Medical Floor

Thud

Stella landed several meters away. The palm of her right hand was filled with second-degree burns and a little trail of smoke was coming out of it. The rest of her arm was broken from her hand up to the elbow, and rapidly growing blood stains were already appearing on her clothes all over it caused by the bone shards.

She remained conscious for a couple of seconds before inevitably passing out.

******

When Stella woke up, she found herself in the middle of a white room. Her whole body was stiff and numb, and trying to move even caused her a little bit of pain.

'Where am I?' she thought, still half asleep.

She tried to get up, however, a stabbing pain coming from her right arm stopped her.

"Ouch!" she exclaimed.

When she looked to her right she saw her right arm covered in a black cast with two vials going into it.

'Yeah, right,' she thought as she remembered her training with Executioner Leywin.

At that moment, a nurse entered the room.

"Good morning," the nurse greeted with a little bow.

"How much time was I asleep?"

"Your arm sustained extremely serious injuries so we had to induce a coma to speed up the healing process as much as possible. You have been asleep for two days."

"But my arm still hurts."

"That's only natural, the healing process is not complete, though it should be completely healed by tomorrow morning. The anesthetic and recovery rate booster agents should do all the remaining work so you can resume your activities immediately," the nurse said while signaling both vials coming out of Stella's cast. "Still, for today just focus on getting rid of the numbness and stiffness that you might be feeling all over your body right now. If you don't have any questions I'll be taking my leave."

"Thanks," Stella said and the nurse made a small bow before leaving the room.

Stella tried to get up from the bed once again and sure enough this time she didn't any pain coming from her right arm.

"The anesthetic agent already started working its magic," she poked her right arm with her left hand, "I can't feel anything up to my shoulder."

After changing into her uniform she left the room. Instead of opening the digital map on her ID card, since it was the first time she had been to the medical floor, she curiously checked out the corridor as she made her way through it, searching for a nearby elevator.

The corridor itself was white and elegant with a kind of cold feeling to it, quite appropriate for a floor that was supposed to be a hospital inside the HSA tower. Every ten meters there was a door on each side of the corridor leading to a big and fancy private treatment room similar to the one Stella had woken up to.

'The first extraction should have begun yesterday, shouldn't there be more people here?' Stella wondered.

All the rooms she had checked had been completely empty and the corridor was also deserted.

'I thought the first phase would've kept the medical floor more active. Well, I guess that only means that this year there were very few injured participants, that's good,' she thought.

She continued walking down the deserted hall. After a couple of minutes, she arrived at a door at the end of the hallway. Once she opened it…

Chaos.

On the other side of the door, she was met with a big hall in complete chaos. Numerous nurses were running around trying to treat the several participants lying on gurneys all around the hall, clearly an ad-hoc solution to the lack of proper medical beds to treat the number of injured participants. However, the number of injured participants apparently even exceeded the number of available gurneys since a lot of them were just sitting on the floor or leaning against the walls.

White curtains partially surrounded each gurney as a way to separate the participants from one another. Still, through the separations between curtains, Stella was able to see some of them. To her relief, all the participants Stella was able to catch a glance of, including the ones who didn't have a gurney, seemed to have non-life-threatening injuries.

However, some of the espers in the hall wished that wasn't the case. Due to the fact that their injuries weren't critical, the medical attention they received wasn't the best, this was in order to reduce expenses since the HSA had to treat thousands of injured participants. As a result, the anesthetic agents they were supplied barely lessened the pain from their injuries.

Stella continued walking through the hall filled with screams of pain until she arrived at another hallway with private treatment rooms on each side, though, they were less fancy and well-equipped than the room had woken up in.

As she stole glances into the rooms she saw severely injured participants sleeping with several devices connected to them, and bloody bandages or cast on various parts of their bodies. Inside some of the rooms, she saw nurses currently treating and monitoring other participants and even participants undergoing surgery done by robots that hovered above their unconscious bodies.

A nurse who was running down the hallway suddenly stopped after she recognized Stella's Black Guard uniform.

"Uhm, miss?" She said, taking Stella out of her thoughts.

"S-sorry, I just looking around," Stella instinctively thought that the nurse was trying to tell her that she shouldn't be on that part of the medical floor.

"Oh, there's no problem at all. It's just that higher-level officers never come to this part of the medical floor so I just thought that you might be trying to find the high-grade medical wing."

"High-grade medical wing?"

"That's the medical floor's section you should always go to, it will provide you with the best possible attention suited to your status."

"My status?" Stella asked and the nurse signaled the Black Guard logo on her uniform.

'So the room where I woke up was part of the high-grade medical wing. But it seemed so deserted and they surely are in need of more space here,' Stella pondered.

"You seem to be a little overrun here, why don't you make use of the high-grade medical wing? There's a lot of available space," she asked.

"Oh, we would never do that. That area is specially reserved for high-level officers or Black Guard operators. Regular nurses such as myself are not even allowed to enter since the high-grade medical wing has its own specialized personnel."

"I see… I won't take any more of your time then, could you just point me to the nearest elevator."

The nurse told her how to get to the nearest elevator, then, after bowing to Stella, she left in a hurry.

As she was leaving the medical floor she stopped for a moment after she passed by a room, thinking she saw a white-haired boy resembling Seth. However, she quickly discarded the idea and continued walking.