I laid out the facts for Tokuma—brief, clinical, and bone-dry. I detailed the point of contact, the enemy count, and exactly how our unit had been split. There was no tremor in my voice, no desperate questions about rescuing Akame.
My mind held only a single, driving rhythm: The scrolls are delivered. The mission is complete. Now... the arm.
Tokuma listened with an impenetrable expression, his gaze flickering only once toward my mangled forearm. His Byakugan, no doubt, saw things beneath the surface that I couldn't even imagine.
"Dismissed. To the medical wing," he barked at the orderlies.
When they led me into the sterile block, the sharp, biting stench of antiseptics hit me like a physical blow. An elderly Iryonin took one look at what remained of my right arm beneath the tattered bandages and unleashed a long, vitriolic string of curses.
"Idiots..." he hissed, his palms igniting with a thick, toxic-green light as he activated his healing chakra.
"Who thought it was a good idea to fuse the skin without repairing the deep tissue first? You've got knots in your tenketsu, boy. Another two hours of this 'treatment' and we'd be sawing it off at the elbow to stop the chakra necrosis."
He poked a finger unceremoniously into my numb forearm. I watched him with total detachment. There was no pain—the soldier pills were still holding the line, turning my body into a foreign, broken instrument.
"War pills..." The doctor grimaced in disgust, peering into my pupils. "Do you have any idea how hard your body is redlining right now? You can't feel it, but your heart is hammering at two hundred beats. As soon as those pills wear off, a wave of pain is going to hit you so hard you'll bite your own tongue off."
I simply stared at him, waiting for him to get to work. I didn't care about his lectures. I only cared about regaining the use of my hand.
"Just heal it, please," I said shortly.
"Heal it, he says..." he mocked, preparing a heavy syringe filled with a cloudy, bluish fluid.
"I'm injecting a blocker now to put you into a deep sleep. I have to open the arm and redo everything from scratch. You won't survive the process conscious, even with those pills in you. If you ever want to hold a kunai with this claw again—shut up and sleep."
He didn't wait for my consent. The needle sank into the vein below my elbow, and I felt a rush of glacial ice surge through my blood. The world began to lose its edges with terrifying speed. The doctor's silhouette blurred into a green smear; the distant voices of Gai and Genma on the neighboring cots dissolved into an indecipherable hum.
Finally, was my last coherent thought before my consciousness plummeted into the heavy, silent void of a medicated coma.
An indeterminate amount of time later…
I opened my eyes. The ceiling of the medical bay, carved directly into the rock, pressed down with a leaden grayness. The first thing I felt was a monstrous weight on the right side of my body, as if a granite boulder had been lashed to my shoulder.
I slowly shifted my gaze to my arm. It was wrapped tight in bandages from my fingertips to my shoulder, and atop the dressings, stabilization seals pulsed with a faint, pale blue light. The arm rested on a specialized soft brace, secured firmly with leather straps.
Alive? The thought was dry and fleeting.
I closed my eyes, concentrating. I needed to check the only thing that mattered. I attempted to guide a thin thread of chakra from my core, down through the shoulder, past the elbow, and toward the hand.
Back in the forest, this had felt like trying to force sand through a clogged pipe—nothing but pain, blockages, and total silence at the far end. Now, it was different. The energy moved... not perfectly, but it moved. It flowed in fits and starts, stumbling over invisible hurdles and echoing with a dull, throbbing ache at the rupture sites, but it reached its destination.
The pathways the old Iryonin had "re-stitched" by hand responded with a faint prickling. The chakra-conducting tracts were no longer a mangled mess; they felt like a mended net—coarse, but functional.
"Don't overdo it," a raspy voice drifted from the side.
The old man was sitting in a chair, leafing through a journal. Deep shadows were carved beneath his eyes.
"I've restored the main lines," he continued without looking up. "Your little friend and her 'fusing' technique left a mountain of scar tissue on the channels themselves. Your chakra will flow better than it did when you crawled in here, but forget about complex techniques or explosive bursts for the next few months. If you overload that arm now, it will quite literally pop from the inside."
I tried to twitch my fingers. Beneath the bandages, there was a ghost of a movement. My index and middle fingers responded first, though they felt alien, as if I were wearing thick, heavy gloves.
"Understood," I said, my voice sounding like the creak of a rusted door.
I let my head sink back into the pillow. The arm was saved—at least for now—as a tool. That was all that concerned me. The cold, calculating clarity of the pills was slowly being replaced by a crushing, human exhaustion, but there was no joy. Only the realization: I was still in the game.
"Where are the others?" I asked, glancing at the empty cots.
"Resting in the general wards. A couple of days, and you'll be discharged too."