Fate's Slave - Shadow Slave X Honkai Star Rail

Sunny stood alone in the ruined wasteland with a shovel made of shadows in his hands, digging through snow and broken stone beneath the pale light of dawn.

The battlefield around him looked like the world had been taken apart by something much larger than war and then carelessly put back together wrong. Entire sections of frozen land had been overturned, mountains of snow displaced into jagged walls, while great trenches carved by claws, explosions, and collapsing structures cut across the white landscape like open wounds. True Darkness still lingered in places where the corpses of abominations had bled it into the world, staining the snow with unnatural blackness that swallowed light rather than reflected it.

Behind him stretched dozens of holes.

Each one was deep enough to bury a person several times over, scattered across the battlefield in an increasingly irritated pattern that reflected exactly how little success he had been having. Some were neat and deliberate. Others looked like he had decided the concept of precision was an insult and simply started excavating entire chunks of the planet out of spite.

Unfortunately, spite was not a reliable tracking method.

Sunny drove the shadow shovel into another patch of frozen earth and lifted a heavy chunk of snow and stone before tossing it aside with enough force to crack it against a nearby slab of obsidian-black ice. His expression remained mostly neutral, but there was a certain dangerous stillness to him that suggested the universe was currently being judged for inefficiency.

He had been searching for Bronya and Veliona.

Or rather, their bodies.

The problem was that the landscape had been rearranged so violently during the battle with Cocolia, the Great Devils, and the Engine’s detonation that the concept of ’where they died’ had become more philosophical than practical. He knew the general area. Unfortunately, the general area now included several square kilometers of destroyed terrain, collapsed caverns, and enough displaced snow to bury a city.

That was assuming they had not simply been launched somewhere else entirely.

That was also assuming they were still near the surface.

If they had been buried too deeply beneath the earth, his shadow sense became nearly useless. Shadows required space to exist. If a body was trapped beneath layers of compact stone and frozen soil where light could not create proper boundaries, then there was very little for him to sense.

It was like trying to hear someone speak from the bottom of the ocean.

Annoying. In fact, Sunny would have an easier time sensing something at the bottom of the ocean.

After another several minutes of fruitless digging, Sunny stopped, leaning slightly on the shovel as he stared across the wasteland in silence.

Then he sighed.

The shovel dissolved back into wild shadows that slid across his arm and vanished into his soul.

He rolled one shoulder and exhaled through his nose.

He could only hope Seele had gone back for them after her dramatic little portal exit. Knowing her, there was a decent chance she had, especially after telling him to go fuck himself with enough emotional devastation to qualify as an Aspect Ability.

If she had not, then he would deal with it himself later.

He already had an idea for a grave.

Not a normal one. Something better.

Something that mattered.

Bronya deserved more than being buried under a random pile of snow because the world had decided to explode at an inconvenient time, and Veliona — well, Veliona would probably complain if he gave her something too sentimental, but she would also complain if he did not, so there was really no winning there.

That could wait. The dead were meant to be remembered, not obsessed over.

For now, there was a much more immediate problem.

Sunny slowly turned his head and looked toward the empty distance where Scar of the Hollow’s corpse should have been.

It was gone.

The Great Devil, the massive dragon-like horror with four wings, obsidian scales, hollow eye sockets, and enough True Darkness leaking from its body to offend reality itself, had simply vanished.

And that was deeply rude.

That was his reward.

His kill!

Technically...

Yes, something else had done approximately ninety-nine percent of the actual work. Yes, Sunny’s contribution had mostly involved surviving near it, making terrible decisions, and capitalizing on the final moments of an already dying monster.

That was irrelevant.

Possession was an idea, not a statistic.

It had died in his battle.

Therefore, it was his.

Naturally, someone had stolen it.

Sunny smiled.

He even had a pretty good idea who.

The IPC was nothing if not efficient when it came to turning horrifying supernatural disasters into profitable quarterly reports. A Great Devil’s corpse was the kind of asset people killed entire civilizations over. Bone, blood, scales, organs, corrupted flesh — every piece of it was worth absurd amounts of money to someone with questionable ethics and excellent funding.

Which, unfortunately, described the Interastral Peace Corporation almost perfectly.

Still, it was a good thing he had prepared for that.

Sunny folded his arms as the morning wind moved through the frozen wasteland.

He had commanded Serpent to knock out and kidnap both the Silvermane Guards and the IPC soldiers during the chaos.

Not because he particularly cared about them on a personal level.

Mostly.

There were practical reasons.

First, there had been absolutely no point in allowing a group of ordinary Awakened soldiers to march into a battlefield occupied by Nightmare Creatures two entire Ranks above them. That was not bravery. That was just extra corpses to clean up.

Sending them in would have accomplished nothing except increasing the local corpse count and making someone else responsible for writing very sad letters later.

Second, and far more importantly, Sunny had a strong feeling he would need leverage.

The IPC was not a corporation one trusted to behave ethically simply because ethics sounded nice in conversation. They behaved according to profit, which meant morality existed only when it was financially efficient.

That required incentives.

So he had taken hostages.

Simple.

Elegant.

Reasonable.

Of course, he was not stupid enough to believe the lives of ordinary soldiers would actually matter much to people like Aventurine or whoever else the IPC had sent. Grunts were expendable. That was practically written into the corporate structure.

No, the real threat was not the loss of personnel.

It was reputation.

The Interastral Peace Corporation liked the word ’Peace’ very much. It was right there in the title, standing proudly between ’Interastral’ and ’Corporation’ like a legal disclaimer.

If word spread that they had marched into Jarilo-VI, turned the place into an apocalyptic nightmare, and then casually abandoned both local civilians and their own people to die while in favor of a Great Devil’s corpse, their reputation would become complicated.

Complications were expensive.

Expensive things got attention.

Attention made negotiations much more enjoyable.

Ah, but he was getting ahead of himself.

That conversation could wait until he had the pleasure of meeting Saint Aventurine again and, apparently, someone named Topaz.

From what he knew, the Ten Stonehearts were all elites within the IPC, each carrying a name tied to gemstones.

They were not all Saints. Some of them were apparently just ordinary humans, which was somehow more concerning.

The real distinction came from the Cornerstones — crystallized fragments of Preservation itself, divine remnants tied to Qlipoth that was gifted to them by Diamond, an Emanator of Preservation. Even mundane humans carrying one could wield abilities far beyond what they should have been capable of, whether in battle, strategy, or whatever strange specialization made someone valuable enough to be included in a group like that.

Still, negotiations were for later.

Right now, he needed to check on Belobog.

He had spent the last few hours recovering enough Essence to avoid immediately collapsing if he attempted anything ambitious. It was not much, but it was enough.

The sun was beginning to rise now, pale gold spreading slowly across the horizon.

It was almost funny.

The Nightmare Gates had opened at sunset.

Everything — the invasion, the Great Devils, Cocolia, the destruction of a third of the city, the collapse of reality, the murder, the fishing — had all happened in a single night.

Some mornings really did start stronger than others.

Sunny stepped forward.

His body dissolved into shadow.

A moment later, he emerged from darkness atop Qlipoth Fort.

Cold wind greeted him immediately, carrying the smell of snow, metal, and distant ruin.

From the highest point of Belobog, he overlooked the Overworld in silence.

It looked bad.

Not unfixable.

But bad.

Several massive sections of the city had collapsed entirely, the streets broken open where the ground itself had given up pretending to remain stable. The fractures connected directly into the Underworld below, exposing ancient layers of infrastructure and forgotten architecture like the planet had been dissected.

One collapse sat directly above the Robot Settlement, where Cocolia, Aventurine, and Clara had made their spectacular entrance by falling through reality like people with no respect for architecture.

Another rupture looked cleaner, almost deliberate, as though something below had blasted upward with artillery powerful enough to punch through the city itself. There was surprisingly little rubble there.

Then there were the Nightmare Gates.

The first loomed above the city like a wound in the sky, vast and wrong, reality stretched open into something that should not exist.

Below it, through the collapsed floor of the Overworld and the shattered ceiling of the Underworld, the second Gate remained visible beneath, another abyss staring upward.

Both were still open.

Both were being monitored.

Clara had apparently left Transcendent automatons behind to watch them, massive mechanical guardians moving with quiet precision around the unstable zones. With both Gate Guardians dead, Nightmare Creature activity had dropped sharply. The Gates were still dangerous, but far less actively catastrophic.

That was nice.

Sunny closed his eyes.

His shadow sense spread outward.

It moved through Belobog like dark water, flowing along streets, under buildings, through broken walls and forgotten corners, searching.

The civilians of both the Overworld and the Underworld had been relocated to the Robot Settlement. Clara’s automatons had formed a perimeter around it, creating the closest thing this planet currently had to functional security.

In the Underworld, he felt the lingering presence of True Darkness spilling from the corpses of the dragon abominations that had emerged from the Overworld’s Gate. The automatons were cleaning that up as well, dragging ruined bodies and corrupted material away before the contamination could spread further.

Overall, Belobog felt strangely empty. Even Aventurine was there, his presence annoyingly easy to notice.

But there was one exception.

One small, stubborn point of life sitting exactly where it should not be.

Sunny tilted his head.

Then he stepped into shadow again.

He emerged inside a clinic.

The room was quiet, dim, and smelled like disinfectant, old medicine, and stress. Cabinets lined the walls.

There was nobody here.

Except for the brat in the cabinet.

Sunny looked toward one of the supply cabinets near the back of the room with the resigned expression of a man who had predicted exactly this.

As expected.

He walked over and opened it.

Ilya launched out like a feral raccoon with mental issues.

’I thought that was my thing?’

There was a snarl, a tearstained face, and a scalpel aimed directly at Sunny’s throat.

It was honestly a decent attempt.

Unfortunately, Sunny was Sunny.

He caught the boy’s wrist easily, stopping the strike before the blade even touched skin. The scalpel pressed harmlessly against the Marble Shell before Sunny casually pulled it from Ilya’s grip like confiscating a toy from an especially aggressive child.

He held it up for a moment, inspecting it.

Then looked down at the boy.

"What are you still doing here, brat? Shouldn’t you have evacuated with the rest?"

Ilya froze.

The panic in him shifted the moment recognition set in.

Seeing that it was only Sunny — and ’only’ was doing a lot of work there — the fight drained out of him all at once, leaving behind something shakier and much younger.

His breathing stuttered.

"N-Nat... Nat, she—"

He pointed toward an empty corner of the clinic.

Sunny followed the gesture.

There was absolutely nothing there.

Then Ilya froze again.

His expression twisted with confusion and panic, like reality itself had just personally betrayed him.

"She was right there. When that monster... the one that looked like Seele touched her, and then... and then—"

Sunny pinched the bridge of his nose.

He was too tired for cryptic haunted-child exposition.

"Right. Uh... maybe we should restart."

He gestured lightly with the confiscated scalpel.

"Who is ’Nat?’"