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

you see

to remember. Then, her face

I saw Sunny leading me through the gates of the

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

vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two

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

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

we will

***

journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp. In the process, Sunny had

came to a sudden realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing

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

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

turned out to be completely

cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and

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, making

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 cold and

most of the time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible or not to talk

was ultimately responsible for creating the false image of a mysterious, unapproachable ice

was just shy and completely inept

himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He just barely managed to not let

not in line with how

to 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, on

social skills did 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 the added layer