Shadow Slave

'I should have known that something like that would happen...'

During one of his conversations with Professor Obel, Sunny had learned of a thing called Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong... he did not know who Murphy was and why that person had been in a position to establish world-governing laws, but their veracity was hard to dispute

...Perhaps that Murphy had been a bit of a tenacious cockroach himself, to come up with such an undeniable rule.

In any case, that was exactly what had happened. Everything had gone wrong. Sunny had hoped to receive information and resources through the Dream Realm, but now, that hope was destroyed. The strange nature of the endless tunnel prevented Awakened from traveling across worlds.

He had not even known that something like that was possible.

'Damnation.'

Instructing the members of the cohort to keep the news to themselves, Sunny hesitated for a bit, and then gave the convoy an order to break camp. They had to continue moving forward.

At that point, he did not expect to reach the exit... however, Sunny still needed information. The tunnel was not looping on itself, as yesterday's experiments had proved, so there had to be some other type of magic involved. IIe suspected that it was spatial in nature, but had to observe more to come to a reliable conclusion.

The Rhino rolled forward, and the civilian transports followed. Once again, they waded through the silent darkness, cutting it with beams of light. Stone walls flew by, and since their surface always looked the same, it was easy to imagine that the convoy was not moving at all, and was instead stuck in place, cursed to repeat the same moment in time over and over again.

The only thing that broke the monotony were the foreboding entrances to the side passages that occasionally appeared from either left or right.

...Sunny knew that the most logical solution would be to try and explore them instead of stubbornly trying to reach the exit of the main tunnel. However, he felt reluctant to do so, at least for now. it was as though everything was forcing him to make that decision... which was exactly what sent his paranoia into overdrive.

'It's almost like something is trying to lure. us deeper underground... curse it...'

Rhino to pass, anyway. And

did pay the side passages a lot of attention, though. As he studied the entrances and the darkness that shrouded them, a small

even if it might have looked like that to the rest of

the command suite. He did glance at the screens from time to time, but rarely. Mostly, he just

Beth couldn't stay quiet

Earth are you doing? Are you trying to cast a magic spell, or

was deep unease and fear hidden behind that annoyance,

Sunny smiled.

am trying to do. i am an

The young woman scoffed.

me. I guess you

Although she could not see them, he was actually weaving strings of essence between

cut on them. However, creating strings

had not been able to practice weaving a lot, if at all, after disembarking in Antarctica. The Chain of Nightmare was too dire and hectic, and demanded too much

things were

enough strings to turn an object into a Memory. He needed a bit more for what he wanted to achieve, though,

though darkness, when people turned quiet and fear spread through the convoy like a plague, he produced Weaver's Needle from the Covetous Coffer, as well as one

would have worked, but Sunny only had these at

create the basic weaves, he began the process of turning it into a Memory. Doing so was relatively easy for him, since he had

thorny part of the process. Sunny had learned how to name Memories through their weave at some point, but each rune took time and additional strings to create. Learning how to weave runes had not been easy, either, and had required both a good understanding of weaves and a deep knowledge of the runic

in which case the Memory would be simply called [???] by the Spell. But Sunny was going for something

down and let out a shaky breath. Both Professor Obel and Beth were

not wanted to break Sunny's concentration before, but now he