Fate's Slave - Shadow Slave X Honkai Star Rail

After their conversation under that full moon, Noctis had secluded himself in his residence for a couple of weeks. Sunny tried to talk with the eccentric sorcerer a few times, but the silent Sailor Dolls refused to open the door and just stared at him with their crude wooden faces.

There was, of course, the option of simply using Shadow Step to get inside... but, somehow, Sunny suspected that intruding upon the immortal Transcendent would not have been the best idea. There were real souls trapped inside these Sailor Dolls, after all.

In the end, he and the other members of the cohort had no choice but to follow the advice Noctis gave him — to rest and prepare for what was about to come. Luckily, there were a lot of preparations they had to do.

For Sunny, that meant several things.

The first one was Shadow Dance. He had found himself in a strange situation, having made the recent breakthrough inside of a nightmare... that he did not really remember.

Sunny could guess that mastering the third step of his battle style was tied to the fact that he had lived through countless nightmares and lost himself in them, becoming truly shapeless and formless... forgetting himself and turning into other people completely.

That observation was in line with how he had initially made progress to the third step of Shadow Step, back in the arena of the Red Colosseum, where he shadowed numerous Nightmare Creatures. Back then, he had almost lost himself, as well, but stopped at the last moment, fearing that he would not be able to come back.

Being trapped in the nightmares had made that frightening step for him, and so, he had approached the very edge of a breakthrough. The final piece of the puzzle had been trying to shadow the epitome of formlessness — another Shadow, Nightmare.

As a result of the breakthrough, Sunny’s ability to recognize and gain insight into patterns of combat techniques had increased even more, now allowing him to understand and predict not only the movements and behavior of his enemies, but also intricately sense the flow of Essence through their bodies, as well as — almost, but not quite — being able to predict their very thoughts.

However, there was one glaring flaw in this miraculous ability, one that he didn’t know how to solve. For the first time since Sunny had created Shadow Dance, the elusive battle art was starting to seem... dangerous. Not only for his enemies, but also for himself.

What was the point of being able to kill something if he ran the risk of losing himself and becoming that thing forever?

Why would anyone want to achieve such a victory, if earning it meant ceasing to be themselves and becoming the very thing they had wanted to destroy?

For now, he didn’t have a solution, and that made him more than a little bit nervous. So, Sunny decided to temporarily concentrate on other things.

Particularly, ensuring that his trump card was completely ready.

So, leaving the Sanctuary, he would travel to nearby islands in search of Nightmare Creatures to hunt, and killed those he could find and that were not beyond his ability to defeat.

The problem was in the fact that there were not as many Nightmare Creatures in the Kingdom of Hope as there had been on the Chained Isles in the future, especially not that close to the stronghold of one of the Chain Lords. As the result, his progress was torturously slow and tedious.

But he had already been so close to fulfilling the requirements. So, it wasn’t too difficult.

To accelerate it somehow, Sunny had made a frightening decision to leave the surface of the islands and take his hunting to their underside, where the true horrors of this land dwelled. Luckily, his new body was somewhat fit to do so — with his sharp claws and talons, he was able to climb any surface, no matter how steep, or even remain mobile while hanging entirely upside down.

And if he made a mistake, the Heavenly Burden was always at hand.

Finally, after many months, he had fulfilled the requirements of the Destroyer’s Final Road, the Memory he had obtained from killing the Doomsday Beast.