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.’

then all of their problems would be

you see

frowned, trying to remember.

me through the gates of the castle! That means

beaming with so much joy that

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

at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up

much emotion, she thought for a

we will

***

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

almost made his head explode from bafflement. That

of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression 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

out

to do with being 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

stumble in the middle of the sentence and fall silent. Her tone never matched

fact that, like many introverted people, Nephis was not in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just

time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible or

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

fact, she was just shy and completely inept

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 jaw hang

line with

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

skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the opposite. She