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.’

all of their

you see anything

remember. Then, her

through the gates of the castle!

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

when talking about reaching the castle, the

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

much emotion, she thought for

we

***

breakfast and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary camp.

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

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

cool. Her taciturn character and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing

impression turned out to be

do with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie,

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

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

time, she simply chose to talk as little as

by her general weirdness, was ultimately responsible for creating the false image of a mysterious, unapproachable

just shy and completely inept in communicating with

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

That’s not in line with how a protagonist

type of person to be the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong people like her

she was