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.

the memories of what

«Ah…»

depths of a frozen Shell, Sunny cut off his

alone in the darkness, he

is… this is

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

who had to live with the scars that

«Now… let's finish this!»

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 still quaking all around

that the spreading cold would reach the very depths of the frozen Shell and swallow his soul, Sunny dismissed the dark giant. However, the broken colossus did not

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 from the Lantern and

of the Winter Beast was still half-buried in obsidian, towering above it like a hideous masterpiece of sinister art. The azure flowers

then exploded outward when two black hands tore through the ice from the inside, Sunny

use Shadow Step again, he instantly teleported some

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

a deep

outside, far away, the terrible snowstorm was dying down. The profane power that supported it was gone, and so, it was going to disappear without a trace before too

as well. Most of the lava that had flown from Erebus had been cooled by the blizzard, solidifying into glass and stone. That said, the volcano had been terribly damaged, an entire side

could have looked up and seen a fragment of the bleak sky

as before. He waited for a bit, ignoring the

some distance… the corpse

azure flowers were gone. The pale ice was shattering, unable to withstand its own weight anymore, and melting. The

was

Sunny slowly approached the place where the Winter Beast

enemy was gone, and all that remained… was a scattering of shimmering soul shards, the fragmented remains of his frozen Shell, and a barrow of pale

bitten in half anywhere in sight. It must have turned to ash like

the titan's body once — was not melting, but neither was it radiating a sense of fatal cold. That cold was there, still,

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