Chapter 44

Sinking into the couch in the break room, I breathed a sigh of relief and closed my eyes. Dealing with patients like these always requires not only physical strength but also mental fortitude.

"Ryo-kun!"

Turning my head and opening my right eye slightly, I saw a familiar face — this girl and I attended courses together.

"Hey, Yuzu-chan," I waved in response.

"How's your latest patient?"

"Better, another week and we can discharge her, I hope," settling in more comfortably, I fully opened my eyes to avoid offending the girl with neglect. "Honestly, in cases like this, you get more tired than if you were treating severe wounds."

"What can you do? Kunoichi used to lie for a couple of months before they could be discharged, and even then, they didn't always return to duty. But now, with your help, they're handling mental traumas in just two weeks!" the intern smiled, sitting down next to me. "And honestly — I understand them, with such a sweetheart nearby."

"Just don't get too touchy, I'm too tired and want to rest during my break," I leaned back a bit.

Yeah, thinking about practice, I never thought I'd end up playing the role of a psychiatrist on top of everything. More precisely, about a month after starting full-time work, I was assigned a rather complex case. Complex not in terms of injuries and such, but in terms of communication with the patient.

We have a lot of kunoichi in our twenty-thousand-strong staff, and cases of rape occur quite often — at least once or twice a month. Risks of the profession. Mostly genin and chunin suffer, but the very first case turned out to be quite rare — a full-fledged jonin was caught by missing-nin and, oddly enough, survived.

Usually, victims are killed on the spot (as I learned from conversations among hospital staff), but the most beautiful ones are sometimes left alive — the hand didn't rise, I suppose. So they sent me to her as a test to see how I would behave and to gauge her reaction — she didn't let men near her. That's when it turned out that they didn't perceive me as a "man," and my boyish face and young age had a positive effect on the victim. Motherly instinct?

And considering my superficial knowledge of psychology, the role of a shoulder to cry on along with a cuddle buddy was assigned to me. Which predictably led to a rapid improvement in the kunoichi's condition. Since then, I've been accustomed to being put in charge of such patients, as the hospital staff joked — working as a red plush teddy bear. However, the hospital is mostly staffed by women, and I'm considered their "little darling," so nothing new.

Despite the fact that such cases are quite emotionally taxing, the end result still brings immense satisfaction. Seeing broken and shattered women bloom again and cope with the tragedy they've endured — it's an incomparable pleasure! And the fact that a beauty kissed me for the first time in my life can't be counted as a downside!

Of course, the profession of a shinobi prepares you for possible risks, including such, but even if the kunoichi withstands what happened and doesn't change her behavior, fear still arises inside, both of recurrence and of the opposite sex. That's what we treat, along with regular wounds.

By the way, all medical personnel are given an informal order to remove pregnancies without notifying women — there were cases of deterioration after such news, up to suicide attempts. I can't say it was difficult for me, but there was some unease. I don't think I could have gotten rid of an already formed child with such cold-bloodedness.

In general, working at the main hospital, I began to understand the cynicism and dark humor of doctors — when you deal with the underbelly of human society, you start to see things differently. Unfortunately, not only the wounded end up with us.

Organ transplants, which pose no special problems for an experienced medic, abortion, victims of fights between shinobi (their own), treatment of the consequences of alcohol and drug poisoning and addictions, correction of the psyche of children who have suffered psychological trauma from witnessing murder, and similar cases.

Of course, not all of them are visible, but a sufficiently observant person can easily put two and two together, drawing the right conclusion from the slips, unspoken words, and overheard chatter of doctors. Oh yes, I forgot to mention the dirty laundry of clans and the almost complete absence of prohibitions for shinobi, especially clan ones.

You could say that ordinary people and shinobi are two different branches of human development, with the former being quite clear, while the latter, despite greater physical perfection, turned out to be morally closer to a pack of predators.

Hence the absence of some moral taboos, in particular regarding the choice of partners — the age difference and even the degree of kinship are almost not taken into account. Especially in clans.

Given that most clans conduct selection to strengthen the born shinobi and consolidate the kekkei genkai in future generations, pairs like brother and sister don't surprise anyone. Especially in the Uchiha and Hyuga clans. And it's all because of the presence of chakra in shinobi — thanks to it, genetic monsters are not born at all, children grow up healthy and hardly ever get sick.

As I learned from scrolls on the subject, during the formation of the embryo, a huge amount of chakra released by the parents contributes to the correction of various defects, and the constant influence of the mother's chakra throughout pregnancy allows the fetus to use even someone else's chakra for proper formation.

Overall, thanks to the development of chakra, shinobi recover from wounds about ten times faster than ordinary people, even without kekkei genkai like mine. Of course, there are also mental traumas, but that's where the Yamanaka and Uchiha with their memory manipulation techniques come in, but that's another story.

True, the latter rarely go into medicine with an activated Sharingan, but there are still two of them. Women. It's a rarity for this clan in itself, as is the profession of a medic.