Shadow Slave

Sunny... come here! I’ll... I’ll only kill you a little...”

”Get the hell away from me, you demented zombie!”

Sunny took a few steps back, easily avoiding the grasp of the shambling corpse of Master Jet. Fortunately, she was not too fast - in fact, she could barely crawl. Her nails powerlessly scratched against the alloy, and Soul Leaper let out a hoarse, disappointed hiss.

”Damn it...”

Sunny shook his head. Despite Jet’s weakened state, avoiding her clutches was a tiresome task - mostly because there was nowhere really for him to run. Currently, the two of them were trapped on an alloy raft that was drifting slowly across the strait between the Antarctic Center and the vast landmass to the east.

When Jet lost control of herself, all Sunny could do was endlessly circle the raft and wait for her to come to her senses.

”Come here, Sunny! I won’t bite...”

He gave her a dark look, then picked up his chair, walked over to the other end of their improvised vessel, and calmly sat down. The length of the raft was no more than ten meters, but for Soul Reaper, that was a vast distance right now. She stared at him for a while, then gave up and rolled on her back with a curse, looking at the sky with a resigned expression.

When Jet remained still, she really looked like a corpse. And technically, she was... but at least in this cold, she was not a rotting corpse. One had to count their blessings.

Unlike the souls of all Awakened, hers was not able to generate essence on its own. Worse than that, her soul core was shattered and constantly leaked what little essence she had left. Once the essence completely ran out, Soul Reaper would truly and forever perish.

The only way for her to survive was to continuously kill living beings and absorb their soul essence. That was actually Jet’s Sleeper Ability. Her Awakened Ability allowed her to bypass all forms of physical defense and strike directly at the souls of her enemies, which was where her fearsome nickname, Soul Reaper, had come from.

Her Ascended Ability was to slowly absorb shards of broken soul cores from those she had killed to build up and strengthen her own, both in terms of size and capacity. It also removed the natural limit of essence infusion that the flesh of most living beings had, allowing Jet to oversaturate her body with essence and achieve truly superb levels of strength, speed, and resilience.

Hers was a Supreme Aspect.

...Sadly, right now, Jet had no essence to spare on strengthening her body. She barely had enough to keep it from collapsing entirely, and even that last reserve was slowly running out.

Things had not gone well for them after the destruction of Falcon Scott. Even after the Winter Beast retreated into the depths of the Antarctic Center, its dire influence remained. Neither Sunny nor Jet had been able to access their Dream Realm anchors, which meant that they could not escape from the waking world. Eventually, the two of them had been left with only one choice - to try and brave the strait.

Actually, there was no need for them to even reach East Antarctica. All they had to do was sail far enough into the ocean to leave the area of influence of the Corrupted Titan, which would allow both to return to the Dream Realm. That would still be dangerous, but not as dangerous as remaining in the Winter Beast’s frozen realm.ℯ

There were no ships coming, and no seaworthy vessels left intact in Falcon Scott. In the end, Sunny had been forced to improvise.

The alloy raft they were currently drifting on... was not just a random sheet of light alloy. It was actually the Covetous Coffer.

That Memory of his possessed an enchantment called [Mendacious Coffer], which allowed it to mimic the forms of inanimate objects. Additionally, the size and intricacy of the simulacrum were dependent on Sunny’s Shadow Core capacity. By now, he was very close to becoming an Ascended Tyrant, so obviously, that capacity was much greater than when he had first acquired the Coffer.

So, Sunny had turned it into a raft. It was much larger than the alloy chest the Coffer usually looked like, at the expense of the complexity. Even better, the [Locomotive Chiffonier] enchantment allowed the raft to propel itself forward at a modest speed.

Most importantly, though, the Covetous Coffer was an Ascended Memory of the Fourth Tier, and as such, it was tremendously more durable than even the strongest alloy would have been. If something attacked them from below... which had already happened a few times... the raft was not going to be destroyed unless the attacking Nightmare Creature happened to be truly terrifying.

Sunny and Jet had ventured into the strait on top of the Covetous Coffer, hoping to leave the Winter Beast’s area of influence in about a day. And... they had. Sadly, their situation did not really improve after that.

As it turned out, there were numerous Nightmare Gates hidden below the cold waters of the ocean here. Perhaps there were too many, or perhaps their luck had just been truly atrocious, but even now, a week later, Sunny and Jet had yet to encounter a place where the Call of Nightmare would not instantly whisk them away if they tried to leave for the Dream Realm.

At this point, it would be easier for them to actually reach East Antarctica. They had made it two-thirds of the way, already. The mighty battleships of the government fleet were able to make the trip in a day or two, but the Covetous Coffer was much slower - so, it was going to take them a few more days to make landfall.

Sunny did not feel too much pressure. Saint was standing guard with Morgan’s Warbow in her hands, warding off most of the sea creatures. Sunny and Saint were capable of dealing with almost every normal threat. If something they could not deal with were to attack from the depths, he could use a combination of Memories to take flight. If they were attacked in the skies, he could dive deep into the ocean.

The only problem he had was that Jet would periodically lose her mind and half-heartedly try to kill him.

Sitting in his luxurious chair, Sunny threw a look at Soul Reaper’s unmoving corpse and sighed.

’Damnation...’