Aftermath Concerns
People moved urgently before my eyes.
Masked and dressed in surgical gowns, they rushed in and out of the operating room, voices tight with the gravity of the moment.
If things stayed as they were, it would be dangerous.
Both of them could die.
And then…
Watching them, I spoke without a shred of hesitation.
"I'll do it! Use as much as you need! I—I don't care what happens to me!"
I rolled up my sleeve and shouted. The doctors' faces flickered with bewilderment at the sound of my voice, but they soon nodded and came toward me.
"…?"
When I came to, what met my eyes was an unfamiliar ceiling.
At the same time I felt the blanket draped over me—and then the sound that followed.
—Beep! Beep! Bee-bee-beep! Bee-bee-bee-bee-beep-bee-beep! Bee-bee-beep! Bee-bee-bee-bee!
"…Shit…"
Even though I was no longer a soldier, the uselessly familiar reveille still dragged a curse out of me on pure reflex.
I had no real obligation to get up, but I hauled my heavy body upright all the same.
"What the hell… Where am I…?"
My last remaining memory was declaring the mission complete and sending the hunters home. And then—the crushing fatigue that hit me right after. Ten straight days of all-nighters had finally caught up with me; the tension snapped, and I had collapsed on the spot.
But the place I was lying in now was not the operations command room. It looked more like a military barracks. There was no one else around except me, but that was the impression it gave.
Judging by the look of things, someone had carried me here after I went down at the end of the operation. Feeling a small flicker of gratitude for that, I got up, straightened the bedding, and dragged my aching body outside to wash up.
"Going by the time… I slept almost a full day? I blacked out Monday afternoon, and now it's Wednesday morning…"
"Aide!"
"Ah… Glass."
After washing up, I was heading for the operations room when Glass appeared in front of me. She had been completely spent from reconnaissance duty alongside the other Air Force hunters, but she looked more or less recovered now.
"Are you feeling any better?"
"Yes. I'm fully recovered—but what about you, Aide? From what I understand, between intelligence analysis and command, you barely slept for ten straight days."
"I'm a lot better now myself. Turns out sleeping like the dead for a full day actually does the trick."
The old saying that sleep is the best medicine had never felt more true. After a brief exchange of well-wishes, I carefully asked Glass the question that had been sitting on my mind.
"Um… do you know what happened after that?"
"Ah… yes. About that…"
In answer to the question from someone who had been out cold for a day, Glass began to explain, in a calm voice, everything that had taken place in the meantime.
With the battle over, the adjutants and guild masters had moved into cleanup. There was no shortage of work—victory reports, resupply of expended materiel, reconnaissance—but above everything else, what they prioritized in that moment was the matter of the thing they had "acquired."
It was the culprit behind the catastrophic defeat the allied forces had suffered in the previous large-scale offensive, the existence that had produced countless casualties. And yet, even though not a single person present was ignorant of that fact, not one of them suggested eliminating the Abyss that wore the exact shape of a bleached human body.
"For now… as I'm sure you've all seen, it would be a stretch to treat that existence as an Abyss right this second."
"Agreed. There are still grounds for suspicion, of course, but after watching a scene like that with our own eyes, it's a little…"
Barely a few hours earlier, this had been the enemy they had fought to the death. Some among them still felt the throb of wounds that treatment had not fully erased. And yet, separate from all of that, there was the scene they had all witnessed together.
In the final moment, without a heartbeat of hesitation, that being had sacrificed both of its own arms to protect a Dreamouth hunter. That image made it impossible for them to see it as nothing more than an Abyss to be destroyed.
And decisively—there was the Dreamouth hunter herself, the one whose life had been most at risk because of it. The woman called Jogs, under the pretext of surveillance, still refused to leave its side even now, staying by the restrained creature as it received treatment as if she were tending to a true friend—or a comrade-in-arms.
"She's something else, that one. By any measure it's a dangerous situation, and she volunteered for it."
"It feels like there's some kind of history there… but what could it be?"
Ara spoke with a touch of curiosity in response to Kara's remark. At that, Adjutant Haeun carefully raised her hand and opened her mouth.
"Actually… afterward, I heard a rough account of something related to this."
Unable to contain her curiosity, Haeun had ended up asking Are—someone on that side—for the broad strokes of the story. And so she carefully began to share what she had heard with the people in front of her.
The past Pyongyang recapture campaign, and what the woman named Jogs had gone through. And the possibility that the humanoid Abyss in question might be one of the hunters who had been sacrificed at that time.
As they listened, complicated emotions began to surface on the faces of the guild masters and adjutants.
"Of course… I can't be certain that it truly is that hunter. But honestly, as things stand, I think the likelihood is high. The facial features match exactly, and more than anything, right after its tail was severed, it clearly recited a military serial number."
"…Mm. If it goes that far, it does get a little hard to keep doubting…"
The Abyss had shown fairly strategic movement before, but speaking with clear knowledge, understanding language, and holding a conversation was an entirely different matter. More than that, the fact that it had regained consciousness only after the pair of dragon heads at its waist had been torn away allowed them to form a few hypotheses.
Circumstantially, this "former hunter" had been seized by the Abyss and turned into a body controlled by those dragon heads—and once they were cut away, it had broken free of that domination. The Abysses' ability to move strategically had likewise been the result of using that host. At the same time, the aggression the Abysses had shown toward the pack it led in this battle might have come from confusion in their recognition, caused by the human presence of the host.
As they analyzed the situation along those lines, a chill automatically settled over the hunters and adjutants.
In other words… if this is how it works, then in the worst case, a human could become an Abyss…
Terrifying. Put another way, it means that among the hunters who've fallen on the battlefield so far, there could be others who show up like this person did.
An Abyss made from a human as raw material—or by transforming a human. What made that terrifying was not merely the creatures' combat power or strategic capability.
The fact that a human could become an Abyss meant that, depending on the circumstances, facing beings they had until now treated as simple monsters might come with emotional agony. This time it had seemed to work somewhat in their favor—but in the worst case, it meant they might freeze in front of an enemy and find themselves unable to swing a weapon.
Wiping out simple monsters and killing a human are completely different problems…
Though there are people out there who wouldn't care about a fact like that in the slightest.
Burying that uncomfortable, unwelcome possibility in a corner of their minds, the guild masters and adjutants decided to set aside the question of how to handle the captured Abyss—or "returnee"—and give it time.