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.

was the actual composition of his new and strange shadow

- although the jet-black Sunny looked and acted like Sunny, he was still

some underlying principles of how a corporeal creature was supposed to be, but the similarity was shallow. He did not have a beating heart, or any internal organs, for that matter. And although there was a rough structure to his form, with something similar to bones being connected to something similar muscles, there was no blood running through his

were no veins, either. At best, there were

it all

Hell if Sunny knew.

...It did work, though.

he glanced at the two shadows that were hiding in the corners of the

you

It stared at him for a while, then raised a hand, as if wanting to say something. Eventually,

shadow, in an uncharacteristic display of emotions, scratched the back of

smiled,

"Yeah..."

malleable than his human body. It could change its shape at will... of course, he needed to possess an excellent

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

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 be able to make more changes like that on

was almost as resilient as his actual body, in the end, it still

in this state, which left Sunny vulnerable. Interestingly enough, the Marble

because the effects of the [Stalwart] trait were being applied to

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 from soul attacks that

every attack against

...Which was not ideal.

a tendency to be wounded a lot, and if each wound

that really won't

physical shadow form with an onyx carapace and