Chapter 170: Tear In The Sky

The vehicle tore down the highway toward Marvello as the glow above the distant city continued to grow brighter.

The road was already becoming difficult to navigate, with abandoned cars scattered across several lanes and emergency vehicles racing in the opposite direction, but Reinhard barely paid attention to them.

His attention remained fixed on the city ahead, where the sky seemed to have developed a faint distortion that grew more noticeable with every passing second.

Emily sat beside him with Aeon resting against her leg, her silver eyes fixed on the horizon. Maki and Lily were in the back with Yuna, and none of them were speaking much anymore.

The information they had taken from the Baal prisoners had already been enough to make the situation terrifying, but seeing Marvello from this distance made it feel different. The city was supposed to be celebrating the Lights Festival. Instead, something dark was beginning to spread across the sky above it.

Reinhard activated his Advanced Mana Perception, and the distant city immediately became layered with countless Mana signatures.

Buildings, vehicles, people, and the roads themselves became easier to distinguish, but something else immediately caught his attention.

Mana was gathering above Marvello, with thousands of tiny fluctuations being pulled toward the same point while the Mana within the city reacted to something far beyond normal perception. Even the Mana belonging to the full moon seemed to be shifting, as though an invisible force were dragging it toward a single location.

More importantly, something beneath Marvello was responding to it.

Reinhard stared at the city for several seconds before Emily noticed his expression. "What is it?"

Reinhard didn’t answer immediately because he was trying to understand what he was seeing. The sky above Marvello wasn’t simply being affected by the Black Moon.

Something seemed to be pulling it open, and whatever was causing that distortion was connected to the enormous concentration of Mana beneath the city.

Maki leaned forward from the back seat. "Can you see what’s happening?"

"Not clearly," Reinhard replied, keeping his attention on the horizon, "but I can see Mana being dragged toward the same point, and there are thousands of smaller fluctuations underneath it. Something is responding to whatever is forming above the city."

Yuna looked toward the distant glow. "How far away can you see that?"

Reinhard glanced at her with a faint smile. "Far enough that I wouldn’t have noticed it before today."

Lily stared at him for a moment before muttering, "You really had to become S-Rank, didn’t you?"

Reinhard smiled. "I was already handsome. I needed something else to brag about."

Emily couldn’t help laughing softly despite the tension surrounding them, while Maki shook her head and Yuna’s lips curved slightly. The small exchange lasted only a moment before the sky changed.

The full moon above Marvello was still visible, but its edge suddenly bent inward. The stars surrounding it seemed to shift with it, while the clouds curved toward an invisible point in the sky.

The distortion spread outward until the entire area around the moon looked as though reality itself had become a thin sheet of glass being pressed from the other side.

Reinhard immediately noticed Emily’s hand tightening around Aeon, so he reached across and took it. Emily didn’t look at him, but her fingers wrapped around his hand almost immediately.

The sight above Marvello brought back memories she had spent years trying to understand.

She remembered the darkness that had swallowed everything, the strange blocks of light that had remained stable within it, and the helplessness of waking up with her Gnosis shattered and her body broken. She had been trapped inside that nightmare the last time it appeared, with no idea what was happening and no one beside her who could reach her.

This time, she was standing outside of it.

This time, Reinhard was holding her hand.

Reinhard looked at her and spoke quietly. "You’re not alone this time."

Emily finally looked at him. "I know."

The distortion above Marvello suddenly deepened. The center of the warped sky became darker, and a thin crack appeared across the moon.

It wasn’t a physical crack in the moon itself, but a tear in the space surrounding it, spreading outward as though someone were pulling reality apart with their hands.

The crack widened, space peeled open, and a vast darkness appeared behind it.

Lily stared through the windshield, her expression frozen. "That’s..."

Maki finished quietly, "The Black Moon."

Emily couldn’t move.

Yuna’s expression hardened as she watched the city below, while Reinhard stared at the phenomenon with his Advanced Mana Perception fully active. He had expected the Black Moon to appear, but seeing it again was still different from understanding it in theory.

The darkness above Marvello wasn’t simply another object in the sky. It was an abnormality that distorted the Mana around it merely by existing.

Then Reinhard noticed something strange.

"Wait."

Emily looked at him. "What is it?"

Reinhard continued studying the Black Moon, focusing on the edges of the distortion rather than its center.

The shape wasn’t stable.

The darkness was still spreading outward, and the connection between the Black Moon and the city continued fluctuating as though something was trying to force the phenomenon into existence.

"It’s incomplete," Reinhard said.

Maki immediately leaned forward. "What?"

"The Black Moon hasn’t fully stabilized."

Emily’s eyes widened. "Then we still have time?"

"Some," Reinhard replied.

The next moment, a scream echoed from somewhere in Marvello.

Then another followed.

The city changed before their eyes.

People who had been gathering for the festival began looking toward the sky in fear.

Families pulled their children closer, while groups of friends stood frozen in the streets as the Black Moon spread across the heavens. Some people began running without even knowing where they were going, while others remained in place and stared upward as though their minds couldn’t accept what they were seeing.

Security forces attempted to organize the crowds, but the growing panic made it nearly impossible. Emergency announcements played through the streets, telling everyone to remain calm and move toward designated evacuation areas, yet the instructions only seemed to make some people more frightened.

A woman pushed through the crowd while calling her husband’s name, desperately searching for him after they had been separated.

A father grabbed his daughter’s hand and tried to move through the crowd, but when another man accidentally bumped into him, the father’s expression immediately changed.

"What are you doing?" he shouted, pulling his daughter behind him.

The other man raised his hands. "I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—"

"Stay away from her!"

The father’s fear had already turned into suspicion, and when the other man stepped back, the movement only convinced him that something was wrong.

He released a burst of Mana that struck the ground between them, sending people nearby stumbling backward.

The man who had been attacked stared at him in disbelief before his own fear turned into anger. "You attacked me!"

"I was protecting my daughter!"

"I wasn’t going to hurt her!"

Neither of them was lying. Neither had suddenly become a monster. They were simply terrified, and the Black Moon was twisting that fear until neither could trust the other.

Elsewhere, a security officer tried to separate two people who had begun fighting. One of them struck him, and his own fear immediately became anger.

He released far more Mana than necessary and sent both people crashing through a storefront.

Other security officers saw the attack and rushed over, but some mistook the sudden burst of Mana for another assault and began drawing their weapons.

Within minutes, several separate conflicts had begun spreading through the same district.

Two friends who had been laughing together at the festival were suddenly arguing because one believed the other was hiding something from him.

A group of Awakeners tried to flee, only to become convinced that the people behind them were chasing them, causing one of them to unleash an ability that struck another group of civilians.

Those civilians responded in panic, and soon an entire street had become a battlefield created almost entirely from misunderstandings.

The horror wasn’t that the people had stopped being themselves.

It was that they were still themselves.

Their fear was still their fear, their love was still their love, and their anger was still their anger. The Black Moon simply took those emotions and pushed them beyond what they could control.

Reinhard watched the city through his Advanced Mana Perception, and his expression gradually became more serious.

He could distinguish ordinary Mana from the strange fluctuations spreading through the population, and the more he observed, the clearer the pattern became.

The emotions weren’t merely being distorted.

They were spreading.

"Left side," Reinhard said.

Yuna immediately shifted toward a collapsing building and moved before the others could react.

"Second floor," Reinhard continued.

Emily looked up and saw an Awakener preparing to unleash an ability toward the street below. She moved instantly, raising Aeon and creating a spatial barrier that redirected the attack into the empty sky.

"Behind us."

Maki reacted without hesitation, forming a spatial barrier that separated a group of panicked civilians from an Awakener preparing to attack them.

Lily helped guide several families away from the fighting while Yuna stabilized a damaged section of the road. For the first time, the Ashcroft Family wasn’t simply a group of powerful individuals fighting beside one another.

They were functioning as a single unit, with Reinhard coordinating the battlefield while Emily identified danger, Yuna controlled immediate threats, Maki manipulated the environment, and Lily handled the people caught in the middle.

Lily eventually returned to the vehicle and looked at Reinhard through the window. "Please tell me you have a plan."

Reinhard glanced toward the burning city and smiled. "Of course."

Lily visibly relaxed.

Then Reinhard added, "It involves going into the city."

Lily stared at him. "That isn’t a plan."

Reinhard smiled wider. "It’s the beginning of one."

Emily laughed softly, and even Maki’s expression relaxed for a moment before Reinhard looked back toward the sky.

The Black Moon had grown larger.

Its edges were becoming more defined, and the distortion around it was spreading farther across the heavens.

At the same time, Reinhard’s Advanced Mana Perception suddenly became overwhelmed by the sheer number of emotional fluctuations spreading through Marvello.

Fear, rage, despair, grief, hatred, and panic were overlapping and colliding across the city.

Reinhard’s expression changed.

"The Black Moon isn’t just affecting them."

Emily looked toward him.

"It’s feeding on them."

The realization made the entire situation worse. Every frightened person created more fear, every violent confrontation created more anger, and every desperate attempt to protect someone created more emotional energy for the phenomenon above them. The city was becoming a massive source of power.

Emily’s expression became pale as she looked toward the streets. "That’s how it started."

Reinhard turned toward her. "You remember?"

Emily nodded slowly. "Not everything, but I remember the feeling. It felt like everyone was screaming, even when they weren’t."

She looked toward the Black Moon, and for a moment the city in front of her seemed to overlap with the broken world she remembered from years ago.

Reinhard tightened his grip around her hand. "Then we’ll stop it before it reaches that point."

Emily looked at him and nodded.

Reinhard turned his attention back toward the sky, following the strange Mana connection Emily had identified. His perception traced the distorted flow through the city until he finally found a concentration beneath the spreading darkness.

His eyes narrowed.

"There."

Everyone looked toward him.

Reinhard pointed toward a distant section of Marvello where the distortion appeared slightly different from the surrounding city. "That’s the source."

Emily immediately recognized the same sensation she had been following. "That place."

Reinhard nodded. "If we reach it, we should be able to interfere with the connection before the Black Moon fully stabilizes."

Maki looked toward the city. "Then we have a target."

Yuna nodded. "How long?"

Reinhard looked toward the Black Moon. "Not enough."

Lily looked around the damaged highway before remembering something important. "Can we teleport there?"

Maki shook her head. "The teleportation array was destroyed when the mansion was attacked, and communications are still down."

Reinhard looked at the road ahead. Marvello was already descending into chaos, and the traffic surrounding the city had become almost impossible to navigate.

Cars were abandoned across several lanes, emergency vehicles were forcing their way through the congestion, and the distant glow of fires reflected against the dark sky.

Lily stared at the road before slowly looking back at Reinhard. "So how are we getting there?"

Everyone looked toward him.

Reinhard glanced toward Marvello, then toward the vehicle. "We’re driving."

Lily’s eyes widened. "Through that?"

Reinhard smiled as he reached for the steering wheel. "You wanted a plan."

Emily moved into the passenger seat and tightened her grip around Aeon before looking toward the Black Moon.

The sight still brought back memories she could never completely erase, but the feeling inside her had changed. The Black Moon no longer represented the helplessness she had felt years ago because she wasn’t standing alone beneath it anymore.

Reinhard started the vehicle and looked at her. "We’re going in."

Emily gripped Aeon and nodded without hesitation. "Together."

Reinhard reached over and took her hand for a moment before returning his attention to the road. "Together."

The vehicle accelerated toward Marvello as the Black Moon continued spreading across the sky, and Emily looked through the window at the darkness above the city.

For years, that sight had represented the moment her life had fallen apart. Now, with Reinhard beside her and her family behind them, it no longer felt like the end of her life.

It was simply something standing in their way.

And this time, they were going to fight back.