NOVEL NEXT Chapter 10. On The Brink of Death.
Chapter 10: On The Brink of Death.
'Oh shitshitshit.' My mind raced as I ran towards the downed boy.
Reaching him, I witnessed a horror scene. His heart and large parts of his lungs were basically destroyed, judging by the sheer size of the hole in his chest. Somehow, someway, this motherfucker was still alive, as his gaze followed my movement as I kneeled beside him.
'Okokokok, calm the fuck down.' I scolded myself mentally. I took a deep breath to order my mind because panicking would only waste time and cause fatal errors.
'Assess the damage,' I thought, supressing the chaos in my mind. It was the first step in treating someone.
The hole in his chest was quite obvious, but if I missed another injury that wasn't clear, he could bleed out while I was trying to fix his chest.
I wasted a precious few seconds looking for any other wounds on his body and fortunately found no other external wounds. He could have had internal damage, but that would have to wait until I closed the gaping hole in his chest.
'Next step is to clear the area around the wound,' I took out a small multitool I kept in my backpack, which included a small but sharp pair of scissors. I cut his shirt in half, ensuring I did not jostle or move him too much. The pool of blood underneath the boy kept growing larger, now reaching my legs, and I saw his eyes start to lose focus as well.
"No, no, no, stay with me; you will be fine!" I whisper-shouted at him as I began to work faster. As I went to place my hands on his chest to start healing, I saw a small flash of light from his left, which, looking at it now, was clutching a small piece of paper. I couldn't pay too much attention to it at the moment as I was racing with death.
I placed both of my hands right above his chest and sent a probing pulse to check the exact extent of the damage. As I first thought, his heart was in pieces, and his left lung had a large chunk taken out of it.
I started working on the blood loss as that would be the first thing to kill him. My hands started glowing a bright green and yellow glow, and the pool of blood around his body finally stopped growing and started shrinking instead. I could conjure up new blood to pump in his system, but that would have taken longer, so I opted to return his spilled blood back to his body. It was a much more complicated process, as I first had to get a hold of all the blood mentally, and ONLY the blood, while avoiding all the dirt and dust and debris it must have mixed with, but luckily, I had already done this many times before.
Although the room I used to do my surgeries was sterile, I had done some of them in a dirty environment for precisely this purpose, as most bleeding people wouldn't usually be inside a clean, sterile room.
As his body started retreating back into his body, I started working on his heart. I could pump his blood inside his body and make more around his body, but I couldn't replace his heart forever for more than a few seconds, as the pressure I would be exerting to pump the blood wouldn't be the exact same as a heart. Too low, and it wouldn't reach into all of his body; too high, and I might rupture his blood veins, causing more harm in the process.
I started by first sending another pulse into his body, but this time, it was focused on the damaged area. I was trying to locate all the pieces left of his shredded heart. Creating new flesh was as time-consuming as making new blood, so I had to use as many usable pieces as I could.
Picking out all the parts beyond repair, I removed them using a small string of telekinetic magic outside the wound. With those same strings, I picked up what was usable and gathered them in place of his heart as I started mending it, connecting the torn pieces, and creating new flesh where needed.
A few seconds later, his heart was whole, and his blood was mostly back in its proper place; some of it was a lost cause as it was soaked in his clothes and, by this point, mine too.
I moved on to working on his left lung. This was the worst part yet, as the lung was complicated to work with because of its intricate pockets. Still, I worked and worked, doing the same as I did with the heart, removing dead flesh and using what was usable to mend the wound.
All in all, it took around 20 seconds from start to finish. Yes, it might have sounded way longer, but I had already practiced so much that I could fix entire sets of organs in way less time. I took this long because I needed to remove his shirt and assess the damage first.
Although the boy's heart and lung were fixed now, he had stopped breathing for a few seconds by now. But that was okay; it meant he was in a state of clinical death. I needed to resuscitate him quickly, but first, I needed to close the gaping hole still in his flesh.
Working on the torn flesh in his chest and his back, it took only a few more seconds for his chest, and although unseen, back to be whole.
The last step was to resuscitate him, which I did by sending a massive pulse of magic throughout his body, the same as the one I used to jostle the rat out of its coma, but this was much more intense.
First pulse. No reaction. Second pulse. No reaction. Third pulse. No rea-
"HUUUUUUH"