1

Elizabeth grabbed her chosen victim and dragged her into the nearest dark alley. Anyone would do, every human being in this city was potential food. But this one was better since it had more meat on its bones than most. It should fill her stomach more easily.

The alley was as dark as everything else. Naturally, she'd waited until night to attack. The city was also active during the night, but thanks to the cover of darkness it was much easier for her to get away with it.

Humans weren't a threat. As she'd said, they were food. Nothing more or less than that. But she couldn't afford to attract the attention of that man, Sylvester.

As she had seen in that hotel, the original's desire to finish him off was nothing more than a fantasy. Elizabeth had been smarter and had slipped away. If they met again, she would be dead before she could blink. That was why she had to be very careful and leave no trace.

She didn't allow the food to scream. She snapped its neck before she set about devouring its skin and flesh, even the bones. Everything should disappear inside her body. She had to be careful that her surroundings weren't stained with blood. Any trace could be lethal.

Therefore, having to eat so often was inconvenient. The corpulence of this food should help, it should fill her up for longer. But it wasn't enough. To reduce the time between meals to the minimum possible, she would restructure her body and her system for ingesting nutrients.

She could do that. The original had been a human at first, and she was like a branch of the Lunar Remnant that they had been transformed into when their heart broke.

She wasn't human. She never had been. She could do many things that escaped the original, even more than the other branches. Perhaps it was vanity, but she believed she had been the most successful experiment.

In a certain sense. They had been born in that hotel for the purpose of killing Sylvester. She was the strongest of them all, but her skills were not going to be focused on an impossible target like that.

The original would see her, if they were still alive, as too successful an experiment.

She had become too smart to head for certain death, after all.

And she had become... one with her host. At this point she thought of herself as Elizabeth, but the parasite was the one in control as they had agreed. Of course. Elizabeth would do none of this.

She needed someone to survive. And by pure chance she had found the best possible host, a person who wouldn't even resist her. And all she'd had to do to buy her cooperation had been to kill a man.

Perfect.

It was as if the heavens were blessing her, approving of her existence. And why not? Maybe the sun was for humans, but the moon, now always in the sky, shone for creatures like her.

2

It was supposed to be a normal day. A bit of a vacation.

He was used to going from one crisis to another, but lately he didn't even have time to rest, and that's what he was doing when the barrier fell.

Sylvester recognized it at first sight.

It had been fired at his command countless times. The Syndicate satellite's electrified barrier, designed to contain the Lunar Remnants, but mostly to reduce the number of civilian casualties. And now, what was this? One of his colleagues was hunting and had requested a barrier?

But it covered too wide an area. He could see it stretching to the horizon. That was too dangerous. It was meant to be used to seal off a small area after cornering a Lunar Remnant, not like this. This way they risked it backfiring and causing more chaos, more deaths.

He didn't understand.

It couldn't be a simple mistake, but....

What was going on?

He would have to forget about a day off and contact those assholes. He knew he was the glue that held the organization together, but really? He couldn't look away for a while without things going to shit? Really, what was going on lately?

"I'm in the center of town, why did you fire such a wide barrier?"

"Agent Sylvester, uh..." He was almost always answered by a different person, whoever was available, which added to his frustration in this case. He'd like to know where he stood. And he would like a person who would get to the point, without wasting his time pausing or stuttering, searching for the right words. Something had gone very wrong, no matter how you put it, shit was shit. "No. It wasn't us. We're trying to figure out what happened, sir.

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Wow. That was even worse than simple human error.

Something had gone wrong? Or were they talking about sabotage? Either way, it wasn't good. He hoped no one had been killed, it would be easy for some cars to have crashed since the barrier had suddenly appeared.

"Okay."

If it was a trap, sabotage, then what was the target? Sylvester thought about these things as he wove through the terrified crowd, frozen or running back and forth, looking for a place to hide. Assuming that there was a Lunar Remnant lurking, that the most commonplace disaster of everyday life was going to repeat itself and it had fallen precisely to them to suffer it.

And maybe they were even right. Maybe that was what was happening.

That parasite had taken over the hotel, spreading among the guests, giving everything to murder him. And now this. It seemed silly, but if a Lunar Remnant was behind this, didn't it suggest that they weren't as scattered as they thought? That some, at least, were cooperating?

He didn't think it was a coincidence or anything like that.

Nothing was a real coincidence. Everything happened for a good reason, even if you didn't know it.

He approached the barrier.

At the very least, this barrier definitely existed to keep him inside. He didn't know if enemies would come for him or take advantage of it to wreak havoc in other parts of the city while he was trapped.

In any case, it was worth a try. Sylvester unsheathed the katana.

He swung it. As soon as the blade touched the barrier, he received a great shock and went flying at least ten meters backwards. He landed on one of the cars parked on the side, that was the only thing that stopped his fall. He was more or less unharmed, but the car wasn't. His body crushed the roof of the car, sinking it until it was almost completely flattened.

Fuck.

He probably wasn't going to manage to punch a hole in the barrier, even if he used his skills and not just the katana.

He shouldn't stay here long anyway. The syndicate workers should find a way to work it out and undo the barrier soon, how hard could it be?

But if they did their job right this should never have happened in the first place. Depending on them was a bit too optimistic for his liking.

"In any case, I need information," Sylvester spoke to himself as he rose from the ruins of the car. The voices of the frightened citizens mingled, but he thought he heard the owner of the car lamenting his fate very loudly, "I'm not getting anywhere blind."

Right now he didn't even know if it was better to go through the barrier or stay inside. What a mess had formed in such a short time.

"Hey, isn't that guy...?"

"Yeah, yeah, that's him. It's got to be him."

"We'll be all right now, won't we?"

"I just want to go home."

More and more people noticed him, and their voices joined the chaos. The pressure of the expectations of billions of people just suffocated you and sapped your energy. Even the expectations of just the people in your immediate line of sight were overwhelming.

He wished they would shut up for a while.

For once. A little bit, even if it was just a little bit.

Sylvester shook his head.

He took off running through the streets, looking for whoever was responsible for this. Or those responsible. He wanted to deny the idea that they were cooperating, but something on such a grand scale surely wasn't the work of a single Lunar Remnant no matter how much he wanted to think otherwise.

Rather, what he wanted to think didn't matter a damn. Just what it was, reality.

Sylvester noticed two people in the crowd and stopped abruptly. There was no particular reason. They were ordinary people who didn't stand out in any way. But, for some reason, his instincts kicked in as soon as he saw them.

So he stood up, and walked towards them.

He wasn't ready to kill, he couldn't just set about wielding the katana in the crowd because of something as vague as instinct. But he was prepared for a fight anyway.

In his mind, there was no doubt. There was not even the possibility that his instinct had been wrong.

And it hadn't.

They turned, sensing him... and changed. They became beasts that came to take his life, pushing their way through the crowd. Tearing deep into the sides, at the very least breaking many ribs.

Sylvester picked up speed, reached them in a tenth of a second and went on the attack.

Which he failed.

Not his fault, too much haste for fear of the disaster that could befall this place if he didn't stop them soon, but because the enemy had dodged. If it could be called that.

One of them changed again in front of his eyes. No doubt about it.

And then he buried a dagger in his chest, but that didn't even matter. That had given him too much information, overshadowing the pain.

So Ryan wasn't the miracle he seemed, there were others like him. He was simply the first one they had heard about.

So those beasts were cooperating and surely many more.

So his vague sense of unease had been accurate.

This was no ordinary attack, crisis or incident, but an operation. And even what happened at the hotel had been planned by 'these people'.

As one pushed the dagger further in, the other, still in his monstrous form, lunged at him.

Sylvester slashed across his face. His open palm sent him flying like a sack of garbage.

Even if this operation was meant to end his life, the place was full of people. Innocents. Inevitably many would die in the process.

"I don't understand," Sylvester said, in the midst of the chaos, feeling as if the world was crushing him to the ground. As he clutched the dagger stuck in his chest, wet with his own blood, "I just don't get it. If you can regain your human form, you can pass for a normal person."

He began to push the dagger out. He'd never had the chance to beat her in strength, but now that he was back in his human form the struggle was effortless. He pulled the dagger out as if no one was forcing it to the opposite side.

"You can go on with your life. So... you've chosen this. I don't understand."

Sylvester pulled the dagger from between his fingers, snapping them as easily as if they were sausages.

They hung like that, twisted, stretched out.

Then he plunged the dagger into his chest. But he didn't miss, he accurately plunged the dagger just above the heart. The enemy staggered backwards, spurting blood from his mouth every time he coughed, staring at the dagger, stupefied. As if he hadn't signed on for this.

As if it was a great surprise to receive what he gave.

How many human beings had this piece of shit killed with impunity?

"I really don't understand."

The other, who hadn't returned to his human form for a second, was running towards him. Before he could reach him, the air twisted as if the world itself intended to protect him and that abomination was repelled again. It wasn't an invisible attack, but one they couldn't see, yet the distinction would matter little to them.

"But I don't need to. I will slaughter you."

The first man drew the dagger from his chest and looked at him, laughing with lips stained with blood like lipstick.

"Someone will die, that's for sure."