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.’

castle really existed, then all of their problems would be solved.

see

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

leading me through the gates of the castle!

face, beaming with so much

talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl

little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she

much emotion, she thought for a

Then we

***

was 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, Sunny had a chance to get to

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

in front of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant

feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning to. The less she talked,

impression turned out to be completely

more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that

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 or

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

the time, she simply chose to talk as little

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

in fact, she was just shy and completely inept in communicating with

coming to that realization, Sunny tried with all his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis

That’s not in line with how

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

thought was also wrong. The fact that Changing Star 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