Childbirth
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!"
In an operating room, a woman lay with her legs splayed wide, her bruised and swollen belly heaving, her sex bared to the lights.
"This is just... grotesque...!"
"Doctor... please don't say that..."
"Sorry. But even if it was a monster that did this, there's a limit...!"
The doctor in the white coat bowed his head at the nurse assisting with the delivery. Shin Eunyeong—that was the woman's name, wasn't it. She had been wandering near a Gate when her luck ran out. Goblins had seized her and dragged her off, and they had used her as a breeding matrix.
From the moment he had answered the call and stepped through the operating room doors, a staggering stench had punched him in the face. He had been practicing for nearly ten years, and he had never smelled anything like it. And when he actually entered the theater, he was appalled.
That smell... is coming from this woman?
He had formed some idea of her condition the instant he had heard she had been used as a breeding matrix. But this was beyond anything he had imagined. Her arms had been torn off at the shoulders, pus streaming from the stumps—the ragged edges of something ripped away by force, the marks of lust and hunger sated in a single act. Her breasts had been half-severed, the subcutaneous fat laid open. Her swollen belly was a canvas of black and purple bruises. Her eyes had withered shut.
Other doctors worked around her, trying to salvage what they could. Neurosurgery. Pediatric surgery. Hepatobiliary-pancreatic surgery. Cardiothoracic surgery. Professors from every department except obstetrics had all crowded around this one woman. It was a vision of hell.
"How is she?"
"I don't know..."
"That bad?"
"I don't even know where to start..."
"What?"
What the colleague meant was this: the moment anyone laid a hand on the woman's body, some unknown force twisted the wounds into a different shape.
"What the hell does that mean?"
"That's what I'm saying—I don't know! It's not like she's been irradiated...!"
The obstetrician looked at the woman. She's not normal. That much is obvious.
The colleague from a moment ago spoke again.
"We've decided to just observe for now..."
"Why?"
"We have no choice but to trust in self-healing..."
"Is that supposed to be a plan? If we don't operate right now, both the mother and the child will die!"
The child would be a goblin's anyway, so it shouldn't have mattered—but the instinct to save a baby surged up in him unbidden. And self-healing? Did that mean they were going to do nothing at all?
As the obstetrician stared in disbelief, one of the nurses spoke.
"Professor... look closely..."
"What is everyone talking about right now...!"
And in that instant, a strange current of energy slithered through the mother's body. Her crushed eyes were slowly knitting themselves back together.
"What is this..."
"This is why I said we can't touch her...!"
So that was what they had meant.
"Doc...tor...! Fix me...! Please, make it hurt less...!"
But Shin Eunyeong's pleading was far too desperate to simply stand there and do nothing. They had already used a considerable amount of anesthetic. It had made no difference. Her mind was fully intact. The drugs did not take in her body at all. So they had dumped in a massive dose without the slightest regard for the child in her womb, and even that had done nothing.
It was a goblin's child anyway. Killing it wouldn't matter.
That was what he was thinking when the mother's plump belly twitched.
At the boundary between the operating room and the outside, two men stood beyond a pane of glass. Doheon and Director Jeong Gyeongtaek. I watched the doctors working on Shin Eunyeong.
Pointless.
Shin Eunyeong would heal on her own regardless. If they put their hands on her, it would only slow the process. Even so, there was something I liked about the way they were fulfilling their duty as physicians.
I wasn't sure how much time had passed when the doctors' movements suddenly quickened.
"Looks like... it's about to be born."
Jeong Gyeongtaek clenched his hands as he spoke. I nodded.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!"
Shin Eunyeong howled, her eyes still gone, her jaw wrenching so wide it threatened to tear free of its hinges all over again. From between her legs, a child emerged, the umbilical cord trailing behind it.
The infant was half-human, half-monster. Neither one thing nor the other. The doctors stared at it in shock.
"How are we supposed to explain this..."
It was thickly built. An orc's child, then. I had thought the orcs were all dead, but there had been one still clinging faintly to life, so I had left it alone. Congratulations on becoming a father, orc.
Meanwhile, the doctors inside the operating room seemed considerably shaken by the fact that the child—half-monster though it was—was human. I found myself worrying they might conclude she had been dragged into a Gate while already pregnant.
"I'll... explain it to them later."
Jeong Gyeongtaek said this to me and let out a sigh.
"Her condition is still terrible, though."
She was grotesque. She was regenerating, yes, but her eyes had sunken into their sockets, and her anus and pussy had been stretched as wide as a face. Torn and ragged marks covered her body. The expressions of the people who had assisted with the delivery had gone past grim and into something frozen. They looked like people who had given up—who am I, and why am I here—and simply resigned themselves to it.
"And these people's silence..."
"Ah... it's fine. I've already prepared a cover story..."
A cover story. They would assist in the delivery of a woman raped by goblins and orcs. But the same woman giving birth to orc or goblin children every single day would raise questions, so the staff who assisted with the deliveries would be rotated out on a regular basis. That was how they had decided to produce Awakeners.
As a method of using the breeding matrix, it was more than satisfactory for making Shin Eunyeong suffer.
Jeong Gyeongtaek, however, had an objection to that line of thinking.
"Sir... bestiality might be worth trying. What are your thoughts?"
I looked at him, uncomprehending.
"Horses, or pigs, or..."
My face hardened.
"I believe I told you not to pity Shin—her."
Animals were considerably more docile than monsters. Monsters were better for tormenting Shin Eunyeong. Jeong Gyeongtaek's shoulders flinched.
"No. This is sympathy for the children who will be born from her."
I decided to hear him out.
"They say a child is heavily influenced by the condition of the mother's body."
Jeong Gyeongtaek pressed on with his explanation.
"The breeding matrix's body has been severely damaged by the monsters using her. That strain is bound to affect the child's body as well."
I simply watched him. He swallowed hard and groped for whatever justification he could find.
"Physical damage takes a toll on the mind. Can we really assume that a child born from such an unstable breeding matrix will be free of personality defects?"
"We want new Awakeners as much as anyone, but having Awakeners with personality defects is a bit... well... so even at this stage, switching from monsters to animals..."
"So what you're saying, Director, is that you'd like to reduce the breeding matrix's stress in order to minimize personality defects in the children born from her."
"Yes..."
I understood.
"If that's how you see it, then go ahead."
"Do you mean that?"
"Do it. But if you do..."
"The breeding matrix's conception rate will drop drastically. And of course, the rate at which we produce Awakeners will fall as well..."
Exactly. The reason I had chosen monsters over animals in the first place was that monsters are faithful to their nature. Animals, ironically, know restraint. Even pigs, which seem to eat endlessly, only consume as much nutrition as they actually need if you look closely. Monsters have no such limit. They eat, they drink, they fuck. They want to devour without end. If there is a single female, they will violate her as many times as physically possible.
Animals are not like that. Once their lust is sated, they are satisfied, and they stop. To breed a monster with a human, you can simply dump them in a dungeon. To breed an animal with a human, someone has to manually bring the animal's genitals into contact with the human's—a tedious, artificial process. Animals have no sexual desire for humans to begin with.
So how did he plan to solve that problem?
I put the question to him.
"I've already made arrangements for that."
A few days ago, the Director said, he had purchased a horse.
"I didn't know you had a taste for riding."
"No. Nothing like that."
The stallion was a special case. It had been used as a laboratory animal in the treatment of a pituitary tumor, and an accident during that process had left it with satyriasis—hypersexuality. From what he had heard, it responded to any female, humans included. They had even commissioned a custom onahole to slake its lust, but the thing wrecked it in no time and flew into a rage. Given the stallion's temperament, it was so rough with ordinary mares that other owners refused to breed their own horses to it. And above all, even before it was erect, its cock was a meter long—which tended to give people pause. It exceeded the average length for a horse.
"So you want to use that horse."
"Yes, that's right."
The Director clapped his hands together. I took a moment to reflect. Monsters were better for making Shin Eunyeong suffer, but looking back, I had not given much thought to the psychological damage the people around her would take in the process of tormenting her.
I could read the Director's thoughts. Which meant I knew that what he had just said was a lie. Personality defects in the children? There had been some truth in that, but the real reason was that he felt a measure of pity for Shin Eunyeong. Watching all of this was wearing his mind down considerably as well. Breaking his promise to me was fairly serious, but given his usual conduct, I decided to let it go this once. I recalled Jeong Gyeongtaek's reaction to Opera a few hours earlier.
"Then lead the way. Let's have a look at this horse."
"Um... and that breeding matrix...?"
Jeong Gyeongtaek pointed at Shin Eunyeong, who still lay in the center of the operating room with her legs spread wide, trembling.
"We'll take her once the delivery is finished."
If you buy a plug, you need an outlet to shove it into.