While there were no electric medical devices, the tools present were quite advanced. None of them belonged in the game's virtual medieval setting.
Just as my farm subspace granted me the ability to grow crops at an accelerated rate, the Doctor had used his subspace since childhood to self-teach medical techniques that were a thousand years ahead of their time.
Furthermore, because the Doctor was also an alchemist, he could synthesize hemostatics that stopped bleeding instantly, artificial blood, and anesthetics.
In the center of the room sat an operating table. It, too, was stained with a bit of blood. It wasn't drenched, just lightly splattered.
'...It hasn't even dried yet.'
What had the Doctor been doing here just moments ago? Did that blood belong to a monster, an animal, or a human?
I peered closely at the blood. My stomach churned slightly, but it wasn't as bad as I had braced myself for. At least it wasn't a sea of blood.
I took a step back and let out a soft, deep breath.
I scanned the small operating room. The iron door was securely locked with a padlock.
The setup, as if demanding I find a key in this room to unlock it and leave. Felt like a twisted escape room if I turned off my brain and didn't think too deeply about the context.
The only other place worth searching in this room was... the metal cabinet I had been deliberately ignoring.
I approached it. There wasn't a single sound coming from inside. I pulled the cabinet door open.
A creature, bleeding profusely and looking as though it had been stabbed all over, slumped out and collapsed at my feet.
"……"
I couldn't even tell what kind of animal it was. Part of the reason was that my brain struggled to process the gruesome sight of bright red blood, but more so because it looked like a grotesque amalgamation of several different animals.
Nausea washed over me. But to survive, I had to keep thinking.
'Was the blood on the table and scalpel because he had just finished making this thing and shoved it in the cabinet?'
Inside the cabinet where the creature had slumped over, a piece of paper was brazenly taped to the wall.
---
## Key <--- Inside the patient's body
I didn't throw up.
Using every tool available on the shelf, I dug through the creature's body and fished out the blood-soaked key. Even with the tools, the carnage felt far too close to my bare hands.
Upon opening the door and stepping out, a completely ordinary living room unfolded before me, exactly what one would picture as a typical medieval home. Judging by what I had seen in the game, the house was about 2,000 square feet.
But I couldn't let my guard down. I had to doubt everything.
Screeek, thud, screeek... From one corner of the living room, a bipedal monster with multiple arms dragged itself slowly toward me.
I readied my sickle.
The blood-soaked chimera's head hit the floor with a wet thwack!
"Is... is someone there...?"
That was when I heard it. A frail voice called out from the small room to my left. It was a stranger's voice. Someone completely unconnected to all this...
"Please help me... Please..."
My hands began to tremble as I gripped the fabric at my thigh.
"The Doctor told me he would save my life... but then he locked me in this room. There's a strange animal in here with me... Please, open the door. Please?"
Every word that seeped through the door felt like it was gouging into my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut before forcing them open again.
The door was latched from the outside. There were no other locking mechanisms.
I could easily open it right this second.
'But it's a trap.'
The choice I was given was so agonizing it made me want to die. Opening it meant walking into danger; leaving it closed meant carrying an unbearable guilt.
"……"
I rushed to the door and lifted the latch. I threw it wide open.
However, I couldn't see the face of the person inside. At the exact moment I opened the door, a chimera unhinged a gaping, cavernous maw, and a body clad in a white hospital gown unceremoniously plopped onto the floor.
I collapsed onto the ground right then and there. Even as the chimera locked eyes with me and limped its way over.
My arm finally moved only a split second before I, too, was devoured. Fortunately, the beast was sluggish, so even my clumsy swing of the sickle was enough to sever its head.
'If I had just opened my subspace and slipped inside, I wouldn't have had to see this.'
My mental state had shattered exactly as the Doctor intended, and I had nearly opened my subspace. What was even more pathetic was the lingering shred of regret I felt for not having opened it.
If I opened the entrance to my subspace while inside someone else's, mine would become permanently bound to the outer one. It meant the Doctor would steal my subspace. That was what he truly wanted.
If I died to the chimeras, or if I couldn't endure the psychological torment and retreated into my subspace alone, it would be a complete and utter defeat.
But there was a way to flip the dynamic of me being the prey.
I had to enter my subspace, but drag the owner of the outer subspace in with me.
If I did that, the inside and outside would invert. The Doctor would end up trapped inside my subspace instead.
This battle was essentially a turn-based fight, a back-and-forth exchange of offense and defense. Or, more simply, a deadly game of tag.
Scouring the house, I finally tracked down the Doctor.
The moment I laid eyes on him, I swung my sickle at the bastard. Unsurprisingly, the Doctor effortlessly dodged my pathetic strike.
"You really have no talent for murder."
The Doctor, his full face now visible, smiled, the grotesque scars on his face twitching.
His face and body were covered in stitch marks, looking as if he had been pieced together. In the past, when he had been madly obsessed with alchemical medicine and conducted reckless research, he ran out of corpses. so he practiced suturing on his own body.
That wasn't all. His shaggy, unkempt hair was a patchwork of different colors. Sections of white, black, and brown were haphazardly mixed with strands of blonde.
For the record, it wasn't dyed.
So intoxicated by his own surgical prowess, he had literally torn off sections of other people's scalps and grafted them onto his own head. He collected hair like a twisted form of tattoos, parading it as a badge of pride.
To an ignorant observer, he might just look like a hair-dye addict, but knowing the gruesome truth made it sickening and utterly repulsive.
More than anything, seeing something in person that had already been deeply disturbing through a game screen was horrifying enough. but actually grabbing a fistful of hair grafted from the flayed skin of multiple victims made it infinitely worse.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Catching me off guard, bile rose in my throat, but I managed to forcefully swallow it down.
Gathering my wits, I dragged the Doctor straight into my subspace.
---
Bard guided Belsus to a large room nestled deep inside the theater troupe's temporary building. It was originally an actress's dressing room, so even though it was vacant, no one would dare enter.
Belsus was left alone with Endymion.
"……"
"……"
The two of them had absolutely nothing to talk about. Their only point of connection was Heean.
Suddenly, however, Endymion shot a furtive glance at Belsus. After pacing the room anxiously for a while, he hesitated before finally asking a question.
"When I was found... wasn't there another man nearby?"
"……"
"What happened to him?"
Belsus's lips remained pressed tightly together for a long moment, only parting right as Endymion began to visibly fret.
"Heean was the one who brought you back. I wasn't there when you were found. I haven't heard anything about someone else being with you."
"…Is that so."
Belsus felt a strange, inexplicable sensation. He recalled a conversation from a few weeks prior.
Inside a random, low-grade dungeon, he had bumped into Paladin. The man had asked him carefully.
— Is he doing well?
As if Heean and his farm had driven a wedge between two people who shouldn't have been separated...
But he also quickly remembered a conversation he had with Heean.
— I received him from a guy named Paladin. Just so you know.
— Received him?
— Endymion's mental state was deteriorating severely, so Paladin asked me to take care of him. We made a trade, and I unintentionally ended up with another boarder.
— Then what exactly did you receive?
— Ownership of Endymion.
— Ownership?
— Well, it's just a figure of speech.
Owning someone else besides me.
Then that 'ownership' really didn't mean anything special at all.
However, Heean had sworn an oath only to him. Holding both of his hands, Heean had boldly declared that he would make Belsus his life's singular purpose.
Belsus, at the very least, had been profoundly moved by those words.
Wasn't this enough?
Even though it wasn't the romantic confession of love I had envisioned, wasn't this already more than I deserved? Wasn't it enough? Belsus's anxious heart easily settled.
But then... his heart began to pound violently again, as if it had forgotten its normal rhythm. His hands kept trembling as they curled into tight fists.
It felt far too ominous. This very moment, without Heean by his side.
Placing his faith in Heean, he waited for his safe return. He prayed desperately that these were all just his own needless anxieties.
---
The Doctor was initially taken aback by the sheer vastness of the space, and the beautiful, idyllic scenery of the farm even made him feel slightly nauseous.
Then came the vines that abruptly shot up from the soil to skewer him, along with a deluge of leaves pouring down to blind him. The Doctor leaped back, wielding his scalpel like a dagger to slash the vines away.
Kreeeeak! The severed plants let out a monstrous shriek. The Doctor found it utterly amusing.
"I wonder... will these plants still move for me once I become the master of this subspace? To think I'll have to research botanical surgery now."
Thwack! At that exact moment, a vine violently pierced the ground just inches from the Doctor's neck.
The Doctor's eyes widened as he stared at the thick vine stem, his scalpel having caught it by a hair's breadth. He then broke into a wicked grin.
The Doctor recklessly hurled the Alchemist's reagents onto the ground. Boom! Crash! Colorful plumes of smoke and corrosive liquids erupted across the soil. The plants writhed and died, screaming in agony as their bodies melted away.
In the brief lull that followed, the Doctor scanned his surroundings. For the first time, a look of genuine perplexity washed over his face.
"I can't even gauge the boundaries of this subspace... I surely don't have to search all the way underground, do I?"
But indeed, after scouring the farm to no avail, who would have thought he would finally discover the farmer buried underground after digging with a shovel?
The farmer had managed to hold out for a whole, agonizing day. Which also meant the Doctor had spent an entire day wandering around, unable to eat or sleep.
The farmer had dragged out a grueling war of attrition for 24 hours, constantly shifting his hiding spots to evade the Doctor, but he was eventually caught, and the roles of 'tag' switched once more.
Heean opened his eyes once again inside the Doctor's house.
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