Chapter 154: A Shadow's Journey Across Antarctica (3)
'If only a certain bastard in blue spandex could show up to help me...'
Sunny felt slightly frustrated at himself for joking in such a bad situation.
He was cut off from the dream realm and had no way of communicating with them... Even Cassie was impossible to reach currently.
Sunny needed to do something and quickly.
He felt that they should not remain here for long, both because they had limited resources and because of his intuition.
Looking at the cohort of Irregulars, Sunny let out a frustrated sigh and stretched with a calm expression, making them confused.
"You go ahead and make the convoy move, I have an idea."
Samara gave her captain a strange look.
"Captain... May I ask what are you going to do?"
To that question, Sunny gave her a chilling smile, making all of them shiver slightly.
"Well I'm glad you asked! I'm going to transform into a monster with giant drills and drill my way downward until I reach whatever abomination is there and kill it!"
***
The convoy had started moving once again, led by the rhino. Sunny and Saint stayed behind in the darkness, feeling its cold.
Looking at his trustful companion, Sunny gave her a smile.
"Hey Saint, if I go crazy, make sure to knock me out, alright?"
His shadow nodded, seemingly excited about the idea.
Sunny gave her an odd look but didn't linger, as he closed his eyes and cleared his mind.
He was going to attempt something crazy... That thing, of course, was none other than attempting to master shadow dance fourth step.
The third step was about fighting like a creature, however the fourth was about becoming one.
This step required Sunny let go of his physical form, allowing him to change shapes at will, much too similar to Hugo.
He has invented the shadow shells to reach the fourth step, although they were crude imitations, he still managed to create some useful ones. His shadow fiend shell was his most useful one, but he also possessed some shells that were based off Hugo's transformations.
That aside to reach the fourth step, Sunny needed to truly let go of his narrow way of thinking as a human and become a true creature in mind.
He had previously used Shadow Dance to read abominations, but never tried to manifest himself into one of them due to it being easy to get lost in that state, maybe forever. He needed to maintain his sense of self while denying it, is possibly the fourth step of Shadow Dance. This involved becoming formless in mind, body, and soul, becoming infinitely malleable like all shadows...
However, Sunny was wrong about one thing. He had the idea that all creatures—All non humans—were monsters, or in other nightmare creatures.
That was because he was a human of the war realm born in the age of the nightmare spell, where only humans existed and nightmare creatures were the enemy. His upbringing had made the idea of creatures being sentient and reasonable nearly impossible.
That was the case, until he had met Noctis and learned about the existence of noble creatures, and more importantly, after Hugo returned and trained with Sunny for a short time.
Sunny had learned a lot about noble creatures and how their way of thinking was different from humans. Hugo experienced that wrapped feeling of changing minds every time he Transformed, so Sunny only needed to copy that.
To change his mind and personality, making it like that of a noble creature.
He sank into the shadow, and reshaped himself into the form he needed for the task. The shadows swirled and transformed, fusing with him and expanding his petite shape, until it became a menacing robot like construct.
At the same time, Sunny's mind underwent a similar transformation, morphing and changing to fit his new body.
He felt it expand, and at the same time, he felt himself losing his humanity...
'So this is what it feels like... How dreadfully beautiful...'
Stepping out of the shadow, Sunny towered over Saint, becoming a machine of shadow metal.
He had taken the form of Armadillo, one of Hugo's aliens that didn't possess "mystical" abilities in the regular sense, making the alien easily replicable. Well, not easy, but manageable.
He had not mastered the fourth step yet, as the spell did not give him a notification but that didn't matter.
Sunny's hands retracted and shifted into that of a drill, spinning rapidly. Then, he turned it downward and drove into the ground, completely annihilating it and falling into the depths alongside Saint.
'The creature here must be truly powerful to affect reality this much... If I consume it, I might be able to evolve into a terror...'
Sunny did not feel strange about those thoughts, as it felt like second nature... However he did recognize that they were not truly "his" thoughts.
Alongside Saint, he descended deeper into the belly of the mountain, destroying the dirt using his drills.
They continued to descend and after a while Sunny found himself at a deeper level of the tunnel.
He landed with a heavy thud, thanks to his weight. Saint landed gracefully next to him.
Looking ahead, Sunny found himself at an intersection, which was drowning in darkness. It was the first one of many - just as Professor Obel had informed him a while ago, there was a whole network of tunnels excavated during the Dark Times here, meant to serve as a bomb shelter in case of an all-out war.
Faced with the complicated maze of passages, Sunny did something that he would normally never do.
He continued drilling down, ignoring the options in front of him.
'What do the humans call this? Thinking outside of the box?'
Well in this case, it would be thinking outside of a cave, but the difference barely mattered.
Falling into a deeper floor, The walls of the tunnel he had seen multiple times finally disappeared, and he found himself in a vast, spherical cave. As he was falling, Sunny briefly noticed a violent crimson light illuminating the world around them.
That light... It was somehow the source of the darkness. Looking deeper into it as he was falling down, that light suddenly became much clearer as it was coming from a dark orb.
It was a giant orb of jet-black stone that floated in the center of the cave, burning darkly with the crimson reflections of the flare's fire. The darkness... the darkness flowed through it, or maybe was born from it. The orb gave Sunny a sense of dread unlike no other. It was the same as when an animal senses the approach of its natural predator...
Whatever that black sphere was... he knew that it was not something any human was supposed to see.
However, he was not a human right now, or at least his mind did not function like one. So, he stilled his will and augmented himself with shadow essence.
His magnificent drill fell down upon the orb, piercing through the veil of darkness, or at least attempting to...
The drill of shadows spun violently, however the darkness was powerful, so much so that the drill began to unravel.
Sunny however did not give up. Instead he called upon more shadows directly from the [Shadow Lantern], reconstructing the drill instantly.
His mind had lost its humanity, and so things such as stress and the constraints of his mortal mind were not a problem right now, or at least not in the regular sense.
Noble creatures still felt stress, although their perception of it was far different from that of humans.
Nonetheless, this inhumanity he has gained through shadow dance allowed him to push past his limits, and finally, his drills reached the orb, barely a second away from being consumed by the darkness.
THUD!
An explosion of darkness spread across the cave, and suddenly Sunny's drills went further scrapping against... A carapace? It was not just one, but multiple of them, each screeching and screaming as the drill squashed them alive.
Beside him Saint was thrown back from the explosion, and at the same time, Sunny saw what was in the orb...
It was not darkness, but instead a myriad of tiny beetle-like creatures that were now swarming over him like a river.
'I'm not getting any shadow fragments... So this must be a single creature controlling multiple bodies... Hundreds of them...'
Both of his hands kept drilling the beetles, however those deadly bugs did not sit idle as they were destroyed but instead they swarmed his armored body, eating away at him violently and damaging his soul...
Before he got overwhelmed, a blade made of dark stone flashed across the darkness, destroying dozens of beetles at once.
It was Saint, using her Transcendent physical abilities to slash away at the beetles, leaving none of them alive.
Pain coursed through Sunny's entire being, so profound that any mundane person would have gone completely mad and yet, he continued killing the beetles, completely engulfed in madness...
Noble creatures had the desire to grow stronger... Far more than humans, at least... And in Sunny's eyes, killing the beetles was the only way of doing that.
It was not the first time he had fallen into this madness but it was the first time it had felt so natural...
And finally, when he almost lost himself, he heard the voice of the spell:
[You have slain a fallen terror: Heart of Darkness]
[You have received a memory: Dark Soul]
It seemed he had finally reached the main body, and crushed its body.
Just as he did that, the entire network of caverns suddenly began shaking violently, and at the same time the true darkness all around Sunny began to move, threatening to swallow him whole.
The terror was dead, however the influx of darkness it had left behind—Likely to fuel its evolution—was still there... And darkness was the antithesis to shadows.
Just as Sunny was about to be consumed by the darkness, something changed around them.
The darkness all around Sunny was suddenly pulled somewhere else... Not too far away from him. It was pulled towards... Saint.
His loyal companion was gathering the darkness into her heart, absorbing it entirely to fuel her evolution.
[Your shadow is evolving]
Within seconds, the darkness was entirely gone and then, Saint unsummoned herself, unable to hold off her evolution anymore.
She was going to become a Transcendent devil soon...
'Good for her...'
Sunny, still shadowing a noble creature felt a little jealous however the cavern was still shaken and slowly, rubble started to come down as the tunnel above began collapsing on itself.
Sunny needed to leave this place however... He did not want to let go of his shadow shell... He did not want to change once again.
What was wrong about being a noble creature? As far as he could tell, he was as real as his original self.
Original self....
'I'm... Lost from light.... Lost from light... Lost from light...'
Chanting his true name like a madman, Sunny's mind briefly came back, regaining a little of his humanity.
In that small moment, he immediately flowed back into the shadows and released his form, becoming a shadow once again.
He reverted back to his shape to that of a human and as he did, he shadow stepped upward.
Darkness wasn't clouding the shadows anymore, so he had plenty of space to jump between.
He had no mouth right now but if he did, he would have let out a sigh of relief.
He had almost lost himself...
'Shadow dance fourth step... It's far more dangerous than I expected...'
More than that, shadowing noble creatures was just as dangerous as shadowing mad nightmare creatures. After all, those creatures of old possessed an inhuman form of intelligence that was twisted and morbid by human standards.
'Is that what Hugo feels when he's Transformed?'
He did not feel pity for him, but instead he felt slightly disturbed by the notion...
Quickly, Sunny caught up with the convoy and jumped out of the shadows, landing atop the rhino.
He remained there for a few moments, and then they finally escaped the tunnel, and Sunny was greeted with the dreadful sky of Antarctica once again.
A small smile appeared on his face.
"Never thought I'd be glad to see this hellhole..."
Despite his relief, there was no time for peace. After all, they were still in Antarctica and currently, Saint was evolving which means she would be unavailable for a while.
He had to put in double the effort to protect the civilians as they journeyed towards Erebus Field.
Summoning [Morgan's Warbow], Sunny let out a calm sigh and made sure to focus on his surroundings, allowing his shadow sense to envelop the world.
The shadows of his Irregular cohort were there, alongside the shadows of countless mundanes... Strangely, there was no nightmare creatures around, not even a single one...
'Not normal...'
Could it be because of the Heart of Darkness territory? No, the horde from before still chased them towards the tunnel so that couldn't be the case...
Looking further, Sunny's eyes widened and he suddenly dropped Morgan's Warbow on the roof of the rhino...
As the convoy continued moving forward on the road, the ocean, which was close to the road, suddenly began rippling...
The water parted away as a gigantic figure emerged from its depths.
It was the fallen Titan, Goliath. One of the three titans in Antarctica.