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.

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

«Ah…»

Shell, Sunny cut off his senses for

the

this

Gere, and Lieutenant

with the scars that the Winter

«Now… let's finish this!»

Sunny was still trapped within the Icy tomb of

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

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

hideous masterpiece of sinister art. The azure flowers were wilting. A few moments later, they caught aflame and turned to ash, disappearing into the

cracks covering the carcass of the dreadful titan widened, and then exploded outward when two black hands tore through the ice from the inside, Sunny crawled out of the crumbling titan and allowed his second Shell to

body of the Winter Beast and able to use Shadow Step again, he instantly teleported some distance away,

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

a deep

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

Erebus had been cooled by the blizzard, solidifying into glass and stone. That said,

ash, he could have looked up and seen a fragment of the bleak sky even from these

not as much as before. He waited for a bit, ignoring the sweltering heat and holding his breath in the

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

gone. The pale ice was shattering, unable to withstand its own weight anymore, and melting. The desiccated corpses

was all

an indescribable feeling, Sunny slowly approached

that remained… was a scattering of shimmering soul shards,

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

remaining ice — 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 to be contained within the ice instead of spreading outward like a

the flaming darkness of the obsidian lake, the mystical