Chapter 132
Crash!
Kalt, who arrived at the hospital located near the port, rushed inside, pushing the door so violently it seemed as though it would break.
Behind him was Lionel, carried on a stretcher.
“He has a gunshot wound to the head! Please take a look at him quickly!”
Blood was matted in Lionel’s pitch-black hair.
At Kalt’s shout, a doctor wearing a white gown came running from the inside. Upon confirming Lionel’s face, the doctor’s face turned pale.
“Isn’t this Duke Valheim……! F-First, come this way!”
His panic was brief. Waving his hand, the doctor ran ahead, and Lionel was soon moved to a pure white bed in the treatment room.
“Please wait here.”
Along with the doctor’s brief instruction, bundles of fresh gauze and medicine bottles were brought into the treatment room one after another.
Blood-stained gauze was put into a bin and brought back out, and new gauze went in again, after time had passed so much that one wouldn’t even know how many times it was repeated.
Around the time the angle of the light seeping through the window in the hospital hallway began to slowly tilt, the door to the treatment room opened and the doctor appeared.
Sweat was beaded on his forehead, and faint red stains were spreading at the tips of his sleeves.
“Fortunately, the bullet did not penetrate the skull head-on.”
He said that whether Lionel instinctively twisted his body upon hearing the gunshot, he miraculously avoided a fatal injury.
The news delivered by the doctor was quite positive, but on the other hand, it was not entirely a relief either.
“However, the amount of blood loss was too great. If it had been just a little later, it could have been…… dangerous.”
Kalt gasped for breath.
“For now, the bleeding has stopped, but I think we should move him to a hospital room first to monitor his condition. There is also a risk of infection.”
Beside the bed where Lionel was moved in the hospital room, a glass bottle was hanging.
The transparent liquid contained in the glass bottle was slowly flowing into his arm along a slender tube.
The white bandage wrapped around his head contrasted with his pitch-black hair, making its presence stand out remarkably.
“It will probably…… take some time until he recovers consciousness.”
***
However, contrary to the doctor’s words that it might take several days to regain consciousness, Lionel opened his eyes in the hospital room early the next morning.
Lionel intentionally inhaled and exhaled slowly at the sharp smell of disinfectant that swept through his airway.
His consciousness was cloudy because of the painkillers.
“Colonel! Dodge!”
With that shout from Kalt, he definitely felt the strength drain from his entire body.
But why.
Why did he open his eyes again.
A deep disappointment spread through Lionel’s cloudy light blue eyes.
It was a gaze as if resenting the fact that he was forcibly pulled up from death to life.
However, that was only for a moment.
Inside his head where intact thinking was impossible, the scenes he had seen right before collapsing rose and intermingled.
Platinum hair fluttering above the deck.
As that afterimage overlapped beneath the faint lamp on the ceiling of the hospital room, soon an eager desire stronger than even the longing for death encroached upon Lionel’s mind.
Agnes.
Even in a hazy state of consciousness, that name that could never be forgotten clearly came to mind.
He had to check. Whether what he saw was truly Agnes.
That single purpose settled clearly at the center of his scattered consciousness.
Lionel’s lips slowly parted.
“……Agnes is-,”
Kalt, who had been leaning against the wall of the hospital room with his head bowed, snapped his head up as he heard Lionel’s voice.
Having sent the squad members back, he was standing guard over the hospital room alone.
“Colonel?”
Lionel, who until a moment ago was lying down with a pale face as if all his blood had drained out, was already raising his upper body as if nothing had happened.
The bed creaked and moaned.
Kalt quickly approached and tried to lay Lionel back down.
“Colonel! You must not move yet. You suffered a gunshot wound to the head.”
“……?”
However, Lionel’s eyes were not properly focused.
It was a face that did not even recognize that right now, this space was a hospital.
Lionel lowered his empty gaze slowly, as if he knew nothing at all.
Come to think of it, he felt like he had heard a gunshot before collapsing.
Was that fired toward him.
However, because that was a fact that was not particularly important, it was quickly pushed out of Lionel’s interest.
The conversation with Kalt evaporated from Lionel’s mind in an instant.
Instead, only a single question rose clearly.
“According to the doctor, you bled too much. That means you must take a rest.”
“I think…… I saw Agnes.”
“Pardon? You mean Lady Agnes?”
At the unexpected sound, Kalt’s grip that was holding onto Lionel loosened.
In front of Kalt’s eyes, the face of the ticket collector who was splattering spit while frantically excited, saying he saw the Duchess, flashed past.
In the end, by a hair’s breadth, he could not stop the departure of the ship bound for Marsen.
However, what if. What if the Duchess was truly aboard that ship……?
While that short assumption shook Kalt’s judgment, Lionel’s hand moved.
Lionel roughly pulled out the needle that was stuck in the back of his hand.
The blood vessel on the back of his hand burst, and blood red blood dripped *drip-drip* onto the hospital room floor.
“……I have to check.”
Lionel stubbornly stepped down from the bed.
Instantly, a pain as if the inside of the back of his head was splitting open surged in. A sharp pain of a different dimension from previous headaches caused cold sweat to seep out on Lionel’s forehead.
However, he clenched his teeth. And then he moved his steps as foolishly and stubbornly as could be.
Every time he barely took a step, blood drops dripped *drip-drip* from the back of Lionel’s hand, following his steps.
Furthermore, whether the sutured area had burst from the sudden movement, red blood was seeping out once again into the bandage wrapped around his head.
Even so, Lionel practically dragged his heavy body and finally opened the hospital room door and stepped into the hallway.
He was in a posture as if he were truly going to run to the pier.
Only then did Kalt snap back to his senses, and in a flurry, he chased after Lionel and left the hospital room.
“Colonel!”
In the end, without being able to get away from the front of the hospital room, Lionel was caught by Kalt.
“Please go inside! I will look into Lady Agnes’s whereabouts!”
At those words, Lionel’s steps finally stopped.
“……You will look into it.”
As if signaling that Lionel was not in his right mind, the voice asking back was slow. His pronunciation was also somewhat slurried.
“Yes. A report came in that someone resembling Lady Agnes was seen. I will check it. So—”
The moment he heard those words. Lionel’s gaze trembled ever so finely.
That there was someone else besides himself who saw Agnes.
That single sentence allowed a ray of hope to seep through the tautly tightened tension.
Only then did the razor-sharp obsession in Lionel’s eyes soften ever so briefly.
The moment the possibility that it might not be too late yet filled that spot instead of the compulsion that he must check.
Lionel’s knees buckled *clack*.
Like a doll whose strings were cut, his firm body lost strength in a single moment and leaned forward.
“……!”
When the startled Kalt hurriedly supported Lionel, his eyelids were already firmly closed once again.
Even if this was a possibility that would end in frustration yet again.
As if the mere fact that he could harbor the thought once more that Agnes might be alive was enough for him.
“Colonel?”
“…….”
Confirming that Lionel had lost consciousness, Kalt barely supported him and laid him back on the bed.
The firmly closed eyelids seemed to show that the consciousness he had forcibly held up had collapsed along with relief.
As if his brief opening of his eyes was a miracle, after that, Lionel could not regain his senses for several days.
His body temperature, which once began to rise, showed no signs of coming down.
The wet towel placed on his forehead quickly became lukewarm, and beneath the bandages that were changed several times, scorching heat seeped through as it was.
Perhaps due to the headache medicine he had been misusing all this time, the prescribed painkillers and antipyretics did not show as much effect as expected.
Because of that, as the days changed, Lionel’s consciousness sank deeper and deeper beneath a deep sleep.
“……Ne…… s.”
Sometimes, between Lionel’s cracked lips, a breath that sounded like calling someone’s name leaked out while delirious with fever.
However, that syllable could not become distinct in the end.
The cut-off syllable was crushed by the heat and vanished into the air.
Even so, only the face of Lionel with his eyes closed did not look like as much of a hell as when his eyes were open.
His closed eyelids, which occasionally t
rembled faintly, even looked quite peaceful.
Just like a person walking through a time period where they have never experienced loss.
However, the moment Lionel opens his eyes again, this peace would shatter into pieces.
