Lunar Awakening-Chapter 64: In A Tight Spot

Leo stood there, faced with his biggest dilemma yet. On one side was a bloodthirsty monster that fed on human fear to grow stronger, currently aiming to kill her younger sister. On the other side was a nanny turned assassin, whose motives were unknown.

To make matters worse, the nanny didn’t seem to be alone.

"Curses," Leo gritted his teeth, watching Hinata take a step forward. ’What do I do? I can’t fight one without worrying about the other. Unless I’m bulletproof, I’ll end up like those two fools on the ground.’

In that moment, Mr. Neuman rose to his feet. His face clearly showed the same turmoil Leo was facing, but he turned and faced his daughter—or what was left of her—and said in a voice that collapsed in seconds, "Hinata, please don’t do this. Please, come back to your senses?"

Hinata was about to take the next step into a pool of blood that was still growing from the corpses she had consumed earlier when she stopped and let her cold, lifeless, pale-blue eyes slide to the side in an unnatural way as she looked at him. The thirst in her once-cracked lips was now quenched by the red liquid that caressed them. Her pale skin now seemed even more white, like she had taken a drastic change in the few seconds after her head had been split open.

Her entire presence reeked of death and malice. The look she shot her own father caused him to take a few frightening steps back. His demeanor crumbled as he seemed to give up on recovering his own daughter and turned to face the nanny, who had his other daughter in her grasp.

He opened his mouth to speak. "Please don’t hurt Melissa. She’s all... She’s all I have left. I can pay—"

Before he could finish his words, a shot rang out...!

A small projectile flew through the air and sank into the man’s shoulder, causing him to fall to the ground with eyes growing wide like they would pop. The shot seemed to paralyze him in that instant. A second later, Melissa’s scream filled the room as she tried in a frantic attempt break free from the nanny’s grasp.

"Father!" Tears rolled out of her eyes like streams, her face contorted and fractured. The once innocent looking girl now looked crazy and broken. "Why are you doing this Madelyn, I thought you loved me!"

A devilish grin grew from ear to ear on the monster’s face as it turned and started to walk toward the nanny and Melissa. It clearly ignored the third party figure standing in the room with them. "Don’t worry, dear sister. I’ve come here to save you from the sinners."

All this while, Leo had been barely present in the room. He had witnessed the scene unfold before him but had remained unmoved for two reasons. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The first was that he had no expertise in such a situation where he would have to fight two opponents and protect a child at the same time. The second was that his now heightened as a werewolf were causing him to behave and think differently. He could hear every beating heart in the room, and smell the blood—there was so much of it—that it made his senses run wild.

A strange thirst started to claw its way up Leo’s throat, and he could not control it. Even more, he wanted nothing more than to let it loose.

"Don’t even think of it," Xavax’s voice came from nowhere, somehow managing to pull him out of his trance-like state. "If you shift, you can’t guarantee the girl’s safety, can you?"

Leo’s head felt much lighter after the entity within him had snapped some sense into him. He exhaled deeply and observed the situation. He knew how little time he had to make a decision, but he couldn’t delay either.

He could choose to let the two confront each other, but the nanny didn’t seem to be against the monster. Leo also had bullets to watch out for. *Curses! This is the worst.*

In the next second, something he could have never anticipated happened. The nanny kicked Melissa forward, sending her stumbling onto her face halfway toward Hinata. Leo’s eyes widened as he was prepared to rush in.

"It’s a trap," Xavax called out to him, saving him from a bullet that happened to miss him by a millimeter.

Leo turned and faced the nanny, who slipped a pair of oval-shaped glasses onto her face. Her dark eyes glinted underneath with emptiness. "What’s your problem, you damn nanny?"

The nanny cocked her gun and sighed. "I can’t let you interfere. If it makes you feel any better, I can put a bullet in you now, if you want."

Melissa looked up at Hinata, walking toward her with a dark grin on her face. Then she turned, stared at Leo, and cried, "Help... me." Beads of tears rolled down her eyes.

Leo had no reason to die for another person’s cause, so he considered running away. But then he recalled something he had told Hinata when they first met.

"Hinata, stop!" he called out, but his words seemed to fly over her head. "Do you remember what I told you when we met—that I have a little sister of my own? If you were ever close to Melissa, or if you have any humanity, don’t do this."

Leo, out of desperation, tried to reach back to any semblance of humanity the monster still had left, but it soon became clear that whatever level of humanity she had the day they met back then was now gone.

However, she did stop, just a few feet before reaching her sister. She laughed. "Humanity? And what is humanity, anyway?"

Leo wished Xavax would have an idea or help him, but the entity remained nonexistent at the moment. He watched Hinata take a step forward and reach out to Melissa. He felt his heart tighten in his chest. He wanted to move, but the nanny’s gun was still aimed at him.

"Hinata!" he screamed at the top of his voice. "Stop it, dammit. Why are you doing this? I thought you loved Melissa because she was like you—"

He watched her freeze, her hand just inches from Melissa’s delicate, broken face. He could tell the young girl would have exploded from fear had he been a second late.

Now that he had the monster’s attention, he knew he had to keep going.

"—Melissa lost her mother, just like you. Isn’t that why you grew close to her? If you kill her, you’re merely going against that. It’ll feel like killing a huge part of yourself. She’s just a child."

By now, Leo was breathing heavily, his heart palpitating as he waited and watched Hinata pull back and stand upright. Her long nails grew longer as veins started to pop out on her hands. He could sense that something was much different about her now. She turned to face him.

What he saw froze him for a moment. Beads of tears were sliding down her jaw. Her eyes still remained glowing red and lifeless. And veins continued to grow across her face and temples. It was like watching strange, black, worm-like creatures crawling just beneath her skin.

She opened her mouth and exhaled, then she spoke in a low, broken voice. "I—I just want the voices to stop."

Leo hesitated for a bit before asking, "What voices?"

Hinata looked down at her sister, then back at him slowly. "Hers and the devil’s."

Leo felt a cold sweat run down the side of his face for some reason. It was strange seeing something that was not human show such levels of intelligence and show such intense fear.

Hinata screamed as she clawed at her face with her long nails, drawing blood and tearing flesh with each swing. Leo could not make a move with a gun still pointed at him, but he kept his eyes fixed, waiting for an opening to save Melissa, who was frozen in place by fear.

After a while, Melissa stopped her mad display. Her wounds started to heal slowly, causing Leo to wonder if his regeneration was similar. Then she spoke—

"I have to silence one so I can think again. And you tell me I don’t care about little Melissa? The nerve of you."

Her tone almost turned sympathetic.

"I love my dear sister more than anything but she is a sinner, she keeps me from having my peace."

Leo could sense she was getting ready to strike. "Don’t listen to it, Hinata. Whatever this is—it wants you to lose your humanity by completely killing the only thing that connects you to humanity."

Hinata stared at him for a moment, her form shifting like she was swaying from side to side yet staying in place at the same time. Then she spoke, "I want the voices to stop. You want to stop me. Now I hear your voice."

Leo caught a glimpse of her shift in motion a fraction of a second before she dashed toward him with explosive force. A tiny part of him was at least relieved that he had saved Melissa from a gruesome fate—for now. A much larger part of himself was more worried about his safety.

He tried to summon the red needle before she reached him, but he already knew it would take several seconds to call forth an artifact. By the time Hinata reached him, the artifact was barely half-formed.

"Curses!"