KEG 8
“I’m like this now, but back when I was at my peak…!”
“Is there anyone here who hasn’t been out there?”
The Espers in the hospice ward spent their free time boasting about their once-glorious pasts.
Unlike a typical hospice ward, the age range was relatively young, mostly in their 20s to 40s, so I didn’t expect to hear “back in my day” type of talk. However, it seemed it was hard to hold back, given the sheer number of people with such flashy resumes.
“I’m telling you, if it weren’t for me, that famous bakery in Daejeon wouldn’t even have been left!”
“Oh, miss, are you the one who raided the Strawberry Siru Gate?”
“That’s right! It’s me! That bakery gets 30,000 visitors a day! If it weren’t for me, all those people would have gone home in tears!”
With eyes sparkling with a hint of madness, she seemed delighted as she explained how the strawberry tarts, strawberry cream bread, strawberry cakes, and the like from the famous Daejeon bakery she had protected were distributed nationwide.
“Even though I look like this now…! My nickname in the military was the Ice Empress… Cough, cough, ugh.”
“Hey, she’s throwing up! Bring a bag!”
As I, who had been getting a drink from the vending machine next to me, took a clean bucket from the trolley, she, who had fallen to the floor from her wheelchair, crawled toward me.
“Ugh… Ugh…!”
She vomited up bright red blood and lumps.
She, who was once called the Ice Empress and had even appeared in internet articles a few times, was said to have suffered a fatal wound from a highly venomous monster, causing her to slowly melt away from the inside.
“Haa, please call a doctor… Cough, ugh,”
With those words, her eyes rolled and she suffered a full-body seizure. I immediately pulled out the talkie-walkie from my waist and called for a doctor.
“Black Panther One… reporting. 2:30 PM, emergency patient in the lounge at the end of the hallway. Convulsing while vomiting blood. Calling medical staff required. Over.”
I laid her on her side to prevent blood from entering her airway, then wiped up the liquids scattered on the floor with a dark-colored towel.
“Miss! Please…!”
As I laid the patient down, the other patients who had been chatting approached and began shaking her body. I pushed them away with my hand and gave them a warning.
“I will handle this. Please try not to get too worked up for the patient’s sake.”
If the person I was talking to had been a soldier, I would have slapped them or shaken them to snap them out of it, but I could not take such aggressive action against patients who were already as weak as they could be. Just as I had learned in this ward, I spoke in a calm tone.
“She will be fine. I have called the medical staff.”
I stroked her back as she trembled all over like someone with chills. And I adjusted the angle of her head to make it a little easier for her to vomit.
“I-I’m scared… I’m scared. I can’t see…!”
Esper patients were usually hospitalized after sustaining injuries in battles with monsters. Consequently, many of them suffered from PTSD.
They often relived their combat experiences and said they were “scared.”
They do not attach significance to the fact that it is a memory of the past. The fear was always present, tearing them down from the inside out with overwhelming vigilance.
Often, to escape the pain, they experienced dissociative phenomena and were transferred to a closed ward.
“Is anyone… anyone there? Please, someone help me…!”
Although she had her eyes open, she gasped for breath and flailed around, claiming she couldn’t see, as if she were hallucinating.
Lacking proper medical knowledge, I couldn’t do anything more than this until the medical staff arrived. I simply held her hand as I had been taught and spoke in a low, calm voice.
“I am here.”
***
“You’re dripping with the military vibe.”
Today, as usual, I was completely absorbed in wiping the windows until they squeaked clean, but I turned my head at the sound of someone sneering.
“Which division were you in?”
Judging by the way he asked so confidently and treated me with condescension, I sensed he held a fairly important position in the military, which made me reluctant to speak. It wasn’t even a division, and since I belonged to an obscure special forces unit created under the name of ‘Guide Infantry’ but never officially given a proper public name, I had nothing to say. I wondered if he would recognize it if I called it the Recycling Waste Disposal Unit.
“I was a company commander in the 7th Division. How can you still act like a soldier in civilian life?”
“…I apologize.”
My hair had grown long now, long enough to cover the nape of my neck and be tied back, and my bangs were long enough to part, yet I couldn’t for the life of him sense a soldier vibe. I was confused, but since I didn’t want to fight, I simply apologized.
“What was your rank? You look like a Sergeant.”
He must have been bored, as he followed me around while dragging his IV bag along, and kept trying to strike up a conversation. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand, as here, all they had was time and all they possessed was the past; however, since I was on duty, it wasn’t really appropriate for me to engage with him. Not that I would have been the type to deal with him even after my shift ended, though.
“Change your bag! Change your bag! It’s annoying to see you running around with those dog tags1 jingling like little kids’ dolls accessories!”
He likely picked a fight after seeing the many dog tags hanging from the olive green bag I usually carried.
“Did you bully your subordinates to take them? You’re such a nasty bastard.”
“I found them.”
They were the dog tags of fallen soldiers from the Guide Infantry unit who had no family or nowhere to go. I started picking them up one by one as they were about to be returned to the personnel office and disposed of, and I had amassed so many that they made a loud noise with every step I took.
“Have you ever been deployed on a gate raid?”
“No.”
Since I wasn’t a guide for the gate entry team, I never participated directly in a gate raid; I was deployed after the raid was over and only collected the corpses, whether human or monster. I never had the opportunity to participate in a raid, nor did I particularly want to. If the Espers were excavators, I was a trowel. Excavators have their own work, and trowels have their own work.
“Hahaha! Then what, you don’t know anything?! And yet you act like a soldier~!!”
His body shook as he burst into laughter. He was missing his left arm, had a large scar on his face, and wore an eyepatch over one eye. After being attacked by a curse-type monster, he was extremely afraid of dark places, and with his heart’s mana circuits damaged, he was in a precarious situation, like a candle in a storm, where it wouldn’t be surprising if he suffered cardiac arrest at any moment.
“Hey! Fuck! Do people like you get a pension too? Huh? Hehehe.”
He said that after completing the application for organ donation and the drafting of an advance funeral intent, he was waiting to write his will. He had a wife and two sons, and before his awakening and conscription, he taught music at a school and had published four volumes of poetry.
“What a waste of taxes, you bastard! Why are you even alive?”
Fortunately, he was discharged with his life intact, but his injuries were so severe that he intermittently emitted dangerous levels of contaminated energy. He could only see his family through video calls and wait here for the day he would die.
“I have to live. That is what I was born for.”
I had never harbored grand questions about life. I lived because I was alive, and I didn’t die because I didn’t want to.
Squeak, squeak–
Even while conversing, I moved my body diligently to wipe the windows until they were clear and clean. No one had touched the windows to leave fingerprints or smear anything on them, yet they became dirty with rainwater and dust simply by being there. Time and the environment simply made them hazy without any malice.
“Hey….”
“Sir~ the lawyer is here~”
Just as he was about to say something, a social worker from behind informed him that the notary public had arrived to draft his will. He left with light steps to write the will, and I pushed my trolley to move on to the next area to clean.
“Sob, sob.”
“Oh dear… What if the patients see this…?”
As I moved on, I stopped briefly when I heard a sound coming from the office where the nurses were gathered.
“The work is too hard… I can’t do it….”
A new nurse, who had just joined, was shedding tears with a face that looked like a swollen dumpling, clutching a wad of tissues in her hand. Judging by how soaked the protective mask under her chin was, she must have been crying for quite some time.
“It’s because you haven’t slept enough. You said you haven’t slept for many hours, right?”
“Can’t they… hire a few more people? It’s so… hard…”
“They said they’d increase the support. We just have to trust them and wait.”
A woefully understaffed ward. A department to be avoided, with no applicants even when job postings are put out. The irritation, sensitivity, complaining, and outrageous behavior of people pushed to their mental limits. Patients lined up to come here, but no one wanted to work.
“Look at my wrist. I’ve been lifting and putting down patients so much that I can’t even handle things properly…”
Thud! Splat–
The plastic takeout cup from a franchise cafe that the nurse was trying to grab fell to the floor.
“Ahh!”
“Oh ~ I told you it looked dangerous~”
Startled, the nurse swept the floor with wads of tissues she had been using to wipe her tears and wiped up the spilled drinks.
“I’ll do it.”
Isn’t this exactly why I was hired? I naturally entered the office, disposed of the cup in the trash, and wiped the floor with a mop. After thoroughly sorting through the scattered torn pieces of tissue paper, I handed the cotton handkerchiefs used for babies to the nurse.
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