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

see anything

trying to remember. Then, her face

me through the gates of the castle! That means we will

beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn't help but curl his

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

turned his head a little and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to

was as enigmatic as ever. Without showing much emotion,

we

***

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

realization, which almost made his head

had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing

seemed to exist 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 and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning to. The less she talked, the more she seemed to know.

turned out to

with being cool and aloof. After talking to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply an incredibly, ridiculously... painfully awkward

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

introverted people, Nephis was not in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It's not that she

simply chose to talk as

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

in fact, she was just shy and

himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes. He just barely managed to not let

line with how

main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident,

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

She was still dangerous.