The Broken Halo

”She really needs to learn how to be calm.”

Simon shook his head as he returned the Murmur Bone to his spatial ring.

The Voice had ended the connection before he could respond, almost as though doing so preserved some of her pride and ego. Simon found that habit mildly amusing, but he did not waste more time thinking about it.

He continued moving through the cracked lands.

His steps were steady and unhurried. Wind carried him across the rougher sections of ground, while Shadow Sense remained spread around the nearby hills and smoking fissures. The face of the dead rebel still covered his own, and his Supreme Archfiend aura remained compressed around his body.

The conditions Simon gave the Voice had not been born from sudden arrogance.

They came from a change in circumstance, and more importantly, a change in strength.

Before the convoy left Velmora, Simon had been a Minor Archfiend whose base strength could contend with a Minor Greater Demon. He possessed many methods capable of killing stronger enemies, but every confrontation with a powerful Greater Demon still required preparation, caution, and the willingness to reveal hidden abilities.

That was no longer true.

His Infernal Heart was now ninety-two percent refined. His base physical strength had reached the upper level of Supreme Greater Demons, while his full combat strength was enough to defeat an ordinary Minor Demon Lord.

Very few Greater Demons could truly threaten him now.

There would always be exceptions-demons with rare bloodlines, powerful artifacts, strange techniques, or abilities that defied common sense-but the number had become small enough that Simon no longer needed to treat every unknown Greater Demon as a possible disaster.

In the Demon Realm, strength mattered more than titles, rules, promises, and sometimes even intellect.

A weak demon could possess a perfect argument and still be crushed beneath someone’s boot. A powerful demon could break an agreement, rewrite the terms, and force everyone else to call it negotiation.

Simon understood that truth long before he became a demon.

’Caution is not a virtue by itself. It is merely the price weakness pays to remain alive. Now that I am stronger, there is no reason for me to keep paying the same price.’

That did not mean he had become careless though.

The Second Claw could be a Demon Lord or something even more troublesome. The Voice’s true strength was also unknown, and the Eastern Faction had survived for centuries by hiding more than it revealed.

Simon could not take all the information at face value without confirming it himself.

He would still prepare escape routes.

He would still expect betrayal.

He simply no longer intended to crawl through their network one minor task and one carefully controlled piece of information at a time.

Time was another reason he had changed the terms.

The original handover had already failed. The carrier was dead, the scheduled meeting had passed, and Black Horn had certainly begun investigating the vanished tracking signals.

Returning the cases through the old route would only place Simon inside an arrangement the Eastern Faction controlled.

Forcing the Voice and the Second Claw to act placed some control in his hands instead.

It also increased his value.

Until now, the Eastern Faction had treated the Outsider as a useful but disposable tool. They gave him limited information, assigned tasks that protected their own members, and expected him to accept whatever terms they offered.

Simon had no intention of becoming their underling.

If they wanted to continue using him, they needed to understand that his cooperation could not be commanded.

The three cases gave him the perfect opportunity to establish that fact.

He had recovered the road’s bones after their operation collapsed, discovered Korran’s tracking trap, and kept the materials hidden somewhere Black Horn could not sense them.

That made him more than an unknown mercenary.

It made him a demon who possessed information, strength, and resources the Eastern Faction currently needed.

There was also the deeper reason.

Simon wanted access to the Eastern Faction’s network.

The Voice was already positioned above Wardens and Needles, while the Second Claw stood even higher. If both appeared at a location Simon controlled, he would gain far more than their faces.

Their methods of arrival, the artifacts they carried, the precautions they used, and the direction they left could reveal parts of the organisation that months of ordinary missions might never expose.

He did not need to decide the entire plan yet.

Whether he watched them directly, attached a Shadow Eye, followed one of their shadows, or forced another exchange would depend on what they brought and how they behaved.

For now, he only needed them to agree.

If they refused, Simon still possessed the cases.

He could alter the terms, inspect the materials further, use them to bargain with another part of Black Banner, or even return them to Black Horn under the right identity.

Whichever side moved first would reveal what the road’s bones were truly worth.

As Simon crossed a shallow trench, another possible problem entered his mind.

’If Blackmoon returns to Velmora alive, the Voice may connect him to the Outsider.’

The timing was dangerous.

The carrier had died and Blackmoon had been swallowed. The Outsider had gone silent and then reappeared with the missing cases. If Blackmoon returned soon afterward, any intelligent rebel would at least consider a relationship between them.

Simon did not dismiss the risk.

He simply did not consider it impossible to manage.

A connection was not the same as a shared identity.

The Eastern Faction could believe that the Outsider had used Blackmoon as an inside contact. They could believe he found Blackmoon underground while recovering the cases. They could believe Blackmoon possessed information about him, owed him a debt, or had unknowingly been manipulated from the beginning.

Simon could even encourage one of those conclusions if it became useful.

Suspicion without proof was only a fog, and Simon had spent a great deal of his life learning how to hide inside fog.

The more possible explanations existed, the harder it would be for anyone to settle on the truth.

As for Korran, Sonya, and Akaza, Simon would handle them separately.

One lie could not satisfy all four sides.

Fortunately, it did not need to.

Simon climbed the side of a low dry hill and stopped at the top.

The cracked lands stretched in every direction. Black hills, smoking fissures, dead grass, and broken stone looked almost identical beneath the crimson sky.

He studied the terrain for several seconds before comparing it to the map Korran had shown during the convoy briefing.

Then he turned slightly toward the south-west.

”Fortunately, I memorised Korran’s map,” Simon muttered as he started moving again. ”Otherwise, I might actually be lost.”