Only I Can Do It!
It happened right after I received the hunter trauma surgery materials from Professor Na Hayeong at Daehan Central University Hospital.
The official documents were strictly for internal hospital viewing and could not be taken off-site.
Instead, she gave me several copied sets with all patient names, guild affiliations, and personal details redacted.
“...Isn’t this technically illegal?”
“It’s not illegal. Every piece of identifying information has been removed, and the materials have been repurposed for educational use.”
“Then why hand them over in secret?”
“Because the administrative team would turn it into a whole ordeal~ You don’t want them?”
“No. I need them.”
At first I only meant to skim through them lightly.
But once I returned home and started turning the pages, something changed.
Pre-surgery examination records.
Imaging analysis findings.
Intraoperative progress notes.
Cause of death.
As I read through every line, my hand froze without me realizing it.
...What the hell is this?
I read it again.
Surely I had misunderstood.
But the conclusion remained identical.
“They let the patient die… for a reason this pathetic?”
The hospital that had provided me with these materials was one of the largest and most prestigious in Korea.
It handled everything from ordinary emergency cases to severe trauma, rare diseases requiring cutting-edge surgery, the latest imaging systems, surgical robots, ICUs, and a dedicated trauma center—all under one roof.
It even possessed specialized wards legally authorized to hospitalize hunters and the specialized equipment their treatment demanded. A truly top-tier medical institution.
And yet.
Even here, in one of the country’s largest university hospitals, the survival rate for hunter surgeries was abysmal.
Out of the most recent hundred operations, only around thirty patients had survived long enough to be discharged.
Of those thirty, the number who recovered enough to return to active duty could be counted on one hand.
The rest had merely clung to life.
Due to permanent complications—nerve damage, destroyed magic circuits, muscle necrosis—they were effectively dead as hunters.
At first I wondered whether Korea’s standard of hunter medicine was simply that low.
But after cross-referencing data from other countries, my perspective shifted.
Even the so-called medical superpowers showed similar statistics.
If anything, the fact that Korea managed even these meager results was a testament to its efforts.
“Still… dying from injuries of this level?”
What shocked me even more were the patterns of the recorded wounds themselves.
So far I had personally operated on two hunters.
Jang Mihyeon, the B-class hunter from the Geumseong Guild who had been transferred to the university ward, and Guild Leader Han Yura, who had been lying in the basement of the Baekho Guild.
Jang Mihyeon’s broken ribs had driven inward and lacerated her lungs. Her thoracic cavity had been flooded with both blood and air; a little longer and her heart and lungs would have been crushed.
Han Yura’s case had been even worse.
Dungeon-type poison and contaminated tissue had lodged inside her body for eight full years. An abscess had formed around her spine, and prolonged compression of the nerve roots had left her outwardly comatose, yet internally it resembled a war zone.
In other words, both had been critical patients who could have died at any moment by ordinary standards.
The hunters in these records were different.
They had been injured badly enough to require transport to a university hospital, yes.
But by the trauma-surgery criteria I knew, they were patients a skilled surgeon could have saved.
They could have been saved—if they had not been hunters.
“Kyaaaak! H-how… You opened it way too wide!”
“Hemostasis! Get hemostasis now!”
“Stop the blade! Stop it! It’s drifting toward the neck!”
“Damn it, whose job was it to maintain the bone saw?! The blade snapped!”
The hunter surgery footage preserved on CCTV was horrific.
It looked less like an operating room and more like the scene of a disaster.
To spread a single rib they deployed industrial-grade cutters; to burn away necrotic tissue they brandished magic staves meant for dungeon monsters.
They were called hunter-exclusive surgical instruments, yet in practice they were nothing more than hunting tools crudely repurposed for medicine.
The doctors in the videos were not incompetent.
Most were clearly desperate.
The problem was the insurmountable gap between equipment and patient.
Ordinary medical tools could not even open a hunter’s body, while hunter-grade tools destroyed healthy tissue far too easily.
A surgical scalpel that sank a fraction too deep would slice past muscle and into organs.
A fixation frame with slightly excessive pressure would crush blood vessels and nerves instead of realigning bone.
A magic coagulator with unstable output would sear living tissue along with the bleeding site.
In the end the patients were ruined more by the treatment than by their original wounds.
I stared at the footage for a long time before slowly exhaling.
When Professor Na Hayeong had first witnessed my surgical technique and called me a prodigy, an existence Korea could not afford to lose, I had assumed she was simply trying to secure a capable assistant.
“So that’s why you treated me like a treasure.”
After all, I would never have cracked open an entire chest cavity just to spread the ribs.
I would not have ruptured intra-abdominal pressure while removing contaminated tissue and flooded the operating room with blood.
And I certainly would not have let a fixation device slip and lacerate both patient and surgeon at once.
“......”
I could not close the files for a long while.
Whether from anger, from emptiness, or from some even deeper emotion, I could not say.
But one thing was certain.
If it had been me.
If I had been standing at the operating table.
I could have saved at least some of them.
No—I would have saved them all.
The moment that thought took root, the decision was already made.
“Wow… You really do seem like a ‘hero.’”
Having heard the story, Sora set her glass down for a moment and looked at me.
Clear, sparkling eyes.
A gaze completely free of pretense, genuinely filled with admiration for another person.
I knew that look well.
In my previous life I had been carried along by such gazes, only to die once within that very light.
“You don’t need to put me on a pedestal.”
“A pedestal? You’re simply that wonderful!”
“I simply gained this ability and am living in a way that matches it. That’s all.”
“But you don’t have to live that way.”
I was about to turn my head, embarrassed, when Sora carefully reached out with both hands.
She cupped my face and turned it back toward her.
Her touch was gentle.
Yet her gaze was strikingly direct.
“Anyone can say, ‘I could have done it, but others can only manage this much and it frustrated me, and since I happen to possess the ability I had no choice…’”
“......”
“But very few people actually do it.”
I remained silent for a moment.
“Are you encouraging me?”
“Yes. And I’m letting you know something.”
“Letting me know?”
Only then did she seem to realize what she had done; her face flushed crimson.
She snatched her hands away in surprise and cleared her throat awkwardly.
Then she hurriedly picked up her glass again and lightly tapped it against mine.
Clink.
A clear, bright sound rang out.
“Jihou… you are not alone.”
“...!”
“You may talk like that, but your face looked exhausted. After what happened, you’re a benefactor to the Baekho Guild—and to me personally.”
Sora smiled awkwardly.
“So if you ever feel tired, come find me anytime. If it’s difficult to come in person, just send a message. I… No, we at Baekho will always be on your side, Jihou.”
I looked down at my glass and gave a small laugh.
“Haha. Thank you.”
Those words sank deeper than I expected.
The statement that I was not alone.
It was something I had never heard in my previous life.
In the heart of Gangnam.
Inside the underground training hall of the Geumseong Guild building—which resembled the headquarters of a massive corporation—something unbelievable was taking place.
Boom!
Baaang!
The hunter who had entered the training ground had only recently reached B-class.
Naturally, the facility had been calibrated to B-class parameters.
Output limiter, golem durability, defensive magic field, counterattack patterns—everything was set to safe mode for rehabilitation.
Yet that safe mode was currently failing to keep up with a single trainee.
“T-this is impossible… We’re experiencing overload!”
“Overload?”
Jang Songhui, monitoring the situation from the control room, furrowed her brows.
“She only woke up last week. She’s still in the rehabilitation phase. Don’t tell me the training equipment is malfunctioning?”
“That’s not it!”
The operator pointed at the screen with a pale face.
“Hunter Jang Mihyeon’s output has surpassed B-class thresholds! The training ground’s defensive magic field is failing to withstand it!”
“...What?”
Inside the training room stood Jang Mihyeon.
Until last month she had been treated as good as dead—a rookie from the Geumseong Guild.
Caught in a chaos phenomenon, her ribs had curled inward and torn her lungs; her thoracic cavity had filled with blood and air.
Had Seo Jihou not happened to be at the hospital that day, her name would have been added to the guild’s list of the fallen.
But now everything was different.
Her breathing came easily.
Her body felt light.
Power surged from deep within her chest.
It was not simply that her wounds had healed.
It felt as though something long blocked inside her had finally regained its full capacity.
“Power… is overflowing!”
Baaang!
The chest of the training golem blocking her path caved inward.
It was a high-durability rehabilitation model that the old Jang Mihyeon would have struggled to scratch.
She felt no resistance, as if she had merely kicked open a rickety old door.
Across the floor lay the shattered remains of countless golems already destroyed in the same manner.