Shadow Slave

That night, the island was quaking without pause. Sunny and Nephis hid in their fissure, not daring to close their eyes - even though a mass of impregnable black rock separated them from the flesh of the Black Turtle, it was unnerving to know that thousands of Corrupted Beasts were currently slithering somewhere below them, shredding the meat of the Great Monster with their terrible glass-like teeth.

The Azure Serpent was also there, hunting down the invaders. Although they couldn't hear its roars, the violent vibrations spreading through the island told them what was going on.

Sunny looked away from the shimmering runes, somewhat startled at how easily he had earned a large amount of shadow fragments. After another violent tremor had shaken the island, he finally closed his eyes.

However, it was not to sleep.

Instead, Sunny tried to imagine... tried to convince himself that he was the Azure Serpent. He was crawling through the grotesque tunnel of bleeding flesh, which he himself had created to kill the hateful carapace monster, furiously hunting the vile creatures who dared to steal his trophy. His long, mighty body was burning from pain, but Sunny did not care.

All he cared about was slaughter, blood, and retribution.

Noticing a tiny warm gnawing on the wall of the tunnel, he let out a terrifying growl and shot forward, destroying the vermin and tearing a large chunk of meat out of the wall with his powerful jaws.

But, behind it, more vermin were revealed, stolen meat digesting in their transparent stomachs.

With madness painting the cloudy world red, Sunny roared and slammed into them with obliterating fury.

'Is this the feeling? Am I on the right path?'

Opening his eyes, he stared into the darkness with an absent expression. Then, he looked at Nephis.

Some time later, Sunny said:

"I feel like our chances of making it off this island alive are dwindling."

She remained silent for a while.

"...So what if they are?"

White flames ignited in her eyes, illuminating them with a pale radiance.

"Has it been any different before?"

Hearing that, Sunny chuckled.

"True... we never had it easy."

He studied her face, then turned to look at the Sin of Solace and sighed.

"Still, I hope that this Nightmare will be better than my Second one. Oh, it's not much of a competition. I must have died a thousand times there... even though I only remember a handful of those deaths, the Third Nightmare surely can't turn out any worse than that."

Nephis turned and looked at him, then smiled faintly.

"Of course. In the worst case, we'll just die once. That's nothing, right?"

As the dark island shook and quaked around them, Sunny grinned.

"Dying once? Child's play! Gods, anyone can do it. You're right, I was worried about nothing."

As they laughed quietly, the Sin of Solace smiled, too.

His smile was bright and full of sinister amusement.

***

The next day after the attack of the krill swarm, the butterfly descended from the skies again. And two days after that, another flying abomination appeared silently in the darkness of the night.

Neither Sunny nor Nephis saw it, but in the morning, the surface of the island was awash with black, fetid blood. It seemed that it was the butterfly that had battled the late contender this time, ripping it to shreds before it had the chance to approach the remains of the Black Turtle.

It must have taken an injury in that battle because the Azure Serpent received more days than usual to recover from its dire wounds.

Then, as they drifted further downstream, a second krill swarm attacked, this one even larger than the first. The battle between the mad leviathan and the vast River Locust swarm lasted for an entire day, and its result was pretty much the same - thousands of translucent abominations slithered into the carcass of the Black Turtle, and the battered serpent followed to hunt them down.

However, what met it inside was another Great Beast - a vile creature made of numerous tentacles and spongy pale flesh - that had snuck to feast on the insides of the turtle while the river serpent had been fighting the krill.

Sunny and Nephis knew how it looked because the Azure Serpent brought its revolting body outside and rose high above the water before swallowing the corpse whole. That was how they learned why a powerful earthquake had suddenly thrown the world into spasms and convulsions before.

...On that day, to their horror, they discovered a deep crack snaking its way through the surface of the Black Turtle's shell. It was not too large, but the fact that the stone carapace of the dead monster had been broken from the inside was indescribably concerning.

Next morning, Nephis went to the edge of the island instead of practicing with Sunny, as they usually did, and spent several hours staring at the water. Then, she brought back disturbing news.

The carcass of the Black Turtle... was higher than it had been before. The parts of it that had been hidden underwater were now dry and exposed.

This meant that a considerable amount of the dead behemoth's flesh had already been devoured by the Azure Serpent, the marauding krill, and the pale thief, thus reducing its weight and increasing its buoyancy. It was also the reason why the swaying and the shaking of the island had grown much more severe lately.

The carapace of the Black Turtle was deteriorating and cracking under the strain of harrowing battles raging around and inside of it, and at the same time, it was being gradually hollowed out by the Nightmare Creatures of the Great River.

Their titanic shelter was slowly coming undone under them.

Worse yet, in the coming days, the number of abominations arriving to feast on the corpse of the titanic monster only increased. There were more krill, more dwellers of the deep, and more winged horrors being lured to it by the scent of blood.

It was a carnival of horror.

The Azure Serpent and the Dark Butterfly were like champions among them, slaying all invaders and occasionally clashing with each other.

But that only made the situation worse.

Now, the dreadful inhabitants of the Great River were attracted not only by the blood of the Black Turtle, but also by the blood of unfortunate abominations that had been slain in their attempt to feast on the turtle's meat.

'This can't go on much longer... it just can't...'

Both Sunny and Nephis knew that doom was swiftly approaching.

However, there was nothing they could do.

No matter how much they hoped and how diligently they watched the horizon, there was no sign of anything that could save them.

There was no land and no ships anywhere in sight. There was not even a piece of flotsam drifting on the waves.

Only a vast, deep, and endlessly flowing expanse of water that shone under the dreamlike radiance of the seven beautiful suns.