692 Free Time

After their conversation under that full moon, Noctis had secluded himself in his residence for a couple of weeks. Sunny tried to talk with the eccentric sorcerer a few times, but the silent Sailor Dolls refused to open the door and just stared at him with their crude wooden faces.

There was, of course, the option of simply using Shadow Step to get inside… but, somehow, Sunny suspected that intruding upon the immortal Transcendent would not have been the best idea. There were real souls trapped inside these Sailor Dolls, after all.

In the end, he and the other members of the cohort had no choice but to follow the advice Noctis gave him — to rest and prepare for what was about to come. Luckily, there were a lot of preparations they had to do.

While all four had trained themselves extensively before entering the Nightmare, many things happened since then. There were a lot of lessons they had learned in these three terrible months, most of them bringing the four Awakened to the very door of death. Now that they had time, they could go over everything they had learned, revisit it, and truly absorb it into their bones, connecting the new knowledge and skills to their foundation in a solid manner.

For Sunny, that meant several things.

The first one was Shadow Dance. He had found himself in a strange situation, having made the recent breakthrough inside of a nightmare... that he did not really remember.

Sunny could guess that mastering the third step of his battle style was tied to the fact that he had lived through countless nightmares and lost himself in them, becoming truly shapeless and formless… forgetting himself and turning into other people completely.

That observation was in line with how he had initially made progress to the third step of Shadow Step, back in the arena of the Red Colosseum, where he shadowed numerous Nightmare Creatures. Back then, he had almost lost himself, as well, but stopped at the last moment, fearing that he would not be able to come back.

Being trapped in the nightmares had made that frightening step for him, and so, he had approached the very edge of a breakthrough. The final piece of the puzzle had been trying to shadow the epitome of formlessness — another Shadow, Nightmare.

As a result of the breakthrough, Sunny's ability to recognize and gain insight into patterns of combat techniques had increased even more, now allowing him to understand and predict not only the movements and behavior of his enemies, but also intricately sense the flow of essence through their bodies, as well as — almost, but not quite — being able to predict their very thoughts.

However, there was one glaring flaw in this miraculous ability, one that he didn't know how to solve. For the first time since Sunny had created Shadow Dance, the elusive battle art was starting to seem… dangerous. Not only for his enemies, but also for himself.

What was the point of being able to kill something if he ran the risk of losing himself and becoming that thing forever?

To kill a dragon, one had to become a dragon...

Why would anyone want to achieve such a victory, if earning it meant ceasing to be themselves and becoming the very thing they had wanted to destroy?

For now, he didn't have a solution, and that made him more than a little bit nervous. So, Sunny decided to temporarily concentrate on other things.

He spent a large part of his days practicing archery with Kai. Sunny quickly realized that he would never be as talented of an archer as his friend was, but that did not mean that he could not achieve great results. In fact, his aim and skill with the bow were increasing at a steady pace.

Still, there was a question of distributing the tools the cohort possessed in the most efficient manner, so Sunny reluctantly tried to lend Morgan's Warbow to Kai. It was for naught, though — because of the [Unbending] enchantment of the bow, his friend was simply not strong enough to draw it.

When their training sessions were over, Sunny would usually return to his room and spent the rest of the day fruitlessly practicing weaving. He had achieved some progress in his attempt to learn how to copy enchantments, but not enough to make the altered weaves stable. The number of Memories he had won in the Red Colosseum was dwindling by the day with no apparent result, with made Sunny very frustrated.

It seemed that he had hit a bottleneck in his understanding of how spellweaves were supposed to work, and was in need of a mental breakthrough to push himself any further.

That breakthrough was not in a hurry to come, though.

…When the day was over and darkness encroached upon the world, Sunny turned to the third, and most time-consuming, part of his preparations… collecting shadow fragments to form his fourth core. Leaving the Sanctuary, he would travel to nearby islands in search of Nightmare Creatures to hunt, and killed those he could find and that were not beyond his ability to defeat.

By now, less than one hundred and fifty fragments separated him from becoming a Devil. The number seemed so small, but at the same time was more troublesome than it should have been.

The problem was in the fact that there were not as many Nightmare Creatures in the Kingdom of Hope as there had been on the Chained Isles in the future, especially not that close to the stronghold of one of the Chain Lords. As the result, his progress was torturously slow and tedious.

To accelerate it somehow, Sunny had made a frightening decision to leave the surface of the islands and take his hunting to their underside, where the true horrors of this land dwelled. Luckily, his new body was somewhat fit to do so — with his sharp claws and talons, he was able to climb any surface, no matter how steep, or even remain mobile while hanging entirely upside down.

And if he made a mistake, the Heavenly Burden was always at hand.

In combination with his swiftly improving archery skill and determination to form a new core before the culmination of the Nightmare arrived, Sunny was able to slay many dwellers of the Dark Side. There were indeed terrible and morbid creatures, and more than a few left scars on his body.

But it was still not fast enough.

By the end of the first two weeks, he was still not even halfway to his goal. And on that day, quietly and without any fanfare, something else happened.

Somewhere out there, in the wild reaches of the Dream Realm…

Changing Star of the Immortal Flame clan had finally become a Tyrant.