Shadow Slave

Caster stared at him for a long time, then suddenly laughed. Even Cassie giggled, entertained by Sunny's earnest delivery.

Shaking his head, the handsome young man smiled and said:

"I see your sense of humor did not change. Good, that is good. Few people manage to preserve it here."

Sunny blinked a couple of times and said, pretending to be offended:

"What do you mean, sense of humor? It's the honest truth."

He received another bout of laughter instead of an answer.

'...There was food, safety, and laughter,' he thought suddenly, remembering how Cassie had described the Bright Castle after dreaming of it for the first time.

She had also seen Sunny leading her through its gates. Her prophetic visions were turning out to be frighteningly accurate.

'Makes you wonder about that other vision she saw…'

Not allowing himself to become distracted, Sunny chased away the ominous feeling and hid a smile. Then, with a shrug, he scoffed.

"Well, don't believe me if you don't want to. That was just one of my many adventures, anyway. Although the other ones were, admittedly, less remarkable — you know, the usual stuff: slaying dozens of awakened creatures, being resurrected from the doors of death by a beautiful princess, summoning ancient horrors from the depths of the cursed sea, outsmarting ancient fiends to escape from their clutches, sailing through the abyss on a boat made of demon bones, fighting gargantuan leviathans underwater, and so forth. Mundane crap like that."

As he was talking, Cassie gradually stopped laughing and turned to him with a somewhat startled expression on her face. It seemed as though it was only now, with the harrowing journey already behind them, that she had finally realized how outlandish it all actually was.

Put together, the facts of their bloody struggle to survive sounded like something out of a fairy tale. But they both knew that all of that had actually happened.

It had happened to them.

Caster chuckled.

"Wow. Compared to you, Sunny, my own story sounds kind of lame. I just entered the Dream Realm near the city wall and spent a few days running away from a bunch of terrifying monsters, then stumbled on a hunting party from the Castle, and that's pretty much it."

He sighed.

"By the way, when did you guys arrive? I'm sure I haven't seen you around before."

There was no reason to lie, and Sunny couldn't anyway. Looking longingly at his monster stew, which was slowly growing cold, he sighed and said:

"We reached the Dark City two days ago, and entered the castle yesterday at dusk."

The handsome Legacy stared at him, then blinked a couple of times:

"Wait… wait… what do you mean? Did you guys really spend two months in the Labyrinth?"

'Uh-oh.'

Finally, the moment he had been wary of came. Sunny really didn't want for anyone to think that he was some kind of a powerful figure. First of all, there was no better advantage than being underestimated by the enemy. Secondly, he still had to hide the fact that Changing Star had not been the only one to receive a True Name in the First Nightmare.

Luckily, he had long thought of an exceptionally convincing excuse.

…When in trouble, blame everything on Nephis.

Laughing inwardly, Sunny pretended to shiver and sighed.

"Yeah. I don't even want to think about it. That place… it's pure hell. Honestly, if it wasn't for Changing Star, both of us would have been long dead."

She wouldn't have survived without his help, too, but Caster didn't need to know that.

Sunny was pretty sure that mentioning Neph's name anywhere near the names of two losers like Cassie and him were believed to be would make anyone think that she had single-handedly carried the both of them to safety on her back.

As it turns out, he was right.

As soon as he mentioned Nephis, something changed on Caster's face. With a strange look in his eyes, the handsome man leaned forward a little and asked in a deceptively calm tone:

"Changing… Lady Nephis is alive? She is here?"

He had already forgotten all about how unlikely it was for someone like Sunny to survive a long journey through the deadly nightmare of the Labyrinth.

Sunny narrowed his eyes slightly. Caster's reaction was a little bit more intense than he had anticipated. It was on the border of being weird.

But then again, the tall and handsome Legacy had seemed to be strangely enamored with Nephis even back at the Academy.

'You bastard!'

Enraged for some unknown reason, Sunny gritted his teeth and said:

"Yeah. She's around."

Turning her head slightly in his direction, Cassie hesitated for a moment, and then added:

"We… we only had two soul shards when we came to the castle. So she is staying in the outer settlement. For now."

Caster leaned back, a hint of disappointment appearing on his face for a fraction of a second. Then, he inhaled deeply and said:

"I see. I see."

Sunny took a sip of his tea and asked:

"Why are you so interested in Nephis all of a sudden?"

The handsome young man looked at him with surprise.

"What? Oh. I'm… I'm just glad to know that more of us survived."

Then, he sighed and shook his head:

"From what I was able to learn, there were no more than seven Sleepers sent to the Forgotten Shore by the Spell this year. Up until today, I thought that I was the only one to survive. It's good… it's good to know that I was wrong."

Caster's face grew solemn.

"If Lady Nephis was with you, that explains how you have managed to reach the Bright Castle alive. But the other three… I'm afraid that they are long dead. May their souls rest in peace."

Sunny and Cassie lowered their heads, coming to terms with this new information. It was true that they had not been treated well by the rest of the Sleepers in the Academy. Still, it was also somewhat heartbreaking to know that several of the kids they had known, even if it was just for a short amount of time, were now gone, killed by the vicious crucible of the Dream Realm.

The cruel and ruthless Nightmare Spell had taken its first victims.

Who would be next?

Without having to look at each other, they quietly repeated Caster's words:

"...May their souls rest in peace."