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

see anything

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

through the gates of the castle! That means

so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help but curl his

talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned

at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on that little

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

we will

***

the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp. In the process, Sunny had a

made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing realization had

confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing

unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning

impression turned out

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

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 never matched what she was trying to say. Often, she would forget to put correct intonations in her speech, making questions sound like statements

openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them! As a

why, most of the time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible

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

fact, she was just shy and completely inept

failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis

in line with how a protagonist

always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People like himself and Cassie, on the other hand, were relegated to exist far away in the

wrong. The fact that 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