Shadow Slave

Time was moving very slowly…

No, it was Sunny who was moving too fast. It almost felt as if the world had frozen.

The rain was suspended in the air, the fountains of mud had grown still, the distant figures of dying Awakened were like grotesque statues.

In this nearly static world, only two things seemed unbound by paralysis — the monstrous Saint in front of him, who was no slower than Sunny himself, and a bolt of lightning that was crawling across the sky, extending toward the ground as it forked and illuminated the bloody battlefield.

'Faster!'

Suddenly, a deafening roar exploded from Dire Fang's mouth, strangely distorted and haunting. It would have hit Sunny like a wall…

But he was prepared.

The [Silenced] enchantment of the emerald bone flute activated, creating a dome of absolute silence around him. Sunny passed through the sorcerous roar without being struck by its crushing power… however, behind him, Nephis had to endure its full weight without the protection of her flames.

Stripped of their augmentation, she couldn't resist it like she had before.

Erasing the image of her falling figure from his mind, Sunny concentrated on the task.

If anything, the importance of success had only become more stark now that his partner was debilitated. If he failed, both of them were going to die.

But he had already rejected the possibility of failure.

He was going to win. He was going to do what he promised to do. He was going to kill a damned Saint!

At that moment, Dire Fang was more than a chance adversary to Sunny. He was the embodiment of everything Sunny wanted to destroy — the rotten authority of the great clans, the vile curse of the Chain of Nightmares, the torturous brand of powerlessness that he bore on his soul ever since Falcon Scott.

inescapable shackles

enemy, an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, an enemy that was nearly impossible

But…

did manage

the other impossible obstacles that pressed him into the ground,

in the Antarctic Center, and now, because of Mordret and his cursed schemes, he was on the verge of

all with one strike — not only because Nephis was weakened and vulnerable right now, but also because of the nature of the Aspect powers Dire Fang

augmented by rage and pain. If Sunny delivered him a serious wound but failed to make it fatal, then that augmentation would only explode further, turning his enemy into a truly

had one

Fang's Aspect, deciphered the battle style of the

that it

ready to tear Sunny apart, and his fangs were ready to sink into Sunny's flesh.

But that was alright.

a master of killing things that were larger and

Shadow Dance, the

when Sunny's technique was as formless

do was try and predict how his enemy would act based on his formidable experience of participating in countless battles. However,

the Saint had never fought a shadow spawn before. He was still judging Sunny

considered himself a human, he was also

of a Shadow Dance practitioner to bend his body in an extreme and almost unnatural way. At the same time, he used the physical characteristics of his fiendish

a result, the Saint's claws tore through the raindrops above

growl as he used all his prodigious

and skilled to allow the unexpected attack to

second before Sunny could bring his

pushed forward, catching