Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra-Chapter 663: Zone lord

The morning came quietly.

Lucavion stirred before the first false rays of dawn broke through the fabricated heavens, his senses pulling him from the deep, almost unnatural sleep he had fallen into. His eyes opened without urgency, black irises cutting through the thin mist that clung low across the Sanctuary's floor.

He inhaled.

The air was different. Richer, somehow. It soaked into his lungs like silk, leaving a faint, vibrating sharpness along the edges of his ribs. His body felt... good. Not just rested, but tuned. Balanced to a degree he hadn't realized was possible.

He sat up slowly, feeling no stiffness, no lingering fatigue. The shallow cuts across his arms and neck were already healed, new skin faintly pink where there had been blood only hours before.

'A healing enchantment,' he thought, noting the faint pulse of energy that clung to his skin like a second, invisible coat. 'Subtle, but thorough.'

He reached out with his senses, brushing against the mana flows around him.

And paused.

There it was—woven into the very air itself.

A secondary field of magic: intricate, careful, impossible to ignore once noticed. It wasn't suppressing him. It wasn't spying, either.

It was marking him.

'Oh,' he mused, his mouth curling slightly at the corners. 'An enchantment.'

Zone Lords weren't just recognized by the trial's systems in name alone, it seemed. They carried a signature—subtle to the average participant, glaring to anyone sharp enough to notice. A faint distortion around the skin, like heat haze, a visible signal to anyone watching closely that he had claimed territory.

'Benefits and drawbacks,' he thought lazily, running a gloved hand through his hair as he stood.

The benefit was obvious—he would be left alone by the system's automated trials for now. A period of enforced rest, accelerated recovery, rewards later on.

The drawback?

Every cadet still breathing on this accursed battlefield would now know exactly what he was.

A Zone Lord.

A walking bounty.

A threat.

He turned his gaze upward, toward the fake sunrise beginning to break across the fabricated sky. The horizon shimmered faintly with the shift in phase—subtle, like a curtain being pulled back on a grand stage.

The next phase of the exam would start soon.

And he?

He had just been handed a bigger target painted square across his back.

Lucavion stretched once, languidly, feeling the quiet crackle of strength along his muscles. His estoc hummed faintly against his back, resonating with the tuned state of his body. Everything—everything—felt poised on the edge of something larger.

He chuckled under his breath, voice low and amused.

"Heh... quite crafty," he mumbled, more to himself than anyone else.

Vitaliara, half-curled along his shoulders in a lazy sprawl, cracked open one eye. [Notice the trap, but still walk into it, hmm?]

Lucavion gave a lazy shrug, feeling Vitaliara's tail flick against the side of his neck like a whip of mild irritation.

"Walking into traps is an art form," he said airily, adjusting the strap of his estoc with casual precision. "You should be honored to witness it."

[Vitaliara snorted, the sound delicate and unimpressed.] [I'll be sure to remember that when you're buried under a mountain of idiots trying to claim your head.]

He smirked, tilting his head just enough to glance at her out of the corner of his eye. "Please. If a mountain of idiots is all it takes to kill me, I deserve to be buried."

[You're impossible,] she sighed, though there was no real heat behind it. [Even when you're technically right.]

Lucavion's steps were unhurried as he made his way toward the Sanctuary's outer edges. The mist thinned, and the terrain began to shift—less dense forest, more broken plains with veins of crystal and twisted, dead trees marking the way.

As he walked, his mind ticked over the numbers with detached precision.

'Around a thousand left. Maybe five hundred, if yesterday's slaughter was as thorough elsewhere as it was here.'

He clicked his tongue softly, not out of worry but calculation.

The original count had been massive—nearly ten thousand. But after three brutal days, and the shift into localized trials, the battlefield had changed drastically.

The weak were gone. The reckless, the hopeful, the arrogant—culled by time and desperation.

Now, only the ones worth noticing remained.

But even that wasn't enough.

Lucavion tilted his head slightly, feeling the faint tremor running through the ground beneath his boots—a whisper of deeper mechanics stirring awake.

'The space is preparing to shift,' he thought, sliding his gloved hand once along the estoc's hilt.

It made sense.

Too many remained.

Too much noise for the next phase.

They needed to thin the competition further—to separate the true contenders from the stragglers. And the easiest way to do that?

Force them into proximity.

Collapse the map.

Compress the field.

[You're smiling,] Vitaliara observed, her voice tinged with wariness.

"I'm always smiling when things get interesting," Lucavion said lightly, adjusting his collar against the artificial morning breeze.

Ahead, he could already see the land beginning to ripple at the horizon, like cloth folding under unseen hands. The trees in the distance shimmered, the ruins twisted, the rivers dried into cracks of barren earth.

The world was preparing to break.

The tremors deepened.

Lucavion felt it under his soles first—tiny shudders, almost polite. Then came the rumbles, splitting through the ground like something massive stirring in the earth's hollowed bones. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

The moss beneath his boots cracked open, veins of raw mana seeping out like blood from a wounded god.

He exhaled once, slow and even.

'Here it comes.'

The horizon before him twisted like a reflection on broken glass. Forests folded into crumbling cliffs, the vibrant greenery scorched away as acid lakes bled across the terrain, sizzling and devouring everything in their path. The false sky above—so carefully painted to mimic a peaceful dawn—fractured. Pieces of it fell like molten shards, crashing into the ground as miniature meteors.

A normal contestant might have panicked at the sight. Screamed. Fled.

Lucavion just tilted his head, watching the spectacle unfold with clinical detachment.

"Breach Protocol," he murmured.

Vitaliara's ears flattened against her skull. [What?]

He smiled faintly, the kind of smile that tasted like secrets.

"They're forcing it," he said. "Collapsing biomes. Accelerating encounters. Entertainment for the spectators."

The outside world—academy officials, nobles, commoners—they were watching. Hungry for blood and miracles both. And the mages orchestrating the trial were more than happy to oblige.

Massive constructs—golems stitched together from prototype cores—lumbered through the shattered landscape, their bodies half-metal, half-mana, eyes glowing with unstable power. Some resembled beasts of iron, others twisted mockeries of knights and dragons, wandering without pattern save for one primal directive:

Hunt.

The Sanctuary's once pristine edges were already torn apart. Acid trails burned through what had been forest. Entire mountain ranges folded inward, crumbling under invisible hands, the stone liquefying into jagged rivers of half-formed terrain.

And from the north—

The first monster wave.

Lucavion caught the tremor in the air before the beasts even appeared—dozens, maybe hundreds, of twisted creatures flooding the collapsed fields. Hybrid horrors, pieced together by wild mana: scaled wolves, horned serpents, birdlike abominations stitched with stone and vine.

From the east, another surge.

And from behind him—the space was compressing like a noose tightening around his throat. The false horizon rolled inward, a wall of shimmering distortion advancing relentlessly, swallowing anything left behind.

[We can't stay.]

"No," Lucavion agreed, stepping lightly to the side as a falling star smashed into the ground where he had stood a second ago, sending up a plume of molten debris.

Candidates could no longer afford to camp. The map was a battlefield now. A crucible.

Only the ones who moved forward—relentlessly—had any chance of surviving.

Lucavion flexed his fingers, feeling the hum of power along his sharpened veins, his tuned body humming with readiness.

'Middle zone,' he thought.

The only relative safety left—the eye of the storm.

That was where he had to go.

He adjusted the strap of his estoc again, casual as a man preparing for an evening stroll, and began to walk—

Straight into the collapsing, screaming chaos.