Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 693: A girl whose life was not easy (2)

’It is always safer to target the weak.’

She’d learned that before she could spell her own name. Safer to hit the girl with smaller hands, to blame the one who wouldn’t talk back, to wound the quiet one before she had the strength to scream. That was human nature—nobles liked to dress it up in politics, strategy, diplomacy. But it all traced back to the same cracked root:

Find the one who seems breakable.

And break them first.

Her gaze didn’t leave the shimmering script, but her ears were already working. Tracking breath patterns. The subtle shift of cloth. The cadence of silence behind her.

She would be challenged.

Of course she would.

Not because she was famous.

Not because she had enemies.

But because someone out there had seen her name in the top five and thought:

She doesn’t look that strong.

The truth didn’t matter. The blood she’d bled, the monsters she’d fought, the desperate crawl into the circle one heartbeat before the collapse—it didn’t matter.

What mattered was this: she was fourth.

And fourth meant visible.

Fourth meant reachable.

The first-place name? Intimidating.

That was especially true—gods, especially—after she saw the number next to first place.

168,420.

It didn’t make sense. Couldn’t. Not when the second-ranked candidate had barely clawed past fifty thousand. Not when the rest of them—herself included—had scraped and bled for every damn point just to survive.

And yet there it was. A number that didn’t just eclipse the others.

It shamed them.

Her gaze slid sideways.

She found him with sickening ease.

He wasn’t hiding. Wasn’t posturing. Wasn’t even pretending to be interested in the atmosphere tightening around the basin like a coiled snare.

He was lying down.

Sprawled across a patch of sun-warmed stone like this was a picnic and not a battlefield. His arms folded behind his head, one leg bent, the other lazily twitching as if to some invisible rhythm. His black hair stuck out in too many directions to be deliberate, and the faint stubble on his jaw gave him the look of someone who didn’t give a damn what mirror he passed.

A white cat—no collar, long-furred, aristocratically uncaring—lounged across his shoulder like it had always belonged there.

And he was smiling.

That lazy, half-lidded, I-don’t-need-to-prove-a-damn-thing smile that people wore right before they broke your kneecaps in a duel and apologized afterward for getting their boots dirty.

From a distance, he didn’t look like a threat.

He looked bored.

His black eyes, ringed in faint shadows like sleep hadn’t visited him in days, barely flicked from face to face. But when they did settle—when they locked briefly onto someone—it was like being studied not as a person, but as a series of possible outcomes.

She knew that look.

She’d seen it on bounty hunters and high-tier mercenaries—the real ones. The ones who never raised their voice, never boasted. The ones who cleaned blood from their cuffs like it was soup-stain. The ones who didn’t hunt for power…

…but attracted it. Like gravity. Like something darker.

Mireilla stared.

Because there were only two types of people who could look that relaxed in a room full of killers.

The delusional.

And the deadly.

And judging by the cat—who now lifted its head just enough to blink at her like it, too, had judged her soul and found it wanting—this man wasn’t delusional.

He was something else.

’These are the ones you never challenge unless you’re ready to bleed for hours just to earn a nod.’

She could hear her old guildmaster now, gruff and half-drunk, warning a younger Mireilla about monsters in human skin. The kind who smiled not because they were kind, but because they were certain.

The kind who didn’t strike first, not because they were slow, but because they liked to see who was foolish enough to think they had a chance.

Lucavion.

That was his name.

Top of the list.

Top of the threat board.

And yet here he was—lounging like a cat in the sun, pretending not to notice the tension unraveling through the basin.

She lingered a moment longer on Lucavion, just enough for the cat to blink again—languid, amused, as if it knew that none of them here were meant to touch the man beneath it.

’But still…’

A part of her wanted to see. To test him. To know if that number was real or some elaborate game played by the overseers. But no—no. She pushed the thought down like a knife into mud.

She couldn’t afford curiosity.

Not now.

Not after the years.

Not after everything she’d crawled through.

’I’m going to the Imperial Arcanis Academy.’

She didn’t say it aloud. She didn’t need to. The words had weight in her bones already—gritted between her teeth in winter, whispered like a curse over healing bruises.

She turned her head with care, not haste.

And found Rank Five.

Toven Vintrell.

His body language said nonchalant. One leg stretched long across the stone, arms behind his head, back resting against a conjured arc of static—a throne made of condensed lightning. Bolts curled up his sleeves like hungry vines, tracing his silhouette with purpose. He didn’t suppress it.

He wanted to be seen.

To the untrained eye, he was just another prodigy showing off his raw output. But Mireilla’s eye was sharper than that.

She noticed the rigidity in his jaw, the tension behind his lazy grin. The way his eyes kept drifting, just barely, toward Lucavion. Like he couldn’t help it.

Like he couldn’t not look.

’He’s scared,’ she thought, ’but doesn’t want to seem like it.’

That, too, was familiar.

Because while Lucavion’s stillness had felt bottomless, Toven’s energy twitched. Arcs of mana sparked from his shoulders when he breathed wrong. Not uncontrolled, but… stretched thin. There was power there, yes—an abundance of it—but it lacked that terrible, centered gravity that clung to Rank One like second skin.

Still, he wasn’t nothing.

And if there was one thing Mireilla had learned, it was this: you don’t need to be a predator to kill something.

You just need to be desperate.

And Toven, for all his lightning, looked desperate not to drop a rank.

Still…

She wasn’t worried about him.

Not right now.

Because her attention snapped to motion in front of her—a candidate stepping into her line of sight with the kind of confidence that came from freshly polished courage.

He stood tall. Not bulky, but sharp-angled. His robes bore the light scuffs of recent battles, but his posture was deliberate, centered. His eyes, an unnervingly cool shade of violet, locked onto her without hesitation.

Mireilla blinked once, then glanced at the shimmering thread of mana above his head.

Edran Sylven.

Rank Seven.

’So you’re the one.’

He could have gone for Toven. Toven, who flaunted his lightning like a banner. Toven, who was only one step ahead of him. But no.

He’d picked her.

Her, who bled her way into fourth.

Her, who didn’t flash power or wear her magic like warpaint.

Her, who looked like a maybe.

’You saw my name, my face, my limp… and you did the math.’

And it was simple math, wasn’t it?

Lightning was flashy. Ice was brittle.

Vines?

Vines could be cut.

“You’re Mireilla Dane,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

She met his gaze calmly. “You’re ranked seven.”

He didn’t respond immediately. His jaw twitched. There was something almost… courteous in his posture, but the hunger behind his eyes betrayed him.

He thought this would be clean.

Quick.

He thought she would be grateful for how mercifully efficient he planned to be.

But Mireilla just tilted her head slightly—only slightly—and her voice, when it came, was dry as winter bark.

“You sure you want to do this?”

His nostrils flared, like her question insulted him.

“I don’t waste my one chance on a bluff,” he said.

She nodded.

Then smiled.

But it wasn’t warm.

It was a blade, sheathed in silence.

“Good,” she said softly. “Because neither do I.”

Behind her, the ground had already begun to shift—roots threading through the stone like a heartbeat beneath skin, quiet and steady.

Let him come.

Let them all watch.

She wasn’t the easiest target.

She was just the one who’d stop smiling the moment the first spell missed.

———–A/N———–

Now, only the following Chapter will be fights, and then the exam is over.

It is time to slap some noble-faces.

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