Inside the hall, the pungent smell of disinfectant and the mustiness of age could not conceal the sickeningly sweet stench of blood.
The smell made Charles’s temples throb, as though something deep within his veins were resonating with it.
Strangely, he felt no revulsion.
Instead, an indescribable trace of familiarity and longing stirred deep inside him, as though the scent of blood had long since seeped into his very soul, an instinct buried beneath the deepest ruins of his memory.
The spacious treatment area was in even worse shape, like a slaughterhouse after a hurricane.
The reception desk, overturned medicine cabinets, the floor that had once been smooth but was now scored with deep gouges, even the heavy hospital beds.
Everywhere he looked, enormous, hideous claw marks marred the surroundings, clearly made by something inhuman.
A dark red, viscous substance resembling half-congealed plasma had collected inside the grooves, forming soft, gel-like deposits that gave off a faint, metallic-sweet odor.
These fresh signs of violent destruction screamed a silent warning.
While he had been unconscious, something unimaginably horrific had happened here.
“I need to get out of this strange place. Now.”
Charles’s nerves were stretched to their limit.
He watched every shadowed corner with heightened vigilance, creeping forward slowly like a stalking cheetah.
“Crunch… crunch… crack…”
Suddenly, a wet, unmistakable sound came from deep within the corridor, like cartilage being chewed and ligaments torn apart, shattering the deathly silence.
Following the sound, Charles looked toward the far end of the corridor.
There, at the boundary between candlelight and darkness, a massive, hideous Scourge Beast crouched with its back to him.
Under the flickering glow of an oil lamp, the shadow cast by its hunched figure swelled grotesquely, twisting across the entire ceiling.
It seemed to sense something and abruptly whipped its head around.
The instant its bloodthirsty gaze met Charles’s, he clearly caught the scent rising from its thick fur.
It came from the same source as the sickly sweet stench filling the clinic.
It was the scent of “Yharnam Blood”!
“Flesh!”
The Scourge Beast growled and tossed aside the mangled remains in its paws, scraps of cloth still clinging to them.
Dropping onto all fours, it charged at him in a frenzy, bringing a gust of blood-reeking air with it.
Compared with gnawing on cold corpses, it clearly preferred the feverish thrill of hunting down living prey and tearing it apart.
“Damn it!”
Its claws ripped through the air with a vicious rush of wind, heading straight for the side of his neck.
The icy certainty of impending death sent Charles’s stomach into a violent spasm, nearly making him vomit.
The Scourge Beast’s exposed hide was riddled with old wounds, some so deep that bone showed through.
Yet at that moment, those wounds only seemed to mock the frail human standing before it.
Against overwhelming strength, speed, and savagery, the reason and skill humans took such pride in seemed as fragile as the brittle shell of a dried cicada.
Just as the tips of its claws came within three fingers’ width of his Adam’s apple, a sharp surge of pain and numbness shot through Charles’s spine like an electric current.
His body seemed to acquire a will of its own.
Moving with a fluidity faster than thought, he threw himself backward as far as he could, then followed with a clumsy but effective roll, narrowly escaping the fatal strike.
Crash!
The Scourge Beast’s claws smashed into the wall where Charles had been standing, sending fragments of stone flying and carving five horrifyingly deep gouges into the surface.
The moment Charles regained his footing, his body instinctively answered with a swift, powerful side kick.
His hard boot heel struck like a guillotine, landing with perfect precision on an old, festering wound at the Scourge Beast’s waist, one already leaking pus and blood.
“Splat!”
Pus, blood, and rotten flesh burst outward like a crushed piece of spoiled fruit, blooming into a foul-smelling, black-red stain across the mottled wall.
The searing pain tore a short howl from the savage creature.
Its enormous body lost balance and crashed heavily onto its knees.
Now was his chance!
The instinct to kill shrieked through Charles’s veins.
He lunged like a starving wolf, pressing the fingers of his right hand tightly together into a blade.
Following the wound his boot heel had ripped open, he drove his hand deep into the Scourge Beast’s warm abdominal cavity!
“Squelch… rip…”
The wet sucking sound of his knuckles sinking into the soft cavity was enough to set his teeth on edge.
Slippery tissue slid beneath his fingertips, the sensation disturbingly like stirring warm pasta coated in thick sauce.
Then he viciously twisted his wrist a full turn clockwise inside the creature’s body.
A grotesque, muffled symphony of tearing, grinding, and churning came from within the Scourge Beast.
Shreds of flesh splattered onto the nearby oil lamp.
The crackle of bursting fat sounded strangely similar to the warped notes of an organ.
“Drip… drip…”
Thick, scalding blood wound along the contours of Charles’s taut arm like living crimson vines.
It gathered at his fingertips in sluggish, heavy streams before dripping onto the floor and joining the rapidly spreading pool beneath him.
The climax of this brutal, efficient ballet of slaughter lasted only a few seconds.
After suffering such a devastating attack from within, the Scourge Beast never even managed a proper counterattack.
Its massive body convulsed violently several times before collapsing completely into the mingled pool of its own blood and that of its prey, a resentful rasp rattling from its throat.
“Hah… hah…”
As the tension suddenly left him, Charles’s knees nearly gave way.
He quickly caught himself on the edge of a nearby bloodstained hospital bed and barely managed to stay upright.
After several moments of heavy breathing, his heart, still pounding wildly from the shock, finally began to settle into a steady rhythm.
He could not tell whether the Scourge Beast had simply been far weaker than it looked because of its old wounds, or whether his own nearly instinctive attack had been so precise and vicious that it could bring down a creature like this in an instant.
But he felt no guilt whatsoever.
In a struggle between life and death, even a moment of needless hesitation or cheap mercy would have gotten him killed.
Thinking back on his lightning-fast reaction and the ruthless way he had fought, Charles himself felt a strange chill.
He could not understand why he possessed such practiced, almost artistic skill in combat and killing, nor why he could remain as calm as an emotionless machine when staring death in the face.
“Maybe my past…” The sole of his boot ground against the Scourge Beast’s still-warm remains.
A low laugh, roughened by blood and dust, escaped his throat before he could stop it.
There was self-mockery in the sound, along with a tremor at the possibility that he had finally uncovered part of the truth.
“…was nothing more than that of a living weapon programmed to kill?”
The mirror-like pool of blood beneath his feet faintly reflected his figure.
The body that had seemed to awaken and reshape itself during that brief fight now looked entirely different.
Tendons hard as stone pulsed beneath his bloodstained bandages, and every line of muscle seemed packed with explosive strength.
Those combat skills were so deeply ingrained that they might as well have been carved into his bones and fused into his spinal cord.
Even with his memories gone and his consciousness clouded, they had not diminished in the slightest.
He searched through the coarse fur of the Scourge Beast’s still-warm corpse and found several test tubes of Blood, carefully sealed and gleaming with a dark red sheen.
His movements were so practiced that it felt as though he had done this thousands of times before.
He did not know exactly what the blood was used for, but anything preserved with such care had to possess some kind of special value.
Perhaps it served as currency, or perhaps…
it was a more potent material for “Blood Ministration.”
He carefully put the test tubes away.
He did not dare remain here any longer.
The heavy stench of blood was like a beacon, and at any moment it could draw more monsters consumed by their thirst for blood.