The hangar looked like a slaughterhouse.
He stepped over a soldier who couldn’t have been twenty-five, half his skull caved in.
Further in, three more bodies lay together near an overturned armored truck. They were shot, burned, and ripped apart by wind blades that sliced through Kevlar.
Survivors pressed against a far wall, security personnel and other staff struggling to process what happened.
Rain counted the dead out of habit. Thirty-nine. No—forty, there was another under the truck.
"Master, are you—" Elaine quickly covered her eyes
To avoid making her uncomfortable, he grabbed a lab coat and zipped it up. Next, he turned his attention back to the wounded.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a hand jutting from beneath a collapsed support beam.
He moved to it, gripped the concrete slab, easily two tons, and lifted it with one hand as if it were Styrofoam.
The woman underneath scrambled backward, eyes wide with terror.
"You’re safe," he said, giving her a reassuring smile as he set the slab down quietly. "Stay still. dical is on the way."
The other dics arrived, and he began directing them to triage the wounded according to the severity of their injuries.
He stopped at a crowd of dics kneeling around sothing on the ground.
A man lay on his back, a steel reinforcent pole punched clean through his abdon.
Entry wound below the ribs, exit through the lower back. He was pinned to the concrete like an insect to a board.
The dics had IV lines in him. Pressure bandages around the entry point. Nothing else.
Rain pushed through them. "Move."
"Sir, we can’t—the pole’s the only thing keeping pressure on the wound. If we remove it—"
"I’ll take it from here." he crouched beside the man, examining the angle of penetration. Liver involvent. Possibly the portal vein. Definitely the intestines.
"Please... tell my daughter... I love her" A wet cough escape from the dying man. "Today’s her birthday..."
"Tell her yourself," Rain replied. It wasn’t a comfort; it was a directive. He snapped both ends of the pole.
"Operating Room. Imdiately."
"Sir, the surgeons are—"
"I’ll do it. Just find a fresh body. Abdon intact. Similar build. And get soone to guide to the operating room."
———————————
Ten minutes later.
Inside OR-3, two bodies lay on adjacent tables. One dying. One dead.
Rain didn’t speak. He closed his eyes and activated ’Tagging,’ a chanism his brain had developed over countless years of evolution.
’Surgery. Human anatomy. Vascular repair. Organ preservation. Hemostasis. Tissue viability. Suturing. Anastomosis.’
The words triggered it—connections forming, gaps filling, procedures assembling themselves like puzzle pieces snapping into place.
When he opened his eyes twenty seconds later, millennia of accumulated surgical knowledge sat at his fingertips, organized and accessible.
He worked on the corpse first—clean incisions, precise dissection, preserving the vascular attachnts. He isolated a healthy section of stomach with its blood supply intact and placed it in preservation solution.
Then, he turned to the living patient. The pole still jutted from the abdon.
"Clamp the superior senteric and celiac arteries. Pack the entrance wound."
A nurse hesitated. "Sir, if we remove the pole before—"
"I’ll remove it after vascular control. Clamp now."
She did.
He gripped the pole and pulled it free in one motion.
Blood welled up and the team applied suction, packed gauze. He cut away the destroyed tissue and positioned the donor segnt.
Then his hands moved.
Sutures moved faster than the eyes could follow. Arterial anastomosis—end to end, running stitch, knots tied with machine-like precision.
The circulating nurse stared. "How is he—"
"Ontal wrap," he ordered. "Irrigate with warm saline."
He worked without pause. Reinforcing. Checking for leaks. Closing layer by layer.
The monitors stabilized.
"He’ll survive," he reassured, stripping his gloves. "Next patient."
He operated for six hours straight.
Forty-three critical patients. Forty-three survivors.
To say his efficiency was otherworldly would be an understatent.
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