The Safe Zone Hospital.
By then, the hospital was packed. Wounded people filled the halls, and doctors and nurses hurried everywhere.
With the war over, large numbers of wounded soldiers from the front lines had been given basic treatment and sent to the rear. The hospital's limited beds had long since run out, and many more casualties had even been temporarily housed in a nearby shopping mall.
Yet even in a field hospital, wounded officers and soldiers were treated very differently.
In a VIP room, a young man lay on a hospital bed, surrounded by people. Some were martial artists; the rest were high-ranking government officials.
"How's the situation?" asked the deputy mayor, who had come to visit on behalf of the city government.
"It's too early to tell," said a middle-aged doctor in his forties, choosing his words carefully. The power was out, and many of the machines couldn't be used, so they couldn't examine the patient in detail. "From our preliminary diagnosis, there shouldn't be anything seriously wrong with him. He seems perfectly healthy!"
At that, the deputy mayor couldn't help glancing at the nurse beside the bed. She was clutching a blood-drawing needle and sliding it futilely and desperately over the young man's arm. The corner of his mouth twitched. Healthy was an understatement. The guy was a freak.
The burly, sweating nurse was on the verge of a breakdown.
She'd been working on the front lines for over twenty years. She'd stuck needles into arms of every sort: young and old, men and women, ugly and handsome, ordinary people and martial artists. What kind of person hadn't she seen?
If all those arms had been cut off and joined together, they might not have circled the Earth, but they could have gone around the Safe Zone.