The Doctor waged a psychological war of attrition, deploying blood-soaked monsters to slowly gnaw away at his opponent's sanity.
I fought a battle of pure physical stamina, using the sheer scale of the farm and the relentless attacks of my plants to exhaust the Doctor until he dropped.
The role of the 'seeker' shifted from the Doctor back to me.
However, the layout of the operating room had completely changed. As new chimeras turned to look at me, their half-stitched jaws clattering, I gritted my teeth and swung my scythe.
Clinging to my fading consciousness, I glared at them closely and noticed a difference in these chimeras.
'Haphazard stitching, like someone clumsily sewing in a home economics class.'
This awkward suturing was the work of the Alchemist.
I hadn't thought the Doctor was fighting alone. As expected, there was someone else in the subspace.
I was fighting a two-on-one battle.
Birds of a feather flock together. Crazy bastards.
I stepped out into the living room through the open operating room door. There was yet another person inside.
"W-Who are you?"
A perfectly normal-looking woman trembled violently and sprang to her feet upon seeing me. She was wearing a white dress that looked like a hospital gown. There was no blood on her clothes.
The Alchemist must have brought her here.
Because she was standing right in the middle of the living room this time, I ended up seeing her face and expression clearly.
"Y-You're not with that doctor... right? Were you dragged here too? We have to get out of here, quickly! Hurry!"
Tears streaming down her face, the woman desperately yanked on my arm. Between the raw, palpable terror radiating from a living human being and my own fear, my body froze, completely paralyzed.
While I stood there frozen, the woman paced around frantically to no avail before suddenly collapsing in front of me.
"M-My body... something feels wrong."
It happened in an instant. The woman suddenly started foaming at the mouth.
"It hurts so much. Please... save me. Do something. Sob, don't just stand there watching, cough, save me...!"
I witnessed what happened next, but I deliberately refused to process it in my head. I would simply tell myself that I had killed just another chimera whose face and expression I never knew.
The Alchemist and the Doctor were sending me a message.
[If you drag this fight out, we'll drag in an innocent person and kill them every time the turn changes.]
It was practically an ultimatum to surrender before that happened.
The Doctor didn't want me dead. At least not until he successfully hijacked my subspace.
After that point, my memories are a blur.
I slaughtered every chimera that appeared. Eyeballs rolled, chunks of flesh scattered, and sticky blood showered over my head.
"..."
With hands slick with blood, I grabbed the Doctor by the hair. The vivid sensation of slicing through flesh and bone with my scythe still lingered on my palms, my entire body a mess of other creatures' blood and melted flesh, as I passed the turn back to him one last time.
"Haa..."
The blood and bodily fluids of the chimeras dripped from my body onto my farm. I forced myself to breathe.
I had my suspicions, but over the course of the several turn changes, I had become certain.
There was one massive thing the Doctor was overlooking.
The Doctor entered the farm. I took cover behind the main gate as my first hiding spot, waiting...
'Alright. Let's run!'
And just like that, I slipped out of the subspace.
Which meant I had completely abandoned the Doctor inside my subspace and bolted out into the city all by myself.
'You crazy, psychotic bastard! Do you really think I'm as bloodthirsty to catch you as you are me?'
As long as I was inside my own farm, I could bail at any time!
It wasn't that the Doctor was too stupid to consider this method of escape. Rather, based on his knowledge, doing such a thing was fundamentally impossible, so he must have completely ruled it out.
Inherently, a subspace is sustained by a Hunter's power. If the Hunter leaves, the subspace instantly loses its function and collapses. Naturally, leaving a "guest" behind in a subspace was theoretically impossible as well.
But my farm was different. It had several deviations from standard subspaces, and one of them was that it functioned perfectly fine even when I left Endymion behind as a guest.
It was as if my subspace was an independent, living entity separate from myself.
'Just like Endymion said about it being the primordial land or whatever... My farm might not be a subspace at all.'
The moment I emerged into the back alleys of the city, I finally caught my breath. All the tension drained from my body, and I collapsed onto the ground.
I was so covered in gore that the original color of my clothes was unrecognizable. The blood of various animals and humans, sticky bodily fluids, and pus clung to me from head to toe.
My paralyzed senses suddenly jolted back to life. The nauseating stench of blood pierced my nose and stabbed at my brain.
My stomach churned violently. The crooks of my arms and legs, my face, the nape of my neck, my hair, my chest, and my stomach. There wasn't a single spot that wasn't coated in sticky grime.
I had already used up all the towels stored in my inventory. I desperately tried to scoop up the dirt and sand from the ground to scrub my body clean.
But in the end, I couldn't hold back my vomit.
"A-Are you okay...?"
I raised my head to see a familiar face standing there again. It was the kid from before. The errand boy who had delivered the Doctor's letter. The one I had chased far away out of fear that he would return to the Doctor and be dismembered to become another chimera.
Even though I knew how horrifying my current state must look and how traumatizing it would be for the child, I discarded all my pride and begged, almost crawling.
"A bucket... please fetch me some river water... I need to wash..."
"O-Okay. Wait here!"
The kid returning with the water bucket looked like an absolute savior. After sending him back and forth several times to dump water on me, wring out my clothes, and scrub myself off, I was finally clean enough to stop retching.
"Here, payment for your help. This money doesn't have any blood on it, so it's fine."
"I didn't help you because I wanted money...!"
The kid shrank back, hiding his hands as if the gesture was too much.
"Since you said that, I really should give you more."
I pulled out another coin and handed it to him. The boy accepted the money despite his tearful expression. As expected, he was a smart kid.
After sending the boy away, I stayed slumped in the back alley for a long time, resting.
But I couldn't sit there forever, so I eventually pushed myself up. Then, I screamed at the sky.
"I'm going to go to the Bard and expose everything you did! I'll make the Bard write it in the chat and broadcast it to the whole damn world! You lunatic! You crazy bastard!"
After screaming curses at the top of my lungs, my miserable mood improved slightly.
One after another, I stopped by a clothing store to buy a new outfit, bought a meal at an inn, and collapsed onto the bed in my room.
I didn't sleep. With the Doctor still trapped in my subspace, sleep was entirely out of the question, nor did I feel capable of closing my eyes anyway.
It took the Doctor ten hours to emerge from my farm. He must have completely trashed the place while frantically searching for me, eventually figuring out my secret.
"To think it's possible to exit while leaving a guest behind. Your subspace is really growing on me."
I stood keeping a very safe distance from him. The Doctor was slower and clunkier than me anyway. He was only agile when performing his 'surgeries'.
Since I boldly made it clear that I had absolutely no intention of ever stepping back in there with him, the match was a draw.
"You failed the moment you tried to capture me alive."
Because I'm never accepting your challenge again. I'll be on my guard a hundred times over.
The Doctor's lips twitched as he pulled his mask back over his face. Just like when he first appeared, he turned around and walked away without an ounce of lingering regret.
---
A few days ago.
"Let's go."
The farmer snapped aggressively. The Doctor dragged the farmer straight in.
When entering the subspace, there was always a fleeting 1 to 2-second window of blindness caused by the unique, soft light that enveloped them. In that brief moment before the senses returned, the Doctor was already positioned behind the farmer's back.
The Doctor drove a syringe full of anesthesia straight into the nape of the farmer's neck.
A mere 4 minutes and 54 seconds.
It was an incredibly short timeframe, just brief enough to ensure the farmer wouldn't realize he had been unconscious upon waking up. The Doctor hoisted the farmer onto the operating table.
...Once the surgery was completed, the Doctor propped the farmer back up so it would seem as though he was encountering the operating room for the very first time. The farmer opened his eyes and looked around the room.
After several days of battling, the farmer utilized the anomaly of his farm, his subspace to catch the Doctor off guard and escape.
Thus, the match ended in a draw... But did it really?
It merely 'looked' like a draw.
The Doctor, Hester, ruffled his colorful hair with his hand. He muttered to the Alchemist, the co-owner of his subspace and someone he considered to be an extension of himself.
"You really are a crazy bastard. You're the first person I've seen crazier than me."
'Grab the farmer and anesthetize him the moment he crosses into the subspace'. That had been the Alchemist's idea.
The Alchemist giggled.
"That's my line. You're far more awe-inspiring than I am."
To slice open a part of the farmer's body, insert something, and suture it back up, all in under five minutes.
The farmer knew absolutely nothing. That the sparse droplets of blood on the operating table and the scalpel. Blood still so fresh that it was warm... was actually his own.
"What a pity. I gave him a very real hint in that first operating room."
---
Key <--- Inside the patient's body
---
Because the true key to escaping me is inside your body, the patient.
Recalling the 'gift' he had left for the farmer, the Doctor happily splayed his fingers and stretched his hands.
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