The Doctor's Duties
“You keep getting the answers wrong.”
After listening to my reply, Sarah laughed for a long while, then walked straight outside without another word—save for a single parting shot about making sure I scrubbed the stink off properly.
“Handling people really isn’t that easy after all….”
Or maybe the smell genuinely was the problem. Had my nose already gone numb to it?
Just as I turned toward the showers, I spotted Dietrich emerging, toweling her hair dry. I had first met her in a white coat, so seeing her in ordinary clothes felt strangely unfamiliar—especially with her hair hanging loose like that.
“I heard you remodeled the showers yourself,” she said.
“Did you like them?”
“The water quality felt good, I suppose. Heats up easily, too. More than anything, I appreciated that you separated the men’s and women’s areas.”
It might seem trivial on the surface, but dividing living spaces by gender was critically important. The larger the population grew, the more carefully it had to be handled. Without private spaces, people couldn’t even manage personal matters or relationships properly, and dissatisfaction climbed. High dissatisfaction led to the very people you’d worked so hard to bring in walking away—usually toward some other faction promising better living conditions.
In that sense, hearing praise like this was—
“What was it like in the Zeroth Reich?”
“Women were almost never among the founding members. From what I remember, a few officers’ wives received special treatment. Private bathrooms, even.”
“And as a doctor, you got that special treatment too, or—?”
“No, no. I’m blonde, remember? So I was only allowed to use the bathroom for about thirty minutes during a specific time slot—along with the other women.”
“I see.”
“The problem was… people pretending to mix up the schedule so they could peep, or leaving certain things in the bathroom that anyone could tell were deliberate. After Sturmbannführer Hans Schulz punished a few soldiers, the unsavory incidents did drop off, though.”
“Hmm.”
The one thing you had to watch most carefully in the apocalypse: sexual desire.
The game had always censored it to some degree, so you never saw the full process… but a female NPC would emerge from the blackout curtain in tears, and the settlement’s dissatisfaction rating would spike overnight. Or, without any warning, a woman would brutally murder the men around her with a gun or a knife. Or a relatively slight male prisoner would accumulate wound after wound until he finally took his own life.
Clamp down completely, though, and people who couldn’t relieve themselves would go berserk or start disobeying orders. At least those of a certain age who still valued morality tended to be disgusted by that sort of thing—James and Curtis were fine in that regard. The real problem would be the younger men I planned to bring in as I expanded my power. Castrating them wasn’t exactly an option either.
…Of course, there had been players who built harems and did exactly that. Then the eunuchs would rebel, the women would pick up guns and start killing the men—
“Don’t worry too much about it,” Dietrich said. “Sturmbannführer Hans stopped the high-ranking officials from randomly conscripting women as playthings.”
“I can’t say I’m entirely surprised.”
“In an empire crawling with beasts, he was the only one I ever thought was decent. Of course, the way he ruthlessly sorted people into those who were useful and those who weren’t—and killed the latter—was chilling. But now that every superior who could give him orders is gone, how that place will change….”
“For the better, you think?”
“You’re the one who said it, Hyunwoo. The day a real doctor arrives, my treatment… won’t improve that much.”
Thankfully, the sleepless nights spent preparing proper living quarters first had been worth it. The relaxed expression, the easy posture, the way she was confiding in me like this—none of those appeared unless satisfaction was high. At least I could set aside the worry that she might grow disillusioned with the Omen family and return to the Zeroth Reich—
“Um, Hyunwoo?”
“Yes?”
“I asked James if there was anything I could do, and he said you’d know better than he would.”
Huh? Had someone ever volunteered for work on their own before? Sure, I’d seen plenty of people get bored and start helping with random chores of their own accord, but….
“If no one is injured right now, I can do laundry, organize personal belongings, clean and sterilize tools—that sort of thing.”
“No, no. There’s no need for you to take on chores like that.”
“But I was rescued and brought here. I can’t just sit around waiting for someone to get hurt, can I?”
“Actually, that’s exactly it. Waiting.”
“Pardon?”
“Being thoroughly prepared so you can respond the moment someone is injured—that’s a doctor’s role, you could say.”
“Prepared….”
“Yes. Prepared.”
Building and managing a settlement was a Crafter’s main content, so assigning people to the right positions mattered just as much. The most common mistake was throwing people into a jumble of miscellaneous tasks simply because hands were short. Specialization suffered, and in a doctor’s case especially, cleanliness standards dropped.
“I can give you some fairly demanding work.”
“Please be specific.”
“I’ll assign you a medical room. Your primary duty will be keeping it scrupulously clean so there’s no risk of infection.”
“I did that back in the Reich… the Empire, too. Yes, no problem.”
I secured a firm commitment to intensive cleaning. Next.
“You’ll also need to take charge of medicine management for the time being. Of course, I know the uses of some of the drugs and can help, but I’ll know far less than you, Dietrich.”
“That’s fine too. You said the work would be difficult, so I was surprised—it all sounds like the natural duties of a doctor.”
“I haven’t listed everything yet. This is just the process of confirming, one by one, what you can and can’t do.”
“You’re thorough. I like that.”
Medicine management: no issues.
“Caring for the injured—”
“I’ll do that without being told.”
Right. That one had been too obvious. Then the final, most important question.
“Are you familiar with dissection?”
“If you’re asking me to work on living subjects—”
“Obviously corpses. Things that are definitely dead. I won’t assign anything dangerous.”
“…Dissecting frogs in a state of suspended animation always left me with a lot of guilt, but if they’re already dead… yes. I can do it.”
“Medical treatment has to come first, of course, but I intend to make dissection and research the second most important duty.”
“And the sterilizing and cleaning—?”
“I’ll help with that. Sweeping dust, mopping up blood, all the menial work—for the time being, consider it entirely my responsibility.”
“But with all the water management, expanding the zones, and installing barricades you already do—can you really handle everything?”
“As more hands join us, my own workload will naturally decrease. That’s not the important part right now. Focus.”
Dissection and research. The higher a settlement’s anatomical knowledge rose, the greater the chance of landing critical hits on enemies. It looked minor, but it was extraordinarily important: even people unskilled in combat gained a dramatically higher chance of protecting themselves or breaking free when ambushed. An extension of self-defense, you could say. Knowing exactly where to stab or twist to inflict serious damage with minimal force made anatomy essential.
Especially now that the game had become reality. In the game it had only been a flailing animation; here I needed to know exactly what to do. So did everyone else—and everyone who would come later.
“The work is figuring out how the bodies of radiation-mutated creatures function, and which parts are their weak points.”
“…That sounds dangerous.”
“I won’t ask you to do it right away. First we build facilities that can hold the monsters in a fresh state and kill them cleanly before dissection, secure protective suits so no residual radiation reaches you….”
“For now, you’re simply asking whether I’m capable of the work.”
“Yes.”
“…A suitable environment, the right tools, enough time, and as many people as possible. If those conditions are met, I’ll gladly do it.”
Even that much confirmation was crucial. Forcing someone into work they hated often led to deliberate sabotage or ruined results out of spite.
“So for the moment, my job is making the assigned medical room actually look like a medical room.”
“Exactly.”
“I feel lighter somehow. I’d been anxious. Everyone else—especially you, Hyunwoo—was rushing around so busily.”
“Starting tomorrow that won’t be an issue, so you can relax.”
“Ahaha.”
Her light laugh left me feeling one burden lighter.
And then—
“Ah, by the way… was I interrupting you?”
“Interrupting what?”
“You came to the showers for a reason, I assume. Looking for me right away? Or for Sarah?”
“Nothing like that… Sarah told me I smelled, so I came to wash up.”
“Smell? Well… it just seems like your usual scent?”
She stepped closer, twitching her nose a couple of times, then tilted her head.
“Yes. I don’t particularly… notice anything special.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The usual sour sweat, a bit of that stagnant-water smell from working the sewers, earth, and… something a little heavier that presses on the nose.”
…Wait. Did that mean I reeked?
“Other than that, same as always.”
“….”
I was still reeling when the door beside us creaked open. James scratched his cheek, blinking sleepily—then—
“Snff—ugh?! Kehek!? Keck, kehek!”
He coughed as if dying, both hands clamped over his nose.
…Dear God.
“What. What’s going on?”
“The smell, khurp, kuh, ke—”
Waving his hands wildly, James fled. Curtis, in contrast, calmly sniffed a few times.
“Smell of old memories, that is.”
“Memories, Curtis?”
“This boy’s giving off that trench smell I told you about. The smell of a trench right after the fighting’s done and you’ve taken it. Wet earth, and then… hmm….”
Now it was trench stench. Dear God.
“You’ve had a rough time of it. Go wash up already.”
He clapped me on the back a couple of times, then wiped his hands vigorously against the wall. My heart ached. I should have washed first and talked later.
And then—
“…Ha.”
Even Sarah, affection apparently low enough for it, vanished with a single snort of laughter.
…I never expected to experience the depression that comes with a low cleanliness rating quite like this.