From a distance, the medical post near headquarters looked like a hospital.
The tents were larger.
There were more flags.
Even the paths for carrying stretchers were packed tight with planks instead of mud. The tracks left by carts going back and forth all night remained pressed deep into the wet boards.
But the moment Ruan took one step inside, he knew.
This was not a better place, but a place where more things were entangled.
The smells were mixed from the entrance onward.
The smell of blood.
The smell of boiled cloth.
Traces of burned incense.
There was also the scent of expensive perfume oil mixed in. It was the trace of a failed attempt to cover the stench of wounds.
And the damp anxiety that came from bodies that had waited too long.
“A relocated lifeline, huh.”
If Sera had not been absent, he would have swallowed those words inwardly, but this time Karen heard them instead.
“What does that mean?”
“It means this is a place hanging not from one line, but from several.”
Ruan answered briefly.
“And it also means that if it snaps, the collapse will be greater.”
Karen did not ask any more.
She, too, seemed to have immediately sensed that the air here was different from that of the frontline tent.
The guards moved before the patients, the attendants before the guards, and the clerks before the attendants.
It did not feel like a place where sound arose when someone was hurt, but a place where, after the sound arose, they argued over who should be allowed in first.
Just inside the entrance, a middle-aged military surgeon looked their way and narrowed his brow.
“You’re that junior military surgeon.”
Classification came before greeting.
“I am Ruan Hesse.”
“I know.”
The middle-aged military surgeon gave only the slightest nod.
“I am Helmad, deputy of the headquarters medical bureau.
Your place is the temporary surgery area in the back.”
“Who decides assignments?”
“One question first.”
Helmad’s gaze swept over Ruan’s head, his hands, and then Karen’s scabbard.
“Why have you brought a guard knight in here?”
Karen’s eyes narrowed at once.
Ruan spoke first.
“It was not my request.”
“Then whose request was it?”
“Likely the commander’s side.”
Helmad’s expression stiffened by the smallest degree.
Even without directly bringing up Eisen’s name, it seemed to be enough.
“Fine.
But you will follow the rules.
This is not a frontline autonomous zone.”
At those words, Ruan smiled bitterly only inwardly.
The frontline tent had never operated autonomously.
It was just that people dying came in too quickly, so hands moved before rules did.
As they went farther inside, there were many sickbeds, but the flow was blocked.
Fever patients and amputees were placed close together.
The recovery area and the surgery waiting area were half mixed as well.
Boiled instruments were on the right, and dirty cloth was directly behind them.
There seemed to be many people, but the order was slow.
Ruan drew in one breath and said,
“This will make the fevers rise higher.”
Helmad looked back.
“What will?”
“The fever patients’ area is too far inside.
There’s no airflow, and they’re right next to recovering patients.”
“Junior military surgeon.”
“The smell is already different.”
Ruan stepped forward and pointed to two sickbeds in the middle.
“Over there, the fever has to be seen before the wound, and this side smells of ruptured intestines.
If you leave them together, both will go bad.”
Helmad closed his mouth for a moment.
In that time, another groan rose from the back.
A young soldier was trembling as he clutched his blanket.
On the bed beside him hung a soaked cloak stamped with a noble crest.
Without asking further, Ruan went that way.
“Bring boiled water.
Not two blankets. Just one.
He’ll suffocate.”
An orderly began to move by instinct, then glanced at Helmad.
With a displeased look, Helmad gestured with his hand.
“Do it.”
With that single brief permission, the air changed.
People began to watch the hands of the youngest military surgeon they had never seen before faster than those of the deputy of the headquarters medical bureau.
Ruan disliked those gazes, but right now he had no room to push them away.
The first patient was trembling more from fear than from fever.
The battle had not even begun yet; he was a soldier crushed during the preparations for the major offensive.
Ruan felt the pulse at his wrist, checked the color inside his lips, had his wet boots removed, and spoke quietly.
“You won’t die.
But if you pretend to endure it now, you’ll collapse tonight.”
The soldier’s eyes wavered.
“Truly?”
“Truly.
So lie down now, drink water, and lower the fever first.”
An attendant from the neighboring bed spoke as if sneering.
“Must you look at something like that first right now?
Our young lord’s arm is broken.”
Ruan did not even turn his head.
“His fingers still have color.
If this one’s fever rises any higher before dawn, it will reach his lungs.”
“What would you know?”
Karen moved one step.
Though she did not draw her sword, the atmosphere changed instantly.
Ruan spoke first.
“Karen.”
It was low, but clearly a restraint.
Karen stopped with her teeth clenched.
Only then did Ruan go to the neighboring bed.
The boy called a young noble lord was sweating coldly with the bone of his arm displaced.
It was a matter not of whether he would live or die, but of how much it hurt.
“This side is more urgent right now.”
The attendant’s face flushed.
“Have you forgotten whose side you are on?”
“That man won’t last the night. So right now, before asking whose side I am on, it is right to take the patient’s side first.”
The words fell with excessive clarity.
Two orderlies nearby inhaled at the same time.
Helmad also lifted his head slightly.
At that moment, hurried footsteps came in from outside.
Three stretchers were pushed in at once.
The first two were ordinary soldiers.
On the last one, blood had dried in thick patches over armor bearing a knight’s emblem.
“Collision at the northern training ground!”
The evacuation soldier shouted.
“A horse went down. One crush injury, two with broken ribs, one with his head split open!”
Before the words were even finished, Ruan was already at the front stretcher.
Karen stepped aside by the door to open the way.
This time, Helmad did not stop him.
“This one. Don’t cut off the leg first.
The pulse is alive.
Tie off the blood first.”
“What about that knight?”
“Breathing first.”
Ruan put his ear to the chest of the knight on the last stretcher, then immediately turned his head.
“That man has two ribs driven inward.
You can see who is most urgent.”
Three orderlies flustered.
Only then did Helmad raise his voice.
“Move as that military surgeon says!”
Once that one sentence fell, a flow formed.
Hands that had been stopped returned to their places.
Someone took up boiled cloth, someone wiped blood, and someone ran to find a record board.
Ruan was at the center of it, yet he did not know he was the center.
He merely held on, in order, to those who would die if they were late.
By the time they had barely sorted out one surgery area, Eisen entered.
His face gave no hint of how long he had been watching.
He had not even taken off his rain-wet gloves.
“Have you finished adjusting?”
Ruan looked down at his bloodstained hands and answered briefly.
“Not yet.”
“Good.”
Eisen’s gaze swept first not over the people, but over the assignment chart, the intervals between beds, and the number of orderlies moving.
“It will be faster to interfere before you’ve finished.”
Helmad opened his mouth in a low voice.
“Commander, this junior military surgeon steps forward far too much.”
“Does it look that way?”
Eisen was not surprised in the least.
“To me, it seems I have just seen him not step forward enough.”
Helmad shut his mouth.
Eisen tilted his head slightly toward Ruan.
“There are more people here than in your tent, and more interests as well.
Even so, in the end it is the same.
If you are late, they die. If you hold on, they live.”
As Ruan washed the blood from his hands, he said,
“Even if I hold on, not all of them live.”
“I know.”
“And yet you moved me here?”
“That is why I moved you here.”
Eisen’s words were still hateful in their precision.
“Because here, one pair of your hands affects the flow of the entire corps, not just one tent.”
Ruan disliked those words.
He had raised his hands to look at patients, but it felt as if everything kept returning to lines, flows, and numbers.
“I only look at patients.”
“Yes.
That is why you are useful.”
It was neither praise nor comfort.
Beside him, Karen’s brows furrowed faintly.
Not wanting to hold on to those words any longer, Ruan turned back toward the sickbeds.
But Eisen left one final sentence behind.
“Starting today, you will not be fixed in one place here. Your hands will be the first to go to each place that collapses first.”
Ruan stopped in place.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you will rotate through the places collapsing the most.”
At those words, Helmad, the orderlies, and even Karen raised their eyes.
“If the evacuation line survives wherever you enter, then there is no reason to tie you down to one place. The lifeline is one line, but the places collapsing are never just one.”
Ruan’s fingertips trembled again.
It was not only from exhaustion.
Transfer was protection, and at the same time an order to be dragged to even more places.
“They are all patients.”
“I know.”
“Then every time I leave one side, the other side will be left empty.”
“That is why I will attach an evacuation team and stretchers to you.”
Eisen answered calmly.
“You will not be saving them alone.
If you reach a place, I will make the structure move with you.”
Those words were strangely heavier.
They meant he was not saving them alone,
and yet it felt instead as if he had been embedded in an even larger structure.
As Eisen turned away, the sound of stretcher wheels rose again from inside headquarters.
This time, there were not two, but five.
Cloaks with different crests swayed all at once.
Before any distinction between noble and commoner, infantryman and knight, messenger and archer, the smell of blood mixed together first and came in.
Ruan looked at it, briefly closed his eyes, then opened them.
This was certainly a larger place.
Not because it was safer, but because who was held on to first immediately became someone’s interest.
And now, the fact that he had been moved into the midst of it was clear.
“Boil more water.”
Ruan spoke first.
“Move the fever patients’ area forward, and I’ll rewrite the surgery waiting board.
If we leave it like this, it will be tangled before nightfall.”
Though Helmad wore a displeased expression, he nodded.
Karen moved closer to the door.
The orderlies looked at one another, then began to run.
Ruan walked toward the stretchers.
He was not the only one that had been moved.
The order and standards he had held on to in the tent, even the rules barely made within the smell of blood,
were now being dragged with him into that larger headquarters.
And so, though he was afraid, he could not stop his hands.
If someone had to tie this place’s lines together again,
then at the very least, he had to know which ones would come undone first.