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

down, studying

of a rich and beautiful black color, with intricate patterns embroidered along its collar, hem, and sleeve edges with

at the waist by an unadorned cord of 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 wilderness. Sunny enjoyed the fact that it allowed him to move around without

only

was light and soft, but more durable than tempered steel. Sunny had tested how impervious it

wet, dissolve in acid, or suffer damage from any other 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 not

tunic itself left his forearms, shins, head, and neck exposed, while the soft shoes only covered his feet and ankles. Worse than that, neither were rigid — 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

make any noise and was extremely light, not constraining his movements at all. More importantly, the other benefits of the Transcendent

boon, as well as the reason why

and the [Blessing of Spirit] made him tire much slower, both mentally and physically, 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 couple of hours at best, and yet

of Soul], meanwhile, boosted the rate at which his essence regenerated. That was an awfully pleasant and valuable benefit, especially here in

of Mind]... that one was

It was as though there were several compartments within his head now, each

been doing more or less the same thing for a long time, in order to control his shadows. lie was long used to perceiving and comprehending the world from several different viewpoints, which all but required him to sort of split his consciousness into several streams... however, after doing some research due to the

deviant ability to partition his mind and

was extremely useful when

devil's needle into a Memory. He was not sure that