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 solved. Sunny cleared his

see anything

remember. Then,

Sunny leading me through the gates of the castle! That

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

about reaching the

Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on

however, was as enigmatic as ever. Without showing much emotion, she thought for a while, and then

we will

***

preparing to abandon the temporary camp. In the process, Sunny had a chance to

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

certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different

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, often revealing more than they had been planning to. The less she talked, the more she

turned out to be completely

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

no idea how 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 silent. Her tone never matched what she was trying to say. Often, she would forget to put correct intonations in her speech, making questions sound like statements

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

talk as

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

fact, she was just shy and completely inept

stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide

line with how

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

fact that Changing Star had problems with expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact,