The Broken Halo

Chapter 815 - 814: The Rift

Simon had learned more from Marek’s speech than he expected.

The Commander had not revealed every secret behind the war, and some of his conclusions were most likely incomplete. Even so, he had shown Simon a side of the conflict he had never bothered to understand during his first life.

Back then, Simon had been obsessed with destroying the Demon Realm.

Demons invaded Earth, slaughtered humans, ruined cities, and transformed everything they occupied. They also killed his family and friends before he became a Demon Slayer. To Simon, that had been more than enough reason to kill them.

He never once wondered what demons believed they were gaining beyond territory, slaves, and resources.

He did not ask why the Demon Lords and the leaders of the clans in his past life continued investing armies into invasions that often ended in failure because of him and his past companions. He did not care why weak tribes willingly sent their young through rifts where most of them would die.

The reasons would not have changed what Simon did.

The slow decline of the Demon Realm was not a sad story capable of making him forgive the millions of humans demons killed. Their ancient bloodlines were weakening, their World Vitality was declining, and their realm might be approaching its death.

None of that made Earth responsible for saving them.

The demons’ main goal remained power.

They wanted a stronger world, greater bloodlines, new territories, more resources, the birth of Demon Gods, and to restore their past glory. To obtain those things, they were willing to contaminate Earth, destroy its cities, and reduce humanity to corpses, servants, or demonic humans.

There was nothing noble about it.

Simon merely found it interesting.

For most of his first life, he had viewed the war from one side of the rift. Marek’s words had allowed him to briefly see it from the other.

That led Simon toward another question.

’How many worlds are there?’

He knew about Earth and the Demon Realm.

There was also the Divine Realm where the gods resided, though Simon suspected what humans called the Divine Realm might not be as simple as one world occupied by every god.

Then there were the ancient beings.

Lilith, her father, and the Daemons of her era possessed histories and powers that did not fit comfortably inside anything Simon currently understood. Some of them might have originated from another realm, or from a place that existed before the worlds he knew.

If Earth and the Demon Realm each possessed their own World Law, World Core, and World Vitality, then the same should be true of other realms.

Some could be younger than Earth.

Others might be older than the Demon Realm.

There might be worlds filled with elements he had never encountered, worlds without Aether or Demonic Energy, and worlds whose laws could not support humans or demons at all.

Simon was about to ask Lilith when Akaza’s voice reached him.

”Blackmoon.”

Simon did not immediately react.

Akaza looked at him from beside Virella.

”We have arrived.”

Simon raised his gaze.

The army had left the final military road and entered an enormous stretch of cleared land beyond Velmora’s outer districts.

The rift site stood ahead.

For a moment, Simon forgot the question he had intended to ask.

The entire region had been transformed into a fortress.

Three defensive walls surrounded the site in wide circles. The outermost wall was low but incredibly thick, with deep trenches, sharpened barriers, and heavily armoured soldiers positioned along its length.

The second wall rose much higher.

Watchtowers stood at regular distances across it, and large offensive artifacts rested behind reinforced openings. Some resembled enormous black spears aimed toward the sky, while others were circular structures filled with compressed fire, lightning, or darkness.

The innermost wall protected the rift itself.

Only campaign soldiers, rune masters, and authorised officials were allowed beyond it. Several layers of identification formations covered its gates, checking the aura, blood, and war tags of every demon who entered.

Above the walls, transparent barriers overlapped like enormous pieces of dark glass.

Simon sensed defensive formations, anti-teleportation arrays, spatial locks, and formations meant to detect anything attempting to hide its presence.

Black Horn had prepared for attacks from outside.

It had also prepared for betrayal from within.

The army passed through one of the inner gates.

Beyond it stood dozens of tall black pillars.

The pillars had been arranged in three large rings around the centre of the rift site. Each one was broader than a house and covered from its base to its peak in countless chaos runes.

Thick lines of crimson and black energy moved between them.

The outer pillars held the surrounding space in place and prevented the pressure of the rift from spreading toward Velmora.

The second ring supported the defensive barriers and controlled the violent storms of energy gathering around the site.

The innermost pillars were connected directly to the rift.

Massive chains forged from Demonic Energy stretched from their surfaces and disappeared into the edges of the opening, pulling at it from different directions.

Beneath the ground, Simon sensed something even more complicated.

Formation lines covered nearly the entire site.

Some travelled toward sealed chambers where rune masters controlled the flow of energy. Others connected to enormous underground reservoirs filled with hell stones.

Far below the central platform rested the replacement stabilisation core. Its repeated pulses spread through the ground like the beating of an artificial heart.

Every pulse travelled into the pillars.

Every pillar fed the rift.

The road to Earth was not merely a hole that had appeared in the wilderness.

Black Horn had built an entire fortress around a wound between worlds.

And at the centre of everything stood the rift.

It was enormous.

The vertical opening rose more than a hundred metres into the air and stretched almost half that distance across. Its shape was uneven, resembling a long tear cut through the world by an invisible blade.

The edges constantly shifted.

Silver cracks appeared and vanished around it, while black and crimson demonic energy collided with pale-blue Aether leaking from the other side.

The two powers twisted together without truly mixing.

From a distance, the interior of the rift looked like a dark mirror submerged beneath moving water. Shapes occasionally appeared beyond its surface, but the spatial distortion made them impossible to identify.

Sometimes Simon saw a pale sky.

At other moments, he saw broken ground, distant structures, or flashes of white light from formations waiting on Earth.

Thousands of demons filled the prepared camps surrounding the rift.

Soldiers formed ranks.

Healers organised supplies.

Rune masters examined the pillars and formation lines, while officers directed different units toward their waiting zones.

The closer Simon moved, the more violently his spatial affinity reacted.

To his senses, the rift did not resemble an open doorway.

It felt like two separate pieces of existence had been torn apart and forced to touch. Countless formations were preventing those pieces from rejecting one another and snapping closed.

Virella stared upward with widened eyes.

Rellis released a slow breath.

Even Sonya’s usual grin weakened as she felt the ground trembling beneath the rift’s power.

Simon said nothing.

He had stood before countless rifts during his first life.

He had faced them from the Earth side with a sword in his hand, waiting for demon armies to emerge.

Now he stood among those armies, preparing to invade the world he once protected.

A reminiscent light entered his sky-blue eyes as he stared at the rift.