The Voices Outside the Hospital Room
After Jia left, the hospital room grew quiet again. The click of her heels had long since faded to the far end of the corridor, and what little air had slipped in when the door closed lingered only briefly before the smell of antiseptic swallowed it whole.
Minjun lay still, staring at the ceiling. The blanket was drawn up to his chest, and what lay beneath it was not yet completely dry. The nurse's wet wipes had erased the morning's dampness, but a faint, clammy unease still clung to his skin.
The warmth of the chair where Jia had sat was already gone. Only a trace of her scent remained on the backrest, mingling with the disinfectant — shampoo and sweat, and a strained, nervous edge she rarely let show.
All that stayed with him were her words: I'll handle it. Handle it where, meeting whom — Minjun hadn't been able to ask. She had risen before his mouth could open, and now even that question clung to the ceiling, unmoving.
Some time passed. It was a lull between rounds and mealtime, and the room held nothing but the hum of machines.
Then, voices began seeping through the gap in the door.
Low, rough men's voices — nothing like the nurses' brisk, businesslike tones. They seemed to be deliberately keeping their volume down, yet the murmur never quite died.
Minjun might be C-rank, but he was still an awakened hunter. His Physical Enhancement kept his senses — hearing included — well above an ordinary man's. He didn't need to strain his ears. Every word outside the door came through with perfect clarity.
"Hey — isn't that Han Jia?"
It was the voice of whichever of them had recognized her first, surprise and excitement tangled together.
"Did you see the leaked photos? Those ones."
"Come on, who hasn't? The whole internet's been in an uproar over them all week."
A short laugh rolled down the corridor. The shuffle of slippers seemed to stop just outside his door, followed by the sound of someone checking the room number.
"What a perverted bitch. Tits, ass, and pussy all out on display, and she still struts around like it's nothing."
"Well, she's a hunter. Guess that breed just comes with a thick face."
"What the hell's she even coming to our hospital for?"
"Word is her husband's the one lying in that very room."
A brief silence followed.
"Ha……"
The sound of breathing drew nearer. Someone was sidling up to the door.
"Fuck. I'm so goddamn jealous it makes me sick. What did that bastard ever do to deserve hogging a woman like that all to himself?"
"Right? If she were mine, I'd grab those tits and tittyfuck her every single day."
"With a chest like that, you'd blow before your dick even got buried between them."
"And that pussy photo — she's got a full bush on her, too."
Laughter mixed in again — shallow, lewd laughter.
"Sounds like the husband took a pretty bad hit doing his hunter work."
"She could be a celebrity, forget hunting. With that figure, she's a natural for AV."
"An A-rank wife like that and he's still out hunting? If it were me, I'd spend every day on nothing but breeding sex."
"Get that sour face of hers sucking cock, then cover her head to toe in cum — the sense of conquest would be unreal."
"Bury your face in that ass and make her rim you, and it'd be even better."
There, at last, the men bit back their laughter.
Listening to them trade that crude, sexual mockery of his wife, Minjun's fingers curled into a fist beneath the blanket, seething with fury. It was a hand his injuries left too weak to grip properly — even so, he squeezed until the fingertips turned white.
Jia's breasts. Her hips. Even her pussy. The men were carving her into parts with their filthy vocabulary. Things that had never once been called by those names were being taken apart out in that corridor like public property.
Tittyfucking. Cocksucking. Breeding. Rimming. The instant those words reached him, something in his gut lurched.
Minjun had never done any of those things. He had never put himself between Jia's large breasts, never had her take him in her mouth, never had her lick him there — never even asked. It was the same for all the rest.
Jia was remarkably fastidious even within their marriage. Intimacy happened strictly on a schedule, with contraception: a kiss, some touching, ordinary penetration. Anything more playful had no place to wedge itself between their calendars.
And yet the men beyond that door had already laid his wife's breasts — breasts they had never once touched — atop their own cocks.
Public property.
The word he'd once read in an internet comment had come back to him in living voices this time. Not a phrase on a screen — but in this same building, this same corridor, on the very floor Jia had crossed only moments ago.
In his head, Minjun traced her route: the door of his room, the corridor, the elevator, the ground-floor lobby, the parking garage. An old habit from Special Forces days, mapping a path — and every meter of it would have drawn stares.
The chest stretching her blouse taut, the hips flaring beneath her skirt. Eyes that had studied the leaked photos would have swept over her like men confirming the real thing. Minjun hadn't witnessed any of it. And without witnessing it, he knew it with terrible precision.
The disgust was extreme. Rage rose with it. While he lay here like this, how much walking had Jia done beneath that downpour of men's lecherous stares?
At the center of that disgust, the seat Jia had occupied only minutes before superimposed itself: her composed face — but her flushed ears. Her clipped little phrase. I'll handle it.
Minjun couldn't tell whether that was her fortitude. He only knew that this same Jia was, in these mouths right now, a slut and a pair of tits.
"Face looks like a cold bitch, but god, that body's fucking bouncy."
"I zoomed in on the pictures — her nipples are big too. Bet they'd stiffen the second you sucked on them."
"Husband's C-rank, I heard. Came out of the Special Forces, and look how he ended up."
"C-rank? A C-rank should've just stayed in the Special Forces. Why bother crawling back out to play hunter. Tch."
Special Forces. The word brushed past the inside of Minjun's ear.
He was a veteran of the Anti-Monster Special Forces from his army days. To Jia as a cadet at the Hunter Academy, it had been a name that made him look like a strong, admirable senior.
For a moment, a memory flickered across Minjun's mind: firelight at a training camp, a young female cadet gripping a spear awkwardly. Back then, Jia had drifted between C-rank and B-rank, and her control of her abilities was terribly clumsy.
When Minjun signaled with his fingers, she would nod and follow. Even after lights-out, her chatter stayed bright — You're so strong, sunbae, she used to say. That voice lived somewhere that had nothing in common with the slut and the tits being discussed outside his door.
But now it was nothing more than a modifier pinned beside a room number. C-rank. A husband lying in bed. The keeper of a thing other men coveted.
Minjun did not open his mouth. He could not have. Arguing with the men beyond that door would only create suffering — and the only one suffering would be him.
The shuffle of patient slippers drew a little farther off. But it did not vanish entirely. All the way around the corner, the same kind of talk kept coming.
"You think that bitch will come back for another visit?"
"Seems like she comes pretty often. Next time we're getting a stealth photo. Her blouse buttons look about ready to burst."
"If the Jia bitch shows up, call me."
"If I'm still on this floor by then, still not discharged……"
"Heh heh. Then drag out your discharge a little. Give us all a look at that ass."
"Eheheheh!"
Trivial, snickering laughter — then the soft chime of the elevator. Only then was the corridor empty.
Minjun closed his eyes. He tried, deliberately, to shut his ears as well. But hearing does not close on command.
The moment his sight vanished, his other senses seemed to sharpen to fill the void. He could hear the click of a keyboard at the distant nurses' station. That clarity was itself a kind of pain.
He lay staring blankly. His sense of time thinned. Where Jia had gone to handle it, what would become of the insurance — such thoughts sank beneath the voices from the corridor.
Pain began to climb. Not only from the injury. His whole body, unable to close its ears, throbbed like one vast open wound.
The call bell sat within arm's reach. Even so, he couldn't press it right away. When the door opened, the corridor would be visible — and someone might still be lingering out there.
The men might come back. His finger stalled above the button, afraid that summoning a nurse would only draw every eye back toward his room.
But endurance didn't last long. Pain got there first.
Unable to bear it any longer, Minjun stretched out his hand with difficulty and pressed the bell.
Some time passed between the bell and the nurse's arrival. Her hands drawing back the curtain were more perfunctory than they had been that morning. She glanced at his face and let out a short sigh.
"Does it hurt a lot?"
"……Painkillers."
That was all his throat could produce.
The nurse checked his chart, confirming the interval between doses, it seemed. Minjun's eyes stayed locked on the ceiling — so that he would not see the corridor.
"It's a bit early for another dose today."
Minjun gave no answer. He didn't need to put on an expression of pain. He was in pain. His body — and everything else besides.
The nurse asked nothing further. Perhaps she knew about the morning. At any rate, she didn't let her gaze rest on him long. She prepared the analgesic and pushed it into the IV line.
The painkiller arrived with the drip, a cold sensation spreading up the inside of his forearm. A prickling ache ran briefly along his veins before everything dulled. Even the pain thinned, as if melting away.
"You really shouldn't keep calling for this so often. It's addictive."
"……Yes."
Minjun nodded, very slightly. Plenty of hunters leaned on painkillers; when your abilities fell short and your body had to keep moving, sometimes there was no other way. But addiction wasn't the problem right now. The problem was ears that refused to sleep.
After the nurse left, the door closed all the way. This time, no voices drifted in from the corridor. Whether that was the drug or simply the absence of people, he couldn't tell.
The ceiling slowly drifted away. The voices faded first. Meaning collapsed faster still.
Only syllables remained. Tittyfuck.Special Forces.Slut. The words tumbled about in no particular order until they fused into one mass with the image of Jia's back.
If he could just fall asleep, that would be enough.
Within his blurring vision, Minjun shut his eyes —
and for a little while, turned away from the fact that his wife's body was laid out on other men's lecherous gazes and their vulgar tongues.