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.’

of their problems would be

see anything

to remember. Then, her

gates of the castle! That means we

on her doll-like face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help

certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the

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

as ever. Without showing much emotion,

Then we will go

***

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

to a sudden realization, which almost made his head

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

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,

that impression turned out to

talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when

convey 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

in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings:

chose to talk as little as possible or not to talk

multiplied by her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating the

fact, she was just shy

coming to that realization, Sunny tried with all his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He just barely managed to not let his

in line with how a protagonist

At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her

had problems 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 with the added layer of