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.’

castle really existed, then all of their

see

to remember. Then, her face

through the gates of the castle! That

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

stuck on a certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the

a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern

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

we will

***

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

was then that he came to a sudden realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing realization had to

gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl.

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 than they had been planning to. The less she talked, the more she seemed to know. That silent, indifferent confidence was arresting, and sometimes even

turned out to be completely

truth behind the matter had nothing to do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with

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,

that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them! As a

she simply chose to talk as little as

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

fact, she was just shy and completely inept in communicating with

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

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

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