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!

A few plates on the floor were broken. If this continued, the repair bill for the dojo

that… Nephis was not exactly at her best. She had just returned to the waking world yesterday. Before that, she had been a Sleeper, which meant that she had no experience of controlling soul essence whatsoever. Let alone doing it with intricate precision and efficiency of a Master,

because Shadow Dance now allowed him to sense the movement of the

instinctual understanding of how to augment their physicality with essence, but it still took some time to get used to it, and even more to master it. However, every Ascended before Changing Star enjoyed

Ascension, controlling essence

also deprived her of a lot of things that people

was out

her hands with a deep frown, Sunny waved

to guide your soul essence. After that, you will have to spend even more time relearning how to fight with

thought for a bit, and then

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

core than him. But with all things considered, if both of them neglected using essence or augmenting themselves with their Abilities, the gap

stood opposite each other and concentrated. Each discarded their broken weapons and took new

later,

time, thing went better.

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 mastery of his Aspect

could not master the style yet, he attuned himself to its flow and cadence enough to be

less the same. Her ability to discern, predict, and control patterns of combat was not based in affinity to shadows, and was sufficiently different

the result, Sunny was able to somewhat predict what Nephis was thinking of doing, while she could predict what he had predicted her actions, and change her approach on the fly… which he would also

sure what was happening! There had to be a solution for this predicament, of course, but he had no time to come up with one

that was just half

was that Neph's essence control was so rudimentary and bad that she couldn't even prevent herself from instinctively using it. As the result, Sunny had to endure sudden outburst of speed, strength, and agility that were too chaotic to predict.