The main camp on the night before the great offensive was as quiet as if it were holding its breath.
It was not because there were no people.
It was because everyone was deliberately stifling the sounds that were theirs to make.
The sound of armor straps being tightened.
The sound of spear shafts being planted on the ground.
The sound of prayers rolled only inside the mouth.
No one spoke loudly of tomorrow, and that made tomorrow all the clearer.
Inside the medical bureau, the smell of ink came before the smell of blood.
Orte had his record board open, and Sera was tying up bundles of bandages again.
Karen was leaning by the doorway, watching the line outside.
“More perfectly fine bastards are coming in today than patients.”
It was just as Sera said.
The first one to enter was not a wounded soldier, but a young infantryman.
His arms and legs were fine, and only his face was stiff with tension.
“Where are you hurt?”
When Luan asked, the infantryman took a folded sheet of paper from his breast.
“I’m not hurt.
If I don’t come back tomorrow, could you…”
His words trailed off.
It was a will.
Luan immediately pointed toward Orte.
“That goes over there.”
The infantryman nodded, but he could not easily move his feet.
“And.”
“What else?”
“If I come back, could you remember my name?”
Luan’s expression hardened at once.
“Why are you asking that?”
“If I can’t get on a stretcher in the afternoon, I’ll come walking, even if I have to.
If I’m pushed back then, I won’t hold out.”
The words sounded like superstition, but in truth they were a very real fear.
The soldiers had learned as well that arriving late meant dying.
Orte asked in Luan’s stead.
“Name.”
“Evan.”
Luan pulled over another sheet of paper.
“Unit.”
“Fourth Infantry, behind the northern corridor.”
“Do you usually have shortness of breath?”
“I cough a bit every winter.”
Luan wrote that much down.
Name, unit, weak lungs.
Sera saw it and frowned.
“What is that now?”
“The ones who need to be carried in first tomorrow.”
“You’re going to make a list in advance of people who aren’t even hurt?”
“If I don’t write it down, they’ll get mixed in.”
Luan spoke curtly.
“If they get mixed in, it’s late. If it’s late, it’s over.”
Even after Evan left, the line did not end.
Some came to entrust rings, some asked for their family’s names to be written down, and some asked that their comrades be seen before themselves.
One spearman asked for just a strip of bandage to be tied to the strap of his pack.
A middle-aged noncommissioned officer repeatedly asked that a runner younger than himself be seen first.
“Even if I arrive first, please grab that boy first.
His lungs are weak.”
Luan asked back with an irritated look.
“If you both come, I’ll see both of you.”
“Even so, if there’s an order—”
“Then the weaker one goes first.
Not because you asked, but because that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
At those words, the noncommissioned officer actually looked more relieved.
It was because it sounded not like a personal favor, but like a rule.
Another soldier held out a leather cord.
He said it had been passed down from his dead older brother, and asked that even if he were carried in, it not be cut.
“If it gets in the way of stopping the bleeding, I’ll cut it.”
When Luan said it flatly, the soldier stared at him blankly.
“Then I won’t get it back?”
“If you’re alive, you can tie it on again later.”
Only after a long while did the soldier nod.
“I don’t do talismans.”
When Luan said it sharply, the spearman laughed awkwardly.
“I know.
Still, if I go with it tied here, I won’t forget where I’m supposed to come back to.”
In the end, Luan tied on a strip of white cloth for him.
Telling himself over and over that it was not a blessing, but a marker.
Watching the scene, Karen muttered quietly.
“People are starting to use you as a priest.”
“They are not.”
“As a fortune-teller too.”
“That either.”
Luan’s voice grew a little harder.
“I don’t know in advance who will live or die tomorrow. I only see which road is blocked and which breath cools too quickly.”
It was a denial, but the soldiers outside grew even quieter.
Their faces said that someone who claimed not to know could at least put them in a line.
The boy messenger who came in last stood there with his hand soaked in sweat.
“I’ll ask just one thing.”
“Briefly.”
“If I make it here tomorrow, can I live?”
Luan looked at that face for a while.
It was a face terrified, yet unable to run away.
War made faces like that grow up the fastest.
“I don’t know.”
The boy’s eyes wavered at once.
Luan placed one more sentence on top of it.
“But if you make it here, I won’t leave you for later.”
With just those words, the boy’s breathing grew a little less labored.
The two soldiers standing outside the door had heard it too.
After that brief promise, the line grew a little longer.
After that, the questions they asked changed slightly.
“If it’s my left leg, where should I go in?”
“How long does it take from the eastern barricade line to here?”
“Are supplies short?”
Luan answered each one briefly.
If you cannot walk, find a stretcher first.
If you can walk, press down on the bleeding and check whether your breath is still there.
And if you make it here, I’ll write down who arrived at what time.
Orte was used to writing down the last words of people who would die.
But that day, people who had not yet died left their names behind.
“It’s the first time I’ve spent all night writing a list of the living.”
When he said it quietly, Luan answered without stopping his pen.
“Because we can’t miss them before they die.”
“This is more frightening than my record book.”
“I know.”
A ledger where names were written after injuries was familiar.
A ledger where names were written before injuries looked like a record of empty wounds.
Daren was watching the scene from a bed in the back, barely lifting himself up.
His wound, not even three days old, still pulled whenever he drew a deep breath.
“Doctor.”
When Luan turned around, Daren asked in a low voice.
“May I stand tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Even if the line is empty.”
“It will open again if you do.”
Luan cut him off firmly.
“You need to be here tomorrow.”
When it was close to midnight, Sera came over with the inventory board.
“The bandages will hold.
We can manage the boiling water somehow too.
But the stretchers are the problem.”
“How many?”
“Three broken. Two with worn straps. At this rate, when they come in all at once, they won’t make it back.”
Luan placed the register he had written beside the inventory board.
Northern corridor.
Far left flank.
The names that would have to come back from far away were clustered on the same line.
He was not someone who knew battle.
He had no interest in who would win where, or when which spearhead would break.
But even by looking only at this register, one thing was clear.
Some of those who had left their names tonight might not get onto a stretcher tomorrow.
That depended more on distance and the number of wooden frames than on skill or courage.
Luan drew short lines over the register.
The northern corridor was a dot.
The far left flank was a long line.
The places where someone was likely to break down while walking were circled again.
He was looking at the roads, not the names.
Who would fall where, in which ditch a stretcher would get stuck, which line would return the latest.
This was not the arrangement of wills, but the arrangement of evacuation.
And yet the names on the paper kept pressing down with the weight of a casualty list.
The names on the paper were still alive.
Even so, each line already looked weighed down like a record written too late.
By tomorrow, some of them might reach the ledger before they reached a stretcher.
“This won’t do.”
Sera asked.
“What won’t?”
“It’ll become a list of the dead, not a register.”
Karen pushed herself off the doorway and turned her head.
“You’re going to find the commander again?”
Instead of answering, Luan folded the register.
Orte tucked the bundle of wills separately into his breast.
Sera put the stretcher inventory board into his hand.
“Then take this too.
They’ll only understand if you show them the numbers.”
Outside, though the night was already deep, the silhouettes of people had not entirely vanished.
Some had still not folded away the fear of their turn, and some came to check one more time whether the will they had entrusted was really still there.
One of Aizen’s staff officers passed by the tent, then stopped again.
He looked once over the line inside the door and the names on the register, then said in a low voice,
“I will report it to the commander exactly as it is.”
Luan did not even lift his head.
“Report the stretchers first.”
The staff officer paused for a moment, then truly wrote down only those words.
Even after the assembly bugle sounded, a boy soldier came running to the threshold long afterward.
His helmet was too large and covered half his forehead.
With breath rising to his throat, he held out a piece of wood in front of Luan.
“It’s my brother’s name.”
A single line of a name had been carved into the wood in clumsy letters.
“My brother went out first.
I was attached to the rear supplies, but… if he doesn’t come back, he asked that even his name tag be brought together.”
Orte quietly held out his hand.
The boy soldier hesitated for an instant, then finally handed over the piece of wood.
“What if neither of us can come back?”
For a moment, Luan lost his words.
Then he spoke very quietly.
“Then I’ll leave behind who made it how far.”
The boy soldier did not cry.
Instead, he nodded with a strange, upright steadiness.
Luan stopped for a moment in front of the tent flap.
I’ll see you when I come back tomorrow.
Please call my name first.
If I make it here, can I live?
Those words clung to the corners of the register.
He had not been able to answer any of those questions properly.
Instead, he wrote one more line at the very bottom of the register.
Stretchers.
And so, with the register from the previous night tucked against his chest, he moved his feet toward the main camp’s command tent.
Behind him, small voices were still continuing.
One more cord of a will was tied to Orte’s record board.
Sera folded the corner of the stretcher inventory board and pushed it into Luan’s hand.
Luan did not look back in the end.
What he could hold on to now was not comfort, but order.
The ink of that night’s register did not dry until the very end.