Shadow Slave

As a Supreme, Sunny had been elevated from being a warrior to being a general — and of a vast army, at that. He was aspiring to become a cunning and competent strategist, and had spent more than a year staging an invasion of the Burned Forest to achieve just that. Sadly, he did not consider himself a seasoned commander yet.

Granted, there were few stellar examples of military excellence for him to emulate - ones he had witnessed, at least. One person who came to mind when he thought about war and warfare was Morgan of Valor, who possessed a shrewd strategic mind and an eerie ability to both manifest and exploit mayhem and chaos.

Morgan always seemed to get the short end of the stick, though.

Every time she received an opportunity to showcase her talent, something seemed to get in the way. A sudden descent of multiple devastating Nightmare Gates, a father who did not really care for winning the war and preferred sending his daughter on a suicide mission, a fratricidal sibling who just happened to be both virtually immortal and in possession of a Divine Aspect... No, really... that poor woman’s luck was worse than Sunny’s. And that was a startling feat in and of itself.

In any case, Sunny considered himself to be a novice strategist. If there was one thing he knew, though, it was that a strategist’s greatest virtue was the ability to swiftly adapt to the shifting conditions of the battlefield.

Take the Eternal City, for example — initially, Sunny had wanted to conquer it. But now, he wanted to plunder and destroy it instead.

The conditions had changed, so naturally, his strategy had to change as well. That was why the Shadow Legion moved.

By then, the battle for the three islands had reached an apogee. Hundreds of the fallen immortals had been lulled to sleep by the Dream Curse, thousands were debilitated and restrained; yet thousands more were crashing into the fortified strongholds of the silent shades, flowing like a river of hideous flesh. Considering the scale of powers involved in the battle, its visage was nothing short of apocalyptic. The grotesque nature of the immortal horrors and the dark cruelty of the ghostly shades made it look like a scene from the depths of a horrid hell. The violence was chilling, and the scope of destruction was devastating — the streets of the Eternal City quaked as they were ruined and rebuilt again.

But even if it did not seem that way, the outcome of the battle had already been decided. Sunny knew that he would win it.

He was just not going to win it fast enough.

So, it was time to adapt.

In the beautiful park on the middle island, the Dark Castle repelled wave after wave of abhorrent abominations. The carapace of manifested shadows protecting its walls was being shattered and rebuilt again, just like the Eternal City itself was still, the Marvelous Mimic had received several deep wounds already, trembling in pain and discomfort each time.

Within its halls, numerous youths were sleeping with peaceful expressions on their beautiful faces, lost in a maze of dreadful nightmares. On its walls, the shades of the Serpent King and of the human Saints that followed him led the rest of the defenders in repelling the attacks of the fallen immortals, armed and armored by the armaments salvaged in the Hippodrome.

On the roofs of the residential district that had been turned into a frigid hell by a furious blizzard, Slayer and her bestial army were fighting a savage battle against the abominable dwellers of the Eternal City. The snowstorm was suffused with the brilliant silver light of the distant spires, turning the world into a dim, gloomy white abyss.

Blood flowed like a river, and red waterfalls plummeted down only to freeze into morbid ice sculptures before hitting the ground. Countless buildings were suspended in a state between existence and destruction, stone debris drifting in the air and serving as precarious stages for clashes between the immortals and the murderous shadows.

The Shadow Wolves and the Obsidian Wasps were now clad in glistening suits of metal armor, making each of them far more difficult to vanquish.

The battle in the leisure district was perhaps the most dreadful, with countless abominable immortals assaulting the black fortress of the Shadow Legion. Its walls were enveloped by layers upon layers of manifested shadows, but they were still covered by deep cracks...

Several sections of the Hippodrome had already collapsed and were restored by the Eternal City, causing heavy casualties among its defenders.

From a distance, it seemed as if the black fortress was drowning in a tide of twisting flesh. Red tendrils rose like a forest, and gargantuan shapes moved toward the crumbling walls. Fiend rampaged among them like a dark colossus made of sharp blades at the moment, however, he was having quite a bit of trouble, entangled by colossal tentacles and pulled to his knees.

Pillars of black smoke rose from the scorched expanse of sizzling flesh around him, and his claws cut the burning tendrils, straining to free him from their hold. A moment later, an enormous black shield suddenly fell from above, piercing the mountain of slithering flesh that besieged him and causing a devastating shockwave when it impacted the ground.

Before the wounded abomination could reel, Saint landed on the cracked cobblestones, causing the ground to quake and the surrounding buildings to collapse. Rising gracefully from one knee, she brandished her tenebrous sword, severing the gargantuan horror- and the building behind it in half.

It was then that the cadence of the three battles entirely changed.

’The change did not happen under the walls of the Hippodrome, however. Instead, it happened on the frozen roofs of the residential district.

There, raging currents of snow obscured everything in sight. Bestial shadows appeared out of the snow to descend upon the frenzied immortals in a deadly fury of fangs, claws, and mandibles — the next moment, however, the mayhem. suddenly ceased.

Slayer’s soldiers silently retreated into the blizzard, disappearing from view. The abominations surged restlessly, expecting to be ambushed and tom apart seconds later...

However, seconds passed, and the eerie lull in the carnage continued.

A dead silence settled upon the residential island, broken only by the howling of the wind.

And then, far away — below the walls of the Hippodrome — a terrifying hiss washed over the attacking immortals.