Shadow Slave

Sunny died.

Being dead… wasn’t too bad, all things considered.

More or less every bone in his body was shattered. His rib cage had caved in, and sharp bone fragments were piercing his lungs. His limbs were twisted at unnatural angles, and his skull had cracked. There was excruciating pain, but it went away almost immediately, since his spine was broken, and his spinal cord was severed.

Bone Weave had tempered his hones and made them incredibly durable, but everything had its limits. For Sunny, that limit had turned out to be being kicked by a literal mountain, apparently.

He could not see anything, because his eyes had burst, and could not hear anything, because his eardrums had ruptured. The world was dark and silent.

It was almost comfortable, if not for the terrible cold.

Sunny was very, very cold.

‘Ah, damnation…’

Could he not just die in peace?

“…You really are a useless piece of outskirt trash.”

Despite not being able to hear anything, he heard the cold, contemptuous voice. His own voice.

‘Gods, can you shut the hell up?’

Sunny sent his shadow sense outward and found out that his broken body was laying on the very edge of the dark water, with icy waves washing his blood off the stone shore and licking his skin.

No wonder he felt cold.

Goliath was nowhere to be seen, but the weakening tremors that shook the world from time to time told him that the titan was walking away, heading inland. Unable to move, Sunny imagined letting out a sigh.

‘…What luck.’

He might have died, but at least the giant had not stepped on him. His body had stopped just outside the dark waves after flying away and ricocheting off the concrete surface of the highway, too. Otherwise, to add insult to injury, he would have had to drown as well.

But since he had not… now, it was time to come back to life.

‘Oh, this is going to hurt…’

Sunny was dead, but of course, such trivialities were not going to stop him. He had not spent most of the Antarctica campaign wearing the Undying Chain without a reason, after all. [Undying] Enchantment Description: “The wearer can not die.”

…As long as he had essence to spare, death was just a temporary condition for Sunny. It was no different from having his head cut off in the Red Colosseum, and he had survived that debacle without too much trouble.

Simply being unable to die for a few minutes was not going to save him, sadly. Back then, Sunny had been healed by Elyas before running out of essence… but now, there was no one to help him.

As soon as he burned through his essence, he would inevitably die.

‘Well, I’ll just help myself, then…’

Sunny summoned the runes.

He did not have eyes anymore, and yet he was still able to perceive them, somehow. It was both strange and logical, explaining how Cassie had been able to communicate with the Spell all that time.

‘Huh…’

Finding the Dying Wish in the list of his Memories, he concentrated on it and read the description of the Transcendent charm’s sole enchantment:

[Death Wish] Enchantment Description: “Those who witness the wielder of this Memory are compelled; friends to be inspired, foes to seek the wielder out. The power of the Memory grows the more enemies they give the gift of death, and can be consumed to heal the wielder’s wounds.”

Death Charge: [1000/1000.]

…Sunny had not been idle since coming to Antarctica. He had saturated the counter of the Dying Wish a long time ago by slaughtering countless Nightmare Creatures across the Antarctic Center.

Now, it was finally time to use that hidden ace.

Feeling his essence running dry and a numbing fog enveloping his mind, Sunny activated the healing enchantment.

Instantly, there was a change.

A furious flood of power rushed into his broken body, repairing it. His eardrums were restored, his liquified eyes slowly started to coalesce back into solid shape. His fractured bones assembled themselves from hundreds of small fragments.

The severed sections of his spinal cord connected back together.

“Argh! Crap!”

The pain was back, sending him into a violent convulsion. Sunny bit his tongue hard enough to feel the salty taste of blood, but a moment later, that wound, too, was healed. The agony of it all was nothing short of exquisite.

“C-curse it!”

…But it was all good. Pain was good. Pain meant that he was alive, or at least coming back to live. It was its absence that was frightening.

A full charge of the powerful Transcendent Memory was enough to bring his body back from being utterly devastated, but the process was not instantaneous. Even with Blood Weave helping, it took some time. Sunny had no choice but to endure, and wait.

He was no stranger to agony, anyway.

At some point, he regained his vision. Rising his head weakly, Sunny looked at himself through the veil of tears. What he saw made him feel disheartened.

The Undying Chain was all but gone. The bleak steel of his armor was shattered and mangled to the point of being unrecognizable. A few pieces of it were bent at sharp angles and pierced his flesh, slowing down the process of healing.

Sunny stared at the bloody mess that was his body for a few moments, then thought that he should probably dismiss the armor.

However, he did not need to.

Almost at the same moment, the Undying Chain suddenly shone with soft radiance, and then disintegrated into a whirlwind of white sparks. The brilliant sparks danced around him for a few seconds, caressing his skin before disappearing without a trace, forever.

The familiar voice of the Spell whispered into his ear:

[Your Memory has been destroyed.]

…Sunny dropped his head back into the water.

‘…Thank you.

The Undying Chain had held long enough for the healing power of the Dying Wish to bring him back from the doors of death, refusing to succumb to the terrible damage before he was safely on his way to being healed… as if on purpose. True to its name to the very end.

It was sort of poetic.

I guess dying makes one sentimental.

What the hell was he thinking about? It was just a suit of armor… an armor-type Memory. Memories did not have thoughts, aspirations, and feelings.

Well… most didn’t.

Turning his head slightly, Sunny stared at the beautiful jade shape of the Sin of Solace, which was laying on the stones a few steps away from him. His eyes darkened a little.

‘So it was you, all that time. Messing with my mind and calling me names?’

The moonlight glinted on the pristine white blade. Everything was silent for a few moments, and then, Sunny’s own voice answered, full of disdain:

“Took you long enough to realize. As expected of an uneducated rat.”

Sunny gritted his teeth and stifled the desire to dismiss the damned sword immediately.

He had already lost his armor, and leaving himself without a weapon would not be a very good decision.

Ignoring the insidious whispers, Sunny let out a pained groan, and then stood up with a stagger.

He was all but naked, terribly fatigued, and suffering from extreme essence exhaustion…

But he was also, undoubtedly, not dead.

Sunny came back to life.

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