The Resolve Carved in Flesh
The night in the slums was qualitatively different from that of the commercial district. If the commercial district pulsed with the lively scents of liquor, meat, and molten metal, the slums' night was a vast sewer spewing the stench of rotting filth, death, and repressed desire all tangled together in an inorganic mess. After finishing my shift at the dismantling yard, I wandered the dark alleys around my shack as usual. I was searching for usable beast bones that could serve as materials for Primal Magic, or fresh blood from corpses stabbed and left in the streets. Even though my stats had risen, my body was still pitifully weak. I hid myself completely in the shadows, muffling my footsteps like a rat.
That was when it happened. From the half-collapsed warehouse on the outskirts of the slums came a grotesque tearing sound, followed by a beast-like, ragged breathing. It was no ordinary scene of violence. The vulgar, wet sound of flesh slapping against flesh and a woman's suppressed moans—pleasure and pain grotesquely intertwined—drifted stickily through the night air.
"Haa, agh…! S-stop… ugh, aaah!"
The accent was familiar. It was clearly modern Korean, not the language of this world. I instinctively held my breath and peered through a crack in the warehouse's wooden wall. There, I witnessed the horrific fate of the female survivors from my group—those who had barely escaped the swamp quest Grum had mentioned days earlier and scattered into the slums.
Inside the warehouse, a few crude torches burned. Large mercenaries who had clearly crossed from another dimension and grotesque back-alley vagrants swarmed the space. In the center, three women were displayed naked like slabs of beast meat on dirty straw piles and wooden tables. One of them was the young woman in Pilates training clothes who had looked at me with desperate eyes in the empty lot, begging to form a group. But now, not a shred of modern intellect or civilized pride remained in her. Her once-neat training clothes were torn to rags that obscenely emphasized her full breasts and narrow waist. Her legs were spread grotesquely wide toward the ceiling to receive the men's violent thrusts.
"Ugh, aah! Thud! Thud! Thud!"
A massive orc-blooded mercenary roared like a beast and mercilessly drove his hugely swollen member into her narrow passage.
"Aaaah! N-no… my stomach, it feels like it's tearing… haaang!"
Her dark eyes rolled back white from shock and pleasure. With no foreplay whatsoever, the man's ruthless pistoning pierced straight to her womb. Her curvaceous naked body trembled like a fish skewered on a spit. Her mind was already completely collapsing. The arrogance with which she had demanded equal rights from guilds and natives out of a desire to survive had been utterly crushed—first by the screams of comrades torn apart by the swamp's monsters, then by the endless rapes that followed day and night.
Every time the orc-blooded man roughly shook his hips and stirred her insides, the grotesque shape of his hideous organ pushed up against her thin belly skin, drawing a terrifying yet sensual trajectory. Her reason screamed to escape this humiliating situation, but her body, forcibly trained in pleasure, greedily wriggled its inner folds and sucked the man's massive weapon deeper.
"Look at that. Your mouth says no, but your pussy's gripping my cock and won't let go. What a perfect little cocksleeve!"
Amid the man's mocking laughter, others approached in turn and began pouring their semen over her open mouth and face. Even as she turned her head as if fainting, she stuck out her tongue like an animal and panted every time the men's ejaculations battered her uterine walls.
"Aah… haa… haa, haaang… deeper, deeper… agh!"
From between the lips of the civilized person who had once sought salvation, only white foam mixed with semen and saliva now dribbled out. Her lower belly, filled with the seed left by dozens of men taking turns, grotesquely swelled like a woman in late-term pregnancy in real time. Sticky fluids and white liquid gushed out whenever the men's hideous members withdrew, yet her womb lewdly convulsed, craving even more semen as if that were its very purpose.
The situation at the neighboring table was no different. Another woman, still in office-worker attire, was surrounded by three men and violated in her mouth and both lower holes simultaneously. The moment all three holes were filled, her mind went completely dark under an explosion of white noise from pleasure. Only waves of pleasure that paralyzed her brain dominated her. When the men finally poured out their last loads, she arched like a bow and convulsed violently. Her belly too had swollen to its limit, the traces of the men rampaging inside protruding here and there. With tears covering her face and unfocused eyes staring into empty space, she had fully accepted the reality that her body had fallen to become the perfect "semen receptacle" and meat-hole at the bottom of Shedborax. She even rocked her own hips to welcome the men.
"……"
I quietly withdrew my gaze from the crack in the wooden wall. My heart pounded madly, and cold sweat poured down my spine like rain. Sympathy? Pity? Anger? Not even one percent of such sentimental garbage stirred in me. My mind was filled with nothing but pure, bone-chilling "terror" at one hundred percent purity. Those women weren't suffering because they were stupid. This was the absolute law of the Shedborax Continent—the natural "order" imposed on the powerless. Women from another world who lost their footing and fell to the bottom became miserable lumps of meat to process the desires of the strong. If a scrawny man like me fell to that bottom, the only ending would be becoming a mercenary's sword practice or monster bait, my entrails devoured while still alive.
I held my breath in silence and hurried away from the warehouse. I returned to my old shack where I could no longer hear the women's moans or the men's leering laughter, and bolted the door. Sitting on the rotten straw pile, I clenched my violently trembling hands. The scene I had just witnessed flashed vividly before my eyes—the beast-like eyes soaked in pleasure and stripped of human intellect, the bellies swollen to bursting, the horrific traces of gang rape. That was the shape of the ruin I would face the moment I became obsolete in this world.
'I have to become stronger.'
It was not a vague will to merely survive. It was a bone-deep awakening that I myself must become a more vicious and terrifying monster capable of snapping the throats of those beasts. I took out the leather pouch I had brought with me today. Inside were ground horned boar bone powder, the dark red blood of a fang wolf, and a nameless poisonous herb I had barely obtained from an old fence in a corner of the slums—all crushed together. It was an extreme primal magic medium that consumed my stamina stat, obtained by risking my life at the dismantling yard to secretly steal usable monster claws and bones without receiving a single coin in payment.
Without hesitation, I took out the sharpest fang wolf bone shard I had honed from my pocket. Then I mercilessly drove it into the left side of my chest—closest to my heart—tearing the flesh.
"Kuh, ugh…!"
I gritted my teeth so hard they felt like they would shatter from the pain of live flesh tearing and blood welling up. I mercilessly rubbed the sticky medium made from the poisonous herb and beast blood over the wound. A burning sensation as if poison were seeping through the wound into my blood vessels and setting every nerve in my body ablaze rushed over me.
'Tattoo…!'
Biting my lips until they bled, I spat out the skill name in a growling, beast-like voice. The mixture of bone powder, poisonous herb, and blood smeared on the skin near my heart began to writhe like a living insect, carving a geometric and sinister pattern.
Hissss—!
"Graaaah…!"
Along with the smell of burning flesh, my body convulsed madly. This tattoo was no shallow trick that merely raised stats by one or two points. The deadly poison seeping into my heart and blood vessels would immediately gnaw at my stamina and life force, but at the same time, it would condense deep within my blood vessels and be stored as a "consumable resource." In an unavoidable, lethal crisis, forcibly releasing this poison engraved in my heart would numb the pain throughout my body and draw out explosive adrenaline and beastly frenzy—my personal survival joker card.
In the agony that felt like poison and blood were squeezing my heart, my vision gradually flickered white. Though I scratched the floor until my fingers bled from the shock that felt like it would tear my sanity away, I forced my eyes wide open and endured.
"Cough, kuh…!"
The moment the pattern finally settled perfectly into a scar, I vomited a mouthful of dark red blood that surged up from my stomach. In the murky blood clot spilled onto the rotten straw, the beast's poison and the remnants of primal magic entangled and emitted acrid smoke. As I wiped the blood away in the darkness and panted roughly, only one thought cooled and hardened in my mind.
I will never fall into becoming their stallion or a monster's meal. Even if I have to crawl vilely across the ground and tear into others' blood and flesh, I will survive to the very end at the bottom of this damned Shedborax food chain. I have no desire for the petty game of kings where one reigns above others. What I want is simply a position where no strongman or monster can grab and shake me by the throat. A position so viciously safe and untouchable that no one can treat me like a mere lump of meat and trample me at will.
The night the beast's poison was engraved into my heart, the pathetic and timid modern man Mokwon—who used to break into a cold sweat at the mere scolding of his superiors—was buried deep beneath this rotten straw. In his place, I donned the mask of a sinister and ruthless sorcerer painted with blood and poison. A survivor who, solely to live, carried venom capable of tearing out the throats of anyone who touched him, opened his eyes with a glint in the darkness.