As the door twirled open, a tall woman in a white and pink nurse uniform stepped into the room.
She was carefully reading through the stack of paper that she held in her hands. Suddenly, she froze as she lifted her gaze to look at the patient – me.
"Haa!" The papers dropped to the floor as she covered her mouth, failing to stifle a shocked gasp.
But she quickly regained her composure and addressed me, "Cadet Lucas, you're awake! Please wait here. I need to alert others!"
With that, before I could even ask who these "others" were, she hurriedly left the room in a panic, leaving me bewildered.
"Oh-kay," I frowned, genuinely perplexed by the nurse's erratic behavior. "That was very strange."
Shrugging slightly, I took a hand out from under the blanket and tried to summon a water bottle from my smart bracelet.
But to my dismay, nothing happened – no ethereal sparks appeared, no object manifested, no bottle conjured.
"What the fuck?"
My frown deepened as I scanned my hand only to realize that I was not wearing my smart bracelet.
A wave of panic crashed into my mind. I pulled my other hand from the blanket and quickly scrutinized it.
And just as I had thought, there weren't any dimensional rings on my fingers.
"This is bad! This is so fucking bad!"
That's when it clicked for me – the crimson head of the Hydra had devoured my upper body, swallowing my rings and bracelet.
But the thing was, I wasn't worried about my smart bracelet or the dimensional rings.
Since I lost my smart bracelet due to an error made by the academy, I could easily put in a request for them to issue me a new one.
As for the dimensional rings, expensive as they were, I could always get my hands on more. n/(0In
But what truly worried me were the things inside my smart bracelet and dimensional rings – the potions and relics that I crafted using my Edit Pen, daggers that I found in the vampiric dimensional ring that I took from Reina's corpse, and that ring itself! It had vampiric runes inscribed all over it!
Assuming the academy had killed off the Hydra after my death, they would likely be dissecting it for enchanted items and relics right now.
If they were to find that vampiric ring inside it, the academy could hold me for questioning under the suspicion that I'm affiliated with the vampires.
I rolled my eyes, letting out some frustrated curses. "Fuck my luck. But with my merits and feats, they won't execute me on the spot, thinking I'm a vampire spy. So I killed a Vampire King and took its loot. It isn't a crime, right?"
As I was in the middle of such thoughts, the door swung open once again. Thinking it was the nurse who had come back, I was about to ask her to explain herself.
However, to my surprise, it wasn't the nurse but three individuals – a young man and two young women – who had entered with pale faces and clear concern in their eyes.
They visibly sighed in relief as soon as they saw me awake and rushed over, pulling me in a tight embrace before I could even react.
"Lucas!" Nero exclaimed, hands wrapped around my shoulders, while Amelia hugged my waist. "You're alive!"
"I was really worried," Amelia added, tightening her arms around me.
Grunting, I tapped them on their backs and shoulders. "I can't breathe, guys!"
"We really thought you were dead for a few minutes," Anastasia sighed.
She was standing a few steps away from the bed, thankfully not reacting like the other two kids and clinging to me.
"Your severed body was burst into flames. It burned down... all of you, or at least what was left of you. When everything finally settled down in the end, we found you in the ashes... alive. You were breathing, but you never opened your eyes until today. It's been six days."
"Ahh, that explains why I'm feeling so thirsty," I nodded slightly.
Nero was the first to let go of me, followed by Amelia. She was a little hesitant to step back as if she thought I would vanish if she let me go.
As she stepped back, however, I saw her swollen eyes. It was painfully clear that she had been crying.
Well, I was killed while saving her. It would be natural if she had been blaming herself for what happened to me all this time.
I remember when I tried to orchestrate a similar scenario at the start of the year to make her and the other main characters trust me.
But funnily enough, this time, I didn't want her to feel that guilt.
My body had moved instinctively to protect her as if some primal force had taken over my mind. I wanted to save her at any cost. It was a reflex.
But what surprised me was the fact that now that I think about it, I had likely done the same for Anastasia or Nero if it was them in her place.
And here I thought I only cared for my own survival.
No, this protective instinct was most definitely strange. It felt… foreign, yet oddly familiar.
I was sure of it. This feeling wasn't mine.
…Or maybe it was. Perhaps protecting them at all costs was an instinct I had honed across past timelines.
I mean, it wouldn't be the first time that feelings from the distant past had affected my emotions in this timeline.
Yes, it wouldn't be the first time I was affected by these strange echoes. I cried when that old elf lady told me about my lives, I felt anxious when Reina narrated the prophecy, and I even experienced guilt when I first met Amelia.
Yeah, it was a very real possibility.
Considering what I saw in my dream, I seemed to share a close bond with these three in that timeline… or the one before that. I don't know. But what I knew was that killing them in that dream had left me heartbroken.
"Lucas?"
Anastasia's calm voice pulled me from my thoughts. I shifted my gaze to look at her, finding a puzzled expression plastered on her face.
"Are you okay?" she inquired.
"I'm fine," I assured.
"You don't look fine," Amelia voiced her concerns, stepping closer to me. She gently touched the side of my face with her cold hand and whispered, "You seem to have a fever."
"No, it's just a shock reaction," I explained. "Dying, getting revived, and waking up from a six-day coma can be… well, tiresome for the body."
"Hey," Nero called out to me calmly. "You can speak freely here. What's wrong?"
Well, there are multiple timelines and I killed you all in one of them. Oh, and there is also an evil god-like entity out there in the universe, trying to kill us. If that's not enough, then I think we are all trapped in a giant Groundhog Day.
…Haa. Clearly, I couldn't tell him all that.
I sighed, shook my head, and decided to change the topic. "I'm fine, Nero. Just tell me what happened after I passed out."
The trio exchanged hesitant glances among themselves before Nero took a deep breath and decided to brief me.
But before he could even utter a word, the door slammed open and five armed men, their heads hidden behind helmets, rushed in, positioning themselves around the bed in front of me.
One of them stepped forward. He was tall and held an energy rifle. He looked at me from behind the glowing blue visor of his helmet and said:
"Cadet Lucas Morningstar, you've been summoned."
