Shadow Slave

For a long while, they just sat quietly together. Nephis was looking at the horizon, thinking about something only she knew about. Sunny's mind was strangely empty.

From time to time, he would cast a glance inside his Soul Sea, observing the recuperating Echo. The scavenger managed to survive its fight against the Carapace Centurion, even if it was just barely. Now, enveloped in a cocoon of light, it was flowing in the calming darkness of Sunny's soul and slowly regenerating.

If an Echo managed to retreat into the Sea of Soul alive, it would eventually recover from any wounds. The holes on the scavenger's carapace were already beginning to close. Its lost pincer arm, however, was not growing back any time soon.

Sunny sighed and summoned the runes. He decided to go over the spoils of the harrowing battle.

Shadow Fragments: [28/1000].

Since it was his Echo that delivered the final blow, the kill was considered to be his. Thus, he received four shadow fragments, two for each of the Centurion's awakened cores. The shards of the cores themselves went to Nephis as per their agreement. She decided to consume one herself and give the other one to Cassie.

The reward was sizable, but seemed disproportionate to the amount of trouble they had gone through to get rid of the terrifying monster. Ultimately, dormant humans like them were really not supposed to battle awakened Nightmare Creatures.

'No way, really?' he thought to himself, full of sarcasm.

It was just their bad luck that there was not a single Dormant-rank creature in this whole damned region of the Dream Realm.

Sunny remembered his lofty plans of hunting weak monsters while safely protected from all their attacks by his tier-five Awakened armor and couldn't help but smile bitterly. Who knew that the Puppeteer's Shroud would turn out to be merely a minimum requirement for survival, as opposed to a huge, odds-defying advantage.

Still, that armor had already saved his life twice, so it was doing its job.

Speaking of armor…

He lowered his gaze.

Memory: [Starlight Legion Armor].

Memory Rank: Awakened.

Memory Type: Armor.

to return light to the cursed

would have been ecstatic to be reading

and settling down in one of the most

Sunny had no idea when they

throat and looked

a

head and looked at him

"A… present?"

Sunny smiled.

you that I received a Memory after we finished off the Centurion. Guess what

her expression did not even show a hint of

So,

Otherwise, he would have preferred to avoid it for as long as possible. There had

was a strangely intimate experience. Not to mention the memory of

had been in any condition to think about

hurriedly grasped it in his own, wishing to be done with this part of the process as

was cool and

One of the spheres of light disappeared from the Shadow Core's orbit. Immediately, he felt something akin to a spark of electricity

and

stood up, walked a few steps away from the