Chapter 46
The first thing that caught his eye was a pure white doctor’s coat.
Dried dark-red blood was splattered everywhere, and the scalpel in the breast pocket glinted in the light. The sharp smell of disinfectant and the heavy stench of blood began to fill the hallway with his arrival.
‘Is that a doctor?’
Ash-gray skin. The only thing on its face was a mouth crammed full of teeth. There were no eyes, nose, or ears to be found, and blood dripped from its torn lips.
The silver name tag on its chest bore not a name but the title ‘Surgeon.’ He’d guessed as much from the scalpel, but it seemed this thing really was in charge of surgery.
Whether it had shown up because a patient had appeared, or because it was simply passing through this hallway, didn’t matter right now. Ian stared down the doctor, his finger hooked on the revolver’s trigger, ready to fire at once if necessary.
“Hmm.”
The doctor studied him for a moment, then turned its head toward Cecilia, who had fainted against the wall.
“Permanent bodily damage from the explosion. And burns. This is serious. I’ll need to perform surgery immediately.”
“…….”
“Are you this patient’s guardian?”
The doctor asked Ian. Ian painstakingly chose among dozens of things he could say in this situation before finally opening his mouth.
“……Yes. And I have no intention of consenting to this child’s surgery.”
“Hm? If you leave her like this, she’ll die. Looking at her now, she even has a brain hemorrhage—are you trying to kill the patient?”
“She won’t die. I’ll treat her myself, so you don’t need to worry about it, Doctor.”
“How absurd. Nurse.”
The surgeon gave a dry laugh and called for a nurse. With a zzzing sound, the emergency room door opened, and a nurse whose whole body was rotting crawled out. The doctor looked down at her and nodded with its chin.
“Give that guardian the consent form, and get the patient onto the operating table right now.”
“Y-yes…….”
The nurse answered in a slurred voice and shambled toward Ian. Ian stopped hesitating and cocked the revolver’s hammer with his thumb.
What would happen if he fired here.
It certainly wouldn’t end well, but it was still far better than losing Cecilia here.
This wasn’t because of some flimsy sense of attachment.
From what he’d seen so far, this godforsaken hospital couldn’t be explored alone. Doing so would be a pointless death. At the emergency exits, burning patients ran around, grotesque nurses had blood and chunks of flesh plastered around their mouths, and the doctors were obsessed with surgery.
Exploring a place like this alone while searching for an escape route was no different from suicide. One wrong step and he’d be beheaded on the spot, or forcibly admitted and made to live out the rest of his life as a patient.
At the very least, he desperately needed someone who could die in his place. So he couldn’t afford to lose Cecilia when they’d only just entered the hospital. If someone had to die, it should be in a much more dramatic place than this.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. It was the biggest one, but he also felt an obligation to repay the help she’d given him.
No matter that he’d become a mage, or that he valued his own life above all else, he still felt a little indebted to Cecilia for throwing her body in front of the explosion. For now, repaying that came first.
So he intended to do his best.
“Hoo…….”
He exhaled through a throat that felt like it was burning with searing pain.
“P-patient. Please wait here for a moment…….”
He coldly watched the nurse drawing nearer and aimed at its head.
And then he pulled the trigger—
“Ugh.”
“……!”
Just as he was about to pull the trigger, Cecilia’s voice came from behind him. Ian immediately stepped back and moved toward Cecilia.
“Sister, are you all right?”
“……My head hurts…… It feels like I got hit by something…….”
“You were hit by a mental attack.”
“Oh, really……?”
Cecilia touched the blood flowing from the back of her head with an unharmed hand, then made a puzzled expression. A moment later, she quickly took in the situation around her and her face hardened coldly.
“……The doctor and nurse.”
“They’re treating you as a patient and trying to take you to the operating room. Can you steady yourself?”
“Ah, yes. Just a moment.”
Cecilia said that and tightly gripped the rosary hanging around her neck. At that instant, her burned skin and shattered arm regenerated in an instant.
“……!”
Ian’s eyes widened at the absurd regeneration.
‘Was she a superhuman?’
He knew such beings existed, but this was the first time he’d seen one in person.
Her ability was probably rapid regeneration. The trigger for it was likely a sacred act, or touching the rosary.
So it seemed she hadn’t been plastering crosses all over herself for nothing.
“Doctor. I’m fine now. I’m not a patient.”
She said that as she held out the hand that had been blown apart to the surgeon. The doctor stood there for a moment, looking down at her, then turned away and disappeared without a word. The crawling nurse also went back into the emergency room.
“…….”
Silence settled once again over the long corridor. Ian let out a sigh of relief and leaned against the wall, while Cecilia slowly got to her feet.
“That book.”
And with that, she spoke.
“A grimoire, maybe?”
Grimoire.
It was a French word for a book of magic, and in Europe it was used almost like a synonym for magic tome. Ian glanced at the Deep-Sea Field Guide clutched tightly in his left hand, then nodded.
“Right.”
Since he’d been exposed as a mage, there was no reason to keep insisting on polite speech. When he’d first gone vampire hunting, casual speech had felt awkward, but now he could speak naturally. Being quick to adapt was one of his strengths.
Ian tapped the cover of the Deep-Sea Field Guide with the revolver’s grip and looked back at Cecilia.
“And you’re not just some ordinary nun from the Vatican either. Right?”
“……An inquisitor. Cecilia Capone. Sorry for lying. But you lied too.”
Perhaps because she’d learned Ian was a mage, Cecilia also stopped forcing polite speech. She puckered her lips and drew a pistol from inside her coat.
“You were playing innocent.”
“It’s not like there’d be anything good about people knowing I’m a mage.”
The reason Ian hadn’t hidden the grimoire and revolver was simple. If he kept pretending to be an ordinary person, as if this were all new to him, it wouldn’t help him here.
If this place had been easy enough to escape, he would have kept acting like a normal person. But the general hospital was a far stranger place than he could have imagined. It was impossible for Cecilia to shoulder all the risk alone.
Every time she got hurt, the patients or doctors would go berserk, and he couldn’t cover every one of those moments. No matter how strong her regeneration was, the instant she was injured, she was defenseless.
It would be far better to reveal that he was a mage and cooperate fully. At least, that was what Ian thought. He didn’t know what Cecilia thought, but it wasn’t especially important.
“Let’s move. Is your body working all right?”
“……Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Good. Exploration comes first. We shouldn’t needlessly provoke the strange things here; I think it’d be best to move slowly.”
“……You’re pretty proactive, huh?”
“Isn’t that better?”
Ian gave a slight chuckle and walked in front. Cecilia followed behind him, with a dagger in one hand and a pistol in the other.
They crossed the long corridor and entered the hospital lobby.
There were no visitors. The only things there were receptionists with only their brains floating in the air, and nurses busily running around. Naturally, none of them looked normal.
Ian glanced at a nurse whose upper body was normal but whose lower half was made up of dozens of heads, and spoke.
“You said these space-type mysteries are best dealt with through a kind of roleplay, right? In that case, it seems like we should each come up with a role…….”
“The freer the role, the better.”
Cecilia answered at once. She checked the revolver cylinder with a quick glance and continued.
“Being trapped in the hospital. For example, if you’re medical staff or security, or a patient, it’s impossible to leave on your own. So the best role is one that can move between the inside and outside of the hospital.”
“Makes sense.”
Doctors and nurses naturally work in the hospital, so going outside would be impossible. There was no way an anomaly would understand the concept of commuting hours, so it was effectively bound to the place. Security was the same.
From the start, time itself was a vague concept in this place. Just like the theme park, this would clearly be nothing but an endless cycle of work, with no real distinction between day and night.
What a truly dreadful place. Ian had no idea what the Administration Bureau was doing, leaving a place like this unattended. He let out a deep sigh and looked around for where a pamphlet might be.
“What are you doing?”
“Usually, spatial anomalies have some kind of rule. Sometimes the Mystery itself hands them out, and sometimes someone writes them down and puts them out.”
“Ah…… I’ll look too.”
Cecilia nodded and began searching the hospital lobby thoroughly.
A little while later, Ian found two pamphlets: “Hospital Life Guide” and “Hospital Center Guide.”
One had been written by the hospital, and the other by the Administration Bureau.
Fortunately, it seemed the Administration Bureau hadn’t been completely useless.
Ian called Cecilia over again, and together they began reading the pamphlet written by the Administration Bureau.
Rustle.
He turned the cover and checked the contents inside.
[Commonly known as Yohan General Hospital. This hospital was named after its director, Yohan, and this document is a guide that I, Administration Bureau agent Park Sang-cheol, discovered and wrote after exploring the hospital. If you find this document and there are any signs of contamination, do not hesitate to discard it.]
[If this document was found by a civilian, I would need to explain what the Administration Bureau is. However, I don’t have much time left. So I’ll leave it at this brief explanation: the Administration Bureau is an organization that professionally handles and investigates the situation you are in.]
[Below is the information my teammates and I have uncovered. I sincerely hope it will be useful for your survival.]
[1. If, before entering the hospital, you introduced yourself as a patient by any means, or if the hospital staff treat you as a patient, I’m sorry, but give up. It would be better to kill yourself.]