Shadow Slave

Luckily, the Wolf was a lethal and ferocious being even without Sunny’s direct control. In fact, if Sunny attempted to issue the Sacred shade commands to tell it how to fight, he would only be getting in the way. The Wolf had more battle experience than he did, was a better hunter than he was, and understood its own capabilities better than Sunny could ever hope to understand them.

The Archon was too fast, too strong, and too beyond the scope of normal understanding for Sunny to be in his element while fighting it, anyway. The laws of existence were bending and twisting around the Deathless Spirit, rejecting the very notion of common logic — time, space, and even causality had become unreliable at best, making the Archon immensely deadly and unpredictable.

One moment, he was taking an unhurried step. A split second later, he was already upon the Wolf, raising his terrifying staff to crush the Sacred beast beneath it. At times, his blows arrived before they were delivered. Time itself hastened or slowed down, or even seemed to flow in reverse on occasion.

Sunny was rattled.

Luckily, the Wolf was not. It did not try to understand or predict the Archon and the results of his actions — instead, it acted on pure instinct, reacting faster than Sunny could even realize what was happening. At the same time, the Wolf was calculating and cunning, steadily evading the Deathless Spirit while never letting him get distracted and turn his attention to the distant Shadow Legion.

With Sunny’s augmentation and assistance, the shadow of the Wolf was putting up an admirable fight against the Archon. It was so fearless and ferocious, in fact, that Sunny imagined that if it had been any other Cursed or Sacred Beast, they would have stood a good chance of defeating it. The Wolf would have long torn the creature’s throat open and feasted on its flesh. However, the Sacred being they faced today was Deathless, and so, no matter how ferocious and fearsome the Wolf was, all it could do was endure as its body was slowly being broken and mutilated.

And Sunny, meanwhile, endured his soul being torn to shreds.

“Argh!”

The Weaver’s Needle trembled in his fingers.

He… was not in good shape. None of his cores had crumbled yet, but they were all full of cracks, almost on the verge of being broken. The silent waters of his Soul Sea were undulating restlessly, while the replicas of the two Citadels he controlled were quaking, fissures slowly climbing up their walls.

It hurt like hell, of course.

‘| just need to hold on… a little more…’

The Shadow Legion was far in the distance by then, almost gone behind the horizon. Neph’s fierce flames, which had illuminated the entire desert, were now a distant halo. The dawn was not yet near, but… Sunny figured that he was perhaps halfway there. He had really managed to buy a lot of time — but sadly, not enough of it.

And he did not think that he could endure ten more minutes, let alone a few more hours.

Not without losing a few of his cores, at least, and therefore a few of his shadows. Who would it be? The youngest of the seven, Lazy? Or maybe their eldest, gloomy sibling? Or perhaps both, and more?

Sunny gritted his teeth.

‘Like hell…’

The weave was slowly taking shape beneath his needle… torturously slowly, compared to how familiar it was.

It was funny, really. Usually, Sunny did not even pay attention to this part of the weaving process. He wove the rudimentary patterns almost unconsciously, relying on experience and muscle memory. But now, this simple weave seemed as difficult and impossible to master as it had once, a long time ago, when he attempted sorcery for the first time.

Back then, he was in a cage in the Red Colosseum, waiting for an overwhelmingly, terrifyingly powerful adversary — an Ascended zealot — to come and kill him. Now, he was in literal Hell, fighting a fallen god.

Sunny wasn’t sure if one could call that a successful career…

‘Get in shape, damn it!’

The Wolf — and Sunny’s soul — endured another blow. The giant beast fell to the sand, grey smoker pouring like a waterfall from its maw, while Sunny’s hand trembled. As a result, the pattern he had almost completed came close to coming undone. Snarling, he ducked to let a piece of shrapnel moving at supersonic speed flash just above his head and grabbed the unraveling threads with one of his hands. If not for the Flesh Weave, he would have lost his fingers right there and then. But, luckily, his body had been altered to excel at weaving — as were his spirit, mind, and soul, for that matter.

So, Sunny managed to keep the pattern together.

It was almost finished by then, requiring only the smallest touches. Catching Weaver’s Needle with his teeth, Sunny used all six of his hands to finish the pattern — and even though his very being was swaying and reeling from the pressure of having to battle a Sacred being’s Will, he finally managed to complete the familiar spellweave.

Sunny let out a tired sigh, holding the radiant soul shard in his fist.

Then, he turned to look at the towering figure of the Archon.

‘Great. Now, the worst part…’

He had to embed the soul shard and the spellweave anchored to it into the Deathless Spirit.

How was he supposed to do that?

The Wolf had barely managed to rise when another devastating blow threw it to the ground once more. Sunny felt his vision darkening and swayed, failing to suppress a tortured groan from escaping his lips.

‘Damn it, crap, curse it all…’

He straightened with another groan and turned to look in the direction of the Tomb of Ariel.

The Shadow Legion had finally disappeared behind the horizon, and Neph’s radiance was like a distant, pale line above it.

Sunny was surrounded by darkness.

He inhaled deeply.

“Fine then. Let’s do it. No point in dilly-dallying.”

With that, he looked at the Archon once more and stepped into the shadows.

When Sunny emerged from them, he was standing directly on the shoulder of the Deathless Spirit.

He was quite high above the desert, and the howling winds immediately crashed into him, straining to throw him down. The ivory fabric of the Archon’s tattered robe was like a soft carpet beneath his feet. The ancient horror’s skull was like a hill in front of him, and the golden crown set into the black bone was like a tall ridge.

Naturally, only a complete fool would climb the body of a malevolent god. Standing on the shoulder of the Archon, Sunny was more or less surrendering himself to death… he could be squashed into a bloody puddle in an instant, or killed in a million other ways.

The black skull turned slowly, two huge disks of gold staring at him like eyes. From that distance, Sunny could vaguely see the images etched into them… but because of the eerie radiance spilling from within the Archon’s skull, he couldn’t quite make out what those images showed.

He wasn’t sure that it would be wise to see them.

The Archon’s terrifying gaze descended upon him like an avalanche, making every wound on his body scream in pain, and every crack on his battered soul widened a little.

Sunny forced out a smile.

“Hey, bastard. What gave you the courage to bully my wolf?”

The Archon stared at him silently, his dislocated jaw hanging in a twisted grin.

Then, he slowly raised a hand, as if intending to squish Sunny like an annoying fly.

Sunny lunged forward, rushing toward the base of the Deathless Spirit’s spine. Far below, the Wolf growled and leaped into the air, abandoning caution to weigh the fallen deity’s arm down. It was sent crashing into the ground by an inexplicable blow that came before the Archon moved his skeleton hand to deliver it, slowly crumbling into a torrent of shadows — but that bought Sunny time.

As his six shadows appeared on the white sand, having been robbed of the shade they had been augmenting, he reached the spine of the Deathless Spirit and thrust the soul shard at it… through it.

And then, he did what he usually did when turning objects into Memories — using Weaver’s Needle, he attached the pattern to the unseen layer of the Archon’s being, therefore connecting the two together.

Bonding them.

‘Did… did it work?”

The skeletal hand was already barreling toward him, obscuring the sky.

At that moment, Sunny heard a voice…

His own voice.

It was the Handy Bracelet speaking.

[You have received a Memory.]

Sunny was at best a heartbeat away from being destroyed.

“Dismiss!”

He was so panicked that he shouted the mental command out loud.

In the next second…

Sunny fell into a hurricane of white sparks, plummeting toward the white dunes.

The shoulder of the Deathless Spirit, which had supported his weight, was not there anymore.

Instead, a vast storm of essence sparks was pouring into his mangled soul.