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.’

then all of their problems would be solved. Sunny cleared his

see anything

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her face

the gates

doll-like face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny

he was stuck on a certain detail of Cassie’s vision. It was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl

turned his head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on

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

we will go

***

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

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

front of the Academy’s gates, Sunny had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and

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 seemed to know. That silent, indifferent confidence

that impression turned out

cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that

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

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,

simply chose to talk as little as

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

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

Sunny tried with all his might but still failed to stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He

not in line with how a

mind, 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 other hand, were relegated to exist far away in the background. Now,

line of 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