She remained motionless for a few seconds, and then slowly lowered her hands and put them on her knees. Her face was pale and bleak.
"Have you checked your Attributes?"
He nodded and looked at her with a curious expression.
"I did. There's a new one there. Soul Conduit."
Changing Star stared into the distance and nodded.
"Yeah. Same for me."
Sunny raised his eyebrow and asked, his voice calm and steady:
"Any idea what it means?"
She did not say anything for a while, and then turned her head to look at him.
"Have you not figured it out?"
He shrugged.
"I was a bit preoccupied. Why? What is it?"
Nephis sighed and looked at the walls of the chamber. Finally, she said: .me.
"This whole tower is a giant soul machine. It was created to collect soul essence and funnel it into the artificial sun. However… it can't function without one small, but crucial gear. A human to serve as the fulcrum of all that power, the conduit for all those souls."
And then, in a much quieter voice, she added:
"...The vessel."
Sunny shuddered, then stared at the corpse of the repulsive creature. The previous vessel of the artificial sun.
Nephis had killed it, destroying a crucial part of the Spire's mechanism… and so, the Spire found it a replacement.
The two of them.
The only two humans left on the Forgotten Shore, conveniently hiding from the obliterating sun inside the ancient tower.
One would be tempted to say that it was fate…
"What does it mean for us, exactly? Are we going to turn into something… like that thing?"
Neph slowly shook her head.
"...Not yet. Not for a long time. The Terror had absorbed most of the souls it had reaped after the battle, and there's no one to make sacrifices to the sun now. The Labyrinth, too, is now dead."
Echoing her words, the Spire trembled once again, and somewhere down below, a deafening sound of crushing stone could be heard.
Sunny tilted his head.
"So what's the problem? Can't we just… get the hell out of here and never come back?"
Changing Star looked at him, her eyes full of cold, bitter emotion.
"You don't get it, do you?"
After that, she gritted her teeth and said:
"The Crimson Spire is a machine, and the Gateway is a part of that machine. The Spire can't function without a human serving as the Soul Conduit… and neither can the Gateway. There has to be a Vessel inside the tower for the Gateway to work."
She slowly rose to her feet, swayed slightly, and finally pierced him with a dark gaze.
"Which means that only one of us can escape."
Sunny stared at her for a few seconds, then looked down at the distant ring of the Gateway.
Finally, he turned back to Nephis and said:
"I don't suppose you'll stay behind and let me go?"
Changing Star looked at him, her striking grey eyes full of intensity and nascent white flames:
"...I was about to ask you the same."
Sunny lingered for a moment, then grinned.
"Not a chance."