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 problems would

see anything

frowned, trying to remember. Then,

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

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

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

and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying

Star, however, was as enigmatic as ever. Without showing much emotion,

Then we

***

and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp. In

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

of the confident,

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

turned out to

bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply an incredibly, ridiculously… painfully awkward

to talk to people. Every time she tried to convey something, she would either use the wrong words or stumble in the middle of the sentence and fall

Nephis was not in 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

talk as little as possible or not to

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

fact, she was just shy

from

not in line with how a protagonist

there were always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People

with expressing herself and lacked 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