Three days later was the day the flank line finally held.
That hand was trembling.
On the inside of the shield, sword cuts that had not yet dried remained. Those who returned traced those marks with their fingertips and still could not smile.
A soldier who had taken up his spearpoint again stared down at his own hand for a long time. Because he knew the hand that had survived was soon to be a hand that had to fight again.
The main camp could not loudly proclaim that victory.
Too much blood had been spent, and they had been pushed too close to the edge.
Even so, people wanted to cling to at least one reason they had survived.
And so the name of one returned spearpoint rose to their lips all too quickly.
Around noon, a soldier came limping down the plank road in front of the main camp.
Fresh bandages were wrapped around his left side, and he still could not even hold his spear shaft fully upright.
Ruan recognized his face at once.
Deren.
He was the spearman whose belly had been opened before that noble knight not long ago.
He was supposed to still be in the recovery ward.
And yet a strange heat remained on his face.
It was the look in the eyes of a survivor forcing himself to move.
“Why did you get up?”
When Ruan asked him directly, Deren stood there, half-stiff.
“The flank was open.”
“And?”
“They needed three more spears.”
“So you went with that body?”
Though Ruan’s voice lowered, Deren instead lifted his head.
“I thought I could hold.”
“You did not ‘think you could hold.’ You nearly died.”
Even as he was being scolded, Deren had something like a strange relief at the corners of his mouth.
That expression irritated Ruan even more.
“Will you lie down right now, or shall I tie your hands and feet for real this time and make you lie down? Standing up again in that condition is not something to be proud of. It is reckless.”
Only then did Deren take one step back,
but he stopped again at the shout that came from behind him.
The soldiers who had returned with him from the flank line were crowding into the main camp’s yard.
Some had lost their shields, some had shattered helmets, and some were smiling even as they limped.
That smile was closer to survival than victory.
One of them saw Deren and shouted.
“He’s alive!”
Another immediately grabbed Deren by the shoulder.
“If the spot where you planted your spear hadn’t held, the flank would have broken today!”
Ruan hated hearing that even more.
In front of him, Deren was still a patient who needed to be laid down before his fever rose again,
but in their mouths, he had already become a hero who had returned alive and filled the gap.
Helmad muttered under his breath.
“Now even guys like that are showing up.”
“They were always there.”
Ruan replied dryly.
“I just didn’t know.”
A short while later, the battle report began on Aijen’s side.
On one side of the main camp’s yard, officers, adjutants, evacuation teams, and soldiers who had come back alive stood mixed together.
It was not a formal commendation.
It was merely a place to confirm who had held where in this battle.
Ruan had no intention of going to such a gathering.
He needed to lay Deren down again, take his temperature, change his bandages, press his wrist, and then see to other patients.
But Deren pulled himself out of Ruan’s hands and said,
“Just a moment.”
“No.”
“Just one word.”
“You will collapse while saying that one word.”
“Even so, I have to.”
His tone was so stubborn that Ruan stopped for a moment.
Karen said nothing beside him, but she followed Deren’s gaze once.
At the end of that gaze were the main camp’s yard, countless soldiers, and Aijen standing at the front.
In the end, Deren half-ignored Ruan’s attempt to stop him and walked forward.
His steps were limping.
Cold sweat broke out on Ruan at the thought that blood might start spreading beneath the bandages again.
“Deren!”
He did not stop even when called.
One by one, the gazes of the people in the yard gathered toward him.
Aijen also cut himself off mid-sentence and looked at Deren.
After gasping for breath a few times, Deren swept his gaze around and opened his mouth.
“The reason the flank didn’t collapse is because of that man.”
His voice cracked from the very first words. Ruan cut him off at once.
“Shut your mouth.”
“No. If that hand hadn’t gone to me that day, I would have ended on a stretcher.”
In an instant, the front of the main camp went completely quiet.
That single line of words passed through the hundreds of people like a blade.
Ruan truly felt his face go white.
Those were words that absolutely must not come out.
At least not in a place resembling an official gathering like this.
“Deren.”
The moment Ruan tried to step forward, Deren’s words fell first into the yard.
From the back, one soldier murmured almost like a breath.
“They say if it’s that military surgeon, even men who should die come back.”
At first, the words were so quiet that their source was not even clear.
But the air in the main camp’s yard picked up such words quickly.
Someone immediately asked the person beside him to repeat it,
and someone else’s face turned as if a rumor he had known for a long time had just been confirmed.
Aijen did not raise a hand while that change was taking place.
One staff officer tried to open his mouth, then stopped after glancing at him.
When the person who could stop it remained silent, the low murmuring in the yard became clearer.
Ruan felt strength enter the hand gripping Deren’s arm.
Because that one line of words would no longer be fully snuffed out by anyone’s hand.
In the end, he went to Deren’s side himself and grabbed his arm.
“Shut your mouth.”
Deren lowered his eyes like a soldier being scolded,
but that strange gratitude still remained on his face.
“It’s the truth.”
“It is not the truth.”
“No, military surgeon.”
Deren spoke almost in a whisper.
“If your hand hadn’t gone to me that day, I would already be—”
“Enough.”
For the first time, Ruan’s voice cracked slightly.
“You came back alive because you held on, not because of my hands.”
Deren did not lower his head to the end.
“I think it was both.”
At that, Ruan had nothing more to say.
Because no matter how he refuted it, to that man, it was sincere.
The expressions of the soldiers around them had already changed as well.
Some were frightened,
some had tears in their eyes,
and some were clutching their caps as if they truly stood before a god.
Karen pressed her lips together as she watched the scene.
She did not like that title.
She looked like someone who sensed faster than anyone how dangerous it was to bind Ruan with such a name.
And yet, at the same time, she also understood why those words had come out.
With her lips pressed shut, Karen looked back and forth between Ruan and the soldiers.
Aijen belatedly took a step forward.
“Anyone whose wound has opened, inside.”
With those words alone, outward order returned.
The soldiers scattered, and Deren, in the end, was dragged back inside by Ruan’s hand.
But it was already too late.
The air left in every corner of the yard was completely different from before.
Helmad clicked his tongue as he looked over Deren’s wound again.
“Crazy bastard.”
Even as he was scolded, Deren’s face was strangely at ease.
“I’m sorry.”
“If you’re sorry, lie down.”
Ruan cut him off coldly.
“If this opens again, this time I’ll grab you by the collar before your spear.”
Only then did Deren smile a little.
That smile was a relief that made Ruan even more exhausted.
Much later, after the patients had been sorted out, Aijen called Ruan separately.
It was at the edge of an empty tent behind the main camp, one without even a war map.
“You don’t want to hear it.”
Those were his first words.
“No.”
Ruan answered with a candor born of exhaustion.
“But now you can’t erase those words.”
“They have to be erased.”
“How?”
Ruan could not answer right away.
If there had been a way, he would have done it already.
He could not stop the mouths of those who had survived, and he could not erase with a single document a name mixed with gratitude, fear, and survival.
“I don’t know.”
“Right.”
Aijen did not look disappointed in the slightest.
“That is why it is more dangerous, and why it is more useful.”
Ruan immediately lifted his eyes at those words.
“Do not speak of a person that way.”
“I am speaking of faith.”
Aijen replied quietly.
“It means the soldiers have gained a reason to endure.”
“It is a false reason.”
“In war, even false reasons are necessary.”
Ruan clenched and unclenched his fist.
There were many things he wanted to say in rebuttal, but in front of a single patient, all of them felt useless.
That made him even angrier.
In the end, Aijen left him with one more sentence.
“I know you hate it.
Even so, it is true that the flank held today.”
He set those words down before Ruan exactly as they were.
It was a commander’s kind of cruelty.
When he returned to the medical bureau that night, the soldiers’ gazes lingered on him longer than before.
Ruan deliberately did not lift his head.
He looked only at wounds, fevers, and bandages.
That way, he could hear a little less of it.
And yet the words that had burst out during the day remained in his ears.
They say even men who should die come back.
They were words that had not yet been given a name.
That made them all the more ominous.
From the moment they had once risen to the lips of the people in the main camp,
the rumor began to spread quickly between the tents.
Ruan pressed the tip of the next patient’s finger, regardless of any such name.
It was to check whether it had the color of life.
Outside, even that simple act of checking was now being called something else.
That night, Orte wrote a single line at the very bottom of the record board, then stopped his hand.
In the end, he could not completely erase that line.
Because too many ears had already heard those words.
Behind the medical bureau, Sera heard two soldiers bring up those words again and swallowed a small curse.
“That isn’t a name that will roll toward anything good.”
Ruan did not answer.
The rumor was already circulating somewhere beyond the reach of Ruan’s hands.
That day, Karen looked outside the door for an unusually long time.
As if she were someone who would immediately step in if anyone brought up those words again.
But she knew as well.
It was not a rumor that could be cut down with a blade.
Before closing the record board, Orte looked toward Ruan one last time.
His eyes held more worry than surprise.
He pressed the edge of the record board with his fingertips.
Because the report format to be submitted to the Church suddenly came to mind.
Ruan alone, unaware of that gaze, picked up the next bandage.
Sera shut the medicine bottle’s lid hard.
Inside the closed bottle, the sound of glass striking glass was unusually sharp.