'Then why didn't he say anything?'

Her heart thudded once, heavy and uneven.

He had known. He had to.

So either he had chosen to ignore her presence… or he had wanted her to see.

The possibility unsettled her more than she wanted to admit.

She tried to reason it out, to fit it into something logical. Maybe his focus had been entirely on Priscilla—that could explain it. Maybe he'd sensed her but dismissed her as irrelevant. Maybe he hadn't cared.

But no—Lucavion didn't miss things. Not people, not details, not moments. His perception cut sharper than any blade she'd seen.

When she'd fought him, she'd realized that under the mockery and laziness, there was precision bordering on predatory. He wasn't just alert—he anticipated.

And if he had anticipated her being there…

Elara's hand slipped away from the wall. The corridor around her suddenly felt narrower, the air thinner.

'Was this… deliberate?' she thought. 'Did he bring me there on purpose?'

Her mind retraced every step—how naturally she had followed him, how conveniently the path had led to the northern wing, how she hadn't questioned it until too late.

He hadn't looked back once. Not once. Yet somehow, it had felt like he knew she would follow.

The chill under her skin deepened.

If he had planned it… what had he wanted her to see?

Priscilla's humiliation? His intervention? Himself?

Her thoughts tangled in silence.

Lucavion was many things—clever, infuriating, unpredictable—but never aimless. Everything he did had a thread running through it, one she hadn't quite found yet.

Elara stopped at the junction where the corridor split into two and rested her hand on the frame of the archway.

"Would you really… use that girl for this?" she whispered to no one.

Her voice came out quiet, half-lost in the air.

But even as she said it, part of her knew that question wasn't really about Priscilla.

It was about herself.

Because if he'd noticed her that day—and let her stay hidden—then she wasn't just a bystander. She'd been a witness he'd chosen.

Elara drew in a long breath, the sound trembling in the silence.

"Why, Lucavion?" she murmured. "Why me?"

The answer didn't come, of course. Only the echo of her own voice and the faint hum of the wards in the walls.

She shook her head again, almost angrily this time, as though denying the thought could erase it. "No. That's ridiculous."

But as she turned down the hall toward her dormitory, she couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere—long before she realized it—Lucavion had already accounted for her presence.

That she hadn't been the observer in that corridor at all.

She'd been part of the script.

Yet on another side….

What Elara didn't know—what her thoughts never brushed against—were the quiet, unseen layers behind the moment she'd witnessed.

Lucavion's world, as always, was not nearly as effortless as it appeared.

The black-threads of flames that wrapped around his wrist, the technique—its faint pulse hidden beneath his sleeve—had been running the entire time, muting and filtering the mana noise around him.

It was a technique for focusing, something meant to let him trace the subtle signatures of vital residue. But it came with a flaw: it dulled his peripheral awareness. A side effect, one he'd simply learned to live with.

Even his instincts—those uncanny reflexes that so often betrayed his calm exterior—had been muted.

Without it, he might have turned toward the faint brush of presence behind the column.

Without it, he might have realized she was there.

But Elara couldn't have known that.

Nor could she have known how carefully he had been tracking Priscilla's mana signature that day. He'd felt something wrong the moment the wards in the northern wing had shifted—subtle interference, a flicker where the surveillance lines bent. The interference had come from the very artifacts the three girls had been carrying—small, delicate pieces designed to jam the Academy's enchantments just enough to hide a little "lesson" from the eyes of the professors.

For Lucavion, isolating the source had required full concentration. He'd followed the trail through the mana flux of the Grand Lecture Hall, sifting through dozens of overlapping signatures from the crowds still lingering after exams. Each student carried charms, pens, enchanted scrolls—all static, all noise.

In that blur, even his senses struggled.

So when Elara had followed him, quiet as a breath and deliberately masking her presence, she had simply vanished into that fog of magic and movement. He hadn't felt her because there had been too much else to feel.

When he finally reached the corridor where the interference sharpened into clarity, his mind had been fixed entirely on what lay ahead.

At that time, Lucavion had already known something like this would happen.

He hadn't known the details—who would cast first, what words would be used, or how far the cruelty would go—but the shape of it was predictable.

Priscilla had been too visible, too defiant at the banquet. Too public in choosing the wrong side. The Crown Prince's hounds would come for her sooner or later.

And when they did, they would want witnesses.

The spherical artifact in his possession—silver-rimmed glass no bigger than an apple—had been the centerpiece of that plan.

He'd gotten his hands on one through a combination of nerve, luck, and the sort of quiet favors that were better left unexplained.

But owning it was one thing. Using it was another.

The Orb was unstable—its internal array still in experimental phases, its lenses prone to distortion if the user's mana wavered even slightly.

For a normal mage, operating one would be easier since it was designed for a normal Awakened.

But Lucavion was not. His physique was different.

To him, to activate the artifact without triggering its self-nullification wards required precision bordering on obsession: the exact balance of three sigils held in perfect resonance, the synchronization of breathing and pulse, and an unbroken focus for the duration of its recording.

Any slip—any surge of distraction, any external interference—and the image would fracture into static.

It was a delicate operation.

And a costly one.

They narrowed his senses, dulled his awareness to anything beyond the focal radius. Every sound outside that invisible ring became muffled; every presence blurred into background hum.

He could see the cruelty in front of him with perfect clarity, but everything else—the faint footfalls behind a column, the subtle flicker of another's mana watching from the dark—was lost in static.

That was why he hadn't turned.

Why he hadn't noticed Elara.

Even when her breath hitched or when her hand brushed the stone, the threads around his wrist drank in the sound, filtered it out as interference. His mind was tuned entirely to the Orb's pulse—the rhythmic flicker of runic light as it absorbed, stored, and layered the scene into memory.

Every insult.

Every strike.

Every moment of silence between them.

The price of that precision had been blindness.

He hadn't sensed her, hadn't even realized another presence was watching until long after the Orb cooled and the recording sealed itself in its crystalline core.

And by then, it didn't matter.

He'd gotten what he came for—the evidence, the control, the story rewritten in his favor.

But the irony was sharp enough to taste.

Because while he'd been busy capturing the cruelty of others, he'd missed the one witness he hadn't planned for.

Elara.

The one person he hadn't accounted for had seen everything he hadn't meant to show.

One by one, without him knowing, he was sowing the seeds of doubt into her heart.

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