The Doctor's Worth (7)

The scene shifts slightly back in time.

A demon had once taken up residence inside his mind.

A demon born of pessimism and cynicism, of loathing—and it had been quietly gnawing away at Jungwook's spirit. Professor Kim had taught him how to drive it out; he was the mentor who taught him how to live as a human being.

At the time, the professor had emphasized one thing above all:

Jungwook had taken those words to mean: become a good doctor who ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠doesn't hate the world, who doesn't hate his patients.

But looking back now, they struck him in an entirely different light.

Maybe the rot had spread just as deep inside him, too.

Otherwise, there was no explaining it—that mistake, back during his cognitive behavioral therapy, when Professor Kim had let tears slip while voicing that "misplaced empathy." Perhaps, in the middle of counseling his own student, a fragment of the professor's true feelings had broken through the surface. Jungwook allowed himself the cautious guess.

And me, only realizing this now... maybe I was indifferent to him, too.

Jungwook's eyes reddened. It was guilt—the gnawing suspicion that he himself had played some small part in his mentor's fall.

Shiho watched him with concern. "Jungwook? Your eyes are all red."

At her call, Jungwook surfaced from the memory and dabbed away the moisture at the corners of his eyes with a tissue. "It's nothing."

"You're really okay?"

"Yes. I'm fine. Let's talk about how we're going to stop Professor Kim."

Drawing on the loops she had lived through, they began discussing ways to hold the professor back.

"Would bullets even work on him?"

"They connect, but he regenerates, so it's pointless."

"Professor Kim has never trained in any martial art. If I get him in a joint lock—"

"You lose. The weight difference alone is hopeless. I mean, what kind of psychiatrist has that kind of strength?"

Danger Level 4 was no idle label.

In a head-on fight, she had not won a single time in hundreds of loops—Professor Kim's raw power was simply overwhelming.

"So it really is a psychiatric-hospital-type Echo."

Jungwook could easily accept that she hadn't stood a chance.

An Echo's combat strength is proportional to its presence. In other words: the more famous an Echo is among people, the fiercer the emotions directed toward it, and the longer the narrative it has accumulated, the greater its presence grows.

That was why some obscure, grudges-soaked retake-student ghost story was far weaker than the red-mask legends everyone knew—and why modern-born Echoes like the red mask were weaker still than the ancient ones that had spent centuries accruing narrative. Which made it only natural that Shiho, the checkpoint supervisor, was no match for the resonated Professor Kim.

"This is exactly why psychiatric-hospital types are such a pain to deal with."

Shiho scratched her head, the gesture pure habit.

Most modern Echoes lack accumulated data, but because they've had little time to build narrative, they're relatively weak. Older Echoes are powerful, but the same span of time means plenty of data has piled up, so countermeasures are known. A psychiatric-hospital-type Echo, however, cherry-picked the worst of both and fused them together.

Fairly recent in origin, yet so masterful at stoking primal fear that it would be remarkable for it not to appear in any collection of ghost stories—scant data to work with, and combat power to match. It had become exactly the kind of existence that was a nightmare to fight.

"I am technically a living record of it, but..." Shiho pointed at the screen of Jungwook's phone. "Honestly, this loop alone has passed seventy attempts, and I can't see so much as a thread of a winning path."

"Seventy?"

Hearing what she had endured, Jungwook could feel nothing but awe. Could anyone stay sane after dying a horrifying death seventy times over?

He wasn't confident he could survive ten.

Reading the meaning in his gaze, she merely shrugged. "I'm a little slow, that's all. Two-digit retries per loop are the baseline for me."

Two digits, she added, was actually on the mild side.

"Escaping Yongsan took over a hundred, wasn't it? Getting out of the collapsed Management Bureau, I stopped counting somewhere past three hundred. Seventy's nothing, really..."

And besides, she said, in this loop she had no memory of her own deaths, which made it far easier.

Jungwook took that gravely seriously. "Even so—if it's hard at all, even a little, tell me right away. I can counsel you now."

"I appreciate the kindness."

But Shiho brushed it off as if it were nothing, swiping lazily down the screen as she answered.

From there, they kept hashing out how to handle Professor Kim.

A direct fight was already off the table—worthless even as a topic of discussion. Rigging the building with explosives and bringing the whole thing down was equally impossible. They had no such bombs, and besides, patients were still inside the hospital.

Pointing out the logical contradiction in his narrative was no good either. Professor Kim was clearly aware of his own contradictions; he simply didn't seem to care.

And according to Shiho, even assassination had failed.

"I slipped rat poison into his coffee in secret, and he caught on after one sip. Like he had eyes in the back of his head."

"Rat poison? The hospital had rat poison?"

"It's called warfarin, apparently?"

"Ah. Warfarin."

Warfarin is an anticoagulant—a drug that keeps blood from clotting. Taken in excess, it can make the blood refuse to stop flowing, and death follows by hemorrhage. In fact, that very principle had once seen it used as rat poison.

But Jungwook pointed out the flaw Shiho had overlooked. "Well, sure, but warfarin gets caught. Obviously."

"What? Why?"

"Warfarin tastes awful. You'd catch it even dissolved in an espresso."

"Huh. And how exactly do you know that, Jungwook?"

"I touch every drug I prescribe to a patient to my tongue at least once. You can't understand why patients hate taking their medicine until you know how bad it tastes."

Why would anyone do that.

Shiho gave him a long, flat stare, but Jungwook ignored it and pressed on.

Somewhere amid the planning, a thought suddenly struck him, and he turned to her with a question. "You keep talking as if it's only ever been you making the attempts. What was I doing?"

She shook her head. "The you of other loops wouldn't agree to assassination."

"I wouldn't? Why not?"

"Because back then I hadn't revealed that I'm a regressor. Even after Professor Kim turned into a monster, you wouldn't accept my way of doing things."

The Jungwook of other loops had tried, to the very end, to resolve it through dialogue. Only after Shiho was operated on and he confirmed she'd been left a vegetable did he finally, belatedly, admit that Professor Kim was a monster.

"Now that I think about it, this is the first loop where you've been this cooperative."

"The first...?"

At her words, Jungwook's expression turned grave, and he sank into thought. After a long moment, he spoke, heavily. "This time... I'm going to serve the professor coffee myself."

"You heard me—poison doesn't work on him."

Jungwook shook his head. "Maybe... maybe the important thing was never the poison."

And so the day of the operation arrived.

Jungwook looked down at his mentor, collapsed in the cafeteria, no longer breathing.

He hadn't laced the cheese donkatsu with the drug—no food could mask its bitterness.

Instead, Jungwook thought back to the espresso he had handed Professor Kim a few hours earlier. He had chosen his mentor's favorite coffee to hide the taste of digoxin—a cardiac glycoside. And as he remembered it, he bit down hard on his lip.

Damn it...

His mentor's body was shaking. A side effect of the digoxin.

Ordinarily used to strengthen the heart's contractile force, it was a powerful drug that, in excess, could induce atrial fibrillation. Long ago its toxicity had been potent enough to serve as an execution poison, which was why it demanded careful handling.

And Jungwook had used it to poison his own mentor.

So now I'm a monster too.

The Hippocratic Oath kept surfacing in his mind. The oath to do no harm with his medical knowledge seemed to whisper, over and over, that he was no longer a doctor.

He could tell himself the man collapsed before him wasn't human anymore—but reason was already murmuring the other truth: that he was the monster.

This was not something a human being did.

However much he told himself it was to stop a monster, he was disgusted—utterly disgusted—with the version of himself ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠who could send off his one-time mentor like this.

"I'm... sorry..."

Jungwook's fingers fidgeted in his pocket, curling around the ampoule of Digibind—the digoxin antidote.

He had prepared it in case Professor Kim grew suspicious of him. If the professor ever doubted the coffee Jungwook had handed him, the plan was to spike both cups with digoxin, then drink his own right there in front of him—and administer the antidote to himself once the side effects began.

But Professor Kim had never doubted him for an instant.

He had drunk the coffee Jungwook brought him without a flicker of hesitation, thanked him warmly, and even made ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a lunch date with him for another day.

And now—

Now his mentor was looking up at him with wide, startled eyes.

"I'm sorry..."

It was all Jungwook could say.

Professor Kim would not die from this. An entity that survived having its head blown open, that shrugged off bullets, was hardly going to perish because its heart stuttered.

But that it would be gravely weakened was beyond question. In this state, Shiho had more than enough opening to subdue him physically.

"I'm sorry, Professor."

The apology came again and again, without pause. If he let it stop, he was afraid he would bolt from the room that very second and inject the antidote himself.

Only by repeating the words like this—by hammering into his own mind that this was a man he had to let go—could he hold himself together.

And behind the endlessly apologizing Jungwook, Shiho was closing in, the shotgun chambered and ready.

The fallen Professor Kim forced his mouth open with visible effort.

"Jung...wook... thank... you..."

"...Professor?"

"Yes... I taught you right, after all."

Leaving those words behind, Professor Kim closed his eyes.

The "Attending Physician of Happy Relieved Hospital" closed his eyes with a face at peace—and never moved again.

At how absurdly, how quietly it ended, Jungwook ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠froze where he stood. Shiho, braced for a battle royale to erupt in that cafeteria, froze too, caught completely off guard.

With both their gazes fixed on the motionless Professor Kim, Jungwook's phone chimed softly. Out of habit, he checked the alert through his smart watch.