Chapter 467: 465
This was arguably the most advanced operating room in the world.
Four figures were already standing by inside, all of them women.
The oldest was Fiona Ran Winchester, a slender woman with short blonde hair who served as the hospital's director.
She specialized in treating viruses and similar conditions. She had also prepared an emergency dose of D99 Serum.
The most voluptuous of the four was Yuko Sagiri, a long-haired brunette and one of the hospital's surgeons. She would lead the operation.
The blue-haired woman was Sayo Hitsugi, a hospital nurse whose figure was second only to Yuko's.
All the necessary equipment had been arranged beside her, and she was conducting one final inventory.
The fourth woman was Miki Tsurugi, their anesthesiologist. She had short reddish-brown hair and was the third-most voluptuous member of the group.
At the moment, she looked somewhat troubled.
The special patient about to arrive was resistant to anesthetics. She would have to employ alternative methods to numb his nerves as much as possible.
"Most of the damage to his body doesn't appear to have been caused by an external force," Yuko said as she examined the footage transmitted to the operating room.
Saeko had sent the video immediately after Kain arrived in this world and appeared beside her.
He had been drenched in blood.
Several wounds had clearly been inflicted by bladed weapons, but most of the damage consisted of countless smaller tears. Those scattered injuries were actually far more dangerous.
Yuko carefully enlarged the image and examined them.
They hadn't been inflicted from the outside. It looked as though Kain's body had ruptured from within.
His skin, or rather, his entire body, seemed to have become excessively fragile. Whenever he exerted too much force, the power erupted outward from within and caused his flesh to crack apart.
That wasn't all.
When he took a few steps after arriving, his body rippled unnaturally, as though its outer layers had partially dissolved into a semiliquid gel.
If he exerted even slightly too much force, pieces of flesh might fall off or simply flow from his body.
It looked as though he had been boiled until his body was falling apart.
Yet external heat clearly wasn't responsible. Otherwise, there would have been extensive burns and charred tissue.
Some areas did display signs resembling heat damage, but the overall condition of his body couldn't have been caused by external temperatures.
It reminded Yuko of the human experiments she had recently conducted on some disposable scum. Eventually, their bodies had been unable to withstand the strain and collapsed.
They had suddenly softened and fallen apart like blocks of tofu.
"His skeleton is probably in terrible condition too," Sayo added. "I'd expect extensive fractures."
The way Kain had moved after arriving suggested more than the collapse of his muscle tissue. The bones supporting his body had also been severely damaged.
"What exactly did this guy encounter?" Miki asked, voicing the question on everyone's mind.
They could at least make several deductions.
Kain hadn't been struck by a weapon of mass destruction.
Nor had he been piloting a machine and sustained these injuries while fighting another machine or a warship.
He had apparently fought some kind of monster in close combat with his own body, pushing himself into this condition.
"Anything capable of forcing him this far must have been a monster," Sayo said.
She had already learned quite a bit about Kain's world.
It was a place overrun with monsters. If it wasn't Orks, it was Tyranids, daemons, or even Chaos Gods.
Saeko couldn't provide any footage of the battle that had caused his sudden injuries. He had clearly been thrown into the confrontation without warning.
Hm?
He was here.
All four women turned toward the door as Kain walked into the room.
His entire body was still covered in blood, but most of his wounds were no longer visible. His abnormal regenerative abilities had clearly taken effect.
A group of women had accompanied him and were now waiting outside.
"Looks like you ran into something genuinely dangerous this time," Yuko remarked in a lightly teasing voice.
Her eyes, however, revealed nothing but worry and concern.
She quickly stepped forward and swept her scalpel through the air, cutting away every piece of his ruined clothing and stripping him bare.
At first glance, his body no longer appeared seriously injured.
"Lie down."
She wasn't directing him toward the operating table, but toward the CT scanner in the adjoining room.
Once the full-body scan was complete, the resulting images made every woman's face twist in shock.
There were more than a hundred foreign objects inside Kain's body.
Some appeared to be pieces of shattered bone. Others resembled stones of varying sizes.
They definitely weren't ordinary bodily stones. Under the CT scan, some looked like spiked balls.
Once they had identified every foreign object, it was time to begin the operation and remove them all.
Before long, another sizzling sound came from Kain's body.
Yuko extracted an object resembling a chunk of charcoal and dropped it onto a nearby tray.
The blackened objects looked like carbonized tissue. Some were extremely hard, while others were brittle.
Kain's body would naturally expel the smaller, more fragile pieces. Even the larger ones would probably dissolve and be removed eventually, but that would take time. It was better to extract them surgically.
The tray also contained numerous bone fragments.
They appeared to have broken away when his skeleton was subjected to forces far beyond what it could bear.
Apart from the bone fragments, they had extracted several objects resembling chunks of ice or diamonds. Each one was shaped like a sea urchin.
They possessed an extremely powerful adhesive effect. More precisely, it resembled the adhesion caused by severe frostbite at extremely low temperatures.
The objects appeared designed to pin Kain's body in place, freezing him and preventing him from moving.
There was almost no way to remove them except by forcefully pulling them free, which tore his muscles apart again.
"Sayo!"
"Got it."
A chunk of flesh was abruptly cut from Kain's body and tossed with perfect accuracy into the specialized metal container in Sayo's hands.
She sealed it immediately.
Metal fragments were embedded inside the piece of flesh. The enemy's weapon had shattered while attacking Kain, leaving pieces buried within his body.
Those fragments were radioactive.
They couldn't dissect the flesh and remove the metal normally because Kain's tissue was effectively serving as a radiation shield.
He had warned them about the fragments beforehand, so they had prepared containers specifically designed to hold radioactive materials.
"Miki."
Yuko was about to make another incision when she noticed Kain's muscles spasming and looked toward the anesthesiologist.
"There's nothing else I can do," Miki replied, shaking her head. "This is already the limit. If I increase the intensity any further, it'll only make his pain worse."
Chemical anesthetics had no effect on him.
Instead, Miki had employed a physical form of anesthesia resembling electrical stimulation, using it to numb his nerves and reduce his pain.
Increasing the intensity now would no longer produce additional numbness.
Truthfully, the relief it provided was insignificant compared to the agony caused by the operation.
To put it bluntly, it offered little more than psychological comfort.
"Just do it quickly, Yuko."
"I understand."
Since her man had said so himself, Yuko stopped worrying about anesthesia or pain management.
It was better to endure intense pain briefly than prolonged suffering. She would use a more forceful approach and remove every foreign object as quickly as possible.
No one knew exactly how long the operation lasted, but eventually, everything had been extracted.
In a sense, they had practically dissected Kain.
None of them could imagine the horrific pain he had endured.
Now it was time for him to attempt something new.
He would test the super-enhanced version of D99 Serum.
Its potency was at least ten times greater than even the most highly concentrated version they had previously created.