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.’

existed, then all of their problems

see

trying to remember. Then,

I saw Sunny leading me through the gates of the

beaming with so much joy that

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

a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying

as ever. Without showing much emotion, she thought

Then we

***

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

made his head explode

in front of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different

was mysterious, aloof 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. The less she talked, the more she seemed

impression turned out

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

the middle of the sentence and fall silent.

the fact that, like many introverted people, Nephis was not in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t

she simply chose to talk as little as possible or not to talk

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

she was just shy and completely inept in communicating

might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with

line with

the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People like himself and Cassie, on the other hand, were

fact that Changing Star had problems with expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact,