The morning at the Third Corps headquarters always began with numbers before screams.
Aizen Locke stood before the battle situation board, not yet cooled, and slowly turned through the reports that had come in overnight.
The left flank had barely held, and nearly half of the northern supply tents had burned.
The enemy remnants that had surged in during the night raid had been cleared out, but even until dawn, the evacuation route remained half-blocked.
Judging only by the first page of the report, it had been an ordinarily bad night.
But from the second page onward, the numbers began to shift, little by little, out of place.
Messenger Hein: returned to duty after delivering orders despite severe shoulder injury
Archer Ramon: returned to battlefield after shoulder laceration. Killed enemy scout leader in reconnaissance battle on left hill. Arm wound reopened afterward
Increase in fever patients slowed after reclassification of recovering patients
Transfer time for the severely wounded shortened after evacuation queue reorganized
At first glance, they were insignificant lines.
They did not stand out like a report of military merit, and they were far less splendid than a sentence about a knightly order taking an enemy commander’s head.
As a record of victory to be submitted to the royal court, they seemed to have little value.
But Aizen had never been the sort of man to push such numbers to the very end.
A front line is decided first not by glorious victories, but by the side that barely manages not to collapse.
What lasts longer is not who cut down more enemies, but who made it possible for someone to fight one more time.
He picked up the next page.
This time, it was a record from the Medical Bureau.
There were many places where the ink had run, and the handwriting shook with urgency here and there.
It was not a handsome report.
Even so, records like these usually had no room to lie.
Tent sections separated.
Boiled water containers separated.
Fever patients moved.
Patients immediately after suturing separated from recovering patients.
Stretcher paths for evacuation reorganized.
If one looked only at the measures, they seemed like the fussy habits of someone obsessed with order.
It was closer to a note saying that some low-ranking medical officer had rearranged the inside of a tent.
But the results attached afterward were different.
The number of patients developing fevers had dipped, and the number of men who failed to last until dawn after the night raid had fallen slightly.
Only very slightly.
That was precisely why it stood out all the more.
Aizen’s hand paused for a moment.
Ten winters ago, he had once trusted in his supply lines, pushed the front forward, and collapsed just like that.
The first thing to break then had not been the knightly order.
It had been evacuation.
Soldiers who had not died by the sword fell to fever, and men who should have survived the night disappeared before morning for lack of water and bandages.
After that defeat, Aizen changed the way he looked at the battlefield.
Rather than who had charged more magnificently, he first looked at who had made others endure longer.
A war that does not collapse usually begins with tedious numbers.
One staff officer cautiously opened his mouth.
“The rumors from the front line are growing as well.”
Without lifting his gaze, Aizen asked,
“To what extent?”
“They say that as long as you make it to the tent where the youngest medical officer is, you’ll live.”
“The reason?”
“The cases of the messenger and the archer who survived a few days ago overlapped. On top of that, some are exaggerating it, saying a white-haired medical officer can raise even the dead.”
Aizen let out a short breath.
He did not believe such talk.
More precisely, he disliked the habit of covering phenomena that could be explained with ghost stories.
But that did not mean he considered rumors themselves worthless.
Soldiers could endure another day with just one reason to believe.
The problem was when that belief delayed evacuation and made them hide their wounds.
He picked up the next report.
This one was a field message that had belatedly come in the previous evening.
After the case of Ramon, a tendency observed among some soldiers to hide wounds and endure, arriving late at the tent.
On the previous day, the youngest medical officer personally restrained the rumor.
Wary of glorifying return to battle, he instructed them, “If you’re injured, call for a stretcher first.”
Aizen’s finger stopped at the edge of the paper.
That one sentence was more interesting than all the numbers before it.
A person who truly wanted to play the saint would not say such a thing.
After all, the more soldiers endured in his name, the easier it would have been for him to gather praise.
And yet that youngest medical officer was cutting down the rumors attached to him.
He had chosen evacuation over miracles, and was speaking first not of tales of return, but of the danger of delay.
Aizen asked briefly,
“What did you say his name was?”
“Ruan Hesse. Twenty-two. A low-ranking medical officer.”
“Noble?”
“No.”
“Records of knight training?”
“None.”
Aizen tilted his head ever so slightly.
A single low-ranking medical officer, neither knight nor noble, with no record of military achievements, was affecting both the return rate of recovered troops and the survival rate of fever patients at the same time.
Such changes did not come from legends.
They came from structure.
And on the battlefield, a person who created structure was often more valuable than three knights.
As he put on his gloves, he said shortly,
“I’ll see him myself.”
The road to the forward medical tent was a mire.
The smell of supply crates scorched through the night still lingered, and the tracks of stretcher wheels were carved deeply into the waterlogged earth.
Aizen walked with only two guards.
If he brought too many people, the inside of the tent would freeze first.
He knew such visits were utterly useless.
As he approached the tent, the sounds reached him before anything else.
The sound of boiling water.
The scrape of stretcher legs against the ground.
Groans held low.
Orders cut short.
Among them, one voice, without a trace of excess, continued to blend in.
“The left side is for fever patients only.”
“Don’t touch the stretcher with those hands. Wash first.”
“Even if you can walk, you lie down for now. Don’t try to endure.”
Aizen stopped just outside the entrance.
Inside, a young medical officer was moving quickly between two stretchers.
His build was slight, and among his black hair were faint white strands, just as the report had stated.
His hand movements were not flashy.
Instead, there was no hesitation.
He took a pulse, examined a wound, immediately divided the next section with his following hand, and even corrected the positions of the assistants without breaking the flow.
It was a movement that revealed habit before talent.
Hands that had endured for a long time.
Aizen soon saw something else as well.
A newly arrived severely wounded man was laid down at once in the right section, while a patient with a fever was moved to the opposite side of the tent.
Boiled water was used only inside, and bloodstained cloths were pushed outside the entrance.
Meanwhile, near the doorway stood a knight who had not yet fully recovered.
His body was that of a patient, but his position was that of a guard.
It seemed like a trivial arrangement, but inside that tent, roles had already been organized.
Just then, a soldier with a deep cut on the back of his hand tried to walk in on his own.
The young medical officer spoke the moment he saw him, without even lifting his head.
“Why did you walk here? Next time, call for a stretcher first.”
“I could endure this much…”
“Whether you can endure it or not is decided after you come in. If it worsens while you’re walking, then it will be too late.”
The soldier could not make an excuse and was immediately laid on a stretcher.
In that brief scene, Aizen saw more than he had in the report.
People might call that tent a miracle.
But what was actually happening inside was the exact opposite.
It was not about making someone stand again.
It was about making them lie down before it was too late.
If a medical officer understood that difference, the way he held a front line would inevitably be different as well.
Aizen watched in silence for a while longer, then stepped back.
The staff officer asked very quietly,
“What do you think?”
With his back to the entrance, Aizen answered,
“The ghost story is wrong.”
“Then shall we suppress the rumor?”
“No. Change its direction.”
The staff officer immediately prepared to write it down.
“Erase the talk that he raises the dead. Instead, spread the word that that tent is a place you must be carried to before it’s too late.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not ‘if you walk there, you’ll live,’ but ‘don’t endure it, call for a stretcher first.’”
“Yes, sir.”
He added one more thing.
“Attach one more evacuation team. Don’t cut their supplies either. If the noble knightly orders try to interfere and take him exclusively for themselves, block them at once.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the staff officer asked,
“Is he worth that much?”
Aizen turned his gaze and looked once more at the tent.
Inside, someone’s breathing was still ragged, and the young medical officer was moving on to the next stretcher without even raising his head.
There was no light there worthy of becoming legend, no splendor fit to be recorded in a tale of victory.
Instead, there was a tedious precision that made one more soldier last one more day.
“More than one knight earning glory,”
Aizen said in a low voice.
“There are times when those hands saving one more noncommissioned officer is worth more. This is such a time.”
By the time he returned to headquarters, he had already reached a conclusion.
Ruan Hesse had to be observed further.
If necessary, he had to be secured, and if someone tried to use those hands merely as material for ghost stories, Aizen would finish his own calculations before they could.
War lasts longer because of the people who create structure than because of saints or miracles.
When he arrived at the headquarters tent, Aizen immediately summoned the officer in charge of Medical Bureau records.
“Compile a separate list of the patients Ruan Hesse has treated.”
“Only the officers, sir?”
“No. Messengers, engineers, noncommissioned officers, nameless infantrymen—every last one.”
The records officer asked back, looking surprised,
“Must we look that broadly?”
Without removing his gloves, Aizen placed his hand on the edge of the battle situation board.
“If one officer survives, one battle line holds. But if one messenger survives, one order arrives on time, and if one noncommissioned officer survives, one line that was about to scatter is bound together again.”
He cut himself off briefly, then added,
“War does not run on noble names alone.”
After a brief silence, he spoke even lower.
“What that medical officer is touching may be not life itself, but the connections that come after it. So we must first see which positions held, and which lines did not collapse.”
The records officer lowered his head without asking further.
Lastly, Aizen drew a black mark over the position of the forward medical tent.
It was a small mark, but from that moment on, that place was no longer a mere medical area, but a candidate for one of the Third Corps’ core assets.
From the direction of the distant medical tent, an extremely faint scent of medicinal herbs followed on the wind.
It was a weak fragrance, quickly buried beneath the smell of blood.
Aizen smelled it only once and did not look back again.
Because he had already seen enough.