Shadow Slave

Surrounded by a radiant halo, Sunny plummeted into the darkness. His breath was ragged and hoarse, and his eyes were blinded by the piercing shine of the immolating ocean of white flames beneath him.

Fearing that his eyes would be permanently blinded by it, he closed them, which helped a little.

'Hot… it's so hot…'

He was drawing closer and closer to the remains of the divine inferno, and as he did, the stonelike metal of the Mantle of the Underworld was growing hotter and hotter. Soon, its outer layer turned bright red. Then, it started to melt.

'Damn!'

Sunny directed more of his remaining essence through the coils of the Soul Serpent, activating the [Living Stone] enchantment of the Underworld armor.

As the onyx melted and cracked, causing him excruciating pain, the Mantle began to repair itself. Before anything could fully breach the surface of the incandescent onyx, the damage was undone.

…For now, the enchanted armor could heal itself faster than it was being destroyed. In large part due to being augmented by both of his shadows, perhaps.

Sunny encountered another problem, though.

It was getting harder and harder to breathe… not even because the air was scalding and hot, but because there was not enough of it.

Fire fed on oxygen, after all.

Luckily, Sunny was no stranger to being deprived of it. What's more, thanks to the Blood Weave, he could get by without breathing for much longer than most Awakened… and he suspected that he would have to do just that very soon.

Hopefully, he would be able to reach the rift shortly after that.

And speaking of the rift…

He carefully opened his eyes a little and glanced into the blinding inferno beneath, trying to judge whether or not he was going to make it. For now, it seemed that he would easily pass the field of fire and enter the dark emptiness… but that was just an illusion.

Sunny had to factor in that his forward momentum was constantly growing weaker, which meant that his trajectory would become more and more vertical the longer he fell through the searing abyss.

was too hard to tell whether or not he was going

weight and lowered one hand, grabbing the hilt of the Cruel Sight. Then, he raised the silver blade to his chest, threw a cursory glance at his warped reflection, and

began to absorb the merciless light of the false stars, growing white-hot and incandescent. Sunny, however, found himself able to see

bubble of darkness left behind by the

'Almost! I'm almost there!'

touch them. No matter how hard Sunny tried, he couldn't draw in even a little

it turned out to

of flames. He only had to fly past one

right through one of the seething orbs and emerged from the other side of it, wreathed in

wasn't physical pain… it was the similar kind of pain he had experienced while using the Broken Oath,

'...shadows... my shadows!'

Underworld, and so, they had been badly damaged by the divine fire. The armor itself had caught

did the only thing that could save him now — he dismissed the onyx armor. The Mantle of the Underworld fell into countless sparks of darkness, which then disappeared,

saw the Cruel Sight crack, the silver of its blade becoming dull and tarnished. Following an instinct, he activated the

wounded shadows around himself and circulated what little shadow essence he had left through his entire

felt cool wind touch his blistering

fought through the terrible pain

him, there was a wall of

in front of him, there

reached the

***

Crap… this is so

course, they were too close

at least not

somehow, miraculously, he would turn out to be immune to it. He was technically a shadow of a

ancestor's

divine one left behind by Shadow God himself. Light

out, the

'Argh!'

surrounding stars as possible. It was as though there was a tunnel of empty darkness torn through the