Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra - Chapter 1049 Hello, Mister Lucavion
Chapter 1049 Hello, Mister Lucavion
“Hello.”
The sound hit Elara like a blade slipped under old scars.
Her breath seized.
Her heart lurched once—hard enough to ache.
For a single, excruciating heartbeat she thought—
‘She knows.’
‘She sees me.’
‘She’s speaking to me.’
The air around her tightened; her shoulders stiffened despite herself. Illusion or not, she felt naked under those familiar eyes—exposed, cornered, dragged back into a past she had sworn she would conquer.
Her fingers curled again.
But then—
A shift.
A soft scrape of a chair behind her.
A faint, amused exhale she recognized instantly.
Lucavion.
Of course.
‘Not me.’
Isolde wasn’t speaking to Elowyn Caerlin.
She wasn’t speaking to her sister she had destroyed.
She wasn’t speaking to the girl she had left in chains beneath the banquet hall.
She was speaking to him.
Her greeting, that delicate smile Elara could hear in the tone alone, was aimed past her shoulder.
Elara forced her lungs to loosen. The air returned in a thin, controlled breath.
Elara held her breath for a moment longer than she meant to, the sound in her ears thickening until even the shuffle of robes and parchment felt distant. Her thoughts spun, not fast, but tight—coiling in on themselves with that familiar mix of dread and logic she had learned to control.
‘She greeted him first.’
‘Directly. Warmly.’
‘Why him?’
That question landed heavier than she expected. She told herself it was only strategy—only suspicion—nothing personal. She had reasons to doubt Lucavion already, reasons carved into her memory whether she wanted them or not. The image of him standing beside Isolde during her downfall still lived in her mind like an unhealed bruise. And now this?
It stung.
Not deeply enough to shake her composure, but enough to pull at a raw nerve she’d buried beneath layers of Elowyn’s poise.
‘Is this proof?’
‘Is he working with her again?’
‘Or am I just seeing shadows where there is nothing?’
She hated the uncertainty. Hated that she even had to ask the question. Logic whispered that Isolde would greet anyone in a room if it served her; she’d always been a master of effortless charm. But another part of Elara—the part still shaped by betrayal—insisted that nothing was coincidence when it came to her sister.
Isolde never wasted smiles.
She never wasted steps.
And she certainly never acknowledged people without some purpose.
Murmurs flickered through the hall, quiet but unmistakable—like ripples breaking across still water.
Not loud enough to disrupt decorum, yet sharp enough to betray collective shock.
Of course they reacted.
How could they not?
Isolde Valoria—fiancée of the Lorian Empire’s Prince, heir to the Valoria line, the prodigy with revealed light affinity—had just walked into the room and chosen to greet Lucavion of all people. And not with stiff diplomatic courtesy either, but with softness. With familiarity. With a sweetness that made heads subtly turn.
Students exchanged glances, their confusion poorly masked.
“That’s Lady Valoria, isn’t it?”
“Why greet him?”
“Isn’t he the troublemaker from the banquet?”
A few whispered before remembering to lower their voices. The examiners were present, but even they flicked discreet glances toward the interaction. No one expected Isolde—the model of poise, grace, and political value—to approach a boy who had spent the last week antagonizing nobles like it was recreation.
Her fame had preceded her.
First for her beauty.
Then for her lineage.
And recently—quite spectacularly—for her affinity test, which revealed a rare, almost mythic light attribute. The Valoria signature, shining openly in the Arcanis Empire of all places.
She was not merely an exchange student.
She was a symbol—political, magical, diplomatic.
And Lucavion…
Well, Lucavion was the academy’s newly minted problem.
A commoner, brilliant but insufferably arrogant, who had challenged the social hierarchy the moment he stepped into the banquet hall, nearly started a fight with the Crown Prince of Arcanis. He was disruptive, unpredictable, and entirely too self-assured for someone without a title to shield him.
Seeing the two interact…
The contrast alone seized the room’s attention.
Even without turning fully, Elara could feel the tension—thin, taut, almost metallic—stretching between the two behind her.
The other students, of course, had no context for any of this. They saw only the surface: a prodigious noblewoman greeting the academy’s resident troublemaker. Nothing more. None of them could possibly imagine the truth beneath the veneer—what bound these two by shadow rather than courtesy.
‘They don’t know there’s history. They don’t know there’s blood on that smile.’
Elara exhaled quietly, let her shoulders settle, and allowed herself the smallest turn of her head—barely enough to see, enough to confirm.
Her gaze caught the scene like a blade through silk.
Isolde stood poised, back straight, chin angled just so—a picture of elegance carved into living moonlight. Her lavender eyes were bright, soft to the untrained gaze, but Elara saw the minute narrowing at the corners, the faint tension around the mouth. A smile perfectly shaped, perfectly sweet, perfectly practiced.
A smile Elara remembered far too well.
A breath colder than dungeon stone slid down her spine.
Lucavion sat casually in his chair—leaning back just enough to seem relaxed, boots planted loosely, posture unbothered. A grin stretched across his face, wide enough to border on insolent, almost playful in its audacity. The kind of grin that said he found something deeply amusing… or deeply beneath him.
But his eyes—
His eyes did not match the grin.
Pitch-black, unblinking, too still. A quiet intensity simmered in them, dark and unreadable, as if he were dissecting Isolde rather than greeting her. It wasn’t interest. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t charm.
It was calculation.
A slow, deliberate assessment that felt nothing like the bantering ease he’d shown minutes ago.
Elara’s stomach tightened.
‘What is he thinking?’
Because Lucavion’s smiles were never simple.
She’d learned that quickly—even as Elowyn.
Every grin had layers.
This one more than most.
Isolde’s answering smile widened—soft, demure, everything she had perfected over years of masquerade. To the outside viewer, she looked delighted; her beauty almost glowed under the wardlight. But Elara saw it—the thin frost along its edge. The faint chill beneath the sweetness. The tilt of lips that never quite reached the eyes.
The exact smile she wore in the dungeon.
A smile that had cut deeper than any blade.
The memory stung sharply, and Elara’s nails bit into her palm beneath the desk.
‘She hasn’t changed at all.’
‘And she’s smiling at him like that.’
She forced her posture still, though the echo of her past trembled faintly under her ribs.
Lucavion tilted his head slightly, smirk widening, but the gesture felt like a provocation—wordless, needling, as if inviting Isolde to make her next move. A grin meant to mock. Or bait. Or dismiss.
Yet his eyes remained cold.
However, to Elara, nothing about Lucavion’s expression read as resistance.
Cold? No.
Annoyed? Hardly.
Calculated? Perhaps to others—but not to her.
What she saw was far simpler. Far more poisonous.
‘They’re performing.’
The grin, the too-still eyes, the tilt of his head—it all slid together into a narrative she knew too well, one carved into her memories and her nightmares. To anyone else, Lucavion might have looked subtly displeased. To her, it looked like a man playing a part. A smirk designed to hide complicity. A mask, not a conflict.
‘Of course he’s not cold to her.’
‘He’s been on her side from the beginning.’
‘He’s only pretending to be unmoved.’
Her stomach tightened—not with shock, but with the grim confirmation of a suspicion she had carried for years. The kind that burrowed under the ribs and whispered cruel little truths.
‘I knew this.’
‘I knew he was with her.’
‘This is just… proof.’
Lucavion finally spoke, his voice low and smooth, the effortless charm sliding into place.
“Hello.”
