Shadow Slave

1518 Ruin

Standing on the crumbling wall of the floating fortress, Sunny saw the light grow dim above Twilight. For a moment, everything was still.

And then, the entire world was suddenly drowned in white radiance, blinding him.

Stunned, he raised a hand to cover his eyes and saw a pristine star ignite in the heart of the distant city. It swelled, growing into a massive sphere of furious flame.

Everything happened in an instant.

The buildings nearest to the white star simply dissolved in its pure light, evaporating. Those further away exploded into dust and were erased from existence by an obliterating shockwave. Those behind them were flattened and melted, turning to ash from the immolating heat.

A wave of incinerating fire, taller than the towering walls of the city, spread outward at lightning speed, consuming everything in its path — buildings, trees, cobblestones, even air itself… and all the tiny human figures flooding the crumbling streets.

Behind it, the furious star rose and deformed, slowly turning into a mushroom cloud of incandescent white flame. The pillar of fire supporting it dwarfed everything, reaching toward the sky.

'W—what…'

Even driven into madness by fury, he was momentarily paralyzed by the harrowing splendor of that inconceivable sight. Twilight... Twilight was being destroyed in front of his eyes.

…That was when the invisible shockwave reached the fortress, shattering its walls and throwing him down.

The deafening roar of the explosion came next, shaking the world.

Sunny plummeted from the broken wall and hit the cold stones with a sickening sound. Bouncing off the hard surface, he rolled and then instinctively covered his head with his hands. In the next moment, a rain of stone debris fell down, pummeling him like crushing hail.

'Who… who dares…'

roar of the blast, he screamed furiously and tried to stand up. Something hit him on the head, but Sunny did not care. Hunched, he rose from the ground and peered into the dust that had enveloped everything around, searching for the massive figure

devoured by flame? So what if it seemed like the sky had been shattered and

was still going to

it so

pillar of flame had reached the heavens and collapsed on itself, torn apart by the wind. The furious light of the pure white star had dimmed and disappeared, plunging the

seven suns, turning the twilight of dawn into a

***

Twilight, ash fell from the sky like snow. In the heart of the ruined city, nothing but darkness remained. Even the air

by ash and ruins. It was slowly coalescing back into the shape of a beautiful young woman from

have a single blemish on it, and her shining hair flowed like incandescent silver, emanating a blinding white

creating a small island of light in the sea of searing darkness. Twilight

were all gone, devoured by the merciless

battled against them were

the darkness with her

she was the only one left, the indestructible reflection of the sinister mirror fiend had nowhere to go but into

***

a calm ocean. The world around her was suffused with

as if she was standing on a sea

suns shone brightly above her

looked at them

— the Terror Core — destroying itself before. But so many Defiled abominations had been consumed by

it, the seventh core was

The last core.

already passed, and Nephis was a

at the only spot of dirt and darkness in her perfectly radiant world. Out there, some distance away, a repulsive creature stood, staring at her with mirror-like