Yuta and Ichigo felt both enlightened and perplexed as they left the shop in the glass room to wander the halls once more. Like before, they received stares from passersby, but now, they no longer made Yuta feel amiss. He felt recognized; he felt… seen. Considering his circumstances, that might have been the most he could have asked for at this moment in time: to be seen, and—he hoped—not be forgotten.

Yuta and Ichigo barely spoke to one another anymore; it hurt to speak, and Yuta doubted he had enough breath in his chest to form words. But they didn’t quite need them; they could speak in other ways, by exchanging nods and glances, or through weakened gestures of their oft-trembling hands.

Yuta spent a moment in one of the hallways, gently touching the arched, wormlike purasuchikku tunnels that stretched out from nearly every room’s doorway. Their surface was smooth to the touch, and slick like a polished stone. Yet it was also flimsy, yielding like cloth beneath the push of his fingertips. Even more surprising was what Yuta saw through the tunnels, and through the windows in the doors beyond them.

He saw people, but places of healing would have people in them in any era. No, what surprised him was that the people weren’t what he’d imagined they’d be.

In his era, faces and skin were enough to earn enmity. For all their differences, the peoples of Mu and Tsurentu were united in their hatred of people who looked different from them. He’d never have expected a Tsurentu hospital to serve foreigners like him and his family, yet they had. Even so, Yuta hadn’t truly grasped the implications of that fact. Only now, as he watched the dying become the dead did he begin to understand.

Men and women, people of all ages, races, and creeds—they were all here, each and every one of them wearing that same set of robes—that unbecoming affair of blue on darker blue, held together by ties at their backs. Yuta saw fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons, laid low by the dark lightning that festered beneath their skin. He saw the hapless looks, and the agonies the plague brought them. But… they were people. People, just as they always had been, even if they did live in a world whose ways Yuta could hardly fathom—and, even then, only from a distance. People, brought low by a “sickness from hell," as Ichigo called it.

At first, seeing what Mu had become, Yuta imagined that the Emperor’s great quest to conquer the New World had merely backfired, and that the conquerors had become the conquered. But now, he realized it wasn’t quite simple.

If the Tsurentu-jin of his era had become the world’s hegemon, they wouldn’t have tolerated Munine goods in their shops. They wouldn’t have tolerated “alien races” in their places of healing, either as patients or as caregivers.

And yet, here they were.

Yuta began to wonder if maybe—just maybe—something good might have come from his era’s death and destruction, after all.

They pressed on, with the going getting more and more difficult the further they went, as if they were approaching an ending. Turning down the corner at the end of the corridor brought Yuta and Ichigo to another large chamber. Chairs filled it to bursting, and people pooled inside it like a high tide in a marsh, huddling, coughing, shivering, and weeping as they awaited treatment, death, or sleep—whichever came first. A few of the people gathered noticed Yuta and Ichigo. One, in particular—a portly man in a round helmet and dark armor—stared at Ichigo with wide eyes. It seemed he’d noticed Ichigo’s scabbarded blade. That would make him one of the few that had.

The physicians here couldn’t have failed to notice the weapon. They simply must not have cared. Yuta empathized with that; he understood that feeling. Standing at the brink of death brought a kind of cleansing clarity. There was serenity in knowing there was truly nothing left to lose. It was the embrace of oblivion; the death of love; the rejection of pointless despair.

And it was evil.

The great truth of the world was that suffering turned men toward evil, not away from it. Those who survived evil and stayed or grew good did it in spite of it. The rest were crushed underfoot until their souls broke, and they accepted their suffering, first in acquiescence, then in pride.

The healers were breaking, slowly, but surely.

He wondered how long they’d last.

“Look…” Ichigo said.

Though there was noise in the background—conversation, coughing; the consuru, making their magic—Ichigo’s words hit Yuta like lightning.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The thunder came when he looked.

Several larger forms of consuru were mounted on the walls. There were two behind the counter by the wall. One was perched up in a corner of the ceiling, and two others were in the middle of the walls, on opposite sides of the room. But of these, only one caught Yuta’s imagination and made him stare and gawk. Only one had colorful images moving gracefully in its window. Only one had children gathered in front of it, sitting on the floor in a half-circle. The images moving on the consuru looked like drawings, rather than the sights of true life that Horosha had shown him. But somehow, that only made them more impactful.

Ichigo coughed. “Is that…?” he rasped.

“Little Sina,” Yuta whispered, nodding in agreement. “The betrothed of the Prince of the Winds.”

The children sitting on the floor didn’t react as Yuta and Ichigo approached them. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. But, whatever the reason, neither the children nor anyone else raised so much as a finger as the two men—one grown, one nearly so—sat down behind them and joined them in watching. The characters spoke in the Tsurentu tongue, and yet the images spoke in a language that transcended speech.

A fading memory graced Yuta’s thoughts: the face of a woman with a heart as wide as the sea, one that had meant everything to him, long, long ago. Unlike most of the faces Yuta still remembered, hers was darker in color than his own. She’d told him stories of Little Sina, the fisher-girl who’d won the heart of the Prince of Winds.

The moving images on the consuru were in a style that was strange to Yuta’s eyes, though not unpleasant. Even so, there was no mistaking the Prince’s gray coat, with its two white sashes, or the wicker sandals with which he walked on land and sea. Yuta remembered tales told with light and shadow. He remembered the tale of the Wisdom Fish, with three black stripes across his glittering red scales.

And now, he watched that story play out once more, brought to life like never before. The Prince braved the Wisdom Fish’s guts to rescue Sina from the depths of his belly.

Yuta wept softly as he watched. The little Prince’s face reminded him of… someone—someone dear to him. Sina did, too, as he was, all besotted with concern.

A voice spoke from within, telling him it wasn’t fair.

The children gathered before the moving pictures were sick and dying, and, just like before, there was nothing Yuta could do to help them, no matter how much he wanted to.

It wasn’t fair.

All that death and destruction had finally made something good, something that not just Mu and Tsurentu could be proud of, but which the whole world could enjoy.

Like with the city of tomorrow, it was a shame he wouldn’t be able to savor it.

And then something odd happened; something odd and impossible, yet also impossibly familiar. It pushed Yuta’s sorrow aside, filling him with terror and surprise. The familiarity tugged at his chin, making him turn his head and look back.

Suddenly, without the slightest sound or warning, a group of strangers appeared on the far side of the room.

People screamed. Panic erupted everywhere, but Yuta didn’t let it distract him.

The strangers were soldiers, and of a kind Yuta recognized. They belonged in this time and place as much as he or Ichigo did, which is to say, not at all.

The soldiers were decked out in arms and armor, still freshly speckled with rust, dirt, and blood. They wore metal plate armor, or corselets atop chain mail. Moisture gathered at the edges of the armor’s lames, and at the brims of their morion helmets, not too far from their paranoid stares. They even had a packhorse. The beast of burden was fully decked in a red and yellow caparison. Bags of rations, munitions, and other valuables hung from either side of its saddle. Another rifleman stood by the horse’s side, nearly as terrified as the animal beside him.

The stink of fresh musket shot split through the sickly sweet air.

One of the soldiers was a rifleman. He held his artfully decorated weapon in his hands. He was reaching for his bandolier even as Yuta stared.

Yuta saw a halberdier, a man with a two-handed axe, a pikeman, and several others.

Then came the screams—and not just the bystanders’ cries.

Most of the soldiers had appeared next to a cluster of invalids in chairs, but one soldier appeared right in the middle of one. Instantly, a pair of bodies fell to the floor—one, the soldier’s, the other, the dying man who had been seated in the chair. They’d somehow fused together, their bodies superimposed one another, and on the chair itself, where it intersected the soldier’s tasset-covered thighs. The crisscrossed mass of flesh, armor, and clothes hit the floor with a thud, its two heads and eight limbs frozen in instant death. As the body fell, it overturned an entire row of chairs, all of which had been linked to another. People were thrown onto the floor.

The rifleman by the horses screamed in terror while his companions readied their weapons. The horse clopped its hooves upon the floor, but the frightened riflemen grabbed its reins and calmed it, leaning into it with closed eyes.

Yuta tried to rise to his feet by pushing off against a nearby chair, but he felt something push down on him and hold him back. Looking up, he saw Ichigo pushing off him with one hand, while reaching for his katana with the other.

More bystanders screamed as Ichigo stepped forward.

“Hey, you Tsurentu fuck-wads,” he said, shaking his head.

“What are you doing?” Yuta said, panting for breath.

“Protecting you,” Ichigo replied.

“I have no more need for protection.”

Coughing, Ichigo glanced back over his shoulder. “But I still need a teacher,” he said. “And a friend.”

Before Yuta could do anything, the soldiers charged. Smokey spitfire from one of the rifles sent a jolt down Yuta’s spine. Fiery pain stung at his side, and then rocked through his entire body when he convulsed in a cough that drowned his gullet filled with ooze.

He fell to the ground, beside… beside the… the man with the sword. The one who fought, even though he should have run. The one whose blade licked off a stranger’s head with a crunch of bone and a splatter of bubbling red.

Yuta fell to his knees.