Shadow Slave

1025 The Fall of Falcon Scott (43)

Sunny followed the network of underground tunnels to reach the barracks, and then emerged from them near where the Rhino was parked. Breathing in the cold air, he spent a moment to enjoy the lack of desire to cough — the strange trauma he had received after touching the Nightmare Gate was all but gone now — and walked forward through the darkness.

Snow was crunching under his feet.

‘Weird. Is this a good sign, or a bad sign?‘

The street illumination in the city often went awry because of the numerous Gates outside and within the wall. Usually, the army technicians and civilian personnel would fix and replace the damaged components promptly, but this section was barely lit. No one seemed to have cleaned the snow in a while, either.

Had the state of the city deteriorated to the point where no one bothered with these things anymore, or was it simply the result of so many people having already been evacuated? By now, only about a third of the initial two hundred million remained trapped in Falcon Scott. Maybe the person assigned to maintain this small corner of the city was already safely across the strait, with no one to replace them. Perhaps it was both.

Glancing at the dark sky, Sunny rubbed his face and walked toward the Rhino.

The last few days had been... hectic.

By all accounts, he should have been dead tired and on the verge of collapsing from sleep deprivation. However, Sunny felt fine... in fact, he felt rather great. His body was full of vigor and vitality, while his mind was fresh and focused.

was the Shroud of

glanced down, studying

to be white, but to his surprise, the tonic turned out to be of a rich and beautiful black color, with intricate patterns embroidered along its collar, hem, and sleeve edges

black silk, and came with a pair of dainty shoes made of the same fabric, with a soft sole that was more suited for a well-tended garden than

only

more durable than tempered steel. Sunny had tested how impervious it was, exactly, and was surprised to find out that the Cruel Sight could not pierce the thin

elemental attacks he had at his disposal. Only the Sin of Solace managed to cut the black silk, and even then with a lot of trouble. ...Which was

while the black silk was very hard to pierce, it did nothing to stop blunt attacks and concussive trauma. The Marble Shell could deal with that, to some extent,

care. The Graceless Dusk did not make any noise and was extremely light, not constraining his movements at all. More importantly, the other benefits of the Transcendent garment far outweigh its

reason why

while the time he needed to recover from fatigue was drastically cut. In the days after the battle with the Devouring Cloud, Sunny had only slept for a

his essence regenerated. That was

[Blessing of Mind]... that one was the strangest, but also the

were several compartments within his head now, each capable of running a separate task concurrently — as long as it was

comprehending the world from several different viewpoints, which all but required him to sort of split

ability to partition his mind and multitask was boosted even further by the [Blessing

say, all of that was extremely useful when

the case and turn the devil's needle into a Memory. He was not sure that he would have been able to achieve quite the same result without