White light flooded their vision all at once, and the sharp sll of antiseptic hit imdiately after, cutting through the fog of unconsciousness with unpleasant efficiency.
The steady beeping of machines echoed across the room, and for a mont everything felt distant and strange, like they were still stuck sowhere between waking up and whatever hell they had just barely crawled out of.
Then a groggy voice broke the silence from sowhere across the room.
"Ahhhh, soone’s here, huh."
Another body jerked upright suddenly.
"I am alive, I am alive!"
The shout bounced off the walls of the ward and ca back twice as loud, and one student sat up so fast that the wires attached to him stretched tight and dragged half the equipnt along with him across the bedside table.
"Oi! OI! I CAN FEEL MY LEGS, WAIT, WHY DO THEY HURT?!"
"Because you are alive, idiot!" soone snapped from the next bed over, still lying completely flat with an oxygen mask half hanging off his face.
A girl on the other side slowly opened her eyes and blinked twice, then raised her hand up in front of her face and stared at it like she was genuinely checking whether it was real or not.
"I’m not dead?"
She paused for a mont, turning that thought over.
"That’s disappointing."
"WHAT DO YOU AN DISAPPOINTING?!" three voices shouted at the exact sa ti.
Another student tried to sit up with what was clearly intended to be a heroic and composed entrance back into consciousness, probably with so kind of cool coback mont already lined up in his head, but the second he shifted his weight he slipped clean off the edge of the bed and hit the floor with a loud and graceless thud.
"AAAH, MY BACK! MY FUTURE! MY DIGNITY!"
He sprawled across the floor like a defeated ragdoll with one arm stretched dramatically forward, and nobody moved to help him.
"Just leave him," soone muttered from their bed. "Natural selection is working."
In the far corner, another student slowly lifted his blanket and peeked underneath it, and his face went pale almost imdiately.
"Guys."
Nobody answered him.
"GUYS!"
"What now?!"
He looked back down and then back up and said, "Everything is still there."
A pause settled over the room for just a second and then collapsed entirely.
"THANK GOD!"
"YOU IDIOT, WHY WOULD IT NOT BE THERE?!"
"YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WENT THROUGH!"
Across the room, another student suddenly grabbed the person in the next bed by the collar and pulled him close, his expression dead serious.
"Tell honestly. Did I die?"
"No?"
"Then why does my body feel like it got run over by ten bulls and then reversed over again?!"
"Because it probably did."
anwhile the guy on the floor had still not gotten up and showed no signs of planning to, and his voice drifted up from sowhere near the tiles with great personal suffering attached to it.
"I see the light."
"You are under a tube light, dumbass," soone replied without even glancing over at him.
Then from one of the beds near the window, a deep and thoroughly confused voice rumbled out into the room.
"Hmm. Where is the enemy?"
Sunta slowly sat up, his hair a complete ss and his body wrapped in bandages from what looked like every direction, and his eyes had the specific quality of soone who was half awake and half ready to fight whatever happened to be nearest to him.
He looked around the room slowly and with a frown that suggested he found none of what he was seeing particularly satisfying.
"Why sll like dead herbs and water?"
Nobody answered him so he sniffed the air again, turning his head slightly.
"Did we win or am I still killing?"
A student nearby blinked at him for a mont and then said, "We’re in a hospital."
Sunta paused and looked down at his own hands, then at the IV needle that was stuck into his arm, and his expression darkened like a cloud moving across a clear sky.
"They tied ."
"NO THEY DIDN’T—!"
Nobody got the rest of that sentence out before Sunta grabbed the IV stand with both hands and ripped it straight out of his arm, and blood dripped slightly from the spot but he didn’t react to it at all.
"RAAAH! I ain’not done fighting! Bring beast!" He swung the IV stand in a wide arc like it was a weapon he had been trained with. "I smash again!"
"IT’S DEAD!"
Sunta froze completely.
"Dead?"
"Yes."
A long pause filled the space between them, and then Sunta sat slowly back down onto the edge of his bed with the IV stand still loosely in his hand.
"Hmm."
He scratched the back of his head with his free hand and then looked down at himself with mild displeasure.
"Then why am I hurt?"
"BECAUSE YOU FOUGHT NOEL, YOU IDIOT!"
"He smashed you."
Sunta grunted once in acknowledgnt and said, "Ohhhh!"
"SUNTA Weak body,"
"Noel Strong,"he muttered as the matter settled the matter entirely, and then his attention drifted to the bed beside him where the guy was still lying dramatically across the floor with his arm stretched out. Sunta leaned slightly over and prodded him with his foot.
"This one dead?"
"I AM NOT DEAD!" the guy scread from the floor.
Sunta nodded seriously and said, "Good, dead ones boring," and left it at that.
Then the door slamd open and a doctor walked in, already carrying the expression of a man who had lost most of his faith in humanity and had not yet recovered any of it.
The mont he stepped fully inside the room he stopped moving and just stood there taking in the scene in front of him.
One student was half hanging off his bed. Another was mid-argunt with his own IV stand. One was still flat on the floor in the posture of a tragic hero. Sunta was holding a bent IV pole at his side like a club. And three others were loudly debating whether their internal organs were all still where they were supposed to be.
The doctor closed his eyes slowly and kept them closed for a mont.
"Can these dumbasses give so rest," he muttered, and nobody listened.
"DOCTOR! AM I DYING?!"
"You are shouting, so no."
"DOCTOR! MY LEG FEELS WEIRD!"
"It was broken in three places, so what did you expect?"
"DOCTOR! HE FELL!"
"I can see that."
Sunta stepped forward with his bandaged arms and pointed at the doctor directly.
"You healer?"
The doctor blinked and said, "Yes."
Sunta pointed at himself and said, "Fix , then I will go fight again."
"No."
Sunta frowned and asked, "Why?"
"Because you are not fighting anything for a while."
Sunta thought about this for a mont with his brow furrowed, and then said, "Then I fight bed?"
"DON’T FIGHT THE BED!"
From the other side of the room, another voice rang out.
"I CAN WALK!"
"DON’T RUN YOU IDIOT—"
THUD!
"I can’t walk."
The doctor didn’t even turn around this ti and simply walked back out through the door with a bang"I am not paid enough for this shit, and it hasn’t even been a week out of which four days of it they are knocked into the hospital."
Inside the ward, Noel watched the chaos for a mont and then turned to look at Reed with a flat expression.
"Did you really design them, shit head? I an, what the dumb fucking screw loose characters are these?"
Reed opened his mouth to say sothing but there was clearly no good place to start, so he closed it again. They had designed the characters to be a little lighter and funnier, but this was pushing past that into sothing else, and it was getting genuinely annoying.
It was too cringe, honestly, but that was the design they had committed to, so there wasn’t much to say about it now. He coughed and shifted the subject sideways.
"That technique, it was Slasher Jules, right?"
"SLASHER JULES."
A frantic voice cut across the room and Noel turned around to find Eleanor making her way over with a stick, moving carefully but with clear purpose in her expression.
"You aren’t healed?" Noel asked, tilting his head slightly because he distinctly rembered stitching her up.
"That’s because you ssed up tearing a tendon."
"Ahhh, I was in a hurry, so I might have made a mistake, and you see I am not perfect." He shrugged his shoulders without any particular guilt attached to it.
"ARGH, whatever. So who is this Slasher Jules?"
"He is one of Nova’s Knights," Reed said, and glanced over at Noel as he said it.
Eleanor caught enough of that to piece the rest together and asked, "So what is your Mystic?"
Noel raised his eyebrows and looked at her for a mont.
"Why do you want to know? You want to hand over my secret weapon? Hell no."
"This is cheating!" Another voice ca from nearby, and it was Elderic, who had appeared at so point looking thoroughly sulky about the whole situation. "You know about ours but we don’t know yours."
Hearing this, Noel let a shady smile settle across his face and said, "I don’t have any Mystic, you dumbhead, and did you forget who I am?"
He paused for just a second and then smirked.
"I am the infamous Trash of Nova."
"Born as mysticless and manaless."
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