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 problems would be

you see anything

to remember.

me through the gates of the castle! That means we

with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t

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

secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if

showing much emotion,

we will

***

was still retreating, they had their breakfast and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary

almost made his head

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

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

out to be

had nothing to do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing

something, 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 questions sound like statements or

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!

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

by her general weirdness, was

just shy and completely inept in

failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He just barely managed to

the hell? That’s not in line with

Nephis had definitely been the 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 himself and Cassie, on the other hand, were relegated to exist far away in the background.

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