The Girl Who Rewinds Wounds (3)
The morning after the graduation ceremony, I arrived at the Imperial Capital Hospital before dawn. When it comes to a new job, showing your face early never hurts.
The healing mages who had dragged themselves in with sleepy eyes couldn’t hide their shock the moment they saw the letter of recommendation. Only then did it truly sink in: Professor Melissa really was an extraordinary person.
I brandished that letter like a key, passing through several mages and doctors. The last physician kindly explained how to reach the director’s office, and so the clueless girl fresh out of the academy marched straight into the private chamber of the hospital director personally appointed by His Imperial Majesty.
The director looked mildly startled when a small young woman pushed open his door, but his expression quickly soured into a frown. Anyone would be irritated if, while preparing for the morning’s duties and carefully polishing a handsome nameplate engraved with Thomas von Zeckendorf, some brazen child barged in without warning.
I approached the displeased director with hesitant steps and held out the recommendation. He scanned the stiff paper up and down with obvious reluctance, then spoke in a bored drawl.
“Hm. It does appear to be a genuine recommendation from Professor Melissa. Young mage, how old are you again?”
He might have only skimmed it, but at least he had recognized the professor’s name.
“Nineteen.”
“Well…”
The old doctor let out a sigh heavy with disbelief.
“…and four months,” I added.
He ignored my addition completely and continued in the same annoyed tone.
“It says you specialized in healing magic required for emergency situations.”
“Y-yes, that’s correct…”
I wasn’t actually using magic, of course. But since I could heal people on the brink of death, it wasn’t exactly a lie. I told myself that much.
“Miss. Have you ever seen someone dying? Or a corpse?”
“N-no… I haven’t…”
My voice carried zero confidence. I had seen a fallen noblewoman once, but I couldn’t say whether that had been true dying. And living as a baker’s daughter had given me even fewer chances to encounter bodies.
The director let out a mocking chuckle.
“I’ve never studied magic properly, but I understand it requires intense mental focus and advanced calculation. Correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“No matter how well you performed at the academy, the moment you see a man with his skull split open or his guts hanging out in the field, all that focus will vanish. The classroom and the battlefield are nothing alike. Your inexperience could cost lives. Do you truly understand that?”
He doesn’t have to be so brutal about it.
Watching him continue to belittle me, a stubborn flame kindled in my chest. I answered with far more conviction.
“I understand perfectly. I believe every mage and doctor begins exactly that way.”
The director snorted. He stayed silent for a long time. Just as I began to worry I had been too arrogant and that he would refuse to hire me, he finally spoke.
“Very well. If I don’t honor Professor Melissa’s recommendation, the mages here will gossip about me behind my back.”
I was quietly sighing in relief when he added with a crooked smile.
“Besides, the emergency department isn’t exactly profitable. I can’t afford to pay a freshly graduated rookie like you very much. I’m offering you an intern’s position. Consider the placement itself my courtesy. Understood?”
I had neither the right nor the courage to call him a cheapskate. I nodded weakly. As I turned to leave, I heard him mutter behind me.
“Why does it smell like bread in here?”
“…I’m a baker’s daughter.”
That was all I said before stepping out of the director’s office and heading toward the emergency wing he had indicated.
“…That concludes my introduction.”
In the emergency medicine department office, a cramped room filled with exhausted doctors, mages, and nurses who looked as if they had already seen the end of the world, I finished my brief self-introduction.
Word of Professor Melissa’s recommendation must have spread, because the atmosphere here was far less hostile than the director’s had been. Skeptical, yes, but not openly antagonistic.
It was obvious I would have to prove the letter’s worth by healing someone in front of them all. If I wanted to build a foundation here, that was the only way.
Time would solve it. Or more precisely, rewinding time would solve it.
And time, I knew, was on my side.
A carriage rattled through the capital’s tangled streets. Inside were the bare minimum of surgical tools needed for field treatment, healing mages clutching portable spellbooks with tense faces, and me.
The moment I finished my introduction in the department office, an urgent messenger burst in. A man in the marketplace near the outer wall had been run over by a carriage; his stomach was torn open.
I caught the others as they reflexively rushed toward the scene without me and begged to be taken along. That I would surely be useful. That I could help.
Everyone seemed reluctant, convinced that no matter my academy grades, I would freeze the instant I saw a real casualty. Yet they couldn’t completely ignore the parachute drop arranged by both Professor Melissa and the director, so they grudgingly let me squeeze into a corner of the carriage that served as an ambulance.
Inside the jolting vehicle I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. I gripped the pocket watch tightly, thinking of falling sand and turning springs. Telling myself that no matter what I saw, I must not panic. That I must use my power without hesitation. Foolish, childish vows.
They proved utterly useless.
The instant we reached the scene and I saw the man with the ruptured stomach, I had to clamp both hands over my mouth.
A young woman and a small boy. What appeared to be a mother and son lay with their bellies crushed and split wide open. Unidentifiable yellow, red, and brown matter spilled out, crushed and tangled together. The accident site reeked with the unbearable stench that rises from inside a human body.
I was every bit the rookie. I hid behind the carriage, retching pathetically. Even the simple act of fighting back nausea consumed every ounce of my concentration.
Only after a senior mage struck my back—get a hold of yourself—and I caught the contemptuous look that said I knew it did I manage to pull myself together.
I squeezed one eye shut, deliberately avoiding the sight of spilled intestines, the food that had once been inside them, the bright crimson blood and pale yellow fat. Step by trembling step, I approached the two dying patients.
I shook off the seniors trying to stop me as though in a trance. My lips moved silently, repeating the same words over and over: spring and sand, sand and spring.
The sight of people so miserably crushed they were nearly corpses threatened to rip my soul from my body, but I knew what I had to do.
I dropped to my knees on the blood-soaked ground. The unpleasant sensation of warm blood soaking the hem of my robe made my skin crawl, but I endured it.
With shaking hands I pulled out the portable spellbook and opened it across my lap, pretending to prepare an advanced healing formula.
Unfortunately both patients remained conscious, moaning in agony. Mother and son alike had lips turned deathly blue. If I failed, they would both die.
I stretched both hands toward them, placing my palms on whatever parts I could reach without touching the gurgling entrails. Then I closed my eyes.
And I prayed. More desperately than I had ever prayed in my life.
Rewind. Rewind… Please, please rewind…!!
My mind had already reached its limit. The moment the thought left me, I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was inside the carriage returning to the hospital. The vibration of the wheels must have roused me. As I slowly opened my eyes, I assumed everyone would be looking at me with contempt for fainting so pathetically at the scene. Instead…
The gazes of the senior mages were complicated. Surprise, pity, reverence, and a faint trace of jealousy. One look at their faces and I knew.
I had succeeded.
As expected… this is exhausting work…
That was how I began saving lives at the hospital, in what could only be called a spectacular debut.
From the next day onward I reported to the Imperial Capital Hospital at the crack of dawn for emergency duty. It was actually more comfortable waiting beside the stables where the rescue horses and carriages were kept than inside the emergency ward where the dying were brought.
There was little I could do for patients whose time had already exceeded the limit I could rewind. Far better to hover near the carriages and reach the scene even one minute—one second—sooner.
Just as my father had feared, I witnessed every horror imaginable. The scenes that needed me were always the most hopeless.
Burst intestines became routine. I saw severed limbs and shattered skulls every single day. I saved many lives, but I failed to save many others.
Time. It was always time.
Some patients could have been saved if I had arrived a single minute earlier. Others died in the span of a few heartbeats right before my eyes.
A few times I desperately tried to rewind the time of those who had died helplessly in front of me, but I soon realized it was pointless. No matter how powerful the ability, bringing back the dead was impossible.
…Or so I firmly believed.
The director, who had openly scorned me at first, stopped looking down on me once he heard reports of the people I had saved by rushing to the scene. After all, it added to his career record rather than damaging it.
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. While the director and physicians left me alone, the mages became a problem. They had genuinely admired my skill at first, but as time passed they began to sense that something was wrong.
The biggest controversy was that every patient who passed through my hands suffered mild memory loss. Most of the healing mages skilled enough to work at a capital hospital were Professor Melissa’s former students. They could not accept the idea that their kind-hearted professor had created a bizarre spell that erased memories as the price of healing.
No matter how widely known I was as her top pupil, and even if they reluctantly acknowledged that she had developed and taught me emergency magic that saved lives at a cost, my “magic” had far too many oddities.
I rarely showed the proper preparation of a spellbook. Instead of unfolding formulas, I closed my eyes, placed my hand, and simply concentrated—an incantation process that made no sense to them.
Looking back, even I could see how flimsy the lie was. To the sharp eyes of elite mages, those flaws must have stood out painfully.
Yet in the end—fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately—the mages’ scrutiny never resulted in my demotion or expulsion.
The reason was simple. Before long the hospital was overflowing with patients. So many that even the small hands of a rookie mage fresh out of the academy had become desperately needed.
It was inevitable. The entire northern border of the empire had become a battlefield, desperately holding back an endless tide of enemy forces. Five months after I began working at the hospital, the Demon King rose.