Morning light nudged Harold awake.
For a moment, he simply lay there, staring at the uneven ceiling of his cave, the old grooves etched deep into the stone.
His arms had gone numb beneath his head, and when he sat up, his shoulders cracked like brittle sticks.
The silence was heavier than the night before.
No rustle of tentacles.
No sharp sigh of exasperation.
No one at all.
"Right," he muttered, dragging himself upright. "Back to the original plan."
The words didn't feel like triumph.
they felt like surrender.
But he wasn't stupid.
He knew food would run out eventually, no matter how he rationed.
He knew he couldn't huddle in this cave forever, sulking.
If he couldn't brave the city yet, then he needed to make himself strong enough that when the time came, he'd walk in without shaking in his boots.
That meant hunting.
It wasn't glorious.
It wasn't noble.
But beasts didn't complain about his bandages or storm off when they could stand again.
They bled, they broke, and they gave him practice.
He pressed his palms together and rubbed them, letting the warmth bleed into his skin.
"Alright. Hunt, heal, repeat. Just keep grinding."
The resolve was thin, like paper stretched across a frame, but it was better than nothing.
He shuffled toward the cave mouth, rubbing his eyes as sunlight slashed across his face.
Then he froze.
Something lay just beyond the threshold.
For a half-second, his brain told him it was a bundle of rags, maybe the remains of one of his traps dragged here by some animal.
Then he saw the blood.
And the hand.
Harold stumbled forward, heart jackhammering in his chest.
It wasn't a bundle of rags. It was a person.
A person, sprawled face-down across the rocky ground, one arm outstretched as though they'd been crawling for the door before collapsing.
Their clothes—what little remained of them—were shredded, dark with dried blood.
Cuts, gashes, bruises bloomed across exposed skin.
He couldn't even tell if they were human or something else.
"Oh, no. No, no, no…"
He dropped to his knees, shaking them by the shoulder. Their skin was clammy, too cold.
When he pressed his fingers to their neck, a faint flutter of a pulse answered.
Weak, but there.
Adrenaline cut through his sluggish morning fog like lightning.
His "plan" of hunting and practicing on beasts evaporated in an instant.
Because now he had a patient.
Without thinking, Harold slid his arms under the stranger's torso.
They were lighter than he expected, frighteningly so, bones and sinew where muscle should've been.
Blood smeared his shirt as he hauled them up, staggering back into the cave.
"Hang on. Just hang on."
He laid them across the stone bed—his bed, recently reclaimed—and for a flicker of a moment, resentment tried to bubble up.
He'd only just gotten it back.
But it died just as fast.
Beds were for patients.
That was the rule, wasn't it?
"Okay. Diagnosis first," he muttered, already shifting into the rhythm he'd carved with Jini. "See what I'm dealing with, then patch you up enough not to bleed out."
His hands moved almost automatically, brushing hair—short and damp with sweat—back from the stranger's face.
Alien.
Definitely alien.
Pale skin, slack jaw, shallow breaths rattling past cracked lips.
Their clothes looked like some kind of padded leather armor, though most of it had been shredded to ribbons.
He forced himself to stop staring and pressed his palm to their chest holding them down as his eyes empowered by his diagnosis skill began to make their way across the patients body.
Multiple sites glowed informing Harold that this new patient had a few dozen injuries in total, far worse off than Jini had origionally been.
Quickly he began to sort through them all.
Laceration. x27
Contusion. x26
Fractures: Ribs x3, Both legs, one arm, collarbone, jaw.
One after the other after he diagnosed them the lights vanished from his vision but even still, more lights remained underneath.
Not surface injuries but damage below the skin.
Internal bleeding in three seperate location, torso, thigh, and lower abdomen.
Harold's stomach dropped.
This wasn't like Jini's clean break or shallow cuts.
This was bad.
Really bad.
"Alright. Okay. We can work with this. Just… don't die on me in the next five minutes, okay?"
He scrambled to summon forth his supplies—first up was his bent iron needle, and thread.
he had quite a few slashes and gashed to suture back together.
Even as pressing as the internal bleeding was, the fact that the blood stayed within the body was still better than the amount pouring out of these wounds being lost.
So with unsteady hands he dove into the work.
Quickly poking the needle through her skin and drawing the thread behind it.
One wound stiched and sealed, without a thought he retracted the needle and the thread snapped holding in place, allowing him to quickly move on to the next.
One.
Two.
...
Twenty.
minutes passed until finally all the external bleeding wounds were sealed up tight.
Then Harold could move on to worry about the bigger problem, the internal bleeding.
Unable to do much with his system tools, Harold did a quick scavenge of the warriors body, only to find a simple dagger like blade tuck alonside their leg in their boot.
Drawing it out, without a moment to sterilize it, Harold dragged the blade along the first site in the victims leg, an outpouring of masses blood began filing out.
With a flash one of his hands held the simple reed and bulb, moving with as much speed as he could manage to suction out the pooling blood, allowing a better view into the now open site, seeing a severed artery spilling large amount of blood into the cavity.
with one hand suctioning, while the other stabbed and pierced the two squiggly pieces together.
it wasnt perfect and blood still trickled out even after he was finished but compared to before this was manageable and would no doubt clot up in due time.
Finished with the first site, he made sure the wound cavity was clear before using his needle to stitch up the wound he himself had made to seal the patient up.