The Broken Halo

BANG!

The ninth tornado tore through a defence tower and carried its upper half into the street beyond.

BANG!

A wall of stone struck the demons sheltering there.

Their screams disappeared beneath the wind.

Across Velmora, the other eight storms continued moving. Roof beams spun between them. Fires bent sideways, feeding burning fragments into columns already filled with bodies.

A guard crawled from beneath a collapsed carriage and reached toward a passing pair of boots.

The owner never stopped.

A moment later, neither of them remained on the ground.

Above it all, Simon watched through the Sword Daemon’s mask.

The city had tried to defend itself.

He had seen formations brighten along the streets and barriers rise between important buildings. Arrays beneath the roads had released pulses of demonic energy, attempting to break the storms’ circulation.

Some had briefly succeeded.

One tornado had narrowed beneath an array before widening again when the next transfer of demonic energy failed to arrive.

The problem was not merely the formations.

It was the demons controlling them.

Inside one surviving defence post, an operator had hammered the same rune repeatedly while staring at the human he believed was standing behind his commander. The order to redirect power never reached him.

Elsewhere, two barriers meant to overlap had risen at different times.

Wind entered the gap.

The control room disappeared beneath the roof it was supposed to protect.

The city’s defences needed coordination. Simon’s killing intent had left their operators barely capable of recognising one another.

By the time some regained enough awareness to act properly, the formations they needed were already broken.

Simon looked toward a final flicker of light beneath the dust.

It failed.

There was nothing left in that direction worth sending another storm through.

’Enough.’

He could feel the strain behind his eyes. His Sea of Consciousness had paid for every moment of terror below, and controlling nine storms had demanded attention he would soon need elsewhere.

He opened his left hand.

The nearest dark-emerald tornado began loosening.

Simon stopped feeding its circulation and let the stored energy disperse. The enormous hurricane bent outward. Its spinning walls lost their shape, shedding stone and timber across the ruins.

The debris did not gently settle.

A section of roof fell through a damaged building. Bodies struck the road, and a broken wagon smashed apart beside an overturned fountain.

Then the hurricane was gone.

One after another, the remaining Halo’s Spirals unravelled.

The ninth released its last load of rubble over a street that no longer resembled a street.

A final crash rolled between the surviving walls.

The wind fell.

For the first time since the storms rose, individual voices could be heard again.

”Over here...”

”Please...”

Someone was calling the same name without pausing long enough to receive an answer.

Simon withdrew his killing intent.

The pressure eased from the city. Demons who had been unable to raise their heads collapsed against the ground, coughing and dragging air into their lungs.

Above them, the blood rain thinned.

The armies fighting between the buildings became transparent. A human drove his sword through a horned giant, then both disappeared before the giant could fall.

The heaps of imagined corpses faded with them.

The real bodies remained.

They lay across exposed foundations, hung from broken balconies, and protruded from the rubble of places where they had tried to hide.

A demon pushed through a fading phantom soldier to reach somebody beneath a beam.

He pulled once.

Then stopped.

Simon watched him sit beside the body with his hands still around its wrist.

Not all the visions vanished cleanly.

A face remained upon a cracked wall long after the army around it had gone. Blood seemed to drip from an intact doorway, although the stone beneath it was dry.

The mask had left impressions too deep to withdraw with a thought.

Some of the illusions were semi-permanent and would take time to dissipate.

But the full battlefield was gone.

Velmora could finally see what had actually happened to it.

Whole streets had disappeared. Buildings that had once hidden the roads beyond them were now piles low enough to look across. Broken towers leaned over courtyards filled with fragments of their own upper floors.

Smoke rose through the dust.

Small fires remained, but the great moving destruction had ended. Nothing was being lifted into the sky anymore.

However, that did not mean the dying had stopped.

A demon pressed both hands against an open wound and watched blood escape between his fingers. Another dragged himself over broken stones, leaving a dark trail where his legs should have followed.

Some survivors remained strong enough to climb out of cellars or break through debris.

Far more had only survived long enough to understand that nobody was coming.

The dead vastly outnumbered the figures still moving.

Beside Simon, Tarvak stared without speaking.

His wind sphere remained intact. Simon had kept that circulation separate when he dismissed the storms.

The commander had survived the destruction of the city he guarded, and Simon was a little bit curious about how the demon felt.

But it was only a tiny bit of curiousity and he did not care to ask.

He turned toward the City Lord’s mansion.

Its roof was gone.

One wing had collapsed inward, filling the rooms beneath it. The outer wall lay broken across the grounds, and the main entrance opened onto a hall with nothing above it but drifting smoke.

Simon narrowed his eyes.

’Still nothing?’

The City Lord should have appeared when the first attacks began. Certainly before nine tornadoes had time to cross the city.

Even the mansion’s destruction had brought no response.

’Is he absent? Or is he hiding?’

Or had the City Lord been watching everything?

Simon sent his wind through the ruined grounds. He found falling dust, the hiss of a small fire, and faint movement beneath a shattered wall.

Nothing that answered his question.

The empty mansion proved very little.

’Where the fuck are you?’

He held his gaze there for another breath, then turned away.

He could not spend the opportunity Enigma had bought him searching every ruin for a threat that had not shown itself.

There was work to finish.

Simon descended among the broken streets, bringing Tarvak with him.

Blood had soaked into the exposed earth, and more ran toward it through the broken streets.

Ten thousand demons had been the minimum for the ritual for his bloodline advancement. What he had seen across Velmora left him with no doubt that the city had paid far more.

Simon stood above the darkened ground and looked around once more.

He knew this silence.

He had heard it after battles in his previous life, when the last resistance ended and the wounded realised the noise that had covered their voices was gone.

The smell was familiar too.

Smoke. Blood. Split stone still shedding dust.

Once, destroying a demon city had meant one fewer threat reaching Earth.

Now it meant he had somewhere to change his bloodline.

There were no companions beside him to discuss what came next. Only Tarvak, suspended in the wind, and a voice living in his heart Simon could not always persuade to answer.

His fingers tightened around the Chaos Blade.

Lilith had called what came next more dangerous than the god he had escaped.

He had not forgotten.

But the alternative was to remain something powerful beings could seize whenever they pleased.

Simon lowered himself onto the blood-soaked ground.

[Lilith. Let’s begin.]

This time, she answered.

[Then bring out all the ingredients.]