Time of the Blind Beast - Side Story 5

If she hadn’t been given time like now to agonize and agonize again, she might have lost to the anxiety, the fear, the pressure, and without realizing it, committed some reckless act.

Dropping even a small amount of poison into the tea, or fumbling in her panic and spilling the contents of the glass bottle somewhere on the man’s body. Even if it did not kill him outright, doing something that would injure him.

And then what ending would have come?

How would she ever bear the weight of that guilt?

Staring quietly at the faint ripples on the water’s surface, Lisanne closed the lid of the glass bottle.

She had been saved too many times before, even remembered by name as the little girl he had once briefly rescued in her childhood. No matter how she thought on it, she couldn’t possibly do such a thing to him.

Anyone who knew grace, who knew right from wrong, could never do so.

Lisanne gripped the glass bottle Akenaus had forced into her hand and approached Ezekiel.

“…Major.”

Calling to him cautiously, Lisanne prayed in her heart.

Please, let this man still remember me.

And if he opened his eyes and spoke my name…

“…Lisanne?”

I would expose all the schemes I’ve been caught up in.

“How are you here?”

I would beg him to find my family, to save me once more.

And I would tell him he was in danger now.

That his own brother was plotting to harm him.

If that was what it took, if that was the only way I could help him…

“…I have something to tell you.”

Lisanne was ready to stake her fate on another choice, one beyond the forced alternatives Akenaus had pressed into her hand.

2. Unlucky Woman

Paulina tied the handkerchief covering her nose and mouth even tighter. She knotted it so firmly that her cheeks and the bridge of her nose ached, yet the stench of rotting flesh still seeped through.

“I think I’m going to vomit.”

A student standing near the dissection table muttered to himself.

Most of the students already looked pale. It was only natural, since this was their first experience of a dissection after entering the medical department. Becoming a doctor required going through this process, but hearing that such a course existed and actually facing a corpse in front of them were worlds apart. So many new students really did vomit while watching dissections that small basins had been set out in the corners of the lab.

The moment the belly of the corpse lying on the sheet, already dark with bodily fluids, was cut open, someone could no longer hold back and rushed out of the dissection lab, gagging.

Unless it was a well-preserved mummy brought from somewhere, there was no way the cadavers supplied for practice could look intact. The human body decays more quickly than one might expect. Since there was no way to preserve it fresh, the only path to the deceased’s peaceful rest was to dissect quickly and then bury it.

Suppressing her rising nausea, Paulina forced herself closer to the dissection table. The stench grew even stronger as the distance between her and the corpse narrowed.

I should have sprayed perfume on the handkerchief beforehand.

Regret hit her, but it was already too late. Paulina held her breath to keep from inhaling the smell. If she carelessly opened her mouth to take a breath, she might well end up seeing with her own eyes the meal she had eaten that morning.

Turning her head briefly to steady her queasy stomach, Paulina unintentionally locked eyes with a man leaning casually against the wall of the dissection room. Among students worn and crumpled from endless classes and exams, often barely even washing their faces, the man in his flashy, immaculate attire stood out without question.

He smiled when their eyes met. Paulina ignored him with a blank expression and fixed her gaze back on the dissection table.

Ethan.

It was a name she despised. Anyone would feel the same if forced into a pair against their will.

Among the male students, Ethan had entered with outstanding grades, while among the female students, Paulina had ranked highest. The two were compared on every matter. At first, it was simply the mindset of having gained a strong rival, a reminder not to slack off in her studies. But such composure didn’t last long.

The few female students who had entered the male-dominated medical department, determined to prove that they were no less capable than the men and that male doctors’ ignorance of women’s bodies made female doctors all the more necessary, studied with a desperate drive and generally scored higher. The male students, seeing the women band tightly together in study, began to feel threatened. They put Ethan forward as their champion, while the female students proudly held up Paulina. Their individual grades grew into a contest of pride between the sexes.

Before she realized it, Paulina was competing with Ethan in everything. If they had shared some similarities that might have built a bond, things might have been different, but aside from their academic excellence, they had nothing in common. Paulina tied her hair carelessly, wore the same plain dark clothes, and lived buried in study. Ethan, on the other hand, fussed endlessly over his appearance and reveled in every kind of social activity. On the very first day of class, when Ethan walked into the medical lecture hall, the other new students had mistaken him for someone from another department who had wandered in by mistake.

When Paulina rubbed her dry eyes as she pored over medical texts, Ethan was reading Shakespeare’s plays. When she skipped meals and survived on a chunk of bread, he was heading to the tavern with his friends.

He even once jumped straight into a football game against another school after hearing they were short of players. That same day, after celebrating the victory by drinking all night, was the eve of exams in the medical department, while Paulina had spent the night in the library. Yet despite his careless ways, he still fought her for first and second place in grades. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t see him in a favorable light.

In a medical department where everyone else was killing themselves with study, here was a man neglecting his work to idle away his time. Could someone so frivolous really be fit to handle human lives as a doctor? Paulina, who lived buried in her books, couldn’t understand why Ethan was even in medical school at all.

At their first dissection, most students either vomited or dropped out halfway. Fewer than five students endured the stench of rot and stayed until the end. Paulina was one of them.

“You’re a girl, how can you be so tough?”

One of the senior students assisting with the dissection clicked his tongue at Paulina.

Not ladylike. Too stubborn.

She was sick of it. She had heard it constantly since admission.

What on earth does it mean to be ladylike, and why should a woman not study fiercely?

Not just Paulina but all her fellow female students shuddered at those words. They had all heard, “I didn’t expect women to be like this, you’re not attractive, why are you trying to compete with men?” Because of the constant “women, girls” remarks, even the variously individual styles of speech and dress they had shown at the entrance ceremony had all become uniform. Hard, sharp, leaving no openings, so they would not look weak or pretty.

“I’m not a woman. I’m a doctor.”

By now, it wasn’t even a new line. She replied bluntly and turned away, but then clapping stopped her in her tracks.

“That answer is excellent, Paulina. I’m not a woman, I’m a doctor… a famous saying indeed.”

It was Ethan.

Had he stayed behind all this time, just watching?

Paulina narrowed her eyes.

And on top of that, for him to clap and deliberately add such words to someone already upset—his shamelessness was downright irritating. Especially since he was one of the most notorious for neglecting his studies.

“We came here with only one goal, to study medicine, but the seniors and classmates treat us not as colleagues but as women. We are future doctors, who don’t know what patients we’ll end up treating, who swear to study hard. What’s the problem with that? We don’t see you as men, so why do you insist on seeing us as women? I can’t understand it.”

“Oh? You don’t see me as a man?” Ethan pulled a shocked expression at the strangest point.

Paulina, exasperated, shot back, “No, I don’t.”

“That’s troubling… How about we have a meal together so you can discover my charms?”

“No.”

Paulina flatly refused and strode out of the lab. She thought she heard Ethan calling after her, but she ignored him.