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 of

enemy. A terrifying enemy, an overwhelmingly powerful enemy,

But…

Sunny somehow did manage to defeat

other impossible obstacles

and his cursed schemes, he was on the verge of losing here in East Antarctica, as well. And so, he was willing to bet everything

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

Sunny delivered him a serious wound but

had

of Dire Fang's Aspect, deciphered the battle style of the Transcendent monster, and

that it would

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

But that was alright.

was a master of killing

while he had absorbed the essence of Dire Fang's battle style into Shadow Dance,

when Sunny's technique was as formless and shapeless as

act based on his formidable experience of participating

shadow spawn before. He

himself a human, he was also

used the inherent flexibility 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

tore through the raindrops above his head, while his momentum remained the

and let out a bestial growl as he used all his prodigious

was too fast and skilled to allow the unexpected attack to reach its

split second before Sunny could bring his sword down on the

pushed forward, catching him in the