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.

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

«Ah…»

in the depths of a frozen Shell, Sunny cut off

alone in the darkness,

is… this is for

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

had to live with the scars that the Winter Beast had

«Now… let's finish this!»

still trapped within the Icy tomb of the Winter Beast's vessel, and the world was still

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

around himself, where the cold had not yet reached. He hesitated for a split second,

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

the dreadful titan widened, and then exploded outward when two black hands tore through

again, he instantly teleported some distance away, stepping on

damage to a Shell was not transferred to the body, but the Onyx Mantle was truly in tatters. It was going to take some time for his armor to restore

a

down. The profane power that supported it was gone, and

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 of it having collapsed to reveal the fiery caverns

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

a bit, ignoring the sweltering heat and holding his breath in

distance… the corpse of the

flowers were gone. The pale ice was shattering, unable to withstand its own weight anymore, and melting. The desiccated corpses of the Nightmare Creatures that

was all

feeling, Sunny slowly approached the

enemy was gone, and all that remained… was a scattering of shimmering soul shards, the fragmented

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

— what had been the innermost core of the titan's body once — was not melting, but neither was it radiating a sense of fatal cold. That cold was there, still, but now, it seemed

flaming darkness of the obsidian lake, the mystical ice