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...'

passages were too narrow for the Rhino to pass, anyway. And he was not going to abandon

of attention, though. As he studied the entrances and the darkness that shrouded them, a small hint of suspicion appeared in

remaining idle... even if it might have looked

suite. He did glance at the screens from time to time, but rarely. Mostly, he just moved his fingers in a

stay quiet anymore and asked in

Are you trying to cast

deep unease and fear

Sunny smiled.

to do. i am an amateur sorcerer,

The young woman scoffed.

tell me. I guess you finally lost

could not see

enough to not cut off any of his fingers in the process, like he had in the Red Colosseum. There was not even a single cut on them. However, creating strings of shadow essence. - not to mention arranging them into an actual weave - required a lot of time, concentration, and, most of

he had not been able to practice weaving a lot, if at all, after disembarking in Antarctica. The Chain of

things were

turn an object into a Memory. He needed

the convoy like a plague, he produced Weaver's Needle from the Covetous Coffer, as well as one of the

would have worked, but Sunny only had

Using it to create the basic weaves, he began the process of turning it

especially 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

would be simply called [???]

end, he tiredly put the needle down and let out a

break Sunny's concentration before, but now