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.’

their problems would be solved. Sunny cleared

see anything

trying to remember.

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

so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help but curl his

Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two of them. Was there some meaning behind

at Nephis, trying to discern if she

was as enigmatic as ever. Without showing much emotion, she thought

we

***

still retreating, they had their breakfast and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp. In the process,

that he came to a sudden realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing realization had to do

of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing

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.

impression turned out to

her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost

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 or

habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad

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

up together, then multiplied by her general weirdness, was ultimately

fact, she was just shy and

stop himself from

That’s not in line with how a

Nephis had definitely been the type of person 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 and Cassie, on the

she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the opposite. She