Shadow Slave

Briefly, Sunny felt confused.

Adjusting to Slayer’s perceptions was a challenge. Her five senses were immensely heightened—far sharper than his own, except for touch, which Bone Weave had long ago enhanced. Merging with her felt like plunging into a world saturated with sound, scent, flavor, and piercingly vivid sight—each layer more overwhelming than the last.

The experience would have crushed him if Sunny hadn’t built an incredible ability to understand and process fresh data through the years, particularly while advancing in Rank. Moreover, Slayer had additional senses beyond the standard five—including a basic form of shadow perception, plus others Sunny couldn’t identify.

Countless disgusting rats were now swarming around them from every direction. A Cursed Beast’s Will was warping reality itself, while Ariel’s Game drained Slayer’s power.

This combination left Sunny stunned for an instant.

“Too many…”

Yet Slayer was already in motion.

When the tide of writhing rats crashed down toward them, she showed her fangs beneath her ripped mask and lunged forward to face them. Her dark eyes sparkled with the icy hunger of a ruthless hunter, while spectral mist flowed behind her like a streaming cloak.

Right then, Sunny experienced something strange—something he’d never encountered while bonding with Slayer as a shadow.

Her essence shifted, flowing clumsily in a manner that shouldn’t have been feasible… yet deliberately, as though she was recalling something that had once been instinctive to her, but had grown rusty over time.

Like she was trying to direct her bright soul essence into her sword’s keen edge—not to feed its spellwork and trigger its magic, but simply to fill the icy steel with it as she did her flesh.

She almost succeeded in whatever she was attempting to remember, but not quite.

Therefore, Slayer triggered the enchantment built into her weapon instead.

Sunny had made two short blades for his deadly Shadow—one from the metal chains supporting the Chained Isles, another from a bone fragment from Godgrave. Both were enchanted to be frighteningly sharp and remarkably tough, plus designed to fly back to her grip if lost.

The scabbards holding the twin blades were also enchanted, created to repair the weapons when damaged.

However, the two swords differed in one key way. The active magic of the bone-carved blade wrapped it in an unseen layer of piercing energy, designed to penetrate the strongest defenses. The active magic of the metal-forged blade, conversely, wasn’t built to pierce. It was built to slice.

This enchantment created a zone of terrible energy and compressed it into a blade-thin surface that stretched forward along the weapon’s trajectory.

Unlike his other Shadows, Slayer couldn’t alter her dimensions at will — compared to the massive Nightmare Creatures Sunny regularly battled, she was completely small. So he’d considered giving her a weapon to fell giants. The blade itself was brief, but the invisible cutting zone could be as vast as Slayer could manage.

While this enchantment was designed for enormous enemies, it proved quite effective against huge swarms of pests too.

As the short sword sliced through air with a whistle, reality itself seemed split along its route. Boosted by Slayer’s furious, brilliant essence, the slash carved a hundred-meter wound through the falling mass of rats, destroying thousands instantly. Gore, organs, and chunks of crushed bodies flew skyward, and a red mist suddenly covered the mountainside, staining the snow crimson.

Every rat was technically part of a Cursed entity, but three rings of ash now surrounded Slayer’s incomplete core, completely filled with Sunny’s Supreme will, while Slayer herself was enhanced by his dark embrace. Even while diminished by the Snow Domain, she easily annihilated the small beings.

This was the benefit of visiting the Shrine of Truth.

Something was amiss… something terribly amiss… with the rat horde, though.

Sunny felt the strange, incomprehensible Will of the Cursed Beast growing briefly, then sensed something that made his blood run cold… figuratively speaking. Sunny lacked a spine currently, and Slayer wasn’t the type of creature to be bothered by anything.

Numerous rats covered the mountain—they’d been chewing on it, gradually consuming its stone foundation, before rushing to devour Slayer. The rats were infinite, yet Sunny had still anticipated feeling their numbers drop slightly when Slayer eliminated several thousand. 𝘳Ａ₦𝖔βË𝘚

Instead, he felt the reverse.

Where thousands of dead rats had been, even more seemed to materialize from thin air. The corpses of their fallen companions were immediately devoured, and the swarm expanded, growing in size.

At that moment, Sunny instinctively understood his enemy’s nature.

He’d suspected this before setting foot on the snow-covered mountainside, but now he was certain.

This realization only increased his concern.

“So my hunch was correct, after all. Hell…”

In a way, the rat swarm—the Rat King—esembled Abundance. It also sought endlessness, but while Abundance achieved this through infinity, the Rat King did so through… multiplication.

The concept the Rat King embodied was multitude. Perhaps there had been one Sacred rat originally, ages ago, but as time passed Corruption consumed it, there were many. Then there were countless.

Simply put, for every rat Slayer and Sunny eliminated… two would replace it.

“Ah… that’s not good.”