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.’

really existed, then all of their problems would be solved. Sunny cleared

see

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

gates of the castle! That means we will

beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help

however, he was stuck on a certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two of them. Was there some meaning

and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if

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

we

***

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

was then that he came to a sudden realization, which almost made his head

the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior

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

impression turned out to be completely

cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply an incredibly, ridiculously… painfully

she would either use the wrong words or stumble in the middle of the sentence and fall silent. Her tone

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

why, most of the time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible or

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

fact, she was just shy and completely

stop himself from staring at Nephis

That’s not in line with

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

thought was also 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 meant