Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra-Chapter 833: A link ?

There was a murmur.

Not loud. Not unruly.

Just a soft ripple—like wind passing through silk—as the Lorian delegation absorbed Thalor’s words.

The students shifted, almost in unison, as if some unspoken instinct had swept through them. Their gazes turned toward Lucavion—measured, curious, now edged with something sharper.

Interest.

Not disdain. Not mockery. But the kind of interest that came from recognition.

Recognition of someone dangerous.

Of someone real.

The one who had parried the Empire’s sword to a draw.

And yet...

He was still being treated as second.

Lucavion felt it—the shift. Not in words, but in eyes. The way the Lorian students’ postures remained poised, yet a few tilted their heads. The faint narrowing of pupils. The glint of calculation from one girl in gold-threaded sleeves. The boy near her, with the long scar running beneath his collarbone, gave a near-invisible nod—half to himself, half to what he’d just understood.

’So they’ve placed him beneath Rowen,’ Lucavion thought.

Of course they had.

Even after a draw.

Because Rowen had stepped forward first. Because Rowen was the Empire’s heirloom—already polished, already paraded.

Lucavion was the challenger. The surprise.

The court had eyes, but they still needed permission to elevate someone like him. No name. No title. No bloodline draped over his shoulders like a banner.

So Thalor had given them that—without ever saying it outright.

Rowen was the standard.

Lucavion was the trial.

The courtyard breathed again—but softer now, more calculated. The game had been balanced, if only in appearance.

Thalor’s arrangement was elegant in its quiet diplomacy. By placing Lucavion against the Lorian representative after Rowen, the Empire had, without ever admitting it, acknowledged the structure laid bare by Prince Adrian’s earlier remark. Titles. Balance. Optics. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Rowen, the heir to the Knight Commander, had already taken the field. To pit him against a lesser noble from a foreign land would have shattered the veneer of politeness Arcanis held so dear.

So Lucavion was slotted into place—not beneath Rowen in strength, but beneath him in standing. It worked, politically.

Prince Adrian understood that.

Hence, when he stepped forward with that unfailing calm, hands behind his back and chin tilted in perfect grace, his words rang as both deference and tactic:

"From our delegation," he said, "Jesse Burns will represent us."

There were no gasps. No shock. Just the quiet, curious tilt of noble heads.

The name meant little.

Low-tier. Borderline minor. A cadet house, barely registered in Empire ledgers.

But the name didn’t matter now.

Because Jesse had already started walking forward.

The hush shifted again, rippling outward as she entered the courtyard—steps smooth, practiced, but unembellished. Brown hair, tied loosely at the neck. A plain blade at her hip. No gleaming adornments. No silver-threaded tunic. Her uniform bore the Lorian crest, yes—but it sat on fabric that looked more functional than fine.

She was, by every noble’s eye, decent.

Not beautiful. Not dazzling. Not threatening.

But her stride was unbroken.

And then she looked up.

At Lucavion.

Thalor’s gaze narrowed.

It wasn’t attraction. Nor intimidation. Nor even the watchfulness of a duelist preparing herself for engagement.

Her orange eyes met Lucavion’s with something far more strange.

Recognition?

No—deeper.

Thalor’s fingers tapped once against the curve of his wrist, the motion featherlight, the smile not quite reaching his lips.

He was no mind reader. Certainly no eye reader.

But he had seen enough to recognize when something was off script.

Jesse Burns didn’t just approach Lucavion with discipline—she approached with something older. More weighted. Her steps were steady, yes, but her gaze?

That wasn’t curiosity.

It wasn’t competitive focus.

It wasn’t admiration, either.

It was a thread.

A taut, invisible cord drawn tight between them, vibrating with a tension no one else in the crowd could name—but Thalor felt it. The way Lucavion hadn’t moved. The way his chin hadn’t lifted. But his breath—just the faintest catch in his exhale.

Ah.

’They know each other.’

He couldn’t say how. Couldn’t say why.

But Thalor had stood in too many courts, orchestrated too many traps, danced around too many veiled betrayals to miss the look a person gave not when facing a stranger—but someone they’d left behind.

’So... there’s something I didn’t know.’

That alone would’ve been enough.

But now?

Now the girl had become more than a name. More than a political placeholder tossed in by Lorian to maintain appearances.

She was a piece of Lucavion’s past.

And Thalor, above all things, collected context.

His gaze followed Jesse’s stride as she moved to her place in the dueling square, and then flicked back to Lucavion.

Still no words. Still no shift in expression.

But the silence between them?

It felt like it had already begun to speak.

"Heh..."

The chuckle left his lips so softly only those closest heard it. But it wasn’t humor. Not entirely.

More like recognition.

Interest.

’Just like Valeria Olarion... this one as well.’

Another woman orbiting the enigma.

Another thread tied to the tapestry that Lucavion insisted on keeping so artfully tangled.

And that was the thrill of it, wasn’t it?

Not knowing.

Not yet.

Not entirely.

Not many still understood who Lucavion truly was. Not even those who whispered his name now with respect. He was rising—yes—but still veiled. Still cloaked in smoke.

And Thalor?

He lived to pull back curtains.

’One way or another...’

Thalor’s tongue flicked over his lower lip—absent-minded, indulgent—as his gaze narrowed on the pair now facing each other in the lanternlit atrium. The audience held its breath again, caught between etiquette and anticipation. But Thalor wasn’t watching the form or the stance. Not yet.

He was watching the thread.

Still pulled taut. Still humming between them.

Jesse hadn’t bowed in flourish. She hadn’t even drawn fully yet. And Lucavion? He hadn’t shifted his posture more than a half-inch. Yet the air had already changed.

There was something here.

Something coiled in the space between their eyes.

Thalor smiled—barely.

Not out of amusement.

Out of appetite.

’Go on... show me.’

Because there were only so many things that made someone like Jesse stare like that. Only so many reasons a sword held loosely in one hand could look like it remembered another life.

Regret.

Betrayal.

Something broken.

Something left unsaid.

’Did you betray him?’ Thalor mused. ’Or did he leave you behind?’

He didn’t care which—not yet. All he needed was the friction. The little crack in Lucavion’s composure. The crack that might splinter into something useful.

Or beautiful.

He leaned forward slightly, just enough for the wine in his glass to shift.

Something interesting might happen, indeed.

*****

Jesse stepped forward.

One boot, then the next, slow and steady on the marble beneath her feet. She didn’t glance at the crowd—didn’t need to. She could feel their stares, their measuring gazes. But they weren’t what filled her mind.

He was.

Lucavion.

Standing there with his estoc lowered and that crooked smirk still half-shadowed by moonlight, like the duel had been nothing more than an idle exercise. Like he hadn’t just dismantled one of the Empire’s most polished prodigies with nothing but instinct and invention.

And Jesse had watched every second of it.

The clash, the pivot, the rhythm—gods, the rhythm. She could still feel it pulsing in the soles of her feet. She knew Rowen’s technique well enough to recognize what Lucavion had broken. He hadn’t matched it. He’d unmade it.

It had been a long time since she saw him fight.

Too long.

Even back in the military—when she was still fresh to war, to everything, when she was still only in the pits of despair—Lucavion had always been different.

Back then, he hadn’t been a commander or some whispered name floating between battle camps. He was just a one-star. A nobody. A boy with too much sarcasm and a blade that never moved wrong.

But, even then...

Even then—

He was already dangerous.

Already right.

She remembered the first time he sparred with her. How his blade slipped past hers, not with speed, but with precision. How he never used more strength than needed. How he corrected her grip not with theory, but with a single, offhanded, "You’re holding it like you’re afraid of bleeding. Either let go or cut something."

She hadn’t forgotten.

Because it was Lucavion—Lucavion—who taught her how to hold a sword with intent.

Who trained with her after hours, long after the others went to sleep.

Who stayed behind when no one else cared whether she lived or died the next day.

He was the one who helped her become stronger.

Not by kindness.

By showing her how not to be weak.

And now, watching him stand across the courtyard, that same unreadable calm in his posture, that same flicker of sharpness behind his eyes...

It felt strange...

Not the kind of strange that made her anxious.

No, it was quieter than that. Heavier.

Like trying to breathe in a room that still carried the scent of something long gone—smoke, steel, him.

Lucavion hadn’t just gotten stronger. His sword had evolved. The way he fought now—calm, unsparing, unorthodox—it was more than talent. It was like watching a language only he spoke.

But Jesse remembered its first words.