Shadow Slave

Sunny walked across the desolate floor of the factory, his expression dim.

He felt bitter.

It was one thing to encounter an enemy who used his own strength against him. An insidious and cunning enemy — one different from both the malevolent Nightmare Creatures whom Sunny had slain in the past and from the callous humans whom he had brought down from their tainted thrones.

However, what really filled him with distaste was that they had been cautious and vigilant, yet still ended up being blindsided by Asterion.

Sunny and Nephis had known that the third Sovereign would become a dire adversary immediately after ending the Godgrave War. Even when they had been building a new world order and learning how to guide humanity in its days of existential crisis, they spared time and energy to prepare for the eventual return of the Dreamspawn. They committed vast resources to searching for the few pieces of information about him that Anvil and Ki Song had failed to erase. They had created a network of informants across both worlds to watch for the signs of his emergence. They rushed to master their new powers as Supremes and grow stronger, so that no enemy of the same Rank could threaten what they had built.

But all their preparations had turned out to be woefully insufficient, because now that the new threat was finally starting to reveal itself, there was precious little they could do to stop it.

The Shadow Clan and Cassie had identified all the cells of Asterion’s newly initiated followers, but eradicating them was not an option. Even if it were, it would serve no purpose, since too many people outside the small groups of thoroughly infected were already aware of his name.

Worst of all, Sunny did not even know what they could have done differently if they had discovered the spreading corruption sooner.

He could not help but feel infuriatingly powerless.

Sunny did not experience fear often these days, but Asterion did make him feel an unpleasant sense of apprehension.

One of the most threatening things about the Dreamspawn, meanwhile, was that they still knew very little about him, even to this day.

And it was very much by design.

Their investigations had borne some fruit in the past month. Old Jest knew a bit, even if his trustworthiness was in question. Morgan had contributed a few crumbs of information, as well. The most important piece of knowledge — and the most unnerving too — unexpectedly came from Seishan.

Seishan, who had inherited some of Ki Song’s legacy, revealed to them why the Sovereigns chose to seal Asterion on the moon instead of simply killing him.

It was not because they were wary of facing him in battle.

Rather, it was because Asterion could not be killed.

‘That devious bastard...’

The Dreamspawn was not technically immortal. However, he had become a unique existence as he climbed the Path of Ascension — a being who was more so an idea than a creature of flesh and blood. A demon of thought, rather than hellfire and brimstone.

For as long as the idea of Asterion dwelled in human minds, he could not be destroyed. Therefore, to kill him, all one had to do was kill everyone who carried the knowledge of the Dreamspawn in their minds.

Therein lay the problem, though.

Anvil and Ki Song had been the carriers of the knowledge about Asterion, as well. So, the only way for them to kill him was to kill themselves first, or at least find a way to erase all information about him from their own minds.

However, if they erased the memories of Asterion from their minds, they would forget why they needed to kill him, in the first place. They would forget how to kill him, too.

Driven into a dead end by that paradox, the best they had managed to do was trap him on the Moon by culling those who composed his eerie Domain, and continuing to suppress his influence from spreading over the decades.

That was a valuable piece of information, indeed, even if it did nothing to assuage Sunny’s worries. If anything, he grew more and more despondent the more they learned about Asterion.

They were still lacking one of the most important pieces of knowledge about the Dreamspawn, though.

It was the knowledge of what, exactly, the threat of his spreading name was.

Up until now, all the people infected by the knowledge of Asterion — those they had managed to identify, at least — were only showing one symptom of the mental disease. They were all helping that knowledge spread further.

The infected did not kill, did not rob, and did not harm the Human Domain in any way. They did not seek to undermine the Immortal Flame clan or disturb the current balance of power. By all accounts, they were still upstanding citizens... if anything, those who were affected deeper were more selfless and altruistic than an average person.

There seemed to be no purpose to the spreading infection except for the growth itself.

The most eerie part of the quickly escalating crisis was how mundane and utterly normal everything seemed.

Of course, Sunny did not believe for a second that things would continue the same way. He did not need to be connected to the great tapestry of fate and possess an uncanny intuition to know that there was some kind of sinister purpose behind Asterion’s attempts to propagate his name as far and wide as possible.

They just did not know what the purpose was.

Today, however... today, they could find out — or at least start to understand the mechanisms of how that purpose was going to be accomplished.

Sunny stopped near an elevator door, where aragtag team of Shadow Clan agents was resting on concrete blocks. He looked at them intently, then asked:

“How is the prisoner?”

One of them — June, was it? — offered him a pale smile.

“He is in top shape, boss. Everything went smoothly... it was eerily smooth, actually. There was no resistance at all.”

Sunny frowned.

”Still, good job”

Leaving the agents behind, he entered the elevator.

Today, they were finally going to interrogate a person who had not simply been infected by the Dreamspawn’s name.

They were going to interrogate an actual subject of Asterion’s Domain.