Life Reversal (4)
“…….”
Healers stood packed into every corner of the training grounds. Once a bout ended, the knights would limp over to them for treatment. I watched the whole spectacle from a distance, sinking into a deep, existential daze.
No matter how many times I see it, this is just absurd.
Only moments earlier, several knights had been trading bare-handed blows hard enough to shatter arm or leg bones. Back in the modern world, that would have meant X-rays, an operating room, setting the bone, pinning it with metal, casting it, then months of rehab at minimum. Here, every last step of that process got skipped. A healer would reach out, splash a little multicolored magic around, and that was that.
Crack. Pop.
Broken bones just… fix themselves like that?
Even after watching it with my own eyes again and again, I still couldn’t believe it. Bones that had nearly torn free of the flesh slid smoothly back into place, and the skin sealed over them without so much as a scar. Knights who’d been groaning over fractures seconds before took a few hits of healing magic and were suddenly fine—bouncing on their feet, even checking their joint range of motion like nothing had happened.
“Guess they don’t need me.”
I’d planned to help people injured in the training bouts, prove my worth, and work my way out of the North. At this rate I was just another hardworking young man doing busywork…
I clicked my tongue and turned my gaze back to the center of the grounds. Matches were still going nonstop. Up in the guest seats overlooking the field sat the Grand Duke and other high-ranking figures, watching the sparring in silence without exchanging anything that looked like conversation.
I was scanning that direction, trying to memorize a few important faces, when—
“…….”
—my eyes locked dead-on with Selene’s, who was sitting among the guests. I jerked my gaze away at once and quickly shifted into a blind spot where the guest seats couldn’t see me. You don’t hold eye contact for long with someone higher up the ladder than you. With a truly vicious superior, three seconds of eye contact was enough to set them off. Selene didn’t seem like that type, but still.
“No point giving them a reason.”
Hidden in the blind spot, I went back to watching the grounds. I’d expected bare-handed sparring to feel a little tame compared to swordplay. It wasn’t tame at all.
So this is what knights are like.
The fighting was fierce. Even from where I stood, you could see how badly every one of them hated to lose; the bouts were that intense. Match after match of sweat-soaked combat resolved itself, and then the next pair of knights walked out into the center of the field—
Waaaaaah—!
A roar of cheers exploded loud enough to shake the training grounds. From the energy in the air…
Some kind of captains’ match?
I watched the two men coming out a little more carefully.
Yeah. Captains’ match.
I didn’t know who the imperial side’s man was. The one from the North, though—there was no way I wouldn’t know him.
That’s the knight commander.
Commander of the Northern Knights. I wasn’t so hopeless that I couldn’t memorize an important face. After years living in the North, this much I knew.
“Show us your full strength, Commander!”
Someone from the imperial side bellowed at the top of their lungs.
So their guy’s a commander too.
Commander versus commander… this really was the main event.
Might as well watch properly.
Not that a total outsider to martial arts like me would understand much. Still, they were commanders. They had to be different from ordinary knights somehow. I watched with that expectation—and sure enough:
“…They really are different.”
The two knight commanders were different in a way that actually showed. The way they traded and read each other was so precise you could see the mind games even from a distance. Both of them moved with extreme caution, probing for the slightest opening.
Then—
Thud—!
The Northern commander slipped into a split-second gap and drove a heavy blow into the imperial commander’s chest. The imperial man went down hard.
…Kind of anticlimactic.
They hadn’t even traded that many proper exchanges before it was over. I was still feeling a little disappointed when the imperial knight on the ground showed no sign of getting up. Sensing that something was wrong, the healers waiting nearby sprinted onto the field. They started pouring magic into the fallen man—
“…What? Why isn’t he getting up?”
Even after taking hit after hit of multicolored magic, the man didn’t rise. The healers began to close in around him one by one—and then:
“Ghk—! Ghhaaagh…!”
His body suddenly arched and jerked in a grotesque spasm, thrashing like a fish thrown onto dry land. He clutched at his throat, gasping and convulsing. His chest ballooned and collapsed in an abnormal rhythm. He was fighting desperately to drag air into his lungs, but you could see it wasn’t going in.
His face is turning blue.
Classic cyanosis—the bluish discoloration of skin and mucous membranes from oxygen deprivation in the blood. On top of that, the thick veins in his neck stood out as if they were about to burst: the jugular veins were swelling to an unnatural degree.
“F-Focus more healing on him!”
“It’s no use! The wounds have all closed, but he still can’t breathe!”
The panicked healers shouted, their faces bloodless with fear. And then the frantic air of the training grounds went strangely still.
Step. Step.
Slow footsteps approached. The healers who’d been stamping their feet in panic parted like the Red Sea.
…What now?
Through the naturally opening path came a figure with a thin veil drawn over their head. Clearly not an ordinary healer. That distinctive, cumbersome, solemn attire—
Someone who uses divine power, looks like.
A high-ranking cleric dispatched by the Church, most likely. The veiled figure knelt quietly beside the fallen man, clasped both hands in a brief prayer, then immediately extended a hand over his chest.
Hummm—!
A pure white sacred light gathered in that hand—something on an entirely different level from the multicolored magic the healers used. Anyone could see it was healing light closer to a miracle than mere spellwork. The light flowed from the cleric’s hand into the man’s chest. For an instant his chest glowed—then the light slowly faded. The cleric rose from their knees as if the problem had been solved and offered a short silent prayer…
“…Ghk—! Ghhaaagh!”
The man’s convulsions didn’t stop at all. He still clawed at the ground, still clutched his throat and gasped, eyes rolling back in a face gone blue-white. Even the miracle of divine power hadn’t worked.
There’s only one thing this could be…
A man dying because he couldn’t breathe. Why was the imperial knight commander in this much pain? The answer to that question was almost too easy.
“That’s cardiac tamponade, no question.”
To explain what cardiac tamponade is, you first have to understand how the heart is built. The heart sits inside a thin, sac-like membrane. Cardiac tamponade is what happens when some kind of trauma causes blood to fill the space between that membrane and the heart itself. That might not sound immediately catastrophic—but the membrane around the heart doesn’t stretch well. So when blood pools between the membrane and the heart, the pressure from that blood presses straight down on the organ. And then what? The heart can’t beat the way it should under that pressure. Blood stops circulating properly, and you end up choking to death. In other words, that imperial knight commander lying there looking almost peaceful as his strength drained away—
If we leave him like that, he’s going to die any minute.
I headed for the fallen commander without a second’s hesitation, shoving roughly through the ring of people crowded around him and forcing my way inside. At this advanced stage of cardiac tamponade, there was only one solution: open a hole in the chest and physically drain the blood trapped inside the membrane. That left one remaining problem. What was I supposed to punch a hole in his chest with?
Ideally it would be something thin and long—a needle, a fine probe. But no matter how hard I scanned the training grounds, there was nothing delicate enough to pierce near a heart with any precision. The only sharp tools in sight were big, bulky swords. I shouted urgently at the frozen crowd around me.
“Are you just going to let him die like this?!”
Startled eyes snapped toward me at the sudden yell.
“Bring me something thin and sharp, anything—now! A rapier, a hairpin, something like that would be even better!”
At my outrageous outburst, the faces of the nearby knights twisted ugly with anger.
“You lunatic—who the hell do you think you are…! Drag him out of here!”
They strode in and reached to haul me away by force—when something slid into my field of view.
Swish—.
A dagger. I turned my head in surprise and found the Grand Duke looking down at me with indifferent eyes; I hadn’t even noticed him approach. The dagger he’d put in my hand had a strange shape. The blade, which must have been an ordinary sword moments earlier, had been cut down smooth and clean—into something that looked exactly like the thin, long needle I’d wanted.
There was no time to marvel. I immediately adjusted my grip on the dagger and set it against the man’s chest. The noise around me rose; I could feel people trying to stop me. I trusted the Grand Duke to hold them back and kept my focus locked on the patient. Bit by bit the surrounding sound fell away—not because they’d actually shut up, but because I’d managed to concentrate.
“Hoo…”
I couldn’t afford to lose focus. Push even a little deeper than necessary and I’d pierce the heart itself—instant death. I had to pierce only that thin membrane where the blood was pooling.
Slice—.
Flesh parted. Bright red blood ran down the knight commander’s chest. Every nerve in my body was trained on the sensation at my fingertips as I drove the dagger in. Not long after, the moment the membrane tore—
Fwoosh—!
The dark, trapped blood that had been sealed inside erupted like a fountain. At the same time, a hot sting flared across my neck. One of the imperial knights had put a blade to my throat and nicked me. So what? I’d saved the patient. I’d done my job, you ungrateful bastards. Right now you shouldn’t be pointing swords at me—you should be—
“Look at your commander. He’s breathing, isn’t he?”
—getting your commander back on his feet the moment he comes around.