Chapter 81

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The very first thing he registered was the absolute lack of strength in his body.

It wasn’t just a simple weakness; it felt as though his physical form was literally sinking straight through the floor. The moment consciousness trickled back, Lino couldn’t even open his eyes, simply letting hot tears stream silently down his face. Actually, he tried to open them, but his eyelids refused to budge. They were so severely swollen that no amount of straining could pry them apart. Why the hell are my eyes so puffy?

“Ugh…”

Still, it was a massive relief that his voice worked. Granted, it was a rough, gravelly rasp barely squeezing past a suffocatingly tight throat, but just being capable of producing sound was a victory in itself.

“Is… anyone… there?”

Blinded, he had to rely entirely on his other senses to figure out where he was. Grateful just to be awake, he gave a weak sniff, desperately hoping he was in a hospital. If he were, the room ought to reek of harsh antiseptics.

The scent of… flowers?

Instead of sterile chemicals, only the delicate, soothing fragrance of blooming flowers wafted into his nose. Rolling his eyes blindly beneath his swollen lids, Lino tried twitching his fingers next.

Rustle. His fingertips brushed against a plush sheet. The texture was far too silky and luxurious to belong to any hospital bed Lino had ever encountered.

I knew it… This doesn’t seem like a hospital. Then where am I?

Even the Haklan barony wouldn’t have been able to afford sheets this expensive, unless perhaps it was the vanity-stuffed bedroom of Iscazel. But as he continued to stroke the fabric, the texture felt strangely familiar. Where have I lain on such an expensive bed before? Just as he tried to jog his foggy memory…

“Lino…?”

A low, hoarse voice broke the silence. In an instant, Lino realized exactly why the bedsheets felt so familiar. The impossibly rough, guttural growl—hovering right on the terrifying line between man and beast—struck him like a physical blow.

“Grondil…”

“Lino!!!”

The mattress violently dipped to one side. A frantic clicking sound of hard claws pressing down rapidly approached, right before incredibly soft beast fur carefully brushed against Lino’s cheek. The crisp, cool scent of a winter forest filled his nose. It was undeniably Grondil in his true beast form.

“Lino. Can you hear me?”

“Ugh… Yes… I hear you perfectly.”

“Hah… O Aquila. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Clutching Lino’s hand desperately, Grondil repeatedly offered fervent prayers of gratitude to the goddess Aquila.

“What… happened to me…?”

Lino mumbled, struggling to pry open his stubbornly sealed eyes even a fraction. He desperately wanted to meet Grondil’s gaze and check his stomach—

Ah…! My stomach!

Raising his free hand, Lino frantically felt around his abdomen. It was completely flat. Which meant…

“Are the babies okay? Did… did they come out safely?”

Lino’s voice trembled violently as he asked. The hand locked in Grondil’s grip shook just as hard. He remembered agonizing over his flattened stomach in that white dream void. The terrifying anxiety that something might have gone horribly wrong during the delivery began to rear its ugly head once more.

“Those fucking bas— No, the cubs are perfectly healthy, so you have nothing to worry about.”

“R-Really?”

It sounded like he was about to call them fucking bastards before he caught himself. Sure, they were literal beast cubs, so calling them ‘saekki’ wasn’t technically incorrect, but the venom in his tone strongly implied the profanity. Still, hearing they were safe brought immense relief. It was wonderful news… but it was rather disturbing how Grondil’s voice rumbled with a murderous, bloodthirsty growl, as if he were ready to slaughter someone on the spot.

“But… nothing’s wrong, is there?”

“Wrong?”

Grondil’s voice, turning the question back on him instead of answering, was laced with intense resentment and a faint trace of bitter sarcasm. Uh… What’s going on? Did something happen?

“Something incredibly huge went wrong.”

“Did something happen to Enoch or Erin? Or to you—”

“Lino Cliff. Something happened to you. Do you even comprehend the state of your own body right now, that you’re out here worrying about others?”

“Pardon…?”

Since the babies were perfectly fine, Lino had been deeply worried that—given his minuscule social circle—some disaster had befallen Enoch, Erin, or Grondil. To hear that he was the disaster, delivered with a grip so tight it practically crushed his fingers, left him utterly bewildered.

“What’s wrong… with me? Ugh… Ahem, hem…!”

He tried to ask what was wrong with his condition, but his voice kept giving out, forcing him to clear his throat. Grondil gently pressed a cup of lukewarm water to his lips. After wetting his parched throat, he could finally speak with a much clearer voice.

“What exactly is wrong with my condition?”

If the babies came out fine, shouldn’t that be it? Flinching his eyebrows, Lino waited for Grondil’s answer.

“Lino Cliff, you… you’ve just woken up after an entire month.”

“…What?”

A month? 

Receiving a soothing cold compress over his eyes courtesy of Grondil, Lino pondered that impossible timeframe. Was my condition so critical that I was unconscious for a whole month? Even when staring up at the operating room’s blinding ceiling lights, all he remembered was struggling to breathe, a hazy mind, and a deafening ringing in his ears, rather than overwhelming stomach pain.

No matter how he analyzed it, it didn’t seem like it had been that critical. Lino looked at Grondil with a slightly subdued gaze. Catching a glimpse of Lino’s clear green eyes sparkling between his slightly parted, swollen eyelids, Grondil ground his teeth audibly. Instead of explaining, he grabbed Lino’s hand and dragged it down to his flattened stomach. Peeling back the blankets and slipping under the shirt, he forced Lino to touch his own bare skin.

Huh.

Even accounting for the lost volume of the babies, it felt alarmingly hollow. Something was terribly wrong. Expecting his firm, muscular abs to instantly return was obviously unreasonable, but for it to be this completely sunken in seemed entirely unnatural.

“Grondil, my stomach… my stomach feels weird.”

“Yes. Your stomach is definitely weird.”

“Why… did it turn out like this?”

Lino pulled his shirt all the way up, examining his completely exposed abdomen. His vision was still compromised by his puffy eyelids, but it was glaringly obvious that his stomach had become a cavern entirely devoid of any muscle whatsoever.

“The problem was that those three fucking brats… were far too massive.”

“Isn’t it a good thing that they’re big?” It means they’re healthy and robust.

As Lino added this thought aloud, Grondil let out a displeased, vibrating growl from deep within his chest.

“That’s only a good thing when you’re an Isbergian with vastly superior physical capabilities. For someone with a frail body like yours to carry three beast cubs—overwhelmingly oversized ones, at that—in your womb… it was completely inevitable that your body would break down.”

“Still, I woke up, so… No, never mind.”

Lino had been about to point out that since he survived and woke up, everything was fine, but the sheer murderous intensity in Grondil’s eyes made him frantically shake his head and swallow his words.

“Where exactly was I hurt? My body…”

If asked if he was okay, he could honestly say yes. The time spent with Grondil, carrying their babies in his womb, hadn’t been a hallucination, and he had survived instead of dying. That was more than enough to be okay. But he was genuinely curious about why his stomach had been reduced to this hollowed-out state.

“I can explain that to you.”

Clack. The hospital room door slid open to reveal Erin. Tossing a thick clipboard stuffed with papers onto the bed, she dragged a spare chair over and collapsed next to Grondil.

“It’s really been a long time, Lord Letia.”

“I suppose… it has? Haha.”

“Don’t laugh. Thanks to you, I practically died and came back to life myself.”

Heaving a massive sigh, Erin shot Grondil a sidelong glare. Whatever the reason, her claim of nearly dying didn’t seem like an exaggeration; she looked infinitely more haggard than the last time he saw her. Her skin was dull and flaky, and the dark circles under her eyes practically dragged all the way down to her upper lip.

Now that he looked closer, Grondil’s fur seemed to have lost its luster as well. Being in his beast form meant Lino couldn’t gauge a pale complexion like Erin’s, but the fur that used to gleam like sunlight dancing on snow was visibly dull and coarse.

Did they spend this entire month agonizing over me? It wasn’t as if he intentionally chose not to wake up, but an overwhelming wave of guilt and profound gratitude washed over Lino for the immense suffering Grondil and Erin had clearly endured for his sake.

“First off, the young lords are all perfectly healthy.”

“You performed the surgery, right, Erin? Thank you so much.”

Lino tried to bow his head in gratitude, but Grondil shot out a hand to stop him.

“Just lie back comfortably and listen.”

“Ah… Right.”

Adjusting the bed’s incline, Grondil helped Lino lean back into a comfortable sitting position, even wedging a plush cushion behind his lower back. Having never been on the receiving end of such meticulous care in his entire miserable life, Lino rubbed his stinging eyes for no particular reason as he waited for Erin’s report.

“I honestly believed the only issue was the massive size of the cubs. Your final test results that day… they showed absolutely no irregularities. The problem was that the complication arose after the results came out… That was the true disaster.”

“What was the complication?”

“The problem was that your womb simply wasn’t resilient enough to carry the cubs to full term.”

“Ah…”

Instantly grasping the terrifying implication, Lino couldn’t even nod, only managing to let out a foolish, hollow gasp. The babies had been too massive for the womb to withstand, which meant… it had ruptured.

So that’s why… that’s why my condition crashed so violently.

“The fact that it was internal bleeding meant we couldn’t immediately detect it, which was another massive issue. If you had been an ordinary human, both you and the cubs would have been in mortal peril… We would have had to prepare for the absolute worst-case scenario.”