Blood-Scented Midnight Ward: The Fever of Infection and the Dawn of Perfect Symbiosis
After the second binding—when the beast’s biological narcotic had thoroughly ravaged her—the hospital room sank into a deathly, grotesque silence. Eunha’s slender body lay sprawled across the floor, bearing the brutal traces of the massive male’s bone pillar that had twice torn mercilessly through her. Deep inside her belly, between the displaced womb and the torn muscular walls of her vagina, the beast’s seething fluids still pooled thickly, driving an unnatural cellular regeneration. Severed blood vessels and muscle fibers were miraculously staunching themselves, using that vile fluid as a medium to knit flesh back together. Yet even this overwhelming healing mechanism had its blind spots.
“Haa… hck… haaah……”
Hot, trembling breaths escaped between Eunha’s thin lips. Her once-pale, translucent skin was flushed a deep crimson, and cold sweat poured down her forehead and neck like a waterfall, soaking the marble floor. The lethal internal injuries were being repaired by the beast’s semen, but the external environment was nothing short of a massive petri dish teeming with bacteria and viruses. Brain matter leaking from her younger brother’s crushed skull, the bodily fluids of hundreds of ruptured corpses pooled across the floor, and the remnants of her own uncontrolled excretions. Even though the beast had licked the area clean with his rough tongue, he could not stop the rampant proliferation of tetanus and countless other pathogens invading Eunha’s wounded skin and torn vulva. In the end, her fragile immune system collapsed, and a terrifying secondary infection fever began.
—Kkiiing. Kkng.
At that moment, a massive shadow approached Eunha through the darkness. The same ferocious 90-kilogram monster that had moments ago shredded her insides to sate its extreme rut now lowered its tail and let out anxious breaths. It had detected, from the body of the perfect female it owned and dominated, not the heat of estrus but the scent of death and abnormal fever.
The beast’s enormous head drew close to Eunha’s face.
—Chup. Lick.
Its sandpaper-rough tongue lapped across her sweat-drenched forehead and cheeks. It was the instinctive, blind first-aid behavior of a wild animal trying to cool the fever and heal the wounds with its own saliva. But each time the beast’s hot breath and saliva touched her skin, Eunha’s inflamed flesh burned with excruciating pain.
“A-ah, it hurts… hngh, stop……”
Eunha raised a trembling, slender hand and pushed the beast’s massive muzzle away. Even as her head felt like it was melting from the fever, the blind pharmacy student’s mind blared its final survival warning. This was a bacterial infection. Physical suturing alone could not break this fever. Without broad-spectrum antibiotics, disinfectants, and antipyretics entering her bloodstream, her heart would stop from sepsis before the night was over.
“Haa… medicine… I need medicine……”
With unfocused silver-white eyes turned toward the ceiling, Eunha reached up with both hands and cupped the face of the great predator she knew must be looking down at her. Stiff, thick fur. Rough breaths gusting from the beast’s hot nose. She gently stroked his merciless muzzle and whispered in a frail voice, as if soothing a giant hunting dog.
“Down… we have to go down. To the first floor. Take me to the pharmacy……”
Though the beast could not perfectly decode human language, its keen intelligence and sharp sense of smell accurately read the desperate intent in Eunha’s fingertips and the scent of crisis rising from her body. It understood that to save this female, they had to leave this place and move to a specific location.
—Krrrng.
The beast rumbled low in its throat and flattened its massive shoulders all the way to the floor beside Eunha’s body. It was lowering itself so the female could climb onto its back—a perfect gesture of submission and protection.
Eunha pressed her shaking arms against the floor and struggled to lift her upper body. She was completely naked. Sticky fluids and dried bloodstains left by the beast still clung grotesquely to the insides of her thighs and buttocks. Relying only on touch and smell in the darkness, she wrapped both arms tightly around the beast’s thick neck and spread her thin legs on either side of its massive ribcage, pressing close.
—Swoosh. Sway.
The moment Eunha settled fully on its back, the 90-kilogram beast flexed its heavy muscles and slowly rose onto all fours. Eunha’s vision was perfect darkness, yet through touch and smell alone she could feel with painful clarity just how enormous the monster was beneath her. Its shoulder height alone reached 90 centimeters. Whenever her fragile breasts and bare skin brushed against the beast’s stiff back fur, a sharp shiver ran through her. Her lower body, its pelvic floor muscles torn to shreds, clung precariously to the beast’s broad back for balance. She had to navigate using only the direction of the beast’s moving muscles and the intense male pheromones pouring from his body—a perfect dependence of the blind.
—Thud. Thud. Thud.
The beast’s massive paws crossed the threshold of the hospital room and stepped into the corridor that had become hell. Perfect silence. Not a single scream or sign of survivors remained in this apocalypse. The corridor floor was a slippery sea of blood formed from the remains of hundreds of bodies that had burst after falling from the sky.
—Crack. Crunch. Squelch.
Every time the beast’s sharp claws and thick pads touched the floor, the sickening sounds of shattering skulls and crushing ribs tore through the hospital’s silence. Each time that terrible vibration traveled up the beast’s spine and into Eunha’s thin thighs, she squeezed her eyes shut and clutched the beast’s neck fur even tighter.
“Left… we need to head toward the stairs.”
Following Eunha’s faint directions, the beast turned without hesitation through the darkness. As it descended the stairs, its shoulder muscles rippled smoothly, and Eunha entrusted her body to that perfect physical balance, enduring her terror with nothing but the beast’s body heat beneath her fingertips.
Finally, they reached the first floor. Eunha felt the change in the density of the stench and the strangely cooler air flow against her skin and sniffed. A familiar scent mixed with countless disinfectants and the distinctive smell of medicinal powders. They were in the area with the outpatient pharmacy.
—Crash! Crunch.
When the beast lightly swatted the pharmacy’s tightly closed glass door with its heavy forepaw, the thick reinforced glass shattered like paper and rained down. The beast stepped forward without hesitation onto the sharp glass shards littering the floor. For a moment, its walking rhythm faltered slightly to one side—an almost imperceptible hitch that Eunha felt through her thighs—but the beast only snorted once and kept moving.
Reaching the stainless-steel preparation counter inside the dispensing room, where there were fewer shards and the surface was relatively flat, the beast slowly tilted its back to help Eunha slide down safely.
“Th-thank you……”
Stepping onto the cold counter, Eunha barely managed to steady her fever-weakened body and stretched both hands forward. She had no sight. Yet the training she had repeated hundreds, thousands of times at pharmacy school, combined with her sharpened senses, began to grant her fingertips an almost supernatural vitality. Her slender fingers spidered rapidly across the collapsed medicine cabinets and shelves.
—Clink. Rustle.
The curves of plastic containers, the texture of aluminum blister packs, the subtle temperature differences of glass. Her nose dissected the coating agents on pill surfaces and the faint chemical scents of powdered medicine like a microscope, sending the information straight to her brain.
“Amoxicillin… no, this is first-generation cephalosporin… clindamycin.”
Eunha’s hands moved unerringly, gathering the necessary medicines onto the counter. Because her vision was blocked, her sense of smell and touch had been honed to their absolute limits. In the darkness, her knowledge as a pharmacist was blooming in perfect form.
—Scrape. Scrape.
Eunha located a mortar and pestle, dropped the selected broad-spectrum antibiotic pills inside, and began grinding them into fine powder with the heavy pestle. She added physiological saline by feel, mixed in an analgesic ointment, and stirred vigorously. The result was a powerful makeshift antibiotic-anesthetic ointment capable of fighting infection and protecting torn mucous membranes.
With trembling hands, Eunha scooped up a generous amount of the ointment she had made. Spreading her thighs, she applied it directly and roughly to her vulva and vaginal entrance—torn in third-degree lacerations by the beast’s violence and now inflamed.
“Hngh! Ah, aaah!”
The moment the sharp disinfectant and antibiotic components sank into her open flesh, a pain so piercing it brought tears to her eyes shot through her entire body. Yet behind that pain, the dull numbness left by the beast’s semen and the anesthetic components of the freshly applied ointment began a strange chemical reaction, rapidly cooling the burning fever.
After swallowing more medicine and treating her wounds, Eunha gradually steadied her ragged breathing. The confirmation of survival through knowledge—that she was not a useless lump of meat but possessed skills that could keep her alive in this hellish world—planted a small support in her collapsing mind.
Just as Eunha finished treatment and let out a deep breath, about to slump over the counter—
—Lick. Suck. Smack.
Near her feet came the wet, dull sound of something being licked and sucked at regular intervals. It was the beast. Eunha bent down and carefully reached toward the sound. Her slender fingertips touched the beast’s massive right forepaw.
—Krrrrng.
The beast reflexively growled low and twitched its paw. It was not trying to attack or push her away—only the defensive instinct of a wounded wild animal. Eunha gently stroked the beast’s thick fur to calm it, then slid her fingers toward its enormous pad.
“Ah……”
What her fingertips found was a sharp foreign object deeply embedded between the thick, cushioned layers of the pad. Earlier, when the beast had smashed through the closed pharmacy door, it had stepped on a piece of reinforced glass. Though the beast’s body had mutated to the point of deflecting bullets, the large shard that had driven straight into the center of its unprotected pad under full body weight had pierced the hide and severed blood vessels. Sticky blood soaked the beast’s paw. Even this overwhelming monster bled and felt pain. And with only its rough tongue, it could not extract the glass shard buried deep in its pad—it had only been licking the surface uselessly.
Eunha’s silver-white eyes trembled faintly.
“Stay still… I’ll… I’ll take it out. It’s okay.”
Eunha fumbled for tweezers and disinfectant. She carefully drew the beast’s massive forepaw onto her slender lap. The moment was strange: the brutal beast’s paw, thicker than an adult man’s thigh, settled docilely under the blind female’s fragile touch without resistance. Eunha concentrated her sense of touch to the extreme, accurately reading the angle of the glass shard firmly lodged between fur and flesh. She inserted the tweezers, gripped the fragment in one motion, and pulled upward with a clean, strong movement.
—Ssshhk. Plop. Thud.
“Krrgh!”
The moment the glass shard came free, dark red blood that had been pooling gushed out. The beast exhaled a pained, rough breath and bared its teeth, but it did not sink them into Eunha. Calmly, she poured disinfectant, wiped away the blood, and packed the deep wound in the beast’s pad with the same powerful makeshift ointment she had prepared earlier. Finally, using a medical compression bandage she found on the counter, she wrapped the beast’s enormous paw in several tight layers, completing perfect hemostasis.
“Now… it won’t hurt when you walk.”
Eunha wiped the sweat-drenched hair from her forehead and gently stroked the beast’s bandaged paw. The beast stared at Eunha’s hand that had treated it, then pushed its massive head heavily into her embrace.
—Krrrrrr.
It was not the destructive vibration it had made earlier while oppressing and ravaging her. This was the deep, peaceful sound of a beast directed at a capable companion who had healed its wounds—or at the mate absolutely necessary for its survival.
In the middle of the apocalypse’s pharmacy turned into a sea of blood, the blind pharmacy student who had lost her sight and been thoroughly violated had proven her perfect value by using her knowledge as a weapon to compensate for this overwhelming predator’s weakness. The beast protected and bred the female with physical strength and supernatural bodily fluids. The female mended the beast’s wounds and balanced their survival with delicate knowledge and pharmaceutical skill. What had begun as simple domination and subjugation, rape and surrender, had evolved into a chillingly grotesque, mutually dependent symbiotic relationship—far more enduring and perfect than any violence in the world—and locked them together with an eternal shackle.