Chapter 11: My First Critical Patient (2)

I stayed pressed against the flow of warm fluid, my hands streaming to leave no gap in the open wound while I synchronized my pace with the mortar team, who had transformed into a makeshift emergency medical squad.

"She says it's only a few more houses, Lieutenant," Caspian provided the latest information he gathered from the Lonfre girl at his side, whose face betrayed a profound fear of loss.

After we cleared the field, we finally reached a small settlement that appeared to be a village in scale. As I ran, pulled along by our small group, my eyes scanned the poorly lit surroundings. I could see that most of the houses were made of wood, or at best, a mix of timber and stone. It truly felt like the aura of an un-urbanized European countryside.

On the gravel path, the mortar team struggled to keep from tripping without slowing their pace. Given the uneven texture of the road, the patient groaned even louder as the jolts vibrated through those carrying him.

"ᛘᛁᚴ!"

"Alright, it's the house with the lantern at the door" Caspian immediately translated.

Peering past Lieutenant Bulgers, who slightly obstructed the path ahead of me, I could see a wooden house standing in a corner right across the village. There was nothing special about it, of course. It looked no different from the other buildings except for the lantern light illuminating its front yard, contrasting with the other dimly lit homes.

Recognizing the destination, the mortar team began to pick up their speed again after it had started to flag. Navigating the outdated road, we finally reached the yard of our target house.

Ashton, who was at the very front, eagerly leaped forward and slammed his boot right into the middle of the door, creating a crash that stung the ears. Honestly, I felt it was a bit excessive to assault a weathered building just to make way for us.

"ᚦᚢᛚᚱ, ᛅᚱ ᚢᛚᚴ! ᚼᛖᛚᛒᛅ!?"

"Shit, kid! She said the door was unlocked, so what was that for!?"

"Hah? How the hell was I supposed to know that!?"

Yep, called it. Fortunately, the door was sturdier than it looked. However, we had no time for a dispute over a moldy wooden door, so the carrying team and I immediately rushed into the wooden building.

"Ash, grab that lantern and close the door after that."

"Yes, sir!"

When we managed to get inside, we were welcomed by the smell of wet wood and mold that grew healthily throughout this timber-structured building. As we rushed through the narrow living room, the sound produced by our boots also drew groans from the wood, as if they were got mad every time we set our feet on their surface.

"Where is the bed!?" I asked, spontaneously snapping at the Lonfre girl.

Without needing a moment for translation, the girl seemed to understand my intent immediately. Her trembling hand pointed toward a corner of the room where a set of stairs led to the upper floor, likely where the bedrooms were located.

"Shit," I clicked my tongue reflexively, my manners slipping.

"Why!? What else are you waiting for!?" barked Freddy, who usually had a gloomy aura but had shifted due to the situation.

"It's dangerous, idiot," I answered him harshly.

It could not be helped. It would take too long to climb the stairs one by one. This man had already waited long enough, and I was afraid that forcing him up would cause unnecessary movement and cause the bullet in his stomach to go even deeper. That would be more of a hassle.

"Alright, lay him here," as usual, Lieutenant Bulgers, who still showed calmness in a critical situation, appeared to clear the things off the dining table.

"Alright, alright. Careful with his head, damn it, Pisger!" Freddy seemed unusually energized
today.

"I know, man!"

Because there was no other choice, the mortar team carefully laid the middle-aged man onto the table we were improvising as an operating bed. In the process, I grabbed the girl's hand. She was startled by it, but I kept pulling her until she stood right over the man she knew.

I turned to Caspian, who was also standing near the girl. "Cas, ask what her relationship is with this man."

Without asking any questions, Cas, who had surprisingly become a professional in doing his duty, relayed my question to the girl. As expected, she was the daughter of this man.

"Alright, I want your hands to be a pillow for your father. I know this will be hard to see, but I am counting on you."

Caspian, who was beside me, immediately translated every word of mine to her without being told. Once she understood, her eyes stared right at me and she nodded. Unlike before, I could see a strong resolve from within her.

Because my morale booster tactic worked, I wasted no more time and grabbed a pair of scissors from my satchel. I used them to tear the father's clothes so my magic could directly touch the surface of the wound without any textile interference.

"Light, I need light! Where is the damn light," I called out while looking around. It did not take long for Ashton to appear with his lantern and stand near me.

With the visibility in the area improved, I began moving my fingers carefully so the sharp blades of the scissors would not make the wound worse. Because the clothes he wore were thin and poor quality, the fabric was easy to cut. It made everything feel easy, until finally, I could see the shape of the wound he received. The skin was completely torn with a hole that was painful enough just to look at.

Come on, the wound would not heal on its own. I refocused my mind and reached back into my satchel. In the dim light of the lantern, I rummaged through the bag until I finally found what I wanted.

My fingers pinched a small ampoule containing a clear white liquid. This was essentially the morphine of this world. Even though I had healing magic, of course I still had to—

"ᚼᛖ..." surprisingly, the father suddenly gripped my hand quite firmly just as I was about to inject the morphine. "ᛒᛅᛅᚱᚦᚢ..."

He mumbled something I could not understand. His grip was strong enough that I truly could not break free. Lieutenant Bulgers and the others also struggled because they had to be careful with his wound. I had not paid much attention to it before, but he had a fairly well-built physique, though of course it still paled in comparison to our Sergeant.

I glanced at Caspian, but he looked even more shocked than I was. The father continued his mumbling, which seemed to be explaining something to Caspian at the same time.

"He, he does not want you to inject that," Caspian said, then began explaining the reason. "He is no stranger to that stuff and knows how precious it is in the battlefield. He wants it saved to be given to us, who he says are more deserving."

"Has he gone mad? This is no time to be a hero!" I snapped, prioritizing reality.

"I think he is quite serious," Caspian turned back to the father. "He will feel guilty if you actually inject him. I think you should respect his wish."

That was quite surprising to hear from Caspian. Or was it just my feeling? Was he becoming sentimental? I wondered what kind of tone the father used while speaking to him in the Lonfre language.

Unable to decide, I shifted my gaze to Lieutenant Bulgers to get a decision from him.

"Don't look at me, Elise," Lieutenant Bulgers shook his head. "In a situation like this, you outrank all of us, even the highest general."

I could feel sweat dripping heavily from my forehead. Now that I was finally alone in making the decision, I knew I was trained for this, but I could still feel a heavy burden on my shoulders.

​"A-are, are you sure?" for the last time, I gave him a chance. "This is going to hurt like hell."

​In the practice of extraction magic itself, it was mandatory to inject the morphine beforehand. We could skip that step, but from what we learned in class, the patient would feel excruciating pain during the extraction process for several minutes. Of course, I felt that no one would be crazy enough to try it, until now.

​"Hell is just a second home to me," even though his thick accent was still present, this stubborn father quoted one of the iconic lines from a famous Arken film.

The father also pointed at something near where Ashton was standing. Since he was the closest, Ashton checked the drawer behind him and found a bottle that appeared to be some kind of alcohol. Ashton immediately handed it to the father.

Fine, no morphine, then. At the same time, I put the morphine back into my satchel.

​After the father gulped down the alcohol erratically, he nodded his head with resolve. Before starting, I reached for the upper part of the daughter's skirt and told the father to open his mouth. I then stuffed the fabric into his mouth. This way, he would not bite his own tongue while enduring the pain.

Once I figured the prep work was as good as it was gonna get, morphine aside, I made the call to move on to the next part of my job. And since it looked like most of the people crammed into this room had never actually seen a Sustainer work up close, I could feel their stares boring into me, tracking every little thing I did.

I lifted my right wrist up close to my mouth and bit down on the release pin of the bracelet I'd worn for years now, the one that honestly felt more like a part of my body than a piece of jewelry at this point.

Click.

That sound meant the bracelet had finally gone loose. And the moment it did, something shifted inside me, like foreign particles that had been sitting dormant suddenly started swimming all over my body in no particular direction. These were the magic energies, parasitic by nature, squatters that had taken up residence in their host without ever paying a single coin of rent. After years of training, though, they'd been brought to heel.

Back in training, our instructors told us we were free to picture the things living inside us as whatever animal we liked. Basically, we were told to use our childhood imagination. A lot of girls went with something like a pod of dolphins, a pack of cute dogs, adorable cats, that kind of thing.

Me? I liked birds. But there was no way in hell I was gonna name something I despised after anything I actually liked. So I always pictured them as a flock of sheep. Why? Because they were loud, they constantly wrecked my sleep, and they always got on my last nerve. So yeah, pretty accurate, right?

Well, I regretted that now. Because the moment I popped that bracelet pin, it felt exactly like throwing open a sheep pen and watching them bolt every which way across some open field while I had to chase them down to make sure none of them got lost. God, I hated being a shepherd. For what felt like the hundredth time.

Patterns of light started crawling up my arms and across my face. I heard Ashton whisper, “Whoa, that’s so cool…”

Yeah. Real cool. Try living with them.

He had no idea that what he thought looked so cool was basically eating through whatever I had left in me just to keep those things active and stable. Not to mention, if I panicked, it would flip the other way around, and I'd end up burning the patient instead of healing him.

"Hold him down," I ordered, my eyes sweeping every man in the room. "Don't let him move even a little. I don't want his intestines coming out with the bullet."

"Geez, learn to read the room, will ya?" Caspian complained about my choice of words.

The others didn't pay it much mind. Lieutenant Bulgers and Freddy threw their full body weight onto the patient without hesitation. The daughter, for her part, kept her eyes half-shut but held her hands steady, still doing her job as a pillow.

My palm hovered closer to the open wound, and the golden light around it grew brighter with every passing second.

"Khera-tu, varkha. Malios... trakh-te... bliu-nom," foreign words spilled out of my mouth, the kind nobody here would ever understand because they were only ever taught to us.

Alright, you woolly little bastards. Fall in line.

While keeping the incantation running on autopilot in the back of my head, I visualized the sheep trimming the grass neatly at exactly the right spot, not scattering all over the place and wrecking the whole harvest field in the process.

"Mmmph!!"

The father's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. The scream muffled by the cloth in his mouth was the kind that cut straight through you. His body arched rigid while his muscles locked up like steel cables.

"Hold him!" I snapped.

My sheep burrowed into the wound like it was a cave. They were hunting for something foreign inside the body, until they finally found it. A stray metal projectile got pretty close to the spine, a few more millimeters and he'd paralyzed, I could fix that but it would take days and given the circumstances it was highly unlikely right now.

Lucky it was also still in one piece and hadn't fragmented. Now came the last part of the extraction. Because in extraction magic, you had to lubricate the path first with restorative energy so the exit wound wouldn't end up more lethal than the entry.

Slow. Don't let it snag.

The more I focused, the brighter the patterns on my face glowed. That actually helped, because I didn't need Ashton's dim lantern anymore.

On the other side of things, just watching the father's suffering was painful enough. It was a genuine miracle that he was still keeping it together.

The good news was, this was almost over.

"Just a little more."

With one sharp mental pull, the lead fragment slid free from the wound. It floated for a moment inside a pale bubble of light before finally clinking down onto the wooden table.

Ting.

The father's body went limp all at once. His head dropped back into his daughter's hands. For one horrible second, I thought his heart had stopped.