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.’

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

see anything

trying to remember. Then, her face

Sunny leading me through the gates of the

face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t

certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about

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

ever. Without showing much emotion, she thought for a while, and then

Then we will go

***

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

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

first met in front of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing

taciturn character and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been

that impression turned out to be completely

nothing to do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing

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

habit of openly showing 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 always

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

by her general weirdness, was ultimately

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

his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at

That’s not in line with how a protagonist should

center stage, there were always confident, strong people

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 with the added layer