Okay, what if I...
- Part of a race of psychopaths that feed on humans' life force, Nero is a second class citizen due to his empathy. That empathy eventually leaves him fed up with the syiks' brutality towards humans, inspiring him to go from outcast to traitor as he secretly attempts to lead the humans in a war against his own blood.
- After being haplessly adopted into the most violent group of his already psychopathic race, Nero finds himself unable to tolerate their brutality towards humans, and risks what little status they've given him to turn traitor and fight for the humans' – and his own – survival.
- Syiks are a people who hunt humans and live off their life force, and they're all psychopaths who revel in the violence – except Nero, an outcast whose compassion allows him to see the humans' side of thing, and even take that side when he decides to potentially lower himself to their status by leading them in a war against his own kind.
...I typed all of these out then realized that what happened is you said they were "too many words" so I made them more words. And now all three of them are too long. *sigh*
Anyways I tried to add some talk about the stakes, but there really is just a lot of information I feel is too important to leave out of the hook? I really need to mention that:
Nero is an outcast/syiks are also mean to Nero himself
Syiks are not supposed to have empathy, and they survive by killing humans and taking their life force
Nero, being a syik, is also subject to having to kill humans (just fyi: technically they can kill any animal, but animals vs humans is like living off of cardboard and a daily vitamin vs eating every meal at whatever restaurant you want) for his own survival. So like. "Betraying his blood" means not only betraying other syiks, but also betraying himself and what he is at his core?
Nero relates to or at least pities the humans and that's why he takes their side
I'd also like to mention that,
Nero recently gained a little bit of status by being "adopted" into that group, and is now risking gaining their personal hatred (as opposed to a general, "oh yeah, we don't like that guy" type of dislike) if they find out he sided with humans
Nero's mostly upset with how the syiks are needlessly brutal with humans, instead of trying to find the most humane way of killing them or mixing animals into their diet so they don't have to kill humans as often
But those things are probably better to save for an actual query rather than just the hook, if I end up mentioning them at all?
I'm being very verbose rn but I guess my point is that I'm having trouble figuring out either what things I'm able to leave out in order to keep this short, or how to word it so I can fit all that into a smaller word count.