Sunny let his shadow sense expand, casting his perception down toward the colossal carapace.
He was trying to gauge the true scale of the creature, but as he studied the craggy slopes and jagged ridges of the island-beast, his brow furrowed in deep, cold confusion.
The black rock was not basalt.
It was not granite, nor was it volcanic stone.
‘Wait…’
Sunny narrowed his eyes, enhancing his vision with the power of his shadows.
The dark, weathered slopes of the shell were marrred by vast, sweeping swathes of soot.
The thick patches of green moss he had seen from afar were not living flora—they were petrified, calcified ash, crumbling under the weight of the wind.
The towering outcroppings of tarnished silver were melted, warped, and twisted into grotesque, frozen waves, as if subjected to a heat so blindingly intense that solid metal had turned to liquid in a fraction of a second.
The entire shell was burned.
It was an horrifying realization.
The carapace of a Great Monster was almost completely indestructible, hardened by centuries of Corruption and reinforced by thick, soul-infused armor.
Yet something had scorched this creature’s back so thoroughly that the stone itself had fused into glass, leaving a scar kilometers wide across its ancient shell.
What kind of power could burn a Great Monster?
A Supreme?
A Sacred terror?
Or…
something else?
Before Sunny could process the terrifying implications, his shadow sense brushed against something small amidst the vast landscape of scorched stone.
In a shallow, crater-like basin near the apex of the shell, hidden behind a spire of melted bone and charred rock, two figures were standing.
Sunny’s breath caught in his throat.
‘Humans?’
He concentrated, focusing every thread of his perception on that tiny basin.
One of the figures was lying flat on the scorched ground, motionless and frail against the dark stone.
But surrounding that body was a faint, incandescent halo—a flickering, stubborn aura of pristine white fire.
The flames purred with a familiar, terrifying purity, burning against the ambient corruption of the Great River like a solitary star in a pitch-black sky.
‘Nephis…’
It was her.
There was no mistaking that blinding, radiant flame.
But she was down, her body still and enveloped in her own defensive fire.
Standing directly over her was a second figure.
It was a tall, imposing shape wrapped in an oppressive, suffocating darkness.
The darkness was not merely a lack of light—it was an active, heavy weight, pressing down upon the white fire like a hydraulic press, slowly smothering the pristine flames.
The entity stood motionlessly, exuding an aura of pure, lightless malice that made Sunny’s soul cold.
Sunny’s mind spiraled into a storm of frantic calculations.
‘She’s alive, but she’s trapped.
Who is that?
Is it a Nightmare Creature?
An Awakened from the cohort?
A Reflection?’
He prepared to dislodge the black needle from his arm, ready to collapse his flight and dive toward the carapace regardless of the danger.
Then, the air behind him collapsed.
It happened in less than a fraction of a millisecond.
There was no sound, no shift in the wind, no warning ripple in the current of air.
One moment Sunny was completely alone in the open sky, and the next, the temperature behind his back plummeted into a freezing, soul-crushing cold.
A presence materialized directly behind him.
It was a density of shadow so immense, so ridiculously pure and concentrated, that Sunny’s five shadow cores vibrated in violent, agonizing panic.
His shadows recoiled, screaming inside his soul sea like wild beasts sensing an apex predator.
Cold sweat broke out across Sunny’s neck.
Every instinct honed through years of deadly combat screamed at him to move, to strike, to flee—but his body was paralyzed by the sheer weight of the aura pressing against his spine.
Slowly, agonizingly, Sunny turned his neck to look over his shoulder.
Floating calmly on thin air, barely a meter away, was a man.
He wore a simple tunic of black silk, looking like a delicate, porcelain doll suspended above the endless river.
A heavy, viscous dark aura coiled around his limbs like living serpents.
It was the exact same man he had encountered at the start of the Nightmare.
The copy wearing his face.
Sunny stared at him, his dark eyes wide with a mixture of dread and profound shock.
From this close, with his shadow sense vibrating against the stranger’s skin, Sunny finally understood the truth.
This was not a human.
This was not a illusion, nor a ghost, nor a simple projection created by a Memory.
The entity standing before him was a Shadow—a true, sentient shadow, given physical form and flesh.
It was a being woven from the same foundational fabric as Sunny’s own shadow cores, but far older, far denser, and terrifyingly complete.
Sunny swallowed hard, his voice raspy and barely audible over the howling wind.
“Who… who are you?” he choked out, forcing his jaw to move through the paralyzing dread.
“What are you?”
The dark young man tilted his head, his obsidian eyes fixing Sunny with a cold, mocking gaze.
The corners of his pale lips began to curve upward into a sharp, ghastly smile.
He opened his mouth to answer.
But before a single word could leave his lips, a soundless chime echoed deep within Sunny’s soul.
The world seemed to freeze.
The howling wind died, the churning waters below went silent, and the light of the seven suns dimmed into insignificance as a cold, mechanical voice resonated directly inside his mind.
It was the Nightmare Spell.
The voice was formal, indifferent, and absolute, announcing a truth that struck Sunny’s soul like a thunderclap:
[Your master is dead.]
[You have no master.]
[Find a suitable master…]