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 solved. Sunny

you see anything

trying to remember. Then, her face

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

with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t

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

at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked

Without showing much emotion,

we will

***

journey and preparing to abandon the temporary

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

formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later,

unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they

out to

truth behind the matter had nothing 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

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 silent. Her tone never matched

not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them! As a result, her face always looked cold

she simply chose to talk as little as possible or not to

was ultimately responsible for creating the false image of a

shy and completely inept in

stop himself from staring at

line with

the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her and Caster. People like himself and Cassie,

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