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.’

all of their problems

you see anything

trying to remember. Then, her face

gates of the castle! That means we will make

smile appeared on her doll-like face, beaming with so much joy

Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about

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

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

Then we

***

spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the

to a sudden realization, which almost made his head explode

confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s past only served to

speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning to.

that impression turned out to be

more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he

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

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

chose to talk as little as possible or not to

multiplied by her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating

was just shy and

coming to that realization, Sunny tried with all his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He

hell? That’s not in line with how

At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People like himself and

also 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