"Azoff!" Tyrell speaks with a deep voice.
"Yes Sir!"
"I would ask you to take Coogler with you and go to the Medical Hall to get treatment for your severe injuries." Tyrell said..
"Okay!" Azoff replied. But Coogler was silent, he was highly disturbed by the outcomes of the battle.
Azoff turns around and opens the door behind him, before walking out of the room he puts his hands on Coogler's left shoulder, indicating him to go out to the Medical Hall.
Coogler turns around, still silent, walks out of the room, Azoff closes the door and walks down deeper to the Medical Hall.
The 'Safe House Medical Bay', as written on the huge sign board hanging out at the walls above the main door of the Medical Hall.
The Hall was carved out at the safe house's deepest level, and was a cacophony of quiet horror, staffed by a large medical team of about 50 doctors and more than 100 nurses.
The wounded men, those whose bodies had survived the slaughter, lay on the beds all over the Hall, their silence broken only by shallow, ragged breathing.
In a small, relatively clean corner, Major Coogler and Major Azoff had claimed a space for themselves. Azoff sat on an empty bed, his face a mask of cold, unbreakable focus.
He then looks around the room, gets up and walks to the right corner, picks up a piece of old rag, dips it completely in a bowl of water, which was on a table nearby and then walks back to his bed and sits down on it.
With that small, wet old rag, Azoff began methodically cleaning his sword. He wiped the blade, which still had thick, dark, dried blood on it. The light scraping sound was loud in the quiet area.
It was a mechanical, controlling act cleaning the evidence of the chaos to clean that brutal memory from his own mind.
Coogler, meanwhile, stood against the bare concrete wall, his posture rigid but his eyes utterly vacant.
He stared at a crack in the wall that wasn't there, lost in a rapid-fire loop of memory: the monster's wet, horrible rasp, the feel of the line snapping behind him, the impossible speed of the claws, and the final, choking sounds of men he had sworn to protect.
The silence between the two Majors was not comfortable; it was the heavy, shared burden of command, trauma, and failure, a bond forged in the black oil of a hundred shared deaths.
A young woman named Paili Elara, no more than twenty, who had been bandaging a sergeant's mangled arm, suddenly froze.
She was a nurse, not a soldier, wearing a white dress, and she had spent the last hour wading knee-deep in the returned survivors, carefully scrubbing the blood from their wounds.
She looked down at her own hands, still stained dark and wet, and began to tremble.
"Four hundred," she whispered, her voice barely a breath.
She gripped the gauze so tightly her knuckles went white, "Almost four hundred. Only twenty-five of them were able to return. The blood on my hands… it's almost four hundred men."
She could no longer hold back her emotions. Her self-control snapped, and she let out a small, mournful cry.
She slid down the wall and curled up on the floor, weeping uncontrollably as the surgical kit fell and scattered around her. Her sadness was instant, intense, and a completely human reaction to everything.
"Why is it happening to us?" Another nurse named Liza, who had been bandaging another soldier in the same room talks to herself.
The soldier whom she was treating can see the pain in her face. He directly says, "Everything will be back to normal again!"
Liza looks at his face, suffering from the injuries but still believes to protect the town, defeat those fucking monsters.
She gives him a smile, hiding her pain behind it, as the soldier also does the same.
Across the room, another sound began. It was Private Timmer, a junior enlistee who had celebrated his eighteenth birthday just three days ago.
He was not seriously injured, but his body had reached its limit. His face, which still had a patch of the monster's drying, black blood on it, was twisted into an expression of intense, frantic terror, not pain.
"No! Stop pulling! Don't pull him!" Timmer screamed, waving his arms and shouting. He was reliving the terrifying memory of seeing his sergeant being ripped to pieces by those monsters.
The scream was a frantic, wounded animal noise, a testament to the horrifying fact that while his bones and flesh had survived the day, his mind had been shattered and left behind on the bloody streets of the Ratigion Colony.
Major Azoff stopped cleaning his blade, and Major Coogler remained frozen, his eyes still fixed , staring at the wall. These two Majors were the only ones left in Elyria, who could still think, plan, and stand.
Their silent composure stood as a harsh and painful contrast to the desperate grief of the few surviving soldiers, revealing the battle's devastating, final cost.
Paili, the nurse, forced herself up from the cold floor. Her body felt stiff after her intense emotional breakdown. Her face was messy with tears and dirt, but her red, teary eyes now showed a terrifying new sense of focus.
She has now begun gathering the components of the surgical kit carefully which were scattered by her. Her movements were now exact and professional.
She picked up the syringe, coiled the clean bandage, and checked the glass medicine bottles if it had any cracks on them before putting everything back in the case.
Her short, intense sadness was over. She had understood that everything's over now, and all that was left was the harsh reality, and the necessary task of survival.
She closed the case shut and then walked over to the two Majors. Major Azoff sat motionless, a dark silhouette against the bloody mess, with that wet rag which had turned into dark black piece of cloth after being continuously used to remove the blood stains, were still hanging frozen above his sword.
Major Coogler was just as still, staring blankly at the hospital wall, a man who had completely retreated into his own mind.
The nurse stopped directly in front of Azoff, forcing him to acknowledge her presence. Her voice was flat, empty of any emotion, purely professional.