Emergency First Aid
The messenger from Dayeon arrived while I was in the middle of crafting a golem.
Late twenties. Three men.
Two of them are covered in blood from head to toe.
They're wrapped head to toe in bandages made from torn clothes......
And the third doesn't look like he has any major external wounds, but something's clearly wrong. He keeps fading in and out of consciousness and groaning in pain.
Dayeon was the one who went down to the first floor to help assess the situation.
The last one is a bit worrying.
External injuries could be treated quickly enough, but if it was something like a zombie virus, we would have a serious problem.
If they've turned into full zombies, purification won't work either. Undeath is basically death, so even if you dragged in the best white mages alive, they still couldn't resurrect the dead. I thought about learning purification magic for a second, but then I realized zombie virus carriers would have black magic power inside their bodies. Magic detection should catch it.
I used magic detection right away.
Only a slight infiltration on the left shoulder?
The rest of his body was clean. Just a faint trace of black magic power seeping into his left arm. It didn't look like a bite. Given how insanely contagious these damn zombies were, if he'd actually been bitten he wouldn't have lasted this long.
Then again, the whole country had become zombie territory in just a few hours. At this rate, even in his current state, it wouldn't be long before he turned.
I need to do something fast.
I set aside the golem I'd been working on. In the worst case I'd have to start over from scratch, but people came first.
Luckily I still had a few healing cores left over from golem crafting and some modern medicine I'd looted earlier.
"Bring them up here."
I sent the message to Unit 2 through telepathy. She immediately lifted the survivors and carried them upstairs.
"Ugh—"
Their condition was painful to look at. The two with severe external injuries were covered in scrapes, gouges, and multiple fractures. It really looked like they'd come face to face with zombies. The fact they were still breathing was a miracle.
"What... what the hell happened to you guys?"
"If it's difficult, please just give the instructions. We will perform the treatment," Unit 2 said gently.
"Thanks."
With the golems' help, I first dissolved healing cores in water, mixed in painkillers, and had the two badly wounded men drink it like a potion.
"Ugh, what is this? Bleh, it's bitter."
They looked like fresh office workers. We were probably around the same age. Their appearances were quite different from mine, though.
Once they forced down the healing-core water, the smaller wounds across their bodies began closing rapidly. The real problem was the larger injuries that needed actual surgery.
The golems and Dayeon opened fresh water bottles to clean and disinfect the wounds. I fed them a few more healing cores, but the improvement wasn't dramatic. Still, the angry red inflammation had calmed down considerably. This much should at least count as proper emergency first aid.
Let's deal with the last one first.
If there was no hope, then... I'd have to let him go quickly.
The noticeably well-built man was wearing blue work clothes. Aside from the obvious wounds, he didn't seem to have any other injuries.
Didn't I already say this? Even if you learn it, it probably won't help. At best it's only useful for common status effects like poison or burns. So the plan to learn purification magic is a no-go.
Is there really no other way?
After thinking it over, one possible solution did come to mind. I immediately posted on the free archive.
It looked like it would work. Still... it was scary.
I closed my eyes, focusing only on the blurry lights of magic power visible through my detection, and gave the order.
"First, give him every painkiller we have."
"This looks pretty risky."
"Less risky than turning into a zombie."
I fed him the strongest over-the-counter painkillers along with a healing core. Once the patient seemed calmer, I had Unit 2 excise the area contaminated by black magic.
Through my magic detection I could faintly see the sharp steel blade Unit 2 had created scraping away the tainted power. Thankfully the painkillers worked; there were no screams.
"That's not it. He passed out."
"......"
"Maybe that's for the best......"
He had to wake up again. With a physique like that, he seemed sturdy. I'd just have to believe in him.
With the emergency treatment roughly finished, I kept using Touch of Healing on all three of them.
Touch of Healing
White light spread out from me and began soaking into their wounds. The area where the black magic had been scraped away healed cleanly right away, but the rest took more effort.
"Touch of Healing. Touch of Healing."
The success rate had dropped a little, but it was fine. If I kept using it, everything would heal eventually.
"Hoo... hoo... I wish all those zombie bastards would just drop dead......"
When I eventually started doing deep breathing exercises for magic recovery and mental stability, followed by full-body stretches, the room's atmosphere transformed into some kind of qi treatment center or bizarre alternative medicine clinic.
Well, since it wasn't modern medicine, alternative medicine was technically correct.
"Ugh... what the hell is this...?"
By then our emergency patients seemed to have given up on trying to understand the situation. Honestly, if I had suddenly suffered major injuries only for magic-using golems to appear and drag me in front of some weird kid doing stretching exercises to heal me, I'd be confused too.
But the treatment was actually working. The one who'd passed out was still unconscious, but his breathing had stabilized. It looked like he'd made it past the critical stage. The other two were slowly regaining consciousness.
And when people woke up in a situation like this, curiosity usually followed.
"Are you a real magician?"
"Yes."
When I answered indifferently, the two men's eyes suddenly changed and they started spouting nonsense.
"Looking at you again, you're actually cute. Wait, you were cute before too..."
"Whoa. Do you have a status window?"
And so a short, tedious time of explanations and understanding followed.
"Don't try to understand it too hard. I guarantee there's no better environment than just doing what you're told here."
At that point Dayeon stepped forward. As expected, it was far more effective for someone who'd gone through similar experiences to speak up than for a bizarre being like me to struggle through an explanation.
"Hoo. This is incredible. It really doesn't hurt anymore."
By then it seemed all the life-threatening injuries had been treated.
"So what exactly happened to you guys?"
I asked. The three of them started off a bit incoherently but quickly got the story out. It was exactly like a zombie movie. The kind of story I couldn't enjoy at all because it was real.
They'd been in a relatively small officetel. The people inside the building who'd luckily survived the first day's chaos had struggled desperately to keep the zombies out.
Some tried to hide and endure, but they couldn't completely conceal their presence and were killed. Some tried to flee the building only to be caught by zombies roaming outside. Some tried to build barricades and guard the doors but failed.
In the middle of all that, unknown black spores had begun multiplying in the distance.
"The guy who's collapsed right now saved the two of us."
When the zombies finally broke in and started searching the building, breaking down every door, the three of them holding out on a lower floor were immediately in danger.
Right as a zombie was smashing through their door, the man had pushed the other two—who were panicking and ready to give up—out the window, then jumped himself.
"He said we should jump to the rooftop of the building next door. It's possible to survive a three-story drop, but if you get bitten by a zombie you'd die for sure, right?"
But zombies that saw people falling between buildings weren't about to let them escape. Even after reaching the neighboring building, the three soon found themselves facing death again. That was when the golems appeared.
The two men's severe external injuries seemed to have come from tumbling across the rooftop.
"Wait, so this guy jumped from one building to another and came out fine?"
"Something about snowboarding or skateboarding. Apparently he's a former athlete."
A former athlete could jump three stories without a scratch? Well, in a world where wizards existed, a parkour master wasn't that strange.
Glad I saved him.
Along with that story, the two also explained about the black spores.
"We don't know where they came from, but they spread fast and turn every living thing nearby into zombies. Bugs, pigeons, everything."
"......"
I'd seen dead pigeons on the ground before, but never zombified ones. I'd naturally assumed only humans could turn. But that wasn't the case. There existed something capable of turning every living creature into a zombie.
"If a zombie mosquito sucks your blood, you turn too, right?"
"Probably. Though maybe it doesn't affect things like bacteria or viruses? If it did, we'd have died long ago."
Even so, it was horrifying. An entity that hadn't been reported on the radio. I had no idea how far those insane spores had spread, but one thing was certain: they were expanding their territory in real time even now.
Eventually they might reach my building.