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

see anything

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

the gates of the castle! That means we

so much joy that

was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind

and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on that

showing much

we

***

for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp.

made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing realization had

of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s past

a bit apart from the world. She was mysterious, aloof and rather cool. Her taciturn character and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved

out to

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

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

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

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

weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating the false image of a

fact, she was just shy and completely inept in communicating

stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He just barely

hell? That’s not in line with how

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

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,