Shadow Slave

After their conversation under that full moon, Noctis had secluded himself in his residence for a couple of weeks. Sunny tried to talk with the eccentric sorcerer a few times, but the silent Sailor Dolls refused to open the door and just stared at him with their crude wooden faces.

There was, of course, the option of simply using Shadow Step to get inside… but, somehow, Sunny suspected that intruding upon the immortal Transcendent would not have been the best idea. There were real souls trapped inside these Sailor Dolls, after all.

In the end, he and the other members of the cohort had no choice but to follow the advice Noctis gave him — to rest and prepare for what was about to come. Luckily, there were a lot of preparations they had to do.

While all four had trained themselves extensively before entering the Nightmare, many things happened since then. There were a lot of lessons they had learned in these three terrible months, most of them bringing the four Awakened to the very door of death. Now that they had time, they could go over everything they had learned, revisit it, and truly absorb it into their bones, connecting the new knowledge and skills to their foundation in a solid manner.

For Sunny, that meant several things.

The first one was Shadow Dance. He had found himself in a strange situation, having made the recent breakthrough inside of a nightmare... that he did not really remember.

Sunny could guess that mastering the third step of his battle style was tied to the fact that he had lived through countless nightmares and lost himself in them, becoming truly shapeless and formless… forgetting himself and turning into other people completely.

That observation was in line with how he had initially made progress to the third step of Shadow Step, back in the arena of the Red Colosseum, where he shadowed numerous Nightmare Creatures. Back then, he had almost lost himself, as well, but stopped at the last moment, fearing that he would not be able to come back.

nightmares had made that frightening step for him, and so, he had approached the very edge of a breakthrough. The final piece of the puzzle had been trying to shadow the epitome of

not only the movements and behavior of his enemies, but also intricately sense the flow of essence through their bodies, as well as — almost, but not quite —

in this miraculous ability, one that he didn't know how to solve. For the first time since Sunny had created Shadow Dance, the elusive battle art was starting to seem… dangerous. Not only for his enemies, but also for

of being able to kill something if he ran the risk of losing himself and

dragon, one

would anyone want to achieve such a victory, if earning it meant ceasing to be themselves and becoming the very thing

now, he didn't have a solution, and that made him more than a little bit nervous. So, Sunny

days practicing archery with Kai. Sunny quickly realized that he would never be as talented of an archer as his friend was, but that did not mean that he could not achieve great results. In fact, his aim and skill with the bow were

there was a question of distributing the tools the cohort possessed in the most efficient manner, so Sunny reluctantly tried to lend Morgan's Warbow to Kai. It was for naught, though — because of the [Unbending] enchantment of the bow, his friend was simply not strong enough to draw

to copy

had hit a bottleneck in his understanding of how spellweaves were supposed to work, and was in need of

not in a

and most time-consuming, part of his preparations… collecting shadow fragments to form his fourth core. Leaving the Sanctuary, he would travel to nearby islands in search of Nightmare Creatures to hunt, and killed those he could find and

from becoming a Devil. The number seemed so small, but at the same time

the Kingdom of Hope as there had been on the Chained Isles in the future, especially not that close to the stronghold of one of the