Ah. It's a Hospital.

I remember the foreign news rattling on, magic flashing across the sky, the mana exhaustion, and then passing out. What happened after that—the part where they hauled me to the hospital—is a complete blank, though…

"Where… is this?"

"Huh? Huuuh???"

The moment my voice came out, a doctor came running like a bolt of lightning.

"Let me start by explaining the situation."

Ah, what a boring doctor. This is the part where he's supposed to say something like, Ah, it's a hospital, don't worry.

"There was no bleeding, but you were transferred to this hospital in a state of cardiac and respiratory arrest. We performed emergency CPR and continued artificial respiration, but…"

Hmm. So that's why my top was half off? The sensation of being naked under the blanket draped over me had felt a little strange. Anyway.

"Cardiac arrest?"

The blood pressure cuff on my arm, that nameless heart-rate gadget clipped to my index finger, and the rest of it—all of it suggested quite a lot had happened.

The doctor lifted my wrist. A paper ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠card was tied to it with a thin string.

"Triage?"

"You know what that is? See here?"

The card labeled Severity Classification Card held a few simple details, and along the very bottom ran a black band printed with the number 0 and the word Deceased.

I had seen people in the other world use something similar—priests and medical support staff. It wasn't anything I had taught them. At some point people had simply started using it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and that was how I remembered it.

Triage is the name they use for it on Earth.

Red, yellow, and green correspond, in order, to immediate, urgent, and non-urgent. Seeing that they had torn all of those off and left only the black…

"Looks like I really did come in dead."

"Yes. But how did you suddenly come back to life like this…"

"Ah, haha. Beats me…"

An awkward laugh was about all I could manage.

Hell if I know either.

The nurse standing beside us finished checking my blood pressure and nodded as if nothing were wrong.

"One thirty-one over eighty-eight."

"Respiration and pulse are fine too. Normally we'd keep you for a day or two of observation, but… given how unusual the current situation is…"

The doctor trailed off and glanced behind him, so I followed his gaze through the ER.

"Hmm."

Doctors, nurses, paramedics, and patients were all jumbled together in a single churning mess. Even though this was a large emergency room with about thirty beds, they had been taking people in as they came, and now bodies occupied every surface that would hold one—the floor, the corners of the corridors, the chairs.

"Team lead, we need to spread these out more."

"Okay. I've got this one. One, two!"

Medical staff and people who looked like hospital employees circulated through the chaos, trying to sort the confirmed dead from the living so they could carve out a little space.

I felt perfectly healthy. No reason to hog a bed.

"More importantly—is there anything I can do to help?"

Blood pressure one thirty-one over eighty-eight, respiration and pulse both normal, right? I rolled up my sleeves and stood.

"Oh."

"Whoa."

Thanks to my top hanging completely open down the front, I had unintentionally given the entire ER a look at my body. Minor problem.

"Oops."

Tap, tap. I fastened the buttons. The corset auto-equipped and cinched in my waist, and I asked the doctor again.

"Help?"

A vivid light began to kindle in the doctor's eyes.

"Would healing of that nature be possible as well?"

Healing, huh. I ran through a few spells related to injury treatment and first aid.

There were already several techniques for examining patient trauma in the other world. Inducing an omnidirectional excited state of positive charge, then detecting the electromagnetic force released all at once to examine hydrogen density… that was just an MRI. Transmitting high-speed accelerated mana through the entire body and measuring the degree of transmission… that was just an X-ray. Spin it around as you take the reading and you've got a CT.

I was about to explain my general capabilities when the entrance doors burst open and an urgent voice rang out.

"Doc! Patient over here!"

"Ah, just a moment! I'll be right there!"

The doctor ran off at the sudden call. I peeked to see what was going on—the patient was someone in a military uniform. Another soldier was performing CPR up on the bed, and the patient's right leg had been severed by something.

Good lord. Had they cut off the leg of someone being dragged into the sky…?

"I'll start with suturing! How many minutes on the tourniquet… ah, shit, necrosis already…!"

"I-I don't know. Please save our company commander!"

A soldier struggling through CPR, tears dripping off his face. The doctor tightened the tourniquet below the necrotic tissue and shook his head.

"We'll have to take everything below the tourniquet… Dr. Choi, take over CPR first! Soldier, step down for now!"

Shouting that, he ran back to me and rattled off his request.

"Is regeneration or restoration of necrotic body parts possible?!"

Does this doctor think the mechanisms of life are easy? Even with magic…

"The human body is an incredibly dynamic organic system. There's no way. I can pull thread and suture a torn area, but I can't intervene in the physiological response itself."

"Ah…"

Clearly disappointed, the doctor ran back to the patient. I had kept him for quite a while.

"Hmm… isn't there something I can do."

But I believe this magic is absolutely badass. When I first showed it to the clinic priests and medical personnel in the other world, their eyes popped out so hard I thought their glasses would shatter. That is how insane this technique is.

I grabbed a man in a suit who had just finished rearranging every bed in the room.

"Are there a lot of people who need imaging or exams?"

"Pardon? Ah, exams?"

At my question, he pointed from the ER entrance all the way to the nurses' station.

"Everyone up to here is waiting for a CT."

Then he pointed all the way to the very back of the ER and shook his head, spent.

"And everyone back there has finished examination and classification. There's no end. No end…"

All thirty ER beds were packed with the critically injured, and counting the ones laid out on the floor, the chairs, and the folding cots, there were seventy people in total. Of those, a little over half still hadn't even gotten a CT. I stretched both hands toward them.

I projected my will into the mana spreading evenly through the ER.

The entire space filled like one enormous magnet—except instead of a magnetic field, it was a mana field.

Ping!

A sound like a submarine's sonar resonated low through ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the space.

Ping! Ping! Ping!

What several repetitions produced was the mana that had permeated people's bodies, and the potential difference released as that mana momentarily reacted with electromagnetic fields. Data measured throughout the space at a resolution of a tenth of a millimeter accumulated in layers.

A vast dataset of multidimensional values—fluids, metals, inorganic skeleton, carbon content, hydrogen content, and more—compounded together. Normally it couldn't be parsed without analysis equipment, but…

With the assistance of the calculation core in the brooch—a legacy of the Fashion Witch—I could rapidly organize the massive volume of data.

All of that took less than twenty seconds.

Hologram images with filters similar to CT and X-ray results floated up over each patient's body. They had been edited to focus only on the abnormal or noteworthy areas of each person, overlaid directly onto those parts.

The doctor, having apparently just weathered a major crisis, wiped the sweat from his forehead and walked toward me, so I showed him the exam results I had just produced.

"That patient doesn't have any major issues—just fainted. That one over there has fairly severe internal bleeding. You should bump them up to red on the triage."

The doctor's eyes flew open so wide they looked ready to burst from his skull.

"Th-th-th-this is…!"

"You looked so disappointed earlier. How about now?"

I didn't even try to hide my puffed-up shoulders, letting out a smug little huff through my nose. This is when I'm happiest, you know.

"Ahem!"

Grab!

The doctor seized my shoulders with sudden aggression.

"Eep."

"Th-this is incredible!"

"Right? Hehe. Now you can treat the critical ones first, nice and fast."

But the doctor's expression was strange. Happy, and yet somehow not happy.

"Ah, but there's actually a problem…"

"A problem?"

His explanation was a bit unexpected. He glanced toward the soldier whose severed surface had begun turning a bluish discoloration, and opened his mouth.

"There's not a single doctor here who can perform an amputation or a craniotomy. I'm a dermatologist, and every other doctor capable of surgery is already in the OR…"

The only physician holding down the ER was himself. About ten doctors were all in the operating rooms, and among them there was even an internist performing amputation-and-reattachment surgery. Normally in a situation like this they would call in the off-duty doctors to fill the gaps quickly, but because of the traffic jams, not a single one had arrived on time.

"That can't possibly…"

I started to say it, but the impossible situation had in fact already happened.

"So in the end, there are no doctors?"

A good idea occurred to me.

At noon in the Republic of Korea, every television channel had switched over to an emergency disaster special.

The boulevard in front of the hospital was packed solid with vehicles. Cars that had crashed wherever people had fallen from the sky sat abandoned where they had stopped, and the whole stretch looked like the ruin of a city that had just come through a war. Those ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wrecks blocked the roads. Other cars swerved wildly to get around them. That swerving caused more wrecks. The vicious cycle stacked on itself, layer after layer.

Tweeeet! Tweeeet!

"Please follow the traffic signals! Hey, you there! Hey!!"

A police officer in a signal vest waved a light stick with pathetic desperation, not even wearing gloves over his frozen hands.

"Are these people completely insane?!"

"Hey, you sons of bitches! You really wanna pull this right now?!"

Masked thugs smashed the glass of an electronics store and vaulted inside, taking advantage of the chaos, while citizens watched and cursed their morals from the sidewalk.

One of the men who had gone in threw the baseball bat in his hand to the floor and crowed with delight.

"Hell yeah. Gotta love American culture."

"Look at those idiots. Hey, grab the stuff already."

"Those people outside won't be a problem, right? Doesn't even look like there are any cops."

"Whoa, look how many foldable phones there are."

The four of them were sweeping merchandise into bags they had brought for the occasion…

Bang! Bang!

Two thunderclap gunshots rolled through the downtown streets.

"Was that a gunshot?"

The four-man crew whipped around. What filled their vision was a temporary public-order detail of reservists, rifles already leveled.

Long hair, body armor sagging without plates inside—they had the look of soldiers the way a knockoff has the look of the real thing. But they had guns, and that made the cosmetic problems suddenly irrelevant to the thieves.

"Don't move! Drop the bags and put your hands up, now!"

"…Shiiit."

Smoke curled from the muzzles of the reservists, who were organized in teams of four to six.

"Holy shit, they're actually shooting? Are they insane?!"

Bang! Crash!!

The glass of a display case packed with phones shattered with a satisfying roar.

"Kyaaah!"

One of the thugs let ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠out a shriek like a child's and flung his bag away, hands flying up.

"You sons of bitches. Hands up, right now!"

Standing orders were to use firearms without hesitation if a riot broke out, or if those black ropes from a few hours ago appeared again. Each man had been issued a magazine loaded with thirty live rounds, and the results were speaking for themselves.

Of course, they weren't supposed to fire yet, since authorization still hadn't come through…

"P-please spare us!"

All's well that ends well, as they say. It did not take long at all to get cable ties around the four thugs' wrists.

The vehicle for transporting criminals… was probably still stuck somewhere in the middle of the road. The criminals were made to kneel while the citizens dumped every curse in the language on their heads.

And the TBS reporter who had caught the entire sequence on the special broadcast was delivering the situation with spit flying, talking as fast as the words would come.

And from the lobby of that same hospital, where the live broadcast had been running for some time, a woman with long gray hair and a pointed hat came walking out, her steps unhurried and even.

"And currently they are bound and waiting—wait, that person! It appears to be the mage Yuria, recently known to have a deteriorating relationship with the government in her capacity as Director of the Magic Bureau! Mage? Mage?!"

Yuria did not so much as glance in the reporter's direction. She sprang.

Fwoosh!

And flew up into the sky.