Shadow Slave

In the ensuing silence, the smile slowly disappeared from Cassie’s face, replaced by confusion. Feeling the sudden tension, she asked:

“Uh… what’s wrong?”

Sunny sighed.

“No, nothing is wrong. It’s just that that direction is the one we wanted to avoid.”

After some thought, he added:

“That’s where I came from yesterday. There’s a lot of scavengers down there.”

The blind girl’s face fell.

“Oh.”

Nephis, who was quietly listening to them, gave him an indecipherable look and finally spoke:

“Tell us more about the castle.”

A shadow of the previous excitement returned to Cassie’s eyes. With a serious nod, she began describing her vision.

“I dreamt of a vast, ruined city built of weathered stone. It was surrounded by tall, impregnable walls. Various monsters were wandering its narrow streets. In the center of the city, the was a hill, and on that hill stood a magnificent castle.”

She smiled.

“But there were no monsters in the castle! Instead, it was full of people. I think… no, I’m sure that they were Awakened. Some were guarding the walls, some were going about their lives without a care in the world. There was food, safety, and laughter!”

‘Well, that sounds great.’

really existed, then all of their problems would be solved. Sunny cleared his

see

remember. Then,

leading me through the gates of the castle! That means

face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help but

he was stuck on a certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind

head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she had

enigmatic as ever. Without showing much emotion, she thought for a while,

we will

***

the sea was still retreating, they had their breakfast and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp.

a sudden realization, which almost made his

met in front of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s past only served to reinforce

interacting with her feel unnerved and

impression turned out to

matter had nothing to do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions

tried to convey something, she would either use the wrong words or stumble in the middle of the sentence and fall silent. Her tone never matched what she was trying to say. Often, she would forget to

not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them! As a result, her face always looked cold and

the time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible or not to talk

up together, then multiplied by her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating the false image

was just shy and completely inept in communicating

might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He

not in line with how a protagonist

definitely been the type of person to be the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like

Changing Star had problems with expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the opposite. She still achieved everything that she had achieved, but with the added layer