Thirteen hours had passed since I unwittingly became a single father.
Outside the window, the autumn sky was a brilliant, unforgiving clear. I had skipped school, calling in sick with a fake cold. The room's temperature was comfortably cool, rendering the air conditioner entirely useless. And right in front of me lay a Ghoul infant, currently partaking in her primary occupation: sleeping.
She was peaceful now, but the moment hunger clawed at her stomach, she would wake and seek out prey. Ghouls, by their very nature, cannot digest anything but human flesh. And the closest human to this particular Ghoul... was me. Unless I offered up my own flesh and blood, her starving cries would never cease.
"Alright, I already want to quit!"
As soon as Mr. Kuzen had dumped Eto on me and vanished, I had crawled into bed—a pathetic, half-hearted attempt at escaping reality. But waking up only dragged me back into this suffocating nightmare. I knew that after meeting Ukina, Mr. Kuzen had stopped hunting living humans, choosing instead to stave off his hunger by scavenging the corpses of those who had taken their own lives. But I was just a normal high schooler; I had never even seen a dead body. Venturing out to harvest the flesh of suicide victims required a level of morbid fortitude I simply did not possess.
Add to that the mundane nightmare of acquiring baby supplies, figuring out the biological differences between human and Ghoul infants, balancing high school with fatherhood, and—the ultimate dilemma—somehow hiding my new, flesh-eating dependent from my parents... It was a logistical hell.
"Nnngh..."
Twitch!
My shoulders jerked violently at the tiny sound. I snapped my head back, heart hammering against my ribs, but exhaled a shuddering breath of relief. She wasn't awake. It was just a sleep murmur. Stroking my chest to calm my racing pulse, I forced my mind back to the immediate crisis.
I can't afford to be paralyzed by terror every time Eto needs to eat. Food first. I'll figure out the rest later.
I lacked the stomach to go prowling for corpses, but that didn't mean I was completely devoid of options to satiate her hunger. Refusing to leave her alone in the apartment, I swaddled her snugly in an oversized towel and carried her outside.
I had made a startling discovery the previous night: perhaps due to her half-human, half-Ghoul lineage, the Kakugan—the terrifying, blood-red and black eye characteristic of Ghouls—only manifested in one of her eyes. Being a mere infant, Eto had absolutely no control over it. It flared up naturally when the starvation set in, but it was just as liable to blink into existence randomly even when she wasn't hungry. To avoid unwanted attention, I arranged the folds of the towel to casually drape over her right eye, concealing the monstrous crimson iris.
"Aaah?"
The rhythmic jostling of my footsteps must have chased away her slumber, for it wasn't long before Eto's eyes fluttered open. The very second her lids parted, the Kakugan ignited beneath the veil of the towel. Her face scrunched up, the trembling of her lower lip signaling an impending wail. It meant only one thing.
Our little princess was starving. Time to go to work, my poor finger.
I offered her the exact same digit she had mauled the night before. Instantly, her face broke into a radiant smile, and she clamped her gums down on the exact same laceration, tearing it open anew. A spike of pure, blinding agony shot up my arm. I nearly screamed. She didn't even have teeth yet, but the sheer, monstrous crushing force of her jaw acted like a steel vise, mangling my flesh and wringing the fresh blood from my veins. The thought of what would happen once her fangs actually grew in sent a violent shiver down my spine.
But the terror was fleeting. Watching her suckle the blood with that utterly adorable, blissful expression—nursing on my open wound as if it were a mother's breast—summoned a bizarre surge of warmth that somehow eclipsed the excruciating pain.
"...Is this the joy of raising a daughter?"
Even as my own flesh was actively being consumed, I felt myself spiritually aligning with every fiercely doting father across the nation. I couldn't care less if the passing pedestrians threw me weird glances.
How long did I walk like that?
Right around the time my finger started taking on a sickly, bluish pallor from the severe blood drain, Eto finally seemed satiated. She popped her mouth off my ruined digit and promptly drifted back into a soft, rhythmic slumber.
"Judging from this... it looks like a Ghoul infant doesn't strictly need solid meat. Blood alone is enough to stave off the hunger..."
If that was the case, I knew exactly where I needed to go. My footsteps eventually came to a halt in front of the neighborhood blood donation center.
Pushing the glass door open, I was greeted by the bright "Welcome!" of a female receptionist. When she politely asked if I was there to donate blood, I looked her dead in the eye, my expression utterly grave, and made my demand.
"Miss... is there any chance you would be willing to sell me a set of blood extraction equipment, no questions asked?"
To cut straight to the chase: I failed spectacularly.
Blood extraction kits are classified as medical equipment and strictly cannot be sold to the public. Beyond that, a random high school kid demanding to buy intravenous needles and blood bags was incredibly suspicious. Factoring in the swaddled baby in my arms, the receptionist probably jumped to some deeply disturbing conclusions.
So, what was my backup plan?
"Is it really okay for medical supplies to be this easy to obtain...?"
The very same equipment the blood center had vehemently refused to sell me arrived on my doorstep the very next day, courtesy of a quick online order. The internet really did sell absolutely everything. If I had known it was going to be this effortless, I wouldn't have subjected myself to the humiliation at the clinic. Oh well. I'd chalk it up to a pleasant first outing with Eto.
Mimicking the procedures I'd seen at the clinic, I strapped a tourniquet around my arm, located a viable vein, and pierced my skin with the thick needle. It was my first time attempting anything like this, so I ended up botching the angle a few times, leaving my arm bruised and aching. But eventually, the deep crimson liquid began to flow steadily into the sterile bag. Watching my lifeblood slowly fill the plastic pouch, I plotted my next move.
"Alright, the food problem is handled. Next is the school problem..."
I couldn't feign a cold indefinitely. As long as I met the minimum attendance requirements, graduating wouldn't be an issue, but to achieve that, I still had to endure at least another month of actual classes. My primary terror, however, was leaving Eto unattended. Anything could happen to an infant left alone; they required constant, unbroken vigilance.
But dropping her off at a normal daycare center was entirely out of the question. The moment the staff noticed her dietary habits or her Kakugan, they would alert the authorities. A squad of CCG Ghoul Investigators would be knocking down my door before the day was out.
Which meant...
I looked over at Eto. Her wide, fascinated eyes were locked onto the blood bag, utterly mesmerized by the rhythmic pulsing of the dark red fluid filling the plastic. Staring at her, a reckless, half-insane resolution began to crystallize in my mind.
"...Should I just do something crazy?"