Shadow Slave

By the time Sunny left the building, Saint was gone. He raised the collar of his jacket to prevent the rain from seeping under it and hid under the eaves of a nearby convenience store, taking out his communicator with an unhappy expression. Effie was running late. She was supposed to call him as soon as her press conference was over and then arrive shortly after—today, they had hoped to make Saint remember who she truly was.

Obviously, that plan would have to be reworked now.

‘Saint is too damn smart.’

He knew, of course, that his Shadow was highly intelligent. However, since she never spoke, Sunny never realized just how keenly astute she really was. It had taken her only a few minutes to deduce exactly what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what his end goal was.

How had she figured him out so swiftly? Sunny had improvised most of his confession on the spot, true, but his supposed mental breakdown was quite believable—after all, everything he had said was true. More than that, correctly guessing his interest in Morgan was not something he would have expected her to do.

It seemed that getting into the private wing of the mental institution was not going to be easy. His tentative plan to broaden the confines of what the Devil Detective’s role allowed him to do by pretending to be mentally unstable, and therefore unpredictable, had not panned out either. They would have to make Saint remember her true self—if his theory was sound and Effie could work her magic again—first... but even that had become difficult now, since the taciturn therapist did not intend to see him ever again.

‘Damn it.’

Sunny did not like being in Saint’s bad books. That had literally never happened to him before.

Frustrated and full of discontent, he looked at his communicator, as if asking it why Effie had not called.

The communicator...

Was dead.

Its screen was black, and it did not respond to anything Sunny did.

He blinked a few times.

‘Don’t tell me...’

Were these things supposed to be recharged daily, as well?!

‘No... no way.’

This was just too impractical!

Sunny stared at the dead device in utter shock for a while, then raised his hand in anger to toss the damn thing at the wall. Eventually, though, he let out a long sigh and lowered it, deciding to spare the battered communicator.

Not the least of all because he had no idea how to procure a new one.

Rummaging through the Devil Detective memories, Sunny found the vague recollection of how to use the primitive, unwieldy communicators of the bygone era... the mobile phones. Covering his face with a palm for a few moments, he groaned quietly, and then walked to his car.

Climbing inside, Sunny started the engine and found a threadbare cable that was supposed to serve as a charger. The port where the cable was supposed to go seemed to have become loose over time, so he only managed to make the barbaric technology work after fiddling with it for a while... needless to say, his mood did not improve one bit as a result. Finally, the communicator started to charge.

A couple of minutes later, Sunny was able to turn it on. What met him was an angry notification denoting that he had a dozen missed calls.

To his frustration, raising the communicator resulted in the contact between the charging cable and the port being lost, so he had to wait a few more minutes before being able to return the call. He spent those minutes quietly seething and cursing the archaic technology of the past era.

‘This might be a golden age, but charging things so often? And with wires, of all things?! Wires, really?!’

And the people! From what Sunny gleaned from the Devil Detective’s memories, they were glued to these primitive things and obsessed with them, to the point of acting tribal. The communicator model you possessed denoted both your allegiance and social status, and those who used the wrong ones were often bullied, mocked, and ostracised. This odd behavior was actively encouraged by the manufacturers, as well.

It was to the point that people went into debt to purchase expensive communicators they could not really afford.

‘Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous!’

It seemed that even living in the apocalypse had its advantages!

When his battered communicator finally gained enough charge, Sunny dialed Effie. She responded almost immediately, her voice sounding a little grumpy:

”Where the hell have you been? I couldn’t reach you.”

Sunny coughed in embarrassment.

“Oh, that. I was with Saint. My communicator... might have been powered down.”

‘What a... wait a minute’

Sunny paled.

‘I was alone with Saint... my communicator was turned off... oh, no!’

It took a Cursed Terror and being banished from fate to make Effie stop joking about Saint being his girlfriend. And he just gave her ammunition to start that damned joke again! 𝘳ÃNОBΕṡ

Sunny hurriedly spoke into the communicator, hoping to interrupt and confuse Effie before she could say anything: “Anyway! How did your press conference go? Were the journalists very annoying? What about the Captain? Was he pleased? Did the PR department shower you with praise? They did, didn’t they?!”

Effie remained silent for a few moments, then said in a strangely grim tone:

”I get it you didn’t watch my press conference, then.”

Sunny raised an eyebrow.

“No... why, what happened?”

It was then that he finally registered the noises in the background—the sounds of dozens of people talking, phones ringing, and the Captain berating someone at the top of his lungs.

Effie sighed.

”Go check the news. Then come back here. We... might have a problem.’

With that, she ended the call.

Sunny frowned, then assessed the local version of the network and opened the news feed.

Immediately, his expression darkened.

”What?”

Pretty much every news article on the first few pages all showed the same picture: a road littered with broken glass and debris, with a wide gap in the bent and torn metal railing on its side and blood smeared on the wet asphalt.

The titles were all sensational, but said the same thing...

“Breaking news! The Valor Group CEO rushed to the hospital after a failed assassination attempt!”

Sunny threw the communicator down and grabbed the wheel.

‘Curse it all... what now?!”