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Chapter 2346: Intricate Control
Shadow Slave

'Holy… hell…'

The second the Snow Worm struck, the entire mountain groaned, and the world itself seemed to shudder in agony. Sunny had witnessed truly harrowing power before, but he had never been so close to something so annihilating, so destructive. Even if he had not been stripped of his shadows and weakened by the Snow Domain, he would have been utterly obliterated by this one strike…

But of course, only if he was foolish enough to get struck.

Not even trying to evade the gargantuan maw of the Cursed Beast, Sunny simply pulled his entire titanic Shell into the shadows, stepping through them to bring down his odachi on the pale flesh of the Snow Worm on the other side of the mountain.

The hundred-meter-long blade cut deep, but even its great length was not enough to sever the Nightmare Creature in two.

In the next moment, the body of the Snow Worm moved, slamming into Sunny with frightening force and throwing him back.

'Crap.'

The deep wound he had dealt the Cursed Beast was already gone, replaced by more pale flesh. The snow under Sunny's feet, meanwhile, rippled peculiarly…

He leaped back, and a split second later, the snow collapsed, falling into the huge maw that appeared beneath.

The Snow Worm's head shot from below, and then, it was as if a pale wall rose in front of Sunny, reaching toward the sky.

That was the neck of the huge Nightmare Creature, who had pierced a tunnel through the mountain and tried to swallow Sunny by appearing right beneath him.

Not wasting any time, Sunny rushed forward and plunged his odachi into the pale flesh, using the creature's own momentum to deliver it a long, gruesome cut.

Almost at the same time, two more arrows pierced the flesh of the Cursed Beast.

And then, two more.

Its huge body seemed to shrink a little… or did it only seem that way?

'Argh!'

Two walls of pale flesh were rushing at Sunny from higher up the slope and lower down the slope - they were the coils of the Snow Worm, who was twisting its body to crush the adversary.

'Not… so quick…'

Sunny barely managed to step through the shadows in time. His Shell was made from them, but it was too heavy, too large - it took him far longer to dive into the shadows than when he was in human form, which could do the same almost instantaneously.

Still, he escaped with his life.

As the head of the Snow Worm turned in the frigid air and rushed down once more, the Obsidian Wasps dove from the sky to attack the huge Nightmare Creature.

Scores of Supreme shades were a lethal threat to almost any creature, but they were too vulnerable in front of a Cursed Beast. After all, shades did not possess the Will, and worse than that, they were weakened by the Snow Domain. So they could be easily crushed and sent back into Sunny's soul if he used them recklessly.

Luckily, there was one silver lining to how heavily suppressed he was here, in Ariel's Game.

Sunny had gone about becoming Supreme in a somewhat backward fashion. By the time he learned how to manifest his Domain, it was already vast and powerful, built out of tens of thousands of shades. Faced with their overwhelming number, he had always struggled to control his Shadow Legion - control it with any level of precision, at least.

But here, Sunny was devoid of his vast army. Instead, he could only command a relatively small number of shades that had been earned inside the Game.

That allowed him to command each one intricately.

He had been training himself to control the Obsidian Wasps precisely for the past few days, ever since earning the first one. Handling a hundred shades was far easier than thousands, especially since his mind was free of having to control his other incarnations and keep an eye on the members of the Shadow Clan.

His mind had plenty of unused capacity for the first time in years, so his efforts to learn how to control his shades better fell into fertile soil.

At first, Sunny simply concentrated on having the Obsidian Wasps move in different directions. Then, he made each of them follow an elaborate path. After mastering easy maneuvers, he moved on to practicing more intricate and complicated tasks, eventually arriving at simulated battles between different groups of shades.

By now, the Obsidian Wasps did not exactly feel like extensions of his own body… but he felt confident in making each of them do precisely what he wanted.

That expanded his strategic repertoire greatly, of course.

Right now, he had to give his shades an opportunity to attack the Snow Worm without being destroyed by it.

So… he aimed them precisely at the areas on its enormous body where its tough hide had been cut by his towering odachi.

The Obsidian Wasps plummeted from the sky, their glasslike wings burning with a crimson glow in the light of the setting sun, and crawled into the Snow Worm's open wounds.

Hidden within its voluminous body, where they could not be crushed and devoured by the Cursed Beast, they bit into its flesh, burying themselves deeper and deeper into it as their legs and mandibles cut and shredded the Nightmare Creature's muscles.

The Snow Worm was huge, but its size could be used as a weapon against it. For now, no more than a dozen shades had managed to crawl into its wounds… but there were going to be more wounds, and more Obsidian Wasps finding their way into the creature's body.

The arrows shot by Kai and Slayer, meanwhile, were constricting the Snow Worm's ability to expand itself more and more.

'It's working.'

As the Cursed Beast's head fell from the sky on Sunny, its shadow covered him. Turning his odachi downward, he plunged it into the Nightmare Creature's shadow, then collapsed into it to flee the horrifying maw at the last possible second.

His strike dealt some damage to the creature's vast, corrupted soul - not enough to threaten its life, but enough to be felt.

The Snow Worm's flesh rippled in agony. 'I think I can kill it.'

The only question was…

Would Sunny be able to kill the damned monstrosity in time?

The sun was setting, and the clock was ticking. If he was not quick enough…

The one being killed would be him.

Shadow Slave
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Comments 40

  1. Offline
    『 』 Hollow
    + 1 ⋅ 0 -
    'Salve Tejedor... Primogénito del Dios Olvidado.'
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  2. Offline
    Atlas
    + 1 ⋅ 0 -
    Honestly Sunny should be like super genius iq rn since he doesn’t have to deal with six other incarnations or shadow clan stuff
    Read more
  3. Offline
    Porcelain Doll Sunny
    + 2 ⋅ 0 -
    I agree with Ethan somewhere below me

    But x100
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  4. Offline
    Doublefaced 2
    + 4 ⋅ 0 -
    It would have been more interesting if seishan came inside the game instead of slayer. And even more fun to see sunny showing both of them the path to supremecy
    Read more
    1. Offline
      Porcelain Doll Sunny
      + 3 ⋅ 0 -
      Seeing that memory come up it was probably important that Slayer came with him into the game, but idk why exactly…
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  5. Offline
    juuzou
    + 3 ⋅ 0 -
    W frl
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  6. Offline
    Ethan
    + 19 ⋅ 0 -
    I f#cking love Shadow Slave, no matter how many times I stack every time I pick it up again its so easy to get immersed into the narrative, G3 really has a skill for capturing the readers attention
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  7. Offline
    ThatOneKidInTheBack
    + 20 ⋅ 0 -
    Did you see that? It can bleed. It can die. Sunny really went full fromsoft fan
    Read more
    1. Offline
      Limitless the fy victimizer
      + 3 ⋅ 0 -
      g3 is one after all
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    2. Offline
      The Mad Prince
      + 0 ⋅ 0 -
      covetous coffer, the fire keepers, yeah g3 is cooking hard
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  8. Offline
    Intrepid_Reader1
    + 9 ⋅ 0 -
    'Holy… hell…'


    So surprising damnations wasn’t enough
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  9. Offline
    Pro100zver25
    + 4 ⋅ 0 -
    Chapter — 2347: Curse of Abundance.

    Sunny played hide and search with the Snow Worm by jumping between shadows while the mountain was falling apart around them. The creature's huge size made it difficult for him to destroy its body, but it also made it difficult for the creature to destroy him.

    The pale, segmented coils of the Snow Worm were wrapped around the entire mountain countless times over, expanding and constricting as they moved at great speed and slowly ground the mountain to dust. Because of their sheer mass and number, the Cursed Beast was its own obstacle when hunting down an foe as mobile as Sunny.

    The Snow Worm twisted its coils unpredictably to catch and crush Sunny between them. When two walls of pale flesh collided, violent shockwaves sent ripples across the sea of clouds, and the entire world seemed to shake. At the same time, its maw was pursuing Sunny, easily digging tunnels through the mountain or soaring into the sky to plummet down seconds later like a ghastly meteor.

    Then again, as the battle continued, Sunny got the impression that pure, focused lethality was not exactly the Snow Worm's strong suit. Rather, it seemed like a creature who subjugated its prey through its sheer… abundance.

    The Snow Worm was too enormous, too voluminous, too inexhaustible. Its infinite body allowed it to weather an infinite number of attacks, only for more pale flesh to burst forward, burying the adversary under its endless mass. So, it could simply endure endlessly, until the adversary was exhausted, tired, and spent.

    In this case, the Snow Worm simply needed to endure until nightfall.

    It was a single-minded and patient creature. And yet, it was exactly its single-mindedness that made the Snow Worm so frightening… its extreme mastery of a single power, of a single concept — used both for attack and defense — made it almost inevitable.

    …As the Sovereign of Death, Sunny took offense to that.

    After all, nothing was supposed to be more inevitable than death.

    ‹If only my legion was here…›

    Growling, he fled from the Snow Worm while shredding its flesh with his great blade. Sunny did not discriminate between attacking the body of the Cursed Beast and its shadow, dealing both physical and soul damage to it.

    The soul of the Snow Worm was as vast and seemingly endless as its flesh, hiding an infinite amount of vile darkness. When souls received a certain amount of damage, they collapsed and crumbled — except for Sunny's own tenacious soul, which was reinforced by Soul Weave and therefore had no such threshold.

    And yet, he felt that the soul of the Snow Worm was too enormous, too ancient, and too deep to be destroyed that way — at least while he was devoid of his shadows and weakened by the Snow Domain.

    Perhaps that was what the souls of all deities were like, or perhaps the soul of this corrupted deity in particular was especially abundant. In any case, destroying it was not something that could be accomplished easily.

    Fortunately, Sunny was nothing if not resourceful. Even if dealing a sufficient amount of soul damage was not feasible, he had other means of destroying a soul.

    After all, he wielded the power of shadows… the power of death. Just as Nephis had mentioned, each Will was unique, and his was all about killing intent. It was the will to see living beings die. That was both his natural affinity and a skill he had developed by wielding Serpent, the Slaying Blade.

    In other words, his Will was more effective and efficient than it was supposed to be when implemented for the purpose of killing. And while the Snow Worm was a being of a higher Rank than Sunny, its Will was not as sophisticated as his.

    Sunny understood it as he was desperately fighting the detestable creature. Yes, the Snow Worm was more powerful than him, and its Will was far more harrowing.

    However, just like a mindless beast could not fathom a combat technique, the colossal Nightmare Creature could not wield its Will with focused intent either.

    The Will of the Snow Worm was not much different from the elemental and largely directionless Will of the millipede swarm. And so, Sunny actually had a clear advantage over the profane deity.

    Therefore, he could infuse each of his soul attacks with the power of Death — with the focused will to see the adversary die — and that will slowly accumulated, poisoning the soul of the Snow Worm. The quantity of damage he dealt to the adversary's soul might not have been sufficient, but its insidious quality was a completely separate issue.

    Even if each cut dealt to the shadow of the Cursed Beast was insignificant due to how vast it was, all of that vastness was poisoned by the Death Will regardless of its nearly endless nature. As soon as Sunny expressed enough will to kill the Snow Worm to overcome its will to live, the creature was going to die.

    Which was not to say that he would be able to achieve that before the sun disappeared beyond the horizon.

    However, that was only half of Sunny's strategy.

    The other half was far simpler — he simply wanted to rip, shred, and devastate the Snow Worm's huge body.

    That, too, was a way to kill the enormous Cursed Beast.
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    1. Offline
      Pro100zver25
      + 3 ⋅ 0 -
      Chapter — 2348: Death Will.

      Every cut Sunny dealt to the Snow Worm's voluminous body served a purpose, and that purpose was to allow more Obsidian Wasps to crawl inside it.

      By now, almost all of them had found their way into the Cursed Beast. They were slithering there, wreaking havoc and mangling tissue while burrowing deeper and deeper. Even if the wounds Sunny dealt to the huge Nightmare Creature were relatively insignificant, being mangled and devoured by a hundred Supreme shades from the inside was not.

      And yet, the Snow Worm endured the harrowing amount of damage being dealt to it almost effortlessly, demonstrating the vast divide between the Supreme and the Sacred — or rather, Cursed — Ranks.

      More than that, even buried deep within its flesh, the Obsidian Wasps were not entirely safe. In fact, numerous of them had already been destroyed. Some were simply crushed by the unfathomably powerful muscles of the Cursed Beast.

      Some had accidentally found their way into its digestive system and were either ground to dust or dissolved entirely.

      Some met their end in ways that Sunny could not even describe, let alone understand, while some were destroyed in more bizarre ways.

      Since the Snow Worm wielded the concept of infinity as its weapon and could expand or shrink its body at will, some Obsidian Wasps were simply torn asunder when the point in space they had occupied suddenly expanded. Others were crushed into infinitely small balls of obsidian when the space they had been occupying shrank.

      Of course, none of them were actually destroyed — rather, they were returned to the dark expanse of Sunny's soul. But they were eliminated from this fateful battle, which was ostensibly the same.

      ‹Gods… just how indestructible is that thing?›

      The mountain was full of holes by now, groaning precariously, which made it difficult for Sunny to find sure footing as he kept escaping the Cursed Beast's awful attacks. The Snow Worm showed no outward signs of being seriously harmed by the swarm of Obisidian Wasps, for now… Which was not to say that it was unharmed.

      In fact, Sunny could sense the cadence of the battle slowly changing.

      He felt a bit of vicious joy as he realized that his preparations had not been for naught, and that his strategy was working. Just as he had planned, he was going to defeat this overwhelmingly powerful adversary by using his advantages — his intelligence, cunning, and skill.

      By then, Kai and Slayer had sunk all of the Finality Arrows he had crafted into the Worm's flesh. The enchantments Sunny had so laboriously created were locking various segments of its body in space, making it more difficult for the creature to exercise its infinite power.

      At the same time, the Obsidian Wasps were ravaging the Snow Worm's insides, while Sunny was poisoning its soul with the power of his deathly will. Kai and Slayer, meanwhile, switched to purely annihilating arrows, helping him wound the Cursed Beast as much as they could.

      Because he could sense it — slowly but surely, the enormous body of the Snow Worm was shrinking. Instead of infinitely growing, it was gradually reducing in size.

      He could not see the result due to the sheer scale of the Snow Worm, but he could sense it through the shadows. Already, there were fewer coils surrounding the mountain…

      And as the battle continued, the rate at which the Snow Worm was shrinking only accelerated. By the time Kai had run out of arrows, Sunny could already see its tail. The maw of the creature, too, had diminished in size — it could still swallow Sunny in one bite, but at least not without doing some chewing first.

      As he stepped through the shadows and rolled on the heavily damaged, perforated slope of the mountain, a new shadow suddenly joined the fray.

      ‹What… is this maniac doing?›

      A haunting sound that resembled a song suddenly permeated the sky, and a sonic wave struck the head of the Cursed Beast, shredding some of its flesh and changing its direction slightly.

      A gorgeous dragon plummeted from above, landing on the Cursed Beast's back and striking at it with its long, sharp claws. At the same time, Kai seemed to have spoken something — the Snow Worm largely ignored his command… but not entirely.

      Sunny almost missed a graceful figure that shot an arrow into an open wound of the Cursed Beast from the dragon's back. Slayer wanted to kill the weakened deity, as well.

      The sun had already fallen halfway behind the horizon.

      ‹We need to hurry.›

      After that, the demise of the Snow Worm was hastened.

      The damage dealt to its soul and body had accumulated, and its ability to command infinity grew unstable. It shrank its body more and more, crushing the Obsidian Wasps within… but it was already too late.

      Soon enough, the Cursed Beast could barely wrap itself around the mountain. Then, its maw became too narrow to swallow the Shadow Colossus — that, ironically enough, made it more dangerous, since it could maneuver much better for a short while. So, Sunny abandoned his Shell and continued the battle as a human.

      Before too long, the Snow Worm shrank to a truly pitiful size — no more than a kilometer from head to tail.

      Then, it became even smaller, similar in size to Soul Serpent.

      …And then, finally, Sunny exhaled tiredly as he leaned on his odachi, looking down at a pale maggot that was wriggling in the mud.

      That tiny maggot was the formerly proud Cursed Beast.

      How could something so great become so pathetic?

      [You have slain an adversary.]

      Sunny sighed with relief as the last vestige of the sun disappeared from view.

      He had killed his first Cursed One today.
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  10. Offline
    Ehis
    + 0 ⋅ 0 -
    I need my daily dose pleaseeeee!
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