Shadow Slave

A matte, jet-black version of Sunny was standing in the middle of the room. He did not move for a while, frozen like a statue, then raised his hands slightly and looked at them with a strange expression.

His fingers moved.

'Well, that's...'

The jet-black Sunny scratched the back of his head, then halted for a moment and tentatively touched his hair. The mere fact that he had hair was a surprise.

'...that's certainly something.'

He felt extremely strange.

Sunny was fundamentally a human. When using Shadow Step, he could assume the form of an incorporeal shadow, then turn himself back to his original form. That was not what he had done today, however.

Today, he had become a shadow, and then manifested himself into a corporeal form without turning back into a human. So, what he was right now was... was...

'I... uh... I'll be damned if I know what I am right now.'

A human inhabiting a human-shaped vessel made of shadows? A shadow brazenly wandering the human world in the form of a person? Or something else entirely?

Descriptions aside, his current state was a curious one.

Because of how faithful the recreation was to the original, Sunny felt more or less like himself. His range of motion, strength, and agility remained the same. His shadow form was Ascended, just like his human body, so it was just as powerful and resilient.

There were differences too, of course.

The most obvious one was the change in his perception. His shadow sense seemed to have become sharper, while his vision was now less pronounced. He couldn't see colors, either - just like in the Second Nightmare, when inhabiting the shadowspawn. This was familiar territory for him.

of his

exact one. It couldn't be - although the jet-black Sunny looked and acted like Sunny, he was still a manifested shadow. As such,

beating heart, or any internal organs, for that matter. And

no veins, either. At best, there were

did it

Hell if Sunny knew.

...It did work, though.

that were hiding in the corners of the

do you

for a while, then raised a hand, as

display of emotions, scratched the back of

smiled, revealing

"Yeah..."

was much more malleable than his human body. It could change its shape at will... of course, he needed

version of himself - that, however, required some practice to master, since such a fundamental change affected a lot of things. He could become larger, too, although there

add two more to his existing ones with ease. The same went for claws, horns, a tail... in the future, as his knowledge of various forms and shapes grew, he would

second discovery was that while the corporeal shadow form was almost as resilient as

simple - the Weaves. Neither Blood Weave nor Bone Weave persisted in this state, which left Sunny vulnerable. Interestingly enough, the Marble Shell still had an

of the [Stalwart] trait were being applied to him

innately connected to souls, to the extent that when Sunny was damaged in the form of a shadow, or one of his shadows was damaged, his soul would be damaged too. Therefore, the corporeal shadow form received the benefits of both the extremely high degree of physical protection and the high degree of protection

attack against it

...Which was not ideal.

and if each wound was transferred directly to his soul,

really

surround the physical shadow form with an onyx carapace and make it much less prone to being