The waves surged and wet her feet, while the wind blew through her hair, scattering it in all directions.

Anya took a step forward. The soles of her feet touched the soft mud as she blankly looked back at the setting sun. The long shadow caused by the setting sun seemed darker than usual. There, at the end of the shadow that seemed to be leading to the horizon, she saw someone. 

Anya fiercely dashed forward. Her feet kicked mud up into the air, and seawater splashed up everywhere as she ran. The mud soaked her, and the sharp shells hidden in the soft mud cut her feet. Anya fell and rolled around in the mud several times, bleeding from her feet, but the sea was nowhere to be seen—in front of Anya was just an infinite mass of muddy blobs.

“Master! Now you are even selling and buying children?”

She still remembered the disturbance she heard one night—his voice that she heard for the first time when she was just a little girl and had a chain restraining her. She also remembered the warmth that she felt when the white-colored incarnation of death, wrapped in darkness, entered the cage she was hiding in.

“Captain!”

Their conversation from back then echoed inside her head.

“You need to fight for His Majesty, Anya—not for me.”

“But I like you.”

Anya liked how he was perplexed at his own voice that he synthesized using magic as he whispered to her gently. She started talking exactly like he did, following his tone. No one else could...