Shadow Slave

Sunny and Nephis stood opposite each other, holding training swords. Both felt more than a little disturbed by how much this scene resembled their bitter confrontation at the very top of the Crimson Spire.

Of course, today, the situation was completely different. They were just going for a friendly spar, not a battle to the death. There were no stakes in this training fight, no emotional investment… no complicated mixture of regret, fury, and resentment.

…So why did Sunny feel as though he had to prove something?

Forcing himself to relax, he glanced at Nephis and attacked. Their swords met with a deafening clangor.

A few seconds later, Sunny jumped away and shouted:

"Stop! Stop! Stop!"

Changing Star froze while he looked around, breathing heavily.

Sunny gritted his teeth and spat a muffled curse.

"Damnation…"

His idea to have a spar might not have been the wisest one he ever had. Yes, the underground dojo was designed specifically to allow Awakened to train their powers. It was isolated, reinforced, and heavily armored, able to transform into an impregnable bunker in case a Gate opened nearby and a tide of Nightmare Creatures flooded the district.

The interior was furnished with heavy plates of armor-grade ceramic alloy and supplied with training equipment meant to withstand the rigors of Awakened power.

…However, Sunny and Nephis weren't Awakened anymore! They were full-fledged Masters, and abnormal ones at that!

was shattered. A few plates on the floor were broken. If this continued, the repair

waking world yesterday. Before that, she had been a Sleeper, which meant that she had no

unrestrained the flow of her essence was, because Shadow Dance now allowed him to

every Master had an instinctual understanding of how to augment their physicality with essence, but it still took some time to get used to it, and even

the time Awakened reached Ascension, controlling essence was as natural

might have been miraculous, but it also deprived her of a lot of things that people who did not break

was out of

stared at the broken sword in her hands with a deep frown, Sunny waved a hand in the

have to spend even more time relearning how to fight with its help. I had years of

for a

let's try this again, but without using any essence at all. It

both of them neglected using essence or augmenting themselves with their Abilities, the gap in physical prowess

concentrated. Each discarded

later,

thing went better. However… not by

their battle techniques. Due to Shadow Dance and his familiarity with Nephis, it didn't take Sunny long to sense the core of her style. It had changed a lot and matured over the past two years, but so did his

flow and cadence enough to be able to predict some of Neph's moves

patterns of combat was not based in affinity to shadows, and was sufficiently different from it… but achieved a

was thinking of doing, while she could predict what he had predicted her actions,

was not even entirely sure what was happening! There had to be a solution for this

was just half of the

had to endure sudden outburst of speed, strength, and agility