"Let go!"
A thunderous roar struck the inside of the tent.
*Crash!*
A sickbed in the right section heaved, and a disinfectant bucket rolled across the muddy floor, spilling turbid, bloody water.
Sera pressed down on the knight's shoulder in a panic, but she lacked the strength to hold down the thrashing giant on the sickbed alone.
"Out of the way! I said I must go at once!"
He was a knight belonging to the Vanguard of the Assault Squad, Fourth Defensive Line.
The one who had been carried in after his calf was torn long from falling into a trap during the morning reconnaissance was struggling violently, tearing at the bandages wrapped around his leg.
"Please stay still! The sutured area hasn't fully adhered yet!"
It was the moment the knight tried to push Sera away with his rough hand.
Ruan walked up to the knight's sickbed.
In his hand was a bloodstained pair of scissors that had just wiped away another patient's wound.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Ruan's gaze was not on the knight's face but on the bandage wrapped around his thigh.
"The assault commander said we would break through the right passage this afternoon! I, of the vanguard, cannot be absent! Even if one leg is crippled, I can still wield a spear!"
The knight's eyes bulged with bloodshot veins as he half-rose.
"The right passage."
Ruan's gaze paused briefly on the bandage.
"That would be the vanguard position charging into the gorge entrance, I presume."
"So what?"
"You cannot go."
Ruan cut him off, cold and firm.
"Who are you, a mere commoner medic, to stop me when I say I am going! Out of the way!"
Ruan lightly lowered his fatigue-laden eyes, then looked straight into the knight's eyes.
It was a dry gaze devoid of persuasion or emotion.
Instead of answering, he roughly peeled away the half-wrapped bandage from the knight's calf.
"Ugh...!"
A laceration densely stitched with blackish-red thread grotesquely gaped open.
The skin had barely closed, but beneath it, the blood vessels grotesquely swelled with every pulse.
"If you take a step now, the suture line on that calf will not hold and will burst. The muscle has been forcibly reattached, so even a single exertion will tear the inner artery anew."
The knight tried to retort through gritted teeth, but Ruan's lips were faster.
"I am not telling you to abandon your honor. I am telling you the state of your leg. Even if you miraculously reach the front lines, the moment you swing your spear once, blood will gush from your artery."
Ruan absentmindedly tapped the swollen upper part of the blood vessel with the tip of his scissors.
"You will collapse from excessive blood loss within ten minutes, no, five. After that, you cannot be moved. You will not be going to cut down enemy soldiers; you will simply collapse, spilling blood, before you have taken a few steps."
The eyes of the soldiers inside the tent converged on them.
The knight's lips trembled.
"This...! How dare you heap curses upon a knight!"
Karen, standing behind Ruan, silently placed a hand on her sword hilt.
A cold, sunken presence crept across the tent floor and up to the knight's nape.
The knight flinched and pulled his hips back.
"Not a curse, but a medical diagnosis."
Ruan casually tossed the bloodstained scissors into the disinfectant bucket.
"Do not step one foot away from this sickbed until tomorrow morning. I do not wish to waste my surgery time and boiled sutures on a patient's recklessness. That is an order."
It was complete medical control.
The knight, huffing with a face flushed red with anger, nevertheless lay back down on the sickbed.
Karen's glare was fearsome, but the physical warning that his suture line would burst and he would die like a dog within ten minutes weighed heavier.
Ruan gave him no further attention and moved to the next sickbed.
He thought that was the end of it.
By afternoon, the inside of the tent had grown eerily quiet.
Distant cannon fire and dull vibrations traveled through the ground, but here, a bloody peace prevailed.
The knight lay on his sickbed, exhaling an irritated breath, glaring only at the ceiling.
He fiddled with his broken spear shaft, cursing his lot for being unable to go to the battlefield.
And exactly four hours later.
"Stretchers! Make room immediately! Hurry!"
Torn screams pushed through the tent flap from outside.
"Someone with a tourniquet, come quick! His guts are spilling out!"
The quiet tent entrance flapped roughly as blood-soaked soldiers poured in.
Ruan tore off his blood-soaked gloves and quickly ran out to the entrance.
"Clear all three beds in the center. Lay blankets on the floor!"
The situation was horrific.
Men pierced all over like hedgehogs by arrows, men whose breastbones had been completely caved in by blunt weapons, were thrown in like luggage.
Mud and the stench of blood instantly filled the narrow tent.
"What happened! An enemy ambush!"
Karen grabbed the collar of a collapsed scout and demanded.
"Th-the right passage assault squad... was completely ambushed in the narrow forest gorge!"
The scout screamed, coughing up blood.
"The knights' vanguard, including the assault commander, who stood at the front rank, were all crushed by massive boulders falling from the cliff top the moment they entered the gorge! It was hell!"
Karen gripped the collar tighter and pressed.
"Damn it! What was the reconnaissance unit doing! Were there no signs?"
"They were waiting from the start! They left the passage open deliberately to lure us beneath the cliff! After the boulders fell, arrows poured from all directions!"
"What of the rear guard!"
"The infantry somehow formed a shield wall, but the front row of the 1st company was crushed by the rain of arrows and logs from above! The muddy road became a river of blood!"
The sounds inside the tent cut off for a beat.
Even the screams of the newly carried-in men faded for a moment.
Everyone's gaze turned, very slowly, toward the right-side sickbed area.
There sat the knight who, four hours ago, had stormed and thrashed about, veins bulging, insisting on joining the assault squad's mission to open the path.
The knight's face was pale as a sheet of paper.
He blankly stared at the horrific sight of his comrades' corpses—those who were to stand at the vanguard with him—being carried in on stretchers.
Assault squad vanguard.
Had the knight joined as planned that afternoon, he would have been at the very front, crushed beneath the boulders.
It was that very moment when Ruan had blocked him, not arguing about honor or the battlefield, saying his calf would burst and he would die within five minutes.
The knight's body began to shake like an aspen.
The strength left his hands holding his broken spear shaft, and it dropped with a thud.
His gaze turned toward the skinny medic's back, tying off blood vessels between wounds among the stretchers.
The knight's unfocused muttering crept through the quieted tent.
"Th-the talk about wasting surgery time and sutures... it was all an excuse..."
The knight's lips had turned blue.
His pupils lost focus and trembled.
He looked down at the bandages wrapped around his leg.
It was the leg with which, until moments ago, he had been determined to drag himself there.
"If I had gone there... I would have died..."
The knight's throat choked before the words could finish.
The surrounding soldiers all gasped.
Even the wounded who had been clutching their chests forgot their pain for a moment and held their breath.
"Those words earlier... they weren't really just about his leg, were they?"
"Shut your mouth. Don't speak such things carelessly."
"But he survived. That knight survived because he was tied down here."
At those words, the knight jerked his head up.
"No."
The denial came too late.
His voice was steeped more in fear than anger.
"He only looked at my leg. He couldn't have known about an ambush."
But even the speaker himself wore an expression of someone who could not quite believe it to the end.
Beneath his torn calf, the bandage was turning red again.
Because of his thrashing just now, one side of the suture line had opened.
Sera saw it and gritted her teeth.
"Do not move. It will burst again."
"Even if it bursts..."
The knight could not continue.
Had it burst.
Had he truly gone to the battlefield.
His imagination stopped before the image of armor crushed under boulders and blood-stained spear shafts.
Someone brought blood-soaked hands together before their chest, then quickly lowered them.
Another soldier who saw that gesture bit his lips with a horrified face.
The soldiers' gazes converged entirely on one person's back.
No one had yet spoken the words: the medic who had twisted the order of death.
Instead, faces that had swallowed those words multiplied one by one inside the tent.
The surviving knight, sending a gaze almost reverent toward the back of Ruan's head, thrashed about on his sickbed, trying to kneel.
One soldier tried to raise his upper body but froze in place; another held blood-soaked hands before his chest, his lips merely trembling.
Groans remained, but an unfamiliar silence settled over them.
"Tie off the artery first. Sera, bring more gauze! Boiling water, too!"
Ruan's gaze was fixed on the third patient's split abdomen.
He had no leisure to see who was trying to kneel or who was clasping hands behind his back.
A soldier near the entrance with his arm wrapped in bandages silently lowered his gaze.
He sat like a patient, but his eyes were not those of a patient.
He turned over every word just exchanged, rolling them around inside his mouth.
Knight.
Right passage.
Five minutes.
It had been a diagnosis of the leg, but to those who heard it, it lodged like a prophecy.
A moment later, the soldier rose as if to fetch water.
Karen glanced that way, but her view was immediately blocked by new stretchers entering.
"Hold the restraint. Amputating the ankle."
Without looking back, Ruan gripped his scalpel and plunged his hand without hesitation between the blood and torn flesh.
The terrible, rasping sound of sawing through shattered bone scraped sharply through the tent.
A blind silence fell, burying even the screams of the dying.
A drop of cold sweat flowed down Ruan's forehead and fell into the pool of blood.
The soldiers held their breath.
The soldier near the entrance hid his bandaged arm inside his coat.
Ruan could not see that.
The scalpel was already moving to the next ankle.