Burning Bright

Doctor

"I... I'm... going to save her life...?" Mutou said as Akira stared him right in the eye, holding onto his shirt.

"Yeah, that's right!" Akira said. "You'll do the operation!!"

"Wh-What are you saying... Were you listening to me!?" Mutou asked anxiously. "It's not that I won't do it, but I can't...!! M-My hands are shaking... and I vomit upon seeing blood. There's no way I can operate—" Akira pulled him up by his shirt.

"We're asking you because you're the only one who can do it!!" Akira said desperately. "I would have done it long ago if I could!! Yarai said he would do it... He isn't going to do it because he's confident about it. He knows there's a slim chance of success. But there's no other way... If we do nothing, she will die!! Are you fine with that...! A lot of people died here already. A lot of lives vanished. We couldn't save them. But we might be able to save one this time! Please, Mutou-san... You're the only one... who can pull that off...!!"

"I... I... I'm..." Mutou said, looking away from him.

"Geez, what a pathetic man... you can't even face your dead son like this..." Yashiro said. Mutou and Akira looked at him.

"Yashiro-san...?" Akira said.

"I'm sure your son is crying on the other side. Poor boy. I mean, he died so early," Yashiro said.

"Wh-What did you say...!?" Mutou said angrily.

"You don't get it? He believed you were the best doctor in the world, right? But here you are all depressed... Don't you think he would be sad seeing your current self, who's abandoning a patient...?" Yashiro asked.

"...!!" Mutou gasped, looking horrified. He remembered how proudly his son had said that he thought he was the best doctor in the world, how he excitedly said he wanted to become a great doctor like him when he grew up. Tears spilled from Mutou's eyes. "Fuh... Fuah..." he cried, shaking. "Uhh... I... What...What should I do..."

"Try to be one once more... the best doctor in the world, who your son was so proud about..." Yashiro said.

"You're safe now, Sensei," Segawa told Kurusu-sensei while she, Matsumoto, and Shigeno watched over her. "There's a real doctor."

"Hah, uhh..." Kurusu groaned, in a lot of pain.

"Just hang in there a bit longer—" Segawa said.

While they were watching the patient, Mutou was supervising the preparations for the surgery. They were boiling a very large amount of water.

"Five minutes after it's boiling, right... should be done by now," Mutou said. "Get it down from the fire and let it cool."

"Yeah," Akira said, and he and Suzuki carefully removed the hot containers from the flames. "What are you using it for? All this boiled water..."

"I'm going to wash the insides of her stomach," Mutou said.

"Eh? The insides?" Akira said.

"The treatment for 'perforation ulcer of the duodenum' is to open the stomach and repair the perforated part. For that we need to wash out the blood and stomach contents that leaked out through perforation. Normally you use isotonic saline solution warmed up to forty degrees Celsius for that... but that's asking too much here. So we're boiling the river water to sterilize it and use it instead."

"I... I see..." Akira said.

"Old man! We prepared the tools like you told us," Yarai said, walking up with Torako, carrying all the 'surgical implements' on a large leaf.