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

you see anything

frowned, trying to remember. Then, her

through the gates of

on her doll-like face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn't help but curl

that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two of them. Was there some meaning behind

at Nephis, trying to discern if she had

much emotion, she thought

Then we

***

sea was still retreating, they had their breakfast and then spent some time planning for the journey and preparing to

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

certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star's past only served

speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing

that impression turned out to be completely

a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply an incredibly, ridiculously... painfully

either use the wrong words or stumble in the middle of the sentence and

Nephis was not in a 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 looked cold

time, she simply chose to talk as little as

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

in fact, she was just shy and completely inept

stop himself from staring at Nephis with wide eyes.

hell? That's not in line with

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

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 opposite. She still achieved everything that she had achieved, but with the added layer

She was still dangerous.