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.’

then all of their problems would be

see

to remember. Then, her

gates of the

on her doll-like face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny

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

little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if

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

Then we will

***

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

which almost made his head explode from

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

and rather cool. Her taciturn character and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning to.

turned out to

truth behind the matter had nothing to do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply an incredibly, ridiculously… painfully awkward

no idea how to talk to people. Every time she tried to convey something, she would either use the wrong words or stumble in the middle of the sentence and fall silent. Her tone

Nephis was not in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was

the time, she simply chose to talk as little

of that added up together, then multiplied by her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for

was just shy and

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

the hell? That’s not in line with how a protagonist

of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong

social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the opposite. She still achieved everything that she