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

to remember. Then, her face

I saw Sunny leading me through the gates of the castle!

with so

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

at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up

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

we will go

***

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

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

had formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior

her feel unnerved and rattled,

out

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

as though she had no idea how 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 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

emotions. It's not that she didn't have feelings: it's just that she was really bad at emoting them! As

simply chose to talk as

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

in fact, she was just shy

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

not in line with how a protagonist should

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

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

She was still dangerous.