Aizen called Ruan back to the command tent while the sun was still high.
The main camp’s medical bureau was just catching its breath after lunch.
The stretchers were briefly empty, and the boiling water had begun to simmer again.
Because he had been summoned in that brief lull, Ruan liked it even less.
It was not a matter concerning a patient.
Inside the tent, the situation board had been spread out wider than usual.
The northern corridor.
The eastern barricade line.
The western marsh.
Small flags and black ink lines overlapped at each position.
Aizen stood before it, his gloves still on the backs of his hands.
“Don’t sit. This won’t take long.”
Ruan had intended to stand from the beginning.
“What is it?”
Aizen held out three documents.
The first listed evacuation delays.
The second, the spread of fever patients.
The third, the number of men returned to duty after deployment.
Ruan frowned after reading only the first line.
Numbers.
Rows without names.
“These are the things that changed after you put your hands on them.”
“It wasn’t me. The medical bureau changed.”
“And who shook it into changing?”
Ruan did not answer.
That question was always uncomfortable.
When he held on to a single wound with his own hands, he had no sense that he was shaking an entire corps.
And yet people outside kept transcribing that hand into grander words.
Aizen pointed to the northern corridor.
“Here, many died because the stretchers were late.”
His finger moved to the eastern barricade line.
“Here, fever spread.”
Finally, the western marsh.
“Here, things will be shaken the hardest within three days.”
Ruan looked between the three places before finally asking.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because that is where you will go.”
Ruan’s expression immediately hardened.
“The medical bureau is here.”
“For now.”
Aizen cut him off with that single phrase.
“From now on, you will move to the front that brings in the most wounded.”
For a moment, Ruan could not say anything.
Because the meaning was too clear: a person was being redirected like an object to wherever he was needed most.
“I can’t.”
“Reason.”
“Patients will be left behind.”
“They’re left behind everywhere.”
“That is exactly why we cannot empty one place.”
Aizen was not surprised.
His face said he had already calculated even that resistance.
“We are not emptying only one place even now.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you stay fixed in one place, that place lives.”
Aizen’s voice was level.
“In exchange, three others live less.”
Those words made Ruan even more uncomfortable.
Because the words saving people and living less had attached themselves so easily in the same mouth.
“I can’t look at it that way.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you keep—”
“That’s why I look at it. You hold on to wounds, and I calculate which lines remain unbroken afterward.”
Aizen answered calmly.
“You hold on to the one person in front of you. I will see which lines do not break after you reach them.”
That division was cruelly precise.
Ruan could not open his mouth for a while.
Because it meant that, even if he denied it, the calculations outside him would not stop.
“I am a military physician.”
“I know.”
“I’m not a corps banner.”
“I have no intention of making you a banner.”
Aizen pushed the small wooden markers set beneath the situation board with his finger.
Two stretchers.
One cart of boiled water.
Two boxes of bandages.
One records soldier.
Four assistants.
Two evacuation squads.
“A mobile medical unit. Not just your hands, but the order and standards you established will be carried with it.”
Only then did Ruan look at the wooden markers again.
“You’re creating this anew?”
“It’s already being assembled. There was resistance, but it wasn’t more urgent than the stretchers.”
“So you’re not sending me alone.”
“If I sent only your hands, they’d break down quickly.”
Aizen said it so casually.
That made it seem all the more true.
“When you move, these standards move with you. Fever patient divisions. Evacuation order. Surgical waiting boards. Even stretcher retrieval lines.”
Ruan swallowed a breath.
It was protection, and also control.
It meant they intended to embed not just him, but his entire method, into the corps’ system.
“It sounds like you’re saying you’ll use a person.”
“That’s right.”
Aizen did not deny it.
“But I don’t intend to use you until you’re worn away.”
It did not sound like comfort.
Even so, his face did not look as if he was lying.
Aizen held out one more document.
This time, it was not numbers, but words that had come from the soldiers’ mouths.
The front where Ruan Hesse goes survives.
The evacuation line he attaches himself to does not break.
Even a tent where fever spreads quiets down once he enters.
The moment Ruan saw the paper, he frowned.
“You record even things like this?”
“If I don’t, others will write them down first.”
“What does that—”
“The nobles will try to bind you to their knight orders. The church will read you as a ghost story. Before that happens, I will bind it in military documents.”
“A person?”
“A phenomenon.”
Aizen cut him off firmly.
“Whether you hate it or not, the soldiers are already moving according to those words. Then the corps must structure itself accordingly.”
Ruan curled his fingers into his palm.
For no reason, he thought again of what Karen had said about being cheap.
He always pushed his own life to the back, and Aizen was trying to drag that hand he had pushed back into even more places.
“What if I refuse?”
“It will be carried out anyway.”
Once again, there was no choice.
Ruan almost gave a short laugh, but stopped.
He did not even have the strength for that.
“When does it begin?”
“Before the first large-scale clash.”
“We aren’t ready.”
“That is why I am making you prepare now.”
Aizen pointed to the situation board again.
“You will be sent first to the places that are unprepared.”
When those words fell, Ruan remembered the smell from the day he had first entered the main camp.
The mingled smell of blood.
The blocked flow.
The people who had arrived too late.
It meant he would now meet such places again, in several locations.
“What about Bern?”
“He will take charge of one base. He is not someone who will follow you around.”
“And Sera?”
“She’ll handle the flow of supplies. If necessary, I’ll attach her to you in rotation.”
“Orte?”
“He’ll be used to divide the mobile records and the records that remain.”
Aizen’s tone stayed on the side of calculation to the end.
That was why it was all the clearer.
When he came out of the tent, Karen immediately lifted her head.
“What happened?”
Ruan only looked down at the papers in his hand.
“It seems I won’t be able to stay in one place anymore.”
Karen was not surprised.
Like someone who had already known it would happen, she only let out a short breath.
“Where first?”
“Wherever is collapsing the most.”
“I’m going with you.”
“I know even if you don’t say it.”
Karen did not ask anything more at that answer.
Instead, she held out her hand and took one of the papers.
Her eyes sank coldly as she scanned the deployment route.
“This won’t be enough with just an escort.”
“They say an evacuation squad will be attached too.”
“You’ll need more.”
Ruan did not answer.
It was already the same kind of thing he had heard inside the tent.
Protection always called for more mechanisms and narrower paths.
From the afternoon onward, the inside of the medical bureau truly began to move.
Sera repacked the medicine boxes by type.
Herbs to be boiled.
Herbs to bring down fever.
Cloth for stopping blood.
She separated what needed to be taken out first on the move from what could be opened later.
Bern pressed down directly on the legs of a folding operating table and swallowed a low curse.
“If we carry this thing around, it’ll bend before the second use.”
“Then have it changed.”
“Now you’re saying things like that too, are you?”
Bern grumbled, but immediately went off to find sturdier legs.
Helmad studied the new deployment chart with a displeased face, but in the end began giving orders one by one.
“The fever patient section goes behind the mobile unit. Let the wind through first.”
“Where do the contaminated cloths go?”
“Opposite the boiling cart.”
Only after saying it did he frown at himself.
“Just listening to me, you’d think you were my adjutant.”
Ruan shook his head.
“I have no intention of that.”
“I know.”
Helmad folded the paper as he replied.
“Still, if your standards make fewer people die, then for now, we follow them.”
The acknowledgment was not smooth.
That made it feel all the more real.
Orte divided the records into two books.
One for storage at the main camp.
One for records kept while moving.
“Why divide them to this extent?” Ruan asked, and Orte answered quietly.
“Because the deaths that remain and the deaths that follow are different.”
Those words lingered strangely long.
It meant that, wherever he went, the names would have to be carried along and written down as well.
The corps moved its structure, Aizen moved efficiency, and his own hands still only held on to one person at a time.
Only then did that fact begin to feel a little real.
By the time the sun began to tilt, word had spread among the soldiers as well.
“They say the military physician is moving with them this time.”
“I heard the front where Ruan Hesse goes survives.”
“They say the commander is assigning him directly.”
“Then if he comes to our side, can we hold out?”
Some were relieved, and some hoped that name would come to their side.
Before the military authorities had even written it all down in official documents, the soldiers’ mouths were spreading it like an institution.
Each time Ruan heard those words, he grew even more tired.
And yet his hands were still pulling directly at the straps of the new stretchers to see whether they were loose.
Tie them once.
Pull again.
Check again.
Because the strap that could be adjusted right in his hands was more trustworthy than the lines on a map.
Just then, Sera held out a small envelope.
“It came from the main camp mail.”
It was familiar handwriting.
Meli.
Ruan only stared at it for a long while, unable to open it.
The more roads there were for him to move along, the sooner he thought of the distant home.
Should he write that he was fine?
That he had become busier?
Or would he be unable to say anything at all and only fold the paper shut?
Karen asked quietly beside him.
“Aren’t you going to read it?”
Ruan slipped the envelope into the inside of his sleeve.
“In a little while.”
Sera heard that and laughed like a sigh.
“If that little while gets long, you’ll read it at dawn again.”
Ruan could not deny it.
It was always like that.
The most human words were always pushed to the very end.
The medical bureau fixed in the main camp was coming to an end.
Now, wherever Ruan went, the order and standards of the tents would move with him.
Even knowing that it might save more people, one corner of Ruan’s heart remained strangely heavy.
Because no matter where he moved, the fact that there would be faces he had to lose first would not change.
The mobile deployment did not end as mere words.
At dawn the next day, Aizen had them set up a temporary operating table once in the open ground behind the northern barricade line, as if it were a real test.
It was not a full battle, but it was practice for moving the evacuation squad, stretchers, boiled water barrels, and medicine boxes all together.
Ruan’s expression worsened as he watched the scene.
“Are you truly going to do this?”
“Words alone are too slow.”
Sera muttered as she dragged a supply box.
“Now we’re even practicing.”
Ruan looked over the position of the temporary operating table once, then immediately corrected it.
“Not here. The wind comes straight through. The blood will cool too quickly.”
“Then?”
“Behind the cart. But put the contaminated area on the opposite side.”
Hearing that, Karen immediately changed the position of the stakes.
Two evacuation soldiers retied the straps along the newly moved stretcher line.
One staff officer watched it and said quietly.
“They really are moving the tent.”
Aizen did not look away.
“It is not the tent we’re moving, but the evacuation line.”
That expression struck Ruan’s ears far too clearly.
By the time the training ended, several soldiers from the northern barricade line were standing at a distance, watching the scene.
“So that’s what it means for that military physician to move?”
“Then this time, our side will be carried in first.”
Their voices were mixed with relief and expectation.
Whenever Ruan saw such faces, he grew strangely more tired.