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.’

existed, then all of their problems would be

see

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

me through the gates of the castle! That

face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t

talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two of them.

turned his head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to

showing much emotion, she thought for a while,

we will

***

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

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

confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s past only served

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

with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie,

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

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

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

in fact, she was just shy

to that realization, Sunny tried with all his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at

the hell? That’s not in line with how a protagonist

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

that line of thought was also wrong. The fact that Changing Star had problems with expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was