Shadow Slave

The skull of Sunny's battered Shell had cracked, and the upper part of it had fused with the ice. That part was torn off when he pushed what remained of his body into the fractured ice, spilling shadows like a tide of black blood.

But his jaws were still intact.

With most of his limbs gone and his colossal body swiftly turning into ice, Sunny let out a frenzied growl as he opened his skeletal maw and bit down on the small silhouette encased in the heart of the Winter Beast's appalling vessel.

Slicing it in half.

A moment later, his teeth exploded into a rain of ice. His mutilated Shell was far too damaged, and would have already crumbled if it had not been fused into ice, becoming a part of it.

His soul was cold, cold… cold enough that even the terrible pain ravaging it had been swallowed by a peaceful numbness. That peace was a herald of death.

But none of it mattered.

Because the moment Sunny destroyed the source of the Winter Beast, the abominable sculpture of Ice that served as its body shuddered.

And then, it started to crack.

He heard a gleeful laughter ring in his mind, breaking through the haze of stillness that was consuming it. Glee, triumph, vindication, pain, sorrow, guilt, hatred… countless emotions were fused into that laugh, creating an eerily disturbing mixture.

Sunny recognized the laughter as his own.

Or was it a scream?

He was laughing… because the Winter Beast was dead. There was no Nightmare Spell to celebrate his Idll, but Sunny had sensed a trickle of shadow fragments entering his soul.

The harrowing titan, Winter Beast, the bane of the Antarctic Center and the executioner of Falcon Scott, the abominable horror that had stolen the lives of Sunny's soldiers and taught him how unbearably crushing a defeat can be, was gone.

Slain by his own hand, no less.

Vengeance… was so sweet.

also so indescribably bitter, because it carried the memories of what it was exactly that

«Ah…»

of a frozen Shell, Sunny cut

the darkness, he

this is for

Professor Obel, Sergeant Gere, and Lieutenant Carin. For numerous others who

had to live with the scars that the Winter Beast

«Now… let's finish this!»

titan was dead, but the ordeal was not quite over yet. Sunny was still trapped within the Icy tomb of the Winter Beast's vessel, and the world was

Sunny dismissed the dark giant. However, the broken colossus did not dissolve into shadows… eerily enough, those parts of it that had been turned to ice by the

to do was create a sphere of empty darkness around himself, where the cold had not yet reached. He hesitated for a split second, then summoned more shadows

above it like a hideous masterpiece of sinister art. The azure flowers were wilting. A few moments later, they

more, and the cracks covering the carcass of the dreadful titan widened, and then exploded outward when two black

and able to use Shadow Step again, he instantly teleported some

but the Onyx Mantle was truly in tatters. It was going to take some time for his armor to restore itself… so, for now, Sunny was left standing there in nothing but the rags of his military bodysuit. No different from how he had been when he returned to

a

that supported it was gone, and

the lava that had flown from Erebus had been cooled by the blizzard, solidifying

if not for the ash, he could have looked up and seen a fragment of the

as before. He waited for a bit, ignoring the sweltering heat and holding his breath in the suffocating

front of him, at some distance… the corpse of the Winter Beast was

shattering, unable to withstand its own weight anymore, and melting. The desiccated corpses of the Nightmare Creatures that had been encased in it caught flame and were scattered by the

it was

an indescribable feeling, Sunny slowly approached the place where the

that remained… was a scattering of shimmering soul shards, the fragmented remains of his frozen Shell, and a

he had bitten in half anywhere in sight. It must have turned to ash like the rest of the

— was not melting, but neither was it radiating a sense of fatal cold. That cold was there, still,

of the obsidian lake, the mystical ice looked almost like frosty