Fate's Slave - Shadow Slave X Honkai Star Rail

Ilya stared at Sunny for a long moment after he asked that question, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and offense, as though he could not decide whether Sunny was joking or whether reality had finally become so absurd that forgetting an entire person was somehow normal.

When he finally spoke, his voice had lowered, quieter now, but far more serious.

"...Natasha?"

Sunny stood there with the confiscated scalpel still resting loosely in one hand while the other folded across his chest. He raised a brow, exhaustion making him look more irritated than concerned, but the pause before he answered was genuine. He searched the name again, turning it over in his mind, trying to force it into place.

Nothing answered him.

There was no face, no voice, no presence attached to it. There was only an empty space where recognition should have been, like finding a missing tooth with your tongue and becoming increasingly annoyed by its absence.

"Is that a friend of yours?"

For a second, Ilya simply stared at him as though he had been physically struck.

Then he shook his head hard.

"No! You... you were talking to her just last week!"

His voice cracked under the strain of trying to make this make sense.

"When you asked about Seele? She owns this clinic!"

Sunny’s expression shifted.

Not dramatically, but enough.

His brows furrowed, and the usual lazy sarcasm vanished as he actually reached backward through memory, forcing himself to reconstruct the scene.

He remembered coming here.

He remembered the clinic.

He remembered asking about Seele.

He remembered the smell of medicine and old paper, the cluttered cabinets, and the deep certainty that children were universally exhausting.

But when he searched for the details of that conversation—

There was only Ilya.

His face twisted slightly, like someone trying to remember the shape of a dream that kept dissolving the moment he touched it.

"I..."

He frowned.

"I was in here, but it was just you. You were the one who told me where Seele was."

That answer hit Ilya like an insult.

His breathing became uneven again as panic clawed its way back into him. He stepped forward immediately, desperate in the way only children could be when adults started denying the reality they depended on.

"I didn’t even know—"

"Wait."

Sunny’s voice cut through the rising hysteria cleanly.

He narrowed his eyes, something aligning somewhere unpleasant in the back of his mind.

"You said a monster that looked like Seele came in, right?"

Ilya stopped.

Sunny continued, slower now, his tone losing all casualness.

"Did she look like a creepy butterfly? With bug eyes?"

Ilya blinked once.

The panic paused just long enough for him to be offended.

"...It was a moth."

He hesitated.

"But yeah."

Sunny tilted his head slightly.

He was not entirely sure what the functional difference between a moth and a butterfly actually was. He would look it up later if the universe continued insisting insect classification was somehow relevant to his life.

What next? Fireflies? Butterflies? Centipedes? Worms, too. A whole lot of worms.

For now, close enough. That explained enough to be irritating.

Sunny’s expression flattened as he placed the scalpel down on a nearby counter with quiet care.

"And she touched this Natasha person, causing her to die?"

Ilya swallowed, then nodded slowly.

Sunny fell silent.

The room seemed quieter because of it.

Veliona’s eyes.

He had seen what they did.

It was not ordinary death. Death was simple. Death left behind bodies, grief, funerals, ugly crying, and paperwork. It fit into reality, however unpleasantly.

What Veliona carried was something worse.

It was closer to negation.

A form of ending that attacked existence itself, stripping something away so thoroughly that reality struggled to remember it had ever been there.

Before, it had resembled existence erasure more than murder. Things touched by it did not merely die — they were removed, as though the world itself had been convinced to stop acknowledging them.

But memory?

That part was new.

Or perhaps it was not.

Maybe it had always been there, hidden by scale, unnoticed because no one had been close enough to observe the absence. Maybe the effect had deepened after Ascension. Maybe it had changed after Corruption. Maybe surviving the Second Nightmare had twisted it into something more complete. Or perhaps becoming a Nightmare Creature had simply removed the last restraints on what that power was allowed to do.

His thoughts moved quickly and without comfort.

Veliona had always been a contradiction. She was Seele’s other soul, a Flaw given shape, a violent fracture in the self that had somehow become a person. If that fracture had evolved—if it had crossed the line between Flaw and Nightmare Creature — then perhaps the death she brought no longer stopped at flesh.

Perhaps it reached backward.

Perhaps it erased narrative itself.

Not just life, but the evidence of life.

Not just a person, but the fact that they had ever occupied space in the world.

Sunny disliked that very much.

He turned inward again, searching further back.

Someone had been here.

Someone had spoken.

Someone had helped.

And yet every attempt to grasp that person collapsed into blankness.

There should have been detail.

There should have been certainty.

Instead there was only absence.

An abnormality.

And Sunny hated abnormalities he did not personally create.

Slowly, he looked back at Ilya.

The boy was watching him with the expression of someone waiting to hear which one of the two of them was insane.

Most likely, he was neither lying nor losing his mind.

Which was unfortunate, because either option would have been much simpler.

"You lived here, right?"

Ilya nodded hesitantly.

Sunny continued.

"I’m guessing Natasha let you stay with her?"

Another nod followed, quicker this time.

That answered enough.

Sunny sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Well, I get how you feel. I think."

That was about as close to emotional reassurance as the runt was likely to receive from him.

"It looks like the memory of Natasha’s existence has been rewritten in my mind."

Saying it aloud made it sound even worse. He was a bit tired of his mind being messed with.

"We should go check if anyone else remembers. As for you... if you were present when she died, maybe that caused some kind of loophole."

Ilya stared at the floor.

His fists clenched at his sides.

For a moment, Sunny thought he might start crying again.

Instead, the boy shook his head.

"I... I can check by myself."

His voice was quieter now, but steadier.

Then he hesitated.

"But..."

Sunny tilted his head slightly.

There was always a but.

Ilya looked up at him, and suddenly he looked much younger than he had a moment ago. Not because he was weak, but because grief had finally pushed past fear.

"...Why did this happen?"

His voice trembled.

"Why do people have to die?"

The question lingered in the room.

Not because it was profound, but because it was honest.

Children asked questions that adults created entire religions trying to avoid.

Sunny leaned back against the counter and folded his arms again.

For once, he did not answer immediately.

There were many possible lies he could offer. There were poetic speeches about Fate, noble suffering, sacrifice, love, and the tragic beauty of impermanence. There were comforting philosophies and grand sentimental nonsense.

Too bad. He was the most honest man in the world, after all. Two worlds, even.

"There are plenty of reasons, but I guess the simplest answer is power."

Ilya blinked, clearly not expecting that.

His confusion was immediate.

Sunny noticed and clarified.

"Or more accurately, imbalance of power. The strong are able to do as they please with the weak, and the weak are the ones forced to either benefit from that or suffer because of it."

He looked directly at the boy.

"Remember when we first met? I chose to give you water. That benefited you."

Sunny shrugged slightly.

"At the same time, I could have just killed you for ruining the view."

Ilya stared at him.

Sunny continued, not because he enjoyed terrifying children, though the accusation would not have been entirely unfair, but because honesty mattered.

"You would not have been able to stop me. There would have been no justice, no moral lesson, no dramatic speech. Just cause and effect."

Beneath those words, deeper thoughts moved.

Veliona had suffered because she was weak, transforming into something inhuman, even if he didn’t know the details.

Natasha, if Ilya wasn’t imagining her existence, had been weaker still. She died because something stronger decided she could.

Bronya had been weak.

Seele had been weak.

Bronya died before Seele could finish Veliona. That was a sign of weakness.

Cocolia had been weak as well, in her own way. Weak enough to succumb to the Stellaron. Weak enough to let Corruption replace her conviction. Weak enough to lose to Sunny once when she held Destruction in her hands, and again when she had become little more than its corpse pretending to move.

Weakness was not innocence.

Strength was not virtue.

It was simply structure.

Above the weak stood the strong.

Above the strong stood those stronger still.

And above all of them stood things like Fate.

That, more than anything, offended him.

Because even the strongest could still be killed by a script they had never agreed to perform.

That was why strength mattered. Because in the end, it was simply a game of natural selection, whether the players liked it or not.

That was why becoming stronger — strong enough that nothing could decide his life except himself — was one of the only goals that felt worth pursuing.

That, and escaping Fate itself.

What better revenge against the world was there than refusing to be ruled by it?

And, of course, that refusal led to his actual end goal:

A simple, peaceful life.

Sunny looked back at Ilya.

"If I had decided to kill you that day, how would you stop me?"

The boy opened his mouth.

Then he closed it.

He already knew the answer.

He hated it.

Sunny continued:

"You could not. If you were stronger, maybe you could. You could stop Veliona from killing Natasha. That logic applies to practically everything."

Ilya was quiet for a long time.

Eventually, he asked:

"Are you strong?"

Sunny actually paused to think about it.

Compared to ordinary people, obviously yes.

Compared to most Awakened and Ascended, still yes.

Compared to Saints, it was pretty situational.

Compared to the things that actually mattered?

Not even close.

He crossed his arms tighter.

"Compared to most people, yeah. I’d say so."

Then, because he already knew where this was going, he added:

"Do you want to be as strong as me?"

Ilya did not answer immediately.

He stared at the floor, hands clenched so tightly they trembled.

There was anger in him. Fear. Grief.

And the ugly beginnings of ambition.

Sunny recognized all of it because he had lived there for a very long time.

After several seconds, before the boy could force himself to answer, Sunny sighed and waved a hand.

"Well, forget it."

Ilya looked up in surprise.

"What?"

Sunny pushed himself off the counter.

"There is no point in being as strong as me. If you are going to go that far, then you should become even stronger than that."

Ilya stared at him like he had just suggested punching the sun.

"Stronger than you? That’s unreasonable, you idiot!"

Sunny grinned.

He stepped closer and flicked the boy’s forehead with enough force to be insulting rather than painful.

"Then be unreasonable."

Ilya glared at him, rubbing his forehead.

Sunny’s grin remained, sharp and familiar.

Because really, what other option was there?

People like them were not like heroes who fell.

They were rats who survived.

Creatures that survived because they learned how to crawl through walls everyone else pretended were solid. Creatures that stole, adapted, endured. Creatures hated precisely because they refused to die when they were supposed to.

And sometimes, it was that utter refusal to die that was needed to slay all who stood against one’s path.