Still relaxed.

Still every inch the reckless fool she remembered—except now, more dangerous, more precise, as if the rough edges of the boy she once knew had been filed down into a blade that could gut a lion before it knew it was bleeding.

The duel began in a blink.

Elayne’s illusions twisted the battlefield—clones splitting from her form, bursts of mirrored movement scattering across the clearing like shards of a broken mirror.

Most opponents would have hesitated.

Lucavion didn’t.

He moved not with hesitation, but inevitability.

Ducking, pivoting, parrying—threading through her attacks like a river finding its bed.

He didn’t chase the illusions. He didn’t fall for the flickers of false motion.

He felt her.

Tracked the ripple of her intent, the rhythm of her heartbeat, even beneath her mana-crafted silence.

The nobles whispered furiously now, confusion bleeding into frustration.

“He’s reading her…”

“That’s not possible—her illusions should have masked everything.”

“He’s—he’s predicting her movements before she even attacks.”

The duel blurred into a symphony of clashes—steel on steel, illusion against instinct.

And still, Lucavion stayed ahead.

No grand explosions. No wasted flourishes.

Just quiet, relentless dismantling.

And for the first time in the entire gathering, Valeria let herself smile.

It was small.

Brief.

But real.

Seeing him like this—irritatingly composed, defying everything the others thought they understood—it was like breathing a different kind of air after months underground.

A reminder of why he had always been so… impossible.

And why she had missed him more than she realized.

Not because of the power.

Not because of the danger.

But because, around Lucavion, life had always been just a little more alive.

More reckless.

More full of possibility.

She leaned back in her seat, ignoring the frantic wagers now being whispered from table to table, the growing tension among the nobles.

They didn’t know what they were watching.

But she did.

She always had.

And as she watched Lucavion step through Elayne’s last desperate illusion and disarm her cleanly—without rage, without cruelty, just a simple, merciless efficiency—Valeria thought:

Welcome back, you idiot.

The scrying orb flickered gently above the tea salon, its image freezing for a breath—Lucavion standing effortlessly victorious, the Blade of Nothing already retreating into the shadows of the woods, her illusions broken and scattered like dust in the wake of a storm.

A heavy silence had fallen over the nobles.

But it didn’t last.

It couldn’t.

Pride didn’t allow silence.

And neither did wounded investment.

“Well,” Lord Bartolini drawled lightly, swirling the wine in his goblet as if weighing the bitterness on his tongue. “It was an interesting match, if nothing else. A… fortunate encounter.”

“Indeed,” Lady Renata Ferani added, smoothing the folds of her silver-trimmed gown. “But really, Elayne wasn’t fully prepared. She had already spent days exhausting herself against the others. It’s hardly a fair measure.”

Another woman across the circle—Lady Fiorenza Altamari, whose family had been quite vocal about intending to ‘sponsor’ Elayne—leaned forward slightly, her voice sweet with poisoned grace.

“The boy is quick, I’ll grant him that. But truly, anyone relying on sheer instinct is bound to be revealed when the real examinations begin. Strategy and stamina decide true power, not showy counterattacks.”

A few around her murmured agreement, eager to bury their discomfort under layered justifications.

Anything to avoid admitting that a nameless boy—without crest, lineage, or patron—had just shattered their illusions.

Valeria said nothing.

She didn’t need to.

Her smile—small, unconscious, and utterly genuine—spoke enough.

And it was noticed.

Lord Bartolini’s gaze flicked toward her, catching the rare shift in her otherwise composed features. His brows lifted slightly in amusement.

“Well now, Lady Olarion,” he drawled, voice carrying a slight edge. “You seem… entertained.”

A few heads turned.

Lady Fiorenza tilted her head, her pearls catching the light like droplets of milk. “Indeed. Have you found something funny?”

Valeria blinked once, the weight of their stares registering a moment too late.

Her smile vanished instantly, smoothing into the neutral, polished expression she wore so easily.

She reached for her teacup with steady fingers, taking a slow sip before answering—perfectly measured, perfectly cool.

“I simply remembered something,” she said.

The truth, but shaped into something harmless.

Fiorenza’s lips curled in a faint, polite smirk.

“Oh?” she pressed lightly. “A memory sparked by such… unsophisticated swordplay?”

The bait was obvious.

But Valeria only tilted her head slightly, letting the smile she should have worn earlier play faintly at the edge of her lips—sharp and unreadable.

Then another voice—one of the younger noble girls, a recent debutante eager to score a social blow—giggled softly into her hand and chimed in:

“Well, surely compared to the standards of House Olarion’s swordsmanship, this must have looked like a child’s squabble, no?”

More polite laughter circled the group.

Valeria set her teacup down with a soft click.

She didn’t bristle. Didn’t rise.

She simply turned her gaze—slowly, lazily—to the scrying orb above them.

Lucavion stood there still, adjusting the white cat on his shoulder, utterly unbothered by the storm he had just left in his wake.

A child’s squabble?

Valeria’s fingers rested lightly on the rim of her teacup, unmoving. Her gaze remained on the scrying orb, though she barely saw the gentle ripples of projected mana anymore.

Instead, she saw something else.

Andelheim.

Dust in the air. The ring of steel. The roar of a crowd too stunned to speak.

Lucavion—then a nameless, coat-tattered fighter, standing alone against three of the Sect’s proudest disciples, dismantling them not with brute force or flashy magic, but with the blade alone.

That was the day the whispers had begun.

Sword Demon.

A nickname born not from flattery, but from disbelief. From fear.

A title carved by watching nobles and wandering mercenaries alike, when they realized—

He didn’t fight like a duelist.

He fought like something born to the blade.

Valeria had seen it firsthand.

Felt it, once, when she had foolishly drawn steel against him in the training fields on a whim.

A single exchange had been all it took.

Not because she had been weak—she wasn’t.

But because he was something else.

Lucavion moved with a rhythm that slipped past logic and theory.

He fought not by textbook forms, not by noble schools refined over generations, but by pure, instinctive mastery—a primal elegance shaped by battlefields, not ballrooms.

No one she had ever met—not in the courts, not in the armies, not even among the so-called sword saints who polished their reputations like armor—could match that raw, unshakable dominance in pure swordplay.

And yet—

Here they were.

Tittering into their gloves.

Scoffing at a man who could cut their pride apart in less than a breath.

Valeria lowered her gaze briefly to her lap, her expression serene.

But inside, the thought struck her so sharply it almost made her laugh:

Even speaking of him in the same breath as your polished courtiers’ “swordsmanship” is an insult to the blade itself.

She breathed in slowly, smoothing the impulse into perfect calm.

‘Well, whatever.’

Currently, she was really happy to see him here.

‘There is no way he would lose.’

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