***
“I may be like this now, but! When I was in my prime!”
“Was there anyone here who wasn’t doing well?”
The Espers in the hospice ward each boasted of their brilliant pasts while enjoying their leisure time.
Unlike regular hospice wards, the age range was on the younger side at 20-40s, so I didn’t expect “back in my day” type talk to come out, but it seemed there were so many people with dazzling histories that they couldn’t help themselves.
“Without me, not even the site of that famous bakery in Daejeon would have remained, you know?”
“Oh, miss, were you part of that Strawberry Siru Gate raid?”
“That’s right~! Me! That bakery gets 30,000 visitors a day! Without me, all those people would’ve gone back crying!”
With eyes gleaming to the point of feeling madness, she looked quite happy explaining how strawberry tarts, strawberry cream bread, strawberry cakes, and more from that famous Daejeon pastry shop she protected were distributed nationwide.
“Even though I’m like this now…! My nickname in the military was Ice Empress… cough, cough, ugh.”
“Oh no, she’s vomiting! Bring a bag or something!”
As I was getting a drink from the vending machine next to me, I pulled out a clean bucket from the trolley, and she, who had fallen from her wheelchair to the floor as if pouring out, crawled toward me.
“Urgh… ugh…!”
She vomited out bright red blood and chunks.
Once called the Ice Empress and having shown her face in internet articles a few times, she had been fatally wounded by a poison-type monster, slowly melting from the inside out.
“Haa, please call a doctor… kugh, ugh.”
With those final words, she rolled her eyes back and had a full-body seizure. I immediately took out the radio at my waist and called for a doctor.
“Black Panther One…, situation report. Emergency patient at rest area at end of corridor at 14:30. Vomiting blood and seizing. Medical staff requested. Over.”
I laid her on her side so blood wouldn’t flow into her airway, then wiped up the liquids scattered on the floor with a dark-colored towel.
“Miss! Please wake up…!”
As I laid the patient down, the patients who had been conversing approached and shook her body. I pushed them away with my hand and gave a light warning.
“I’ll handle this. For the patient’s sake, please try not to get excited.”
If the other person had been a soldier, I too would have slapped her to wake her up or shaken her body to check for a response, but I couldn’t take such violent actions with patients who had weakened as much as they could. I spoke in a calm and stable tone as I had learned in this ward.
“She’ll be fine. I’ve called the medical staff.”
I stroked the back of the woman who was trembling all over as if she had chills. And I adjusted the angle of her head so she could vomit more easily.
“I-I’m, I’m sc-scared. I can’t see anything…!”
Esper patients were usually hospitalized due to injuries from combat with monsters. Because of this, there were many patients suffering from PTSD.
Most of them recalled combat experiences and said they were “scared.”
The fact that it was a memory from the past held no meaning for them. Fear was always in the present progressive tense, and extreme wariness crumbled them from within.
Sometimes they experienced dissociation to avoid pain and were transferred to closed wards.
“Is anyone… isn’t anyone there? Please, someone help me…!”
Even though she clearly had her eyes open, she gasped for breath and flailed about, saying she couldn’t see anything as if having hallucinations.
Without proper medical knowledge, there was nothing more I could do for her until medical staff arrived. I could only hold her hand and speak to her in a low, calm voice as I had learned.
“I’m right beside you.”
***
“You reek of being a soldier.”
Today too, I was diligently cleaning while squeaking the windows clean when my head turned at the sneering sound.
“What division were you in?”
From the way he boldly asked while speaking down to me, I could feel he had been in quite an important position in the military, which somehow made me reluctant to speak. Not only was it not even at the division level, but I had belonged to an unnamed special unit that had been created as “Guide Infantry” but had never been given a proper external name, so I had nothing to say. Would he understand if I said recycling trash disposal?
“I was a company commander in the 7th Division. Hey man, what are you doing still acting like a soldier in civilian society?”
“…I apologize.”
My hair had grown long enough to not only cover the back of my neck but be lightly tied up, and my bangs had grown long enough to part, so where on earth did he feel the soldier vibe from? I had my doubts, but I didn’t want to fight, so I obediently apologized.
“What was your rank? You look exactly like a Private First Class.”
Apparently quite bored, my opponent dragged his IV drip along while following me around and kept talking to me. In this place, what they had was time, and what they possessed was only the past, so it wasn’t that I didn’t understand, but I was currently on work hours, so it wasn’t appropriate to engage with him. Though I wouldn’t have engaged even after work ended either.
“Change your bag~ It’s distracting when you walk around with dog tags clanging ignorantly like kids hanging dolls on their bags~”
He seemed to be picking a fight after seeing the many dog tags hanging from my usual military green bag.
“Did you extort them from your juniors? You’re such a bastard.”
“I picked them up.”
They were the dog tags of Guide Infantry unit war dead who had no family or lost their place to go. I had started picking up one by one the ones that had been returned to personnel and were about to be disposed of, and so many had accumulated that they made a loud noise whenever I walked.
“Have you been deployed for Gate raids?”
“No.”
Since I wasn’t a Guide on the Gate entry team, I hadn’t directly participated in Gate raids and was only deployed after raids ended to collect corpses, whether human or monster. I didn’t have the opportunity to participate in raids, nor did I particularly want to. If Espers were excavators, I was a hand trowel. Excavators have excavator work and hand trowels have hand trowel work.
“Kuhaha! Then you don’t know anything?! And yet you act like a soldier~!!”
Shaking his body greatly 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. He had been attacked by a curse-type monster and was extremely afraid of dark places without light, and his heart’s mana circuit was broken so cardiac arrest could come at any moment—he was like a candle before a storm.
“Hey! Damn~! Do people like you even get pensions? Huh? Kekeke.”
He said he had completed organ donation applications and advance funeral directive forms and was waiting to write his will. He had a wife and two sons, and before awakening and being conscripted, he taught music at a school and had published four collections of poetry.
“What a waste of taxes, you moron! Why do you live? Huh?”
Fortunately, he was discharged while still alive, but his injuries were so severe that he intermittently emitted contaminated energy at dangerous levels, so he could only meet his family through video calls and waited in this place for the day he would die.
“I have to live. That’s what I was born to do.”
I’d never had grandiose questions about life. I lived because I was alive, and I didn’t die because I didn’t want to die.
Squeak squeak—
Even while having a conversation, I faithfully moved my body to clean the windows transparently and cleanly. No one had touched the windows to leave fingerprints or gotten anything on them, but the windows became dirty with rainwater and dust just by being there. Time and environment simply made them cloudy without any malice.
“Hey…”
“Sir~ The lawyer is here~”
Behind him as he was about to say something, the social worker came to inform him that the notary public who would help write his will had arrived. He left with light steps to write his will, and I also pushed the trolley to move and clean the next area.
“Sniff, sob.”
“Oh my… What if the patients see you…”
As I moved, this time I heard sounds from the office where nurses were gathered and stopped walking for a moment.
“Work is too hard, unnie… I can’t do this anymore…”
The new nurse who had just started was crying endlessly with a face like a bloated water dumpling, clutching a bunch of tissues in her hands. From the fact that the contamination energy prevention mask under her chin was all wet, it seemed she’d been crying for quite a while.
“It’s because you’re sleep-deprived. Didn’t you say you only got a few hours of sleep?”
“Can’t they… hire more people? It’s too… hard… wahhh—”
“They said they’d increase support. You have to trust and wait.”
A hopelessly understaffed ward. A department people avoided where no one applied even when job postings were put up. The irritation, sensitivity, complaints, and bad behavior of people pushed to mental extremes. There was a line of patients who wanted to come here, but no one who wanted to work here.
“Look at my wrist. From lifting and moving patients so much, I can’t even properly hold things…”
Thud! Splash—
The plastic takeout cup from a franchise cafe that the nurse was trying to hold fell to the floor and spilled its contents.
“Oh my, oh no!”
“Oh my~ I thought it looked dangerous~!”
The startled people wiped up the beverage with the tissue bunches they’d been using to wipe tears, sweeping the floor.
“I’ll do it.”
Isn’t this what I was hired for? I naturally entered the office, separated the cup into the trash, and mopped the floor. After thoroughly sweeping up the scattered torn tissue pieces and organizing them, I handed the nurse a cotton handkerchief like the ones babies use.
