Shadow Slave

Sunny remained motionless for a while, then chuckled.

"No... that's crazy! It would never work."

Then, he stared at the wall some more.

...Would it?

'No way.'

The thought that had crept into his mind while he was thinking about the limitations of the Shadow Shell was so out there that it seemed utterly ridiculous. But the more he thought about it... the fewer reasons to discard it he saw.

'No, that's... that's a bit too strange, even for me.'

And yet, he could not find a logical reason for why it wouldn't be true.

Sunny hesitated for a while longer, then furtively looked around.

Then, he cleared his throat, stood up, and left the office.

If he wanted to test this bizarre theory, he needed to do it somewhere more private.

He left the Valor compound and made his way to the nearby dormitory, where most of the government staff still remaining within the siege capital lived. There, he entered his living quarters - which were a bit more spacious and had better amenities than that of both mundane and Awakened government workers - and locked the door behind him.

Being an Ascended had its perks.

to stand watch - two outside the apartment, two within - and stood there for a few minutes, mentally going over what he was about to

to be dangerous,

The principle was simple.

steps of Shadow Dance to date. The essence of his battle art was shapelessness and formlessness - it allowed him to shadow an enemy, copying the very essence of their combat technique. After doing so, he could predict their movements, the flow of their battle intent,

allowed him to shadow simpler battle styles. He had achieved

faster. It also gave him a glimpse of an intuitive understanding of the

techniques in the Dreamscape, which culminated during his first duel with Morgan.

was the hardest one yet. Sunny had started his journey toward mastery of it by expanding his horizons and starting to shadow not only humans, but also Nightmare Creatures. In the bloody arena of the Red Colosseum, he had submerged himself

accept the formless nature of the shadows and let go of their actual self - which, of course, posed the risk of losing it forever. Sunny had made that dangerous breakthrough after being

he had pulled the dissipating pieces of his true self back together by using his True Name. It served as an anchor for what

allowed him to actually perceive the flow of essence through their bodies as opposed to just feeling it intuitively, and even gave him the ability to sometimes predict

The fourth step...

he had to invent all on his own,

Shadow Dance went far beyond battle techniques... and would be much, much harder to conceive and master for

Dance, he had achieved progress in other aspects of

he had created by bringing together various facets of his skills, Attributes, and

most important - without deep comprehension of the

was a

possessed a human body. No matter how much training he had put into

if... he added another

Shadow Shell existed as a combination of his Dormant Ability, Shadow Control, his Ascended Ability, Shadow Manifestation,

Dance - was missing from

that, perhaps, was the reason for

let's

he might just discover a direction that would eventually lead him to the next step of