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

see anything

trying to remember. Then, her face

me through the gates of

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

It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl

turned his head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if

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

Then we will

***

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

realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing

had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s

seemed to exist a bit apart from the world. She 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

that 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 that Nephis

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 never matched what

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 have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them! As a result, her face always looked

of the time, she simply chose to talk as little

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

just shy and

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

hell? That’s not in line

be 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,

expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the