Atonement
Seohyun had been hospitalized in a certain hospital.
On her way home after classes, she had suddenly suffered a myocardial infarction and been rushed in. Fortunately, people nearby had called for help quickly, and by the time she arrived here she had already stabilized.
After days of tedium, the boredom of hospital life was finally set to end today with her last psychological counseling session.
It did strike her as odd that a heart attack would warrant psychological counseling, but she figured there was no harm in going through with it.
What did trouble her was that after every session, she always came out feeling as if she'd been plunged into sleep — hazy, strangely refreshed, and yet somehow faintly unsettling, like something wasn't quite right.
Still, they'd told her that once this final session was over, she would be discharged immediately, so she resolved to bear with it a little longer and gripped the handle of the counseling room door.
"Hello there, Seohyun. How are you feeling?"
When she opened the door and stepped inside, the young female doctor — someone she'd seen enough times now to grow fond of — greeted her with a smile.
"Ah, yes. I'm fine…"
Tzzt.
Seohyun, sitting across from the doctor and answering with a smile, doubted her own eyes when the woman's body blurred like a screen full of static, then snapped back into focus.
"…I'm… fine."
"What's the matter?"
The doctor asked, pausing at the way Seohyun trailed off — and then, seeming to understand, she spoke.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Just now — this doctor devoured a psychological specialist named Han Chaeryeon. You know, the woman the Order had been using hypnosis and brainwashing on to manipulate your memories. It hasn't been long since I ate her, so I haven't quite stabilized yet."
"What on earth are you…"
At the doctor's smiling delivery of words both bizarre and impossible to believe, Seohyun's face went blank with incomprehension.
"I'm going to recalibrate your memories now. Because you need to atone to him. To Yoon Dohyun — my beloved existence."
At the familiar name — Yoon Dohyun — Seohyun found she could no longer speak at all.
Her mind went numb, and every one of her senses detached and drifted away, as though her body were no longer her own. She could no longer tell whether the place she stood was dream or reality.
But when a black liquid began seeping out from the doctor's body and creeping slowly toward her, she understood that something had gone terribly wrong.
She had no idea what that unidentifiable thing approaching her was — only that it was something that could never exist within an ordinary, mundane reality.
Then… was this place a dream?
Or was it a nightmare?
As those thoughts swirled through her disconnected, weightless senses, the vivid sensation of a cold liquid crawling up her body startled her so badly that she snapped awake.
This was no time to be dazed.
A terror that raised goosebumps across her entire body seized her, and urgency flooded in. The fear of becoming something that was no longer herself — a dread that threatened her very existence — overwhelmed her, and she twisted her head and opened her mouth.
"Help m—"
Several days had passed since I met the male demon.
The day after that encounter, I had headed to the university braced with tension and dread, certain that something unfathomable was about to happen — but all that came back to me was the news that neither Ryeonhwa nor Seohyun had shown up at school.
"I'm worried about Seohyun…" said Hanbyeol.
"Yeah… me too," Wooshin replied.
When Seohyun failed to appear for the morning lectures yet again, the two of them — who shared classes with her — exchanged worried words, their faces drawn with concern. Even Siwoo, who had never thought much of Seohyun, rested her chin on her hand and wore an expression that looked uncannily like worry.
Everyone but me had of course tried contacting Seohyun, and not a single one of them had managed to reach her.
Knowing the full story of why she hadn't come to the university, I sat frozen in my seat, anxiety coiling in my chest.
What if something had gone wrong for Seohyun that day?
Her face flashed in my mind — gasping, heaving for breath, half-dead beneath the demon.
"Don't worry too much. I'm sure it's nothing," said Siwoo, smiling and offering comfort from the seat beside me — my worry must have been showing on my face.
"Yeah… thanks."
I answered her kind words listlessly, though I felt a genuine, quiet gratitude toward her. Maybe it was because we were the same age, or maybe our temperaments simply fit, but Siwoo and I got along easily. In truth, it was more accurate to say we simply clicked. Whatever the reason, I felt a deep closeness with her — which was probably why she was the person I talked to most at the university.
"Hi there, everyone?"
At the sound of that voice — strange and yet unmistakably familiar — every head in the group turned on its own.
"Unnie!"
"Noona!?"
Hanbyeol and Wooshin cried out in astonishment at the sight of Seohyun, the source of the voice. I too stared at her, equally stunned.
"Sorry for making you all worry," Seohyun said, taking a seat near us, and then explained why she'd been absent and unreachable all this time.
Her parents abroad, she said, had been injured, and she'd rushed out of the country to care for them. The explanation flowed without a single hitch, like someone recounting events that had genuinely happened — so seamless that even I, who knew the real situation, nearly found myself convinced.
"Are your parents all right?" Hanbyeol asked carefully, concern in her voice.
"Of course~ Thanks, Hanbyeol. You really are the best."
"And me, noona?"
"Siwoo, you too. Thank you."
"Hehe…"
Mid-conversation with Wooshin, Seohyun turned her head to the side, looked at me, and spoke.
"It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"…It has. I was worried."
When she suddenly addressed me, my heart lurched violently for an instant — but I suppressed the tremor and steadied my expression.
"After class, could the two of us talk for a bit? There's something I absolutely have to tell you."
That word — alone together — sent a haze of suspicion and unease rising up inside me. I wanted to demand right then and there what it was she had to say, but watching her turn back to chatting with Hanbyeol and Wooshin, I had no choice but to strangle that anxiety down for the rest of the lecture.
When the lecture ended and I followed Seohyun, the place she led me to was that deserted rooftop floor — the very spot where she had once used my relationship with my sister as leverage to threaten me.
Ryeonhwa had said that while manipulating her memories, the organization would erase everything about my sister as well — but I hadn't been able to confirm any of that yet, so as I climbed up after her, my nerves were stretched taut.
Or else… could it be that the memories of the demon hadn't been wiped properly, and she remembered that it was me who carried her away that day?
A thousand thoughts churned as I reached the floor. Seohyun checked that no one was around — and then, without warning, dropped to her knees before me.
"I'm sorry, Master. Please forgive this worthless filth for the insolence I committed against you."
"…What?"
I stared down, dumbfounded, at Seohyun bowing her head to the ground at my feet, begging forgiveness. By some cruel joke of fate, the spot where she knelt was exactly where I had once knelt before her.
"Wh-what are you saying, Seohyun…"
"Please, Master. Grant me permission to wash away the sins I committed against you."
It wasn't an act, and it wasn't a joke. There was no reason for it to be — which only made it harder to understand why she would behave this way toward me.
"Sins? What sin are you talking about? And 'Master'? What on earth—"
Swoosh.
Seohyun lifted her bowed head and looked up at me.
I was about to ask what she was actually talking about when I realized her eyes held no focus at all, and my open mouth closed again.
Something was wrong with the way she kept grinning, like a person on drugs. Listening closely, even her voice was slightly slurred, as if she were drunk. That look — as if some essentially human part of her had been castrated and knocked askew — reminded me of what Ryeonhwa had said at the end about the aftereffects of the memory manipulation.
Don't tell me… this is it? This is the aftereffect?
But…
Unable to fully accept it — knowing even as I refused it that I was refusing it — I was just fumbling for my phone to call Ryeonhwa in a panic when it happened.
Tup.
"Forgive my sins with sex, please. Let me atone with my body, Master."
"Eek— w-wait—!"
Seohyun closed in right in front of me, grabbed my crotch through my pants, pressed her face against my groin, and nuzzled her cheek against it like a puppy begging affection from its owner.
A flushed face, heat blooming in her unfocused eyes. The softness of her cheek rubbing against me, and the hot breath spilling from her mouth, taunted my groin through the fabric of my trousers with a maddening, wanton cruelty.
Only after watching her sway her hips back and forth like a wagging tail while gazing up at me did her clothes and appearance finally register in my mind.
The black leather H-line skirt, slit slightly along the sides of her thighs, rode up as she knelt with her legs spread, and her pink panties peeked out with conspicuous subtlety. Her open-shoulder top bared her prominent collarbones and plunged into an explicit display of cleavage, accentuating her already indecent allure. The heavy makeup — dark lipstick, lashes drawn long — made it plain that she had prepared today with every intention of seducing a man.
"I'll do anything to earn your forgiveness, Master. So long as I can serve as your cum dump, as a toilet for you to relieve your lust in, I'd give you my life. I don't care if you use me like tissue paper to catch your filth and throw me away. So please, Master…"
Seohyun thrust out her pale pink tongue, licked her lips deliberately, and whispered in a voice dripping with seduction.
"Please use me.♥"
Swoosh.
Before I knew it, her outstretched hand had covered the hardened bulge beneath my pants, caressing it with deliberate enticement.
"Haa…"
Under the name of atonement, Seohyun's seduction drew a trembling moan from my mouth. My mind had already lost the room to wonder why she had ended up like this. If anything, the memory of her face in the past — looking down at me kneeling, carved with contempt and mockery — overlapped with the woman before me now, and my excitement only climbed higher.
She was nowhere near Jia's level, of course, but Seohyun was beautiful enough in her own right. Her figure was exceptional, beautiful enough to pass for a model anywhere she went. In fact, from the moment she'd entered the university, she'd been confessed to again and again — not just within our department but across others.
And now that woman was groveling beneath me, begging me to use her body sexually. All manner of filthy imaginings flooded in, and with them came the impulse to make them real.
"Hehe♥ I'm a s-sinner, hngh! I have to be f-forgiven by Master, ahh, hehehe!! To be forgiven, I have to ha-have sex, relieve Master's lust… hngh… obey Master's commands… carry out anything Yoon Dohyun commands, anything at all…"
Watching Seohyun mutter her broken, meaningless babble like a malfunctioning machine, I understood: the human part of her had been knocked irrevocably, catastrophically out of alignment.