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.

course, was the Shroud of

studying the

simple tunic of fine, soft silk. He had expected it 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 with silver thread.

the same fabric, with a soft

shoes only looked

and the shoes were made of was light and soft, but 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 fabric no matter how hard

burn, get 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

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 that, to some extent, but it

did not make any noise and was extremely light, not constraining

as well as the reason why he felt so invigorated despite the

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 he felt very refreshed

regenerated. That was an awfully pleasant and valuable benefit, especially here

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

enchantment did not exactly make him smarter or more insightful, but it did make his mind more... productive. It was as though there were several compartments within his head now, each capable of running a separate task concurrently — as long as it was not

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 Graceless Dusk, he had discovered that most

his mind and multitask was boosted even further by the [Blessing of

of that was

a much faster rate, Sunny had finally been able to crack the case and turn the devil's needle into