Moon Theory (ABO)Ch66 - recoil, crashing down

The shelter reeks of blood.

And unbeknownst to himself, Yang Rong is flickering his eyes from one corner of the dining area to the next, scanning past crimson dribbles, slobs of viscera, ugly streaks of post-mortem remains. Alongside the toppled tables and chairs are mangled bodies of half-morphed humans (they were guests, though Yang Rong is not interested in their identities). qXRBUA

The perimeter is in quarantine as Yang Rong scans (his heart is pounding, he would admit) for a familiar face. A soft sigh of relief escapes him when he sees no silver-haired young man, no one of his frame shackled inside a cramped crate due to be shipped away. Droves of military men (donned in those same black uniforms) are packing the anomalies one by one, throwing them inside heavy duty crates and cages, locking them up so the infection wouldn’t spread.

The containment is no different from a massacre. A small shelter, host to a few dozens of infected humans, is now turned into a quarantine zone. Its residents are either mercilessly slaughtered or, if inspection deems them to be slightly rational, they would be knocked unconscious before being chained.

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Yang Rong watches it happen expressionlessly.

When they pass the canteen area and into the lounge, he sees that the place is a mess. The bookshelves have toppled over, the sofas overturned, the carpets dyed red. The dainty furniture – all destroyed. 5H rlN

And then – past the lounge and near the reception hall, a few meters away from the entrance of the place, appears a distraught black-haired, brown-eyed young man. Yang Rong remembers him as Hyun but how he can identify him with his face entirely botched up is concerning. The familiar face has turned into some ghastly apparition of half-human, half-bear, the young man’s eyepatch discarded to reveal an entire portion of thick brown fur.

His body thrashes by the reception desk (the ropes restraining him aren’t enough to quell his aggression) and when he looks up, his eyes lock squarely with the colonel’s. There is utter mania, fear and hate that dither across his handsome, bloodied features. Colonel Yang thinks it’s a familiar look – he’d seen it a couple of times from Noah, though the latter’s emotions are usually masked with certain complexity.

Hyun, however, shows nothing but feral contempt.

With constricted, red-glowing eyes, the young man thrashes more violently against the ropes, ignoring the two soldiers holding him down.

One of the soldiers tases Hyun on the neck, paying no heed to the pained groans. “It is beginning to lose its senses, General Xie,” the soldier says as he dials up the intensity. “I estimate it may only have a few more minutes to live. The infection is spreading at a rapid rate. It is unfortunate when we thought we’ve finally managed to capture a rare hybrid.”

“I see,” General Xie replies, calmly making his way forward. “If you are unable to quell him, then take care of the remains.”

“Yes sir,” comes the reply.

The soldier releases his grip briefly to arm his rifle, but not before Hyun rips himself out of the deadlock, his grizzly morph giving him enough strength to tear the binds. o2dvAa

His body expands into a grotesque state, his limbs swelling twice the size that is humanly possible. When the ropes shred apart, Hyun, in a manic fit, pierces his elongated claws into the soldier’s chest.

Immediately, blood spurts out in fountain waves. In all of one second, Hyun has turned into a fully morphed, crazed creature. The soldiers around him shout in a frenzy as they rapidly point their guns toward him.

Hyun ignores them all. Even in his state of delirium, he has a sliver of consciousness that drives him to crawl forward, his unfocused eyes drilled onto Yang Rong.

“—You.” His voice is as monstrous as his appearance. Coarse, husky, unintelligible. Colonel Yang hears him exceptionally clearly, however. Hyun may have chuckled, or he may have sobbed – the sound of it is gurgled. “How dare—you—Colonel Yang!” 0mDqHK

The sound of gunfire stops for a moment when the soldiers finally register Yang Rong’s presence. They have on a look of confusion and wariness.

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

Yang Rong’s expression is unblinking.

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Yang Rong receives the rifle. But unbeknownst to himself, his façade has cracked – only the slightest distortion, not at all visible in the dimly lit area. JTQfcL

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Yang Rong’s gaze is lowered downward to Hyun’s (limp) body, littered with bullet holes, lifeless (or will be soon).

Chrysanthemum Garden.

Yet, the young man brims with such intense hatred that Yang Rong himself is…

“…None,” Yang Rong says, his syllables eerily steady. “It is only that—” uMkR7y

Just then, a chime of the hanging bells by the door.

Perhaps it was a loud jingle, the bells swerving erratically, the door thrown open so abruptly it collided against the stone walls – but whatever noise was made became completely muted through Yang Rong’s ears.

He somewhat registers a bloodcurdling scream. Allaire, the woman normally so composed and frivolous, scrambles toward her (dying) lover in a panic, her body unsteady, her sobs masked by the coarse yells from the men around them. The young woman is the most tattered he’d ever seen of her. Appearance-wise, she is dressed to the nines – immaculate woolen skirt, clean white blouse, elegant heeled boots. Emotional-wise, she is nothing short of wrecked.

However, Yang Rong focuses zero percent on her and one hundred percent on the young man that remains frozen by the entranceway. jWDKbY

Like in a rotoscope, those ethereal features scrunch up in heartrending intensity. Still so beautifully, his pupils constrict into lines so thin they may have disappeared. His heterochromia is as fetching as his pallor, the pasty white of his skin matching the pristine silver of his hair.

The young man, with his eyes glossed in layers of thin ice (they will shatter any moment now), trembles where he stands. Still, he does not move – neither does he move when he sees the black-clad general nor when he sees the freeze-framed colonel.

And Yang Rong remains still just like he.

Time is lagged when General Xie, surrounded by a dozen more soldiers, points his rifle at the silver-haired young man. Yang Rong, struck motionless, finds himself pathetic. 5QBcha

A flash of appall, of fear, of hurt and then Noah disappears outside just as quickly as Yang Rong seizes the firearm from his superior and hurls it onto the ground – he hurls both of their firearms onto the ground.

The black rifles clatter onto concrete tiles and skid five meters away – as far away as he can toss them here.

Amidst screaming, shouting, objects breaking and more clamor, General Xie turns toward him and calmly asks, “What are you trying, Colonel Yang?”

Yang Rong, uncaring of the background noise, meets his gaze and coldly says, “Shut up.” yd8FrZ

His words are cold, but his heart is pounding so hard it threatens to combust. Yang Rong feels acid in his veins, the sensation of being pumped up in stimulants, his muscles straining underneath his clothes. His mind is blank sans one single image of Noah’s widened eyes, his trembling frame. The image is etched so deeply it throws him into overdrive.

Delirious, he might be, and he can only take it out in bouts of adrenaline, yanking the general by the collar and pressing his rough fingers dangerously close to his neck.

The general, with his bloodstained gloves (those stains are invisible but are most certainly there) and his full-black uniform (which in retrospect, Yang Rong finds the design unsightly to the eye), purses his lips and says, “Yang Rong.”

“Xie Liwei,” he replies. “You have scared him.” 6vcVSd

His grip gets increasingly firmer, almost enough to cut off circulation if not for the smallest semblance of rationale holding him back. When Yang Rong speaks again, his voice is of unmasked anger and his pupils have constricted into harrowing dots. “Point your gun at Noah again and I will have your head.”

“His name is Xie Xing,” replies the general. “He is my son.”

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Yang Rong slams the man against the adjacent wall, striking with so much force that the nearby candle wicks topple onto the ground. With something akin to a snarl, he spits out, “I do not care who you were to him.”

“—General Xie!” comes the concerned voices of the soldiers in black. They are unhesitant to point their guns at the colonel, but Xie Liwei holds up a hand, motioning for them to halt. 2osymt

“Two weeks gone missing and you have changed,” the man says unfalteringly. “You have become lax, Colonel Yang—or, is it that you no longer go by the title?”

He neither affirms nor denies. Yang Rong decides he’d rather not be here with these brawny military men – ironic, it is, for him to abandon his supposed comrades to give chase to a transient, silver-haired young man. And ironic, it is, for his distraught and muddled mind to clearly process that he is one hundred percent, with absolute certainty, in love with Noah.

So when he dashes out the door and leaves all miscellaneous behind him, he is prepared for the worst backfire.

His breaths escape laboriously. Even his alpha senses are not keen enough to hear past the sound of his own palpitating heart. The dog tag clashes against his chest as he sprints, going at a speed that is extreme enough to break the winds. sSCZBt

Yang Rong scales past browned-out weeds, past uneven hills, past the few other soldiers on scout (he cares not for the way they’re calling his name, his title), past perhaps a hundred anomalies in the deep, dark forest before his body almost collides into a thick tree stump.

“Noah,” he rasps out, holding onto his bloodied left arm (when he had gotten injured, he also does not care). He drags his weary body across muddied terrain and he hasn’t the slightest inkling where to go, where to look. He only knows that he is looking. “Noah… please do not leave.”

Of course there would be silence – he is speaking to air, after all, hoping his voice would project to wherever the other is.

“Rong-ge will apologize for as many times as you want.” And he has zero credentials to say this, yet he still tries over and over again. “Please do not leave. Not just yet.” 2bKJMT

He runs for what feels like hours, though it may only be minutes with how distorted his senses are. Cutting the silence of the night are the rustling of leaves and the low growls from the beasts around. Then there is a shuffle of clothes from a short distance away, an eerie click of a holster, the press of a trigger, a deafening gunshot, a pained whimper—

What follows is a sudden coarse yell – it isn’t Noah’s voice, so Yang Rong also cares not the slightest when the yell has turned into a bloodcurdling scream, the man’s vocal cords pitching from high to low before paralyzing.

The area is so pungent it may as well be fogged in blood.

Yang Rong snaps apart the branches in his way. Again, his pulse is strumming so loudly he can’t think – it is only instinctively that he heads forward, his sight trained in one direction only. He gets closer to the source. cdXGkd

Yang Rong dismisses the dead soldier’s body on the ground. He may have been one of the platoon’s men on lookout or he may have been a random scrounger, but Yang Rong focuses not a bit on his mangled appearance nor on the utterly brutal way his body was torn apart.

Noah is breathing raspingly next the corpse. His knees have sunk into the ground, his trousers picking up more of the dirt and filth.

He is covered in red – from the dainty locks of his bangs to the paleness of his face, from torso down to the fresh bullet wound beneath his ribs. Noah’s fingernails have turned into sharpened claws and those too are stained red. His skin tone seems to have lost even more melanin, the pallor of it so ashen even his white shirt dulls in comparison.

Like a specter in the night, Noah and his visage will haunt Yang Rong beyond infinity. D7Il40

If in a rational state of mind, Yang Rong would focus more on his claws, his canine teeth, his small white ears that perk by the lateral of his skull. If in a rational state of mind, Yang Rong would linger on that appearance and how Noah carries enough beauty to overtake any sort of brutality in that feral, half-hybrid form.

All such thoughts are meteorically chucked away when the silver-haired young man slumps forward, his body quivering from injury, his eyes scrunched up in so much agony that—

Chrysanthemum Garden.

Yang Rong is very, incredibly fucked up.

“Noah,” he tries to sound out when he gets closer. It seems his body is propelled to move despite himself knowing he has little right to be here, to be near him. Yang Rong, for all his poise and all his diehard self-confidence, can only shakily kneel in front of the younger man. GrdTwX

His trembles when he reaches forward – fuck, he also knows he has no right to touch him and so he stops midway, his hand hovering hesitantly in the air. “Noah… do I still have a right to be by your side?”

Oh, he is definitely aware of how pathetic he sounds. His words are as desperate as his twisted green eyes, as vile as his battle-hardened self. He is leagues apart from the untainted silver-haired young man.

Inwardly, he chuckles.

Noah, finally alert of his presence, finally snapping back to certain alacrity, flinches when Yang Rong gets a centimeter closer. Yang Rong is trained to read body language, but he doesn’t exactly need to be trained to see how frightened the younger man is. M5wzLt

Heteroclite eyes are rucked in pain, those light-colored orbs reflecting a million tones of pure, unbridled hatred. Noah’s lashes are aquiver, and his lids are brimming with tears. He stares at Yang Rong like he would some monstrous thing – not very far off, in all honesty, for Yang Rong has never done anything right.

“I’m sorry.” Yang Rong repeats it like a mantra over and over again. He doesn’t expect Noah to forgive him – still, Yang Rong is pressed to try. Perhaps he is only trying excuses. His words are laced with hesitance, regret and absolute grief. “I’m sorry, Noah. Your Rong-ge is the worst type of person.”

If Yang Rong so much as taps him, Noah would shatter like brittle glass. Noah stares at him with so much contempt – but there is so much more hurt and betrayal that flicker on his fragile features.

“…Colonel Yang.” When Noah says it in a whisper, there is zero hatred. Only sadness. “I absolutely despise you.” kxtVdL

When the first trickle of tears fall, Noah bobs his head downward. His body slumps forward weakly in motion. Chaffed cheeks rest against the cotton fabric of Yang Rong’s shirt and the two of them settle in lull. The wind carries with it a low tremor that masks their raspy, uneven breaths. Noah is trembling in the embrace but still, he does not make a sound.

Neither does Yang Rong who holds him upright.

“I know,” he replies, his voice coming out quiet and raw. “…I know.”