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.’

their problems would

you see

to remember. Then, her face

leading me through the gates of the castle! That means we will

face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help but

It was that, when talking about reaching

his head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on that

much emotion, she thought for a while,

we will

***

for the journey and preparing to

sudden realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing realization had to do with

Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations

was mysterious, aloof and rather cool. Her taciturn character and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and

out

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

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

openly showing her emotions. It’s not that

chose to talk as

her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating the false image of a

shy and completely inept in communicating with

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

not in line with how a protagonist should

type of person to be the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People like

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