Shadow Slave

The runes Hope had used were not small, intricate, and elaborate. Instead, they were giant, spanning the whole width of the blood-soaked arena, and guided torrential floods of soul energy instead of thin streams of it to create the unimaginably powerful enchantments.

Once Sunny knew where to look, it didn't take him long to start noticing a pattern and meaning in the placement and direction of the grooves cut in the ancient stone. The problem was, their scope was too great to be perceived from the floor of the arena. He would have been able to see the entirety of the runes, perhaps, from the very top of the amphitheater.

But fighters were never allowed to leave the battlefield, unless it was to return to the dungeon.

…In the absence of an aerial view, all he could do was to try and compile the disjointed pieces of the puzzle in his mind. By now, Sunny had fought in most of the killing boxes in the arena, except for a few.

After defeating another group of Warmongers and being thrown back into the cage, he spent the entire night trying to remember each of the stages he had shed blood on, and the pattern of the grooves on their floor. It was like assembling a complicated puzzle, only instead of the actual pieces, all he had were fragmented memories of them.

Luckily, his memory had always been good. In fact, after becoming an Awakened and having the opportunity to interact with a lot of different people, many of whom were very smart and educated, Sunny realized that his ability to instantly memorize things were somewhat unnatural even among them. Before, he had just assumed that everyone could do the same.

Still, he had to have paid attention to a thing in order to remember it, which was not the case with all of the grooves — only those that had happened to appear in his way. Plus, he was also having trouble determining how the irregularly shaped killing boxes were situated in relation to each other, since that wasn't something he had thought about before.

The task of creating a perfect three-dimensional replica of the entire arena in his mind was not an easy one.

while fighting the Nightmare Creatures in the Red Colosseum. Confounded by the fact that

meant more injuries, more pain, and

the Trial of the Red Colosseum had turned out to be a

not going to end

Demon of Desire kept him going, no matter how wounded his body and how broken his spirit became. It was almost like an obsession.

wrong with his taciturn demonic partner. The young man tried to encourage the shadow creature as well as he could, but what could he say

their lives against a swarm of deadly monsters, only to be thrown back behind the iron bars, fed the raw flesh of the abominations they had just killed, and go through the whole nightmare again the next day, with no hope of ever escaping except for through death… through being killed and eaten by the

Colosseum, chained in the same vicious cycle, and doomed to eventually share the same fate as their slaves. Inside this ancient theater,

days they had spent in the colosseum, he finally managed to create a complete image of it in his head. With it came the understanding of the shapes of the giant runes that were cut in the

understanding came the ability to

the shape and position of the runes, Sunny found himself able to peer beneath the surface of the stone and see their function. The ability had always been within him, hiding in the depths of his changed eyes… he just had not known where

new knowledge, Sunny was able to perceive vast rivers of soul essence flowing beneath the arena and through its

sorcery was — the ability to guide and shape hidden energies, most often that of souls, to express one's will upon the world… the enchantments were simply

was all this soul energy

assumed that the Red Colosseum was similar to the Crimson Labyrinth, and fed on the souls of creatures