Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 773: Headmaster Verius

Elara watched the Crown Prince without meaning to.

It was difficult not to.

There was something about the way he stood—no, held the room. He didn’t demand it like Adrian, didn’t pierce it like Lucavion, didn’t weave through it like that girl, her name was Valeria.

No. Lucien Lysandra rooted the room. Like a truth that didn’t care if you agreed.

His presence was cut from another cloth—disciplined, severe, but not brutal. Regal not just in title, but in effect. He didn’t shimmer. The air around him did.

Her eyes narrowed faintly. Not from doubt—just from the way instinct tickled at something behind her thoughts.

He was sharp, yes. But not like a blade drawn on a battlefield.

No. He was administrative sharpness. The kind that rewrote tax law with the same precision used to authorize invasions. The kind of sharpness that bled not from swords, but from signatures.

’Like Valeria,’ she thought. But not quite.

Valeria was a blade wielded. Lucien was the hand that never had to raise the blade at all.

Power in its purest form: absolute. Assured. Untouched.

Beside her, Selphine let out a low, appreciative exhale. “He looks… composed.”

Aurelian nodded slowly, his gaze resting on Lucien with the kind of ancestral approval bred into noble bones. “That’s what a ruler looks like,” he said simply. “Presence without noise.”

Selphine’s eyes gleamed, and there was no sarcasm in her tone. “Our house will never rise that high—but at least we’re aligned properly.”

Elara said nothing. To her, the politics of the empire was something that is on the second-hand, as she was here for revenge. But when paying attention to the talks of Selphine and Aurelian, she came to learn that, their households were aligned with crown prince’s faction.

She heard them. She even agreed, in part.

But her gaze… her gaze drifted. Pulled like thread to flame.

Across the hall. To a table at the edge of ceremony, away from thrones and crowns.

To him.

Lucavion.

She hadn’t meant to look. She didn’t plan it. She wasn’t even sure why her eyes moved in that moment, when Selphine’s words still hung in the air like praise wrapped in silk.

But they did.

And what she saw—

His face hadn’t changed. Not from earlier. Not from the moment he had locked eyes with her and whispered her name without breath.

But his eyes—

They were fixed on Lucien.

Sharp. Focused.

And full.

Full of intent.

Not admiration.

Not fear.

Not curiosity.

But something active. Something alive and pacing.

Elara’s heart gave a single, careful thud.

’Why?’

Why that look?

’Why him?’

Lucavion wasn’t supposed to look at anyone like that.

Not the boy she remembered. Not Luca.

He was the kind who watched storms for their beauty, not for their destruction. Who grinned through bruises and challenged fate with laughter. He wasn’t… this. Whatever this was.

That look—intent, cold, measured—wasn’t curiosity. It was assessment. Strategy. As if Lucien Lysandra were not a prince to revere, but a variable to map. A figure to counter.

And Elara—

She couldn’t understand it.

Because she didn’t know him.

Not really.

Not anymore.

The boy from the garden, from the laughter and the late-night sparring, the boy who hadn’t spoken up when it counted—he wouldn’t look at someone like that. Wouldn’t carry that kind of edge in his gaze unless—

Unless there was history.

Or purpose.

’Is there a connection between them?’

The thought unsettled her.

Too speculative. Too rooted in the unfamiliar.

And perhaps more disconcerting than the question was the fact that she kept looking at him. As if something in her blood remembered the shape of him even when her mind tried to forget.

Elara turned her gaze away.

Sharply. As if it might cut the thread that bound her thoughts to that moment.

She focused instead on the chandeliers—on the shimmer of mana-light diffused through etched crystal. On the murmur of shifting silverware and the clink of goblets. Anything. Anything to drag herself back into the safety of detachment.

’Focus. This is not the time.’

And then—without warning, without fanfare—

The hall changed again.

The doors at the peak of the dais parted with slow, deliberate grandeur.

A ripple passed through the room—not loud, not immediate—but inevitable.

The professors stood straighter. The nobles lowered their voices to reverent murmurs.

He had arrived.

The chamber dimmed—not in light, but in presence. As though some deeper current had been drawn taut, pulling every sense inward.

The great doors atop the dais parted with slow, architectural elegance, carved sigils glowing briefly along the arch as they responded to a presence that required no fanfare.

He didn’t walk in.

He entered.

A man robed in deep indigo, embroidered with constellations too ancient for the sky to remember, stepped forward. His hair, long and snow-white, was tied behind him in a manner both formal and effortless. He walked with a straightness that defied age—each step patient, exact. Not slow. Not hurried. Simply correct.

Elara’s breath caught in her throat—not for who he was, but for what he carried.

Not in his hands. In the air.

The mana around him bent. Not crushed, not whipped into shape like raw power unleashed—but guided. Tempered. Coaxed into silence by the mere nearness of his body.

’Archmage.’

She knew the taste of that presence. Had trained beneath its shadow, had knelt before it and begged understanding from the chaos of the weave. Her master had carried it.

But this one was a little different.

’It is stronger….’

That endless, sovereign calm, it was even stronger than her master’s.

“Is that…?” Aurelian began, barely audible.

Selphine nodded, her voice lower than he’d ever heard it. “That’s him. The Headmaster of the Imperial Arcanis Academy.”

“Verius Itharion,” Aurelian murmured. “I thought he’d look more… Imperial.”

Selphine’s eyes narrowed faintly. “You don’t need armor when you are the battlefield.”

Her voice dipped to a hush, reverent not from superstition, but fact.

“He’s been alive for over a century. Maybe more. No one knows exactly. He became a 5-star in his twenties. Hit 8-star before the last succession war even started. And he’s been Headmaster for forty years.”

Aurelian blinked. “Forty?”

Selphine nodded. “Since before we were born. Since before our parents were even old enough to apply.”

Elara didn’t speak. Her eyes hadn’t moved from the man.

Verius Itharion.

She had read the name. All candidates had. But the paper didn’t breathe like this. Didn’t explain how the air would fold in his wake—not with fear, not with reverence, but with recognition.

“That’s the Archmage of Space,” Selphine continued, almost as if telling a bedtime legend. “The one who rewrote the fundamentals of displacement theory. The one who bent leyline fracture to his will. The one who created the Pseudo-Ten.”

Selphine’s lips curved—not into a smile, but something wry. “That’s what they call it, at least. The Pseudo-Ten. A living space, shaped entirely by magic. A realm where time and pressure shift at will. The entrance trials were conducted inside it.”

She remembered the sensation: the way gravity itself had changed with every breath, the spatial tugs, the fragmented light, the monsters that seemed real even as they bled.

“That wasn’t an arena,” Selphine went on. “It was an artifact. A spell you can walk inside.”

Aurelian leaned forward, brow furrowed. “But that’s all rumor, right? There’s no proof. I mean… no one’s ever made a Ten-Star spell. Not since—”

“Lysandra the First Flame.”