Unduh Aplikasi
1.42% Shadow Slave / Chapter 30: Starless Void

Bab 30: Starless Void

Sunny was expecting to first look at the place where his arrival to the Dream Realm was going to take place from above, just like it had happened at the beginning of the First Nightmare. Back then, time had magically moved in reverse, giving him an opportunity to see hints of what he was going to face.

Instead, immediately after hearing the greetings of the Spell, Sunny found himself blind and drowning. As he instinctively tried to open his mouth to scream, salty water rushed inside, making him choke and twitch.

More than that, he couldn't see anything. No, it's not that he couldn't see — it's just there was no source of light around. Usually, darkness wasn't a problem for Sunny, but, for some reason, his sight wasn't working anymore. Maybe the seawater he was submerged in was blocking it.

If it wasn't for the special space perception that the affinity to shadows gave him, he would have been completely disoriented. With its help, though, he barely managed to understand which side was down, and which side was up.

Luckily, Teacher Julius's lessons had included swimming. Swearing to thank both the old man and Master Jet once he came back, Sunny forced himself to stay calm and began to swim upward.

In a few long and tense seconds, his head broke through the surface of the water. Sunny was finally able to draw in a deep, hoarse breath.

'Breathe, breathe. You're still alive!'

After sucking in enough air to soothe his burning lungs and compose himself to a certain degree, Sunny carefully spun in the water, trying to take in his surroundings.

What met him was an endless, jet-black expanse of undulating waves. Above them was an empty black sky. There was no moon, no stars, just a dark vastness of repressive nothingness. Sunny blinked a few times, cold dread taking hold of his heart.

'This is… a sea? An ocean? Was I dropped in the middle of an ocean?'

No, it couldn't be. There had to be solid ground somewhere nearby!

As he was gripped by a momentary panic, a remote sound suddenly drew his attention. Sunny turned around and saw a triangular dorsal fin moving in his direction. Luckily, it was still hundreds and hundreds of meters away.

'Wait… if it's so far away… then how come I can see it so clearly?'

Despite being submerged in water, Sunny still felt like there was suddenly cold sweat all other his body. By his estimation, that dorsal fin was at least five meters tall. It was rapidly approaching, growing visibly larger with each second.

'Damn you, Spell!'

With eyes full of horror, Sunny spun again, desperately trying to find something — anything! — to save him. And there, a short distance away, he finally noticed a black mass protruding slightly above the water.

Not wasting even a second on thinking, he started to swing his arms and legs, swimming in the direction of the black mass with a considerable speed. However, no matter how fast he swam, the giant shadow of the unknown creature was closing the distance between them much faster.

A small part of Sunny's mind managed to preserve its rationality even when faced with this boundless, primal fear. Not allowing himself to slip entirely into panic, Sunny tried to think, and then silently commanded his own shadow to wrap itself around his body. Instantly, his speed increased twofold.

Just seconds before the unknown colossus got to him, Sunny reached the black mass, stretched out his hands, and pulled himself out of the water. He rolled away from the edge, scratching his skin on the uneven rocks, and jumped in fright when the whole surface underneath him shuddered, as though something massive had collided with it.

As Sunny backed out, terrifying jaws appeared from the water, with rows and rows of giant teeth, each one as long as he was tall. He opened his eyes wide, understanding that the rock he had climbed on was not tall enough to save him from the monster.

'Why is it even trying to eat me?! I'm too small to be considered a filling snack for something this enormous!'

… However, before the monster had a chance to attack, a colossal tentacle suddenly broke through the water and rose into the air like some strange, black tower. Before too long, it fell down, entangling the owner of the giant maw and pulling it back under the water.

Sunny lost the feeling in his legs and plopped on the ground, his mouth opened. His whole body was shaking.

A few seconds later, the dark sea was calm again, as though nothing had happened. The indifferent waves continued to move silently under the lightless sky.

'So, it wasn't trying to eat me,' he realized, frozen.

'It was trying to run away.'

***

A few minutes later, Sunny was pretty sure that nothing was going to devour him, at least not immediately. With that certainty, he was finally in a state of mind to stop trembling and explore his surroundings a little.

The black mass he climbed onto turned out to be a single stone platform of around twelve meters in diameter. Its surface was mostly flat, covered with grooves, and somewhat dry. Due to the regular shape of its edges, it seemed more like something man-made than a natural formation. But then again, here in the Dream Realm, it was hard to be sure that something "man-made" was actually made by humans, as opposed to…

Better not to think about it.

The platform wasn't connected to anything, existing as a tiny island in the sea of darkness. There wasn't anything else above the water for as far as Sunny was able to see. After discovering that fact, he also realized something else.

It was that he was wet, cold, and completely naked.

'Huh.'

In his defense, the clothing situation was the last thing one would think about when trying to save themselves from abyssal monsters. Also, it's not like someone was here to witness his stark paleness and private bits.

Still, it was sort of cold.

Sunny summoned the Puppeteer's Shroud and watched as dark-grey garments covered his body. It even came with a pair of high, soft-soled leather boots. Clad in grey fabric and lusterless leather, he suddenly felt much safer.

Not to mention, warm.

After that, Sunny sat down in the middle of the platform, as far away from water as he could, and tried to remember the unique characteristic of every explored region of the Dream Realm he could think of.

Unfortunately, none of them matched this starless, dark void.

'Of course not,' he thought with a bit of resentment. 'Even if some unlucky humans had ever come here, I doubt that they were able to return to the real world alive.'

Not with those things hiding underwater.

Not yet desperate enough to leave the platform and try to swim away in search of land, Sunny decided to wait and see. Maybe something was going to change as time went by.

With a soft sigh, he habitually looked for his shadow. However, due to the total darkness that surrounded him, it couldn't really be seen. He just barely felt its presence.

"This must be a paradise for you, right? All this gloom and not a star in sight!"

The shadow, of course, did not answer.

"Anyway... good job earlier."

With a nod, Sunny lay down, using his hands as a pillow. Not thinking about much, he stared into the black sky and waited. The sound of the undulating waves was, actually, quite relaxing.

After a while, he closed his eyes and listened. Minutes merged together, growing into hours.

… Suddenly, Sunny caught a slight change in the sound of the sea. It was as though something was shifting. He opened his eyes and noticed that one corner of the sky was slowly turning grey. Soon, a glimpse of a pale sun could be seen rising above the horizon.

A new day had come to the starless void.

And with it, the dark sea suddenly surged.


Bab 31: Low Tide

The black, opaque water suddenly surged and seethed, as though a living creature desperately trying to avoid the pale light of the coming dawn. Sunny slowly rose and, after some thought, carefully approached the edge of the stone platform.

Looking down, he blinked and then kneeled to make sure that what he saw wasn't an illusion.

The sea seemed to be receding.

Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, the water level was dropping. The circular stone formation he had been taking shelter on used to barely protrude out of the waves, but now there were meters and meters of wet rock between him and the restless surface of the sea.

As the sun climbed up, the monstrous ebb tide continued. Soon, Sunny found himself standing on the edge of a tall cliff, with a hundred-meter drop separating him from the churning waters. Beneath him, the rock formation broadened and changed shape. However, from his vantage point, it was hard to determine what that shape was, exactly.

At that time, the dark surface of the water began to be punctured here and there by sharp crimson blades. As it dropped even further, it was as though a crimson forest was slowly rising from the black depths. The "trees" were made of something resembling coral, growing chaotically into each other and stretching toward the sky.

They were colossal in size, with irregular protrusions entwining and merging together, looking monumental and eerie in the black and red reality of the sunlit void. The labyrinth formed by this strange reef stretched as far as Sunny could see, broken here and there by protruding cliffs, sudden chasms, and distant natural features.

Half an hour later, utterly shocked, Sunny stared down and realized that the sea was completely gone. If not for the black seaweed left hanging on wet rocks and scarlet pillars of coral, he would even doubt if it was ever there.

His small circular island had turned into the peak of a strange, towering, irregularly shaped cliff. Looking down, he felt his head spinning.

By then, the night had already fully retreated, letting morning finally take its place.

'I'm not seeing things, am I?' Sunny thought, pinching himself.

What the Spell was that?

***

Despite the sudden disappearance of the dark sea and its hidden monsters, Sunny was in no rush to climb down from his circular stone platform. Firstly, he felt that if the sea was able to disappear, it was surely able to come back, perhaps at any moment.

Secondly, he did not know what dangers the coral labyrinth was hiding. Perhaps there was something even scarier than the owner of the giant tentacle down there.

But that did not mean that he wasn't going to explore.

Coming back to his spot in the middle of the platform, Sunny sat down and commanded his shadow to separate itself from his body. Then, taking control of it, he approached the edge of the platform and nimbly slid down.

Habitually moving from one shadow to another, he began the descent. At this moment, Sunny was glad that shadows had no weight and were not affected by gravity.

While the shadow was busy climbing down, Sunny yawned.

"Say, don't you think that you need a name?"

Although his shadow was already too far away to hear him, they still could communicate through their shared connection. Of course, the fact that it could did not mean that it would. The shadow was sort of taciturn, mostly because it didn't have vocal cords and was unable to speak.

Plus, its temper wasn't that great.

"How about… Shameless? No? What about... Shady? Also no? Hm, what about something simpler, like… What? Well, do you have suggestions then? Alright, alright! We'll shelve this conversation for later."

By the time he was done with this short monologue, the shadow had already reached the bottom of the cliff. The range of [Shadow Control] was not limitless, but it was just barely enough to explore their nearest surroundings.

Entering the labyrinth, Sunny found it to be extremely disorienting and convoluted. The paths between coral pillars were sometimes broad, sometimes narrow. They twisted and turned without any logic, often leading to dead ends or even back to where he started. More than that, some paths entered inside the "coral" mounds, turning into dark tunnels.

The labyrinth was vast and multi-layered, making Sunny's head hurt after multiple fruitless attempts to memorize the layout of the nearest pathways. In the end, he sent the shadow up, forcing it to climb on top of the crimson forest and start jumping from one sharp coral blade to another — knowing full well that he himself would not be able to do the same.

Soon, he circled the strange cliff and froze, scared by the sight of what was happening in its shadow.

There, the corpse of the giant shark-like creature that had briefly pursued him the previous night was laying on the ground, the pillars of coral around it shattered and broken.

More precisely, half of it was there, with grotesque innards spilling out of the terrible wound and stretching far away into the distance. The other half was gone, as though it had never existed.

Around the corpse, hundreds of smaller monsters were scurrying, tearing away and devouring its flesh bit by bit. Each of them was about two and a half meters tall, looking like a weird mix of a demonic crab, a centaur, and a nightmare.

They had four pairs of long, segmented legs that ended in scythe-like protrusions. At the front, a human-like torso was protruding from the carapace, also clad in thick chitinous armor. The head, if it was even the appropriate word, was situated directly on top of the torso, with no neck in between. It had two narrow eye slits and a vicious-looking mouth with several slimy mandibles. Instead of hands, the monsters had two enormous pincers.

Currently, they were all using those pincers to tear off chunks of meat off the desiccated corpse and stuff them into their mouths. From time to time, a fight for an especially juicy piece of meat would break out, ending up in a few monsters being torn apart and quickly devoured by the victors.

Sunny swallowed.

Both because the sight of heavily armored, powerful monsters made him nervous and because looking at them feasting, he suddenly felt very hungry.

'Each of them seems like trouble. And there are hundreds of them.'

His luck, like always, was awful.

'At least I don't have to wonder why the labyrinth feels so empty. All the inhabitants are having a party!'

Feeling a little bit apprehensive about turning his shadow's back to the monsters, Sunny commanded it to look back and study the cliff he was taking shelter atop of. Something about it was making him feel uneasy.

The shadow turned around and looked up, taking in the sight of the strangely shaped cliff. It took Sunny a few minutes to shift his perspective and recognize it for what it was.

'That's… a finger. That's a hand. That is… a sword?'

He blinked.

'It's a statue.'

Indeed, the cliff was man-made. It was an ancient, colossal statue at least two hundred meters tall. The scale of it was so massive that it boggled the mind. From what Sunny could see, it depicted a knight clad in an elaborate plate armor, with seven shining stars carved into his breastplate. In his hands, he was holding a gargantuan sword, pointing it to the ground.

However, the most striking thing about it was that the giant stone knight was missing his head. In fact, the roughly circular platform Sunny was standing on turned out to be the top of his neck. And by the looks of it, the head wasn't missing by design — it was as though something, or someone, had violently tore it off at some point in the distant past.

Sunny walked around the platform, looking down from all sides, but didn't notice the head lying anywhere near.

'What on Earth is this place?'

Without any hints to find the answer, he led his shadow back to the giant's neck and settled at the western edge of it, studying the feasting monsters.

He didn't move until the sun was about to set.

Just as Sunny expected, as soon as the sun touched the horizon, a deafening rumble could be heard coming from somewhere below. The monsters instantly stopped their feast and scurried away, some hiding inside the coral pillars, some simply burying themselves in the soft soil.

A few minutes later, the first streams of black water appeared in the labyrinth. Their volume quickly grew, and soon an apocalyptic flood devoured everything around. The sea was returning with the approach of the night.

Sunny stared at this unimaginable process, thoughts churning in his head.

In an hour, the circular platform was the only thing above the dark waters once again.


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