"Grimwald, what do you intend to do?"
Journeyman Physician Marcen asked. Watching him ready a syringe needle in the flask in an instant, alarm came first.
"Jake, do you have some illness where you cannot understand a sentence the first time? I said remove the breastplate."
"Who is Jake. My name is Marcen. Now not even one syllable matches!"
Marcen ground his teeth and began detaching the breastplate. He sawed off the lid where the hinge had caught and would not open.
"Aagh, aaagh!"
The patient's agonized scream rang through the dungeon loudly enough to bring it down.
"Whoa, whoa, he must not move! Associate Physician, please help me hold the patient down!"
Marcen gripped the thrashing knight's arms and legs tightly. His instincts screamed that it would be catastrophic if the man touched the bone blade lodged in his own chest.
"Be careful. At that rate you will cut off the patient's arm too."
"There is nothing for it. It is adamantium plate armor. The body of it is too hard to cut."
"Do not touch the bone blade. Unless you want to see a fountain of blood."
Marcen went into assisting, grumbling.
Why am I following this man's orders?
Before he even had time to wonder, Dunker drove the syringe needle into the vein. Watching the handling, rough-seeming yet precise, Marcen sensed without realizing it that he must not interfere.
And then, as though by magic.
The patient, who had been raising absolute hell, gradually lost focus in his eyes and began to go slack.
"No, I do not believe it."
Marcen, unable to accept it, prodded the patient to check his response.
The patient who moments ago had been ready to bolt, unable to bear the pain, no longer responded.
As though he felt no sensation at all.
'How is such a thing possible?'
Even at the Tower of Pharmacy, which produced a variety of medicines, there were almost no potions that reduced pain.
At most they took the edge off a headache or a stomachache. Pain management effective on a patient with a mortal wound.
'Could it truly be...... that there is a medical theory I do not know?'
It was not a poison that kills or knocks out the patient, nor was it sleight of hand with some cure-all like an elixir.
An elixir was a phantom potion that could not be brewed in the first place.
Marcen asked, along with the countless questions rising in his head.
"What did you just inject?"
"A magic drug that makes you forget pain."
Every Physician blinked in astonishment.
Blocking the pain of a trauma patient?
Exactly as Dunker said, it was no different from the realm of magic. In this state, various surgeries that existed only in theory might become possible.
"The sedation has taken. Hey, Jacob. Keep checking his heartbeat. Tell me the moment it drops."
"U-Understood."
Marcen immediately took the patient's pulse.
"Sonic Sight."
Marcen drew a small spell circle and cast the spell. The outline of the circle then pulsed in response to the sound of the patient's artery moving.
"Magic? It is like a sonar detector."
"It is a pulse-measuring spell modified from detection magic. Any Physician can use it; it is fundamental."
"That one actually looks useful."
That magic could assist surgery was the moment Dunker's fixed notion that cutting-edge equipment was essential was broken.
Setting aside the curiosity to ask more, he focused on the patient for now.
"Hey, is there magic that measures blood pressure? MTP...... blood pressure control as well."
"Blood pressure control...... heart pressure can be measured, but control is difficult."
"Never mind. I will have to go by feel."
He took the largest of the flasks prepared by type in his bag.
He fit a needle into the cork. A syringe.
"Do we pull the blade first?"
"No."
At Marcen's question Dunker answered definitively.
"Intercostal muscle penetrated. Complete fracture of the fourth rib. The blade is likely propping the rib up. What happens if we pull it now?"
"Additional bleeding occurs. It must be compressed and staunched immediately."
"Not only that. The broken rib will drop down and compress the lung further."
"Then do you intend to open the chest and remove the right lung? Theoretically it would be possible."
Marcen spoke gravely, cold sweat on his forehead.
"When a thoracotomy or laparotomy is performed, the patient dies without fail. Even if they do not die instantly of pain, every one of them died within days. Do you have a solution?"
Thoracotomy was a surgery in which even the Tower of External Medicine counted success as near miraculous. Marcen's point was accurate.
'In these sanitary conditions all the disinfecting in the world is not enough. Far too vulnerable to outside pathogens.'
Dunker too knew that fact better than anyone.
"What potions do you have?"
"Why do you need potions?"
"Show me."
This was a medical corps dispatched under the Medical Institute's direct authority. They would have plenty of potions at dozens of gold a bottle, which a commoner could never be prescribed.
Marcen asked no further and calmly took out the potion bottles. Liquids of every color lined up.
"Purple is the Erosion Resistance Potion. You know that one well. Green is the Healing Enhancement Potion; it raises natural healing in proportion to mana circuit strength. Blue is the Mana Recovery Potion. Absorption rate about twenty percent. Sky blue is the Underwater Breathing Potion, deep navy is the Poison Resistance Potion, and......"
"Underwater Breathing Potion? What is its principle?"
"Air condensed by magic dissolves out over time. Duration is thirty minutes."
"Hm. You would not know how much oxygen it supplies per minute?"
"Not to that extent......"
Dunker nodded.
"Going by the breathing, the patient's right lung is filled with blood from the pneumothorax. From the degree of heaving, it has not filled completely. Fortunately that means the wound is shallow."
"In that case."
"We drain the blood filling the lung. Removing the blade comes after. If the hole tears further and causes a perforation it would be a catastrophe."
"Drain the blood? You mean that is possible without opening the chest? Surely not with that needle?"
Only then did Marcen understand the purpose of the needle and flask in Dunker's hand. His face went white.
"B-But. The inside of the chest is not even visible, and the ribs are broken. If you were to wrongly pierce a major vessel it would be a disaster......"
"Quiet."
Dunker felt along the lower chest with his hand without hesitation, searching for the sensation.
Marcen, and every Physician there, swallowed hard and focused on that delicate touch.
"Keep the patient from moving. On my signal, administer the Breathing Potion orally."
"U-Understood."
The Physicians held the patient's arms and legs fast.
Dunker made his final micro-adjustments to the needle's angle.
'No tremor.'
Every finger responded smoothly.
In that instant.
'Huh?'
The interior of the chest, which should have been invisible beneath the skin.
The illusion arose that its structure was vividly visible before his eyes.
However rich one's knowledge of the human body, the size and precise position of organs and bones all differ from person to person.
Perhaps the sensation at his fingertips had fused with his experience from his past life.
The bone blade lodged inside the patient, the fractured and displaced rib, the vessels that must not be touched, the location where blood had filled the lung, even the minute tremor from respiration.
'I can see it.'
It rose vividly in his field of vision.
It might be a phantom conjured by imagination.
Perhaps his brain had gone mad from seeing too many emergency patients in his past life.
Dunker was not flustered.
'This is not a phantom.'
The time in his past life spent tending patients in the emergency room, snatching naps without a day off.
It felt like a form of certainty that experience had accumulated and his instincts had achieved.
And he believed in it.
His own hands, his own knowledge.
'Now.'
Precisely. Without hesitation.
He drove the tip of the needle in.
—Sssshk.
"Ooh......"
"No......"
The Physicians let out their breath. Inserted without the slightest error, the needle reached its target exactly without injuring the patient in the least.
Tik. Dunker made a hole in the other end of the flask.
—Trickle, trickle......
Blood began to be drawn out by the pressure differential.
"The breathing is subsiding."
"Potion."
"Pardon? Ah, the potion!"
Journeyman Physician Marcen hurriedly tilted the patient's neck back to secure the airway. He poured the potion in according to the graduation marked on the flask.
"First measured dose administered."
"Are you sure it went into the airway?"
"Fifty-fifty. It cannot be measured precisely. It breaks down into air inside the body, so there is no risk of choking."
With no intubation, this method was the limit. Part of the potion would go down to the stomach.
"......Hoo, hoo."
The potion seemed to take effect at once and the patient's breathing stabilized.
Expensive, and used inefficiently. Some gas in the stomach should not be a problem.
"Hemothorax drainage complete."
Dunker pulled out the syringe. The flask was full of blackened blood.
From here was the real work. The blade lodged in his chest.
"The fourth rib needs traction. You, come here and hold this tight."
"Ah, yes."
"We remove the blade while compressing and staunching. Everyone keep your wits."
The Physicians tensed. Each took his position.
"One, two."
Shk! Dunker pulled the blade out without hesitation, like drawing a sword.
The Physicians compressed the chest and staunched it so the blood could not escape.
The pain must have been severe; the patient shuddered all over.
"Hold on like it is a rope you caught on a cliff. Let go and you are all dead."
Dunker sutured immediately between the towels and bandages the Physicians held to the site.
'F-Fast, as expected.'
'Tremendous concentration in this chaos.'
Before they even had time to marvel.
Tok.
The sound of thread being cut with scissors.
"Suturing complete. Patient vitals, pulse?"
"Six-tenths of normal. No sign of dropping further."
"Good. Stabilize him now, and once the internal bleeding stops administer antibiotics. Keep observing the course."
"Ah, yes."
The Physicians' eyes went round as though they had witnessed high-tier magic.
'Removing pleural fluid from a pneumothorax, a hemothorax at that, with a single needle.'
'If the angle had been off even slightly, his insides would have been painted with blood and he would have died.'
'The suturing was perfect too. No, beyond that.'
Dunker pulled off his gloves and stood up.
"Young Master, I brought the potions!"
Hammer arrived belatedly. She looked around and raised a question.
"Is the surgery already over?"
"You're late, idiot. Did you crawl here?"
"Do not be so hard on me. I was hauling waterskins with the supply unit. Look at this sweat. This is genuinely my sweat. Have a smell."
Dunker recoiled from Hammer as she thrust her head at him.
Someone approached that same Dunker.
It was Journeyman Physician Marcen.
"Doctor Dunker...... sir."
"Journeyman Physician Frank."
"Call me whatever you like. The thing is......"
Marcen hesitated, then set his jaw hard and made a great resolution.
"I apologize. For being stubborn all this while......"
He scratched his head awkwardly.
"Young Master...... Commander. Honestly I could not trust your judgment. I still cannot. If we accept theories of unknown origin without verification, the system collapses."
Marcen spoke calmly.
"But watching from beside you, I understood. That there is no falsehood whatsoever in the Commander's will to save patients. So......"
The Journeyman Physician shrank in on himself as though making a confession.
Dunker snorted and clapped him on the shoulder.
"Hey, thanks to you that patient lived. Journeyman Physician Marcen."
"Ah. My name."
"More to the point, tell me about that thing from before. The spell that measured the heartbeat. What was it called?"
"Ah! Modified detection magic. It is a Tier 1, not very difficult."
"What else have you got?"
Dunker left the spot together with Marcen.
***
At that hour, on the seventh floor of the Swamp of the Abyss.
"......"
Third Princess Schnellia raised her head and looked up.
"Tch."
A cliff split apart like a family separated.
The gap was only barely visible.
"This is not good."
She looked around.
There lay the three vanguard knights who had fallen with her, and the corpse of an enormous golem.
"What is Ersin's condition?"
"......She has lost consciousness. Her breathing is weak. At this rate."
The two knights looked at the one who lay bleeding from the head and shook their heads.
"......Haah."
Hundreds of meters below, in the gap of a cliff.
Schnellia bit down on her lip.
It was time to remove the blade.