“No, Mr. Hooker, you must leave.”
She pushed the scholar back onto the ship. Ye Tang said, “You are our hope, the hope of the medical world, and the hope of all the sick.”
“Only if you survive and develop a vaccine that can completely defeat the Spanish Flu will the war between us and the Spanish Flu truly end.”
“But—!”
The scholar still wanted to get off the ship, but a group of people approached from behind him and half-dragged, half-pulled him back.
“It’s you all—”
He realized that his scholar relatives and researcher friends were all there, their eyes brimming with hot tears just like his own. The scholar suddenly understood: Mrs. Hedelin had already persuaded his relatives and friends in advance. She intended to send all of them—these “hopes”—without exception to a place where they could conduct their research in peace.
Accompanying the researchers were also Daisy and Charlotte. Under Daisy’s command, the crew quickly raised the gangplank. The merchant ship began to pull away from the shore.
“Madam, but Mrs. Hedelin…! You are a ‘hope’ too…!!”
The scholar’s shouts and his tears were scattered together by the sea wind.
Researchers were precious, but those who supported researchers were equally precious. It was precisely because of Mrs. Hedelin that these researchers could conduct their studies with peace of mind.
No researcher would want to lose their listener, their understanding supporter.
No researcher would want to watch the person they regarded as a soulmate fall.
“I have already left hope for you.”
Ye Tang smiled and looked toward Daisy.
Receiving Ye Tang’s signal, Daisy nodded through her tears from the deck.
‘From now on, she would sponsor these researchers. No matter how much money it cost, no matter how much manpower it required, she would support the researchers until they created the ultimate weapon to slay the Plague Knight.’
“Madam,”
Daisy sniffled, maintaining her noble demeanor as she turned back to Charlotte. “What is it, Charlotte?”
“I love you, Mother.”
Charlotte kissed her mother’s cheek as she spoke.
For the first time in her life being called “Mother” by her daughter, Daisy blanked out for a moment. But in that instant of her daze, Charlotte ran from her side. After a brief sprint, she leaped toward the shore where Ye Tang stood, like a startled rabbit.
“Cha… Charlotte!?”
Daisy rushed madly to the ship’s edge, wanting to jump off the merchant ship as well. But by then, the ship had pulled nearly two meters away from the shore. This was no distance a noblewoman like Daisy could leap.
To prevent Daisy from falling into the sea, the people around her hurriedly grabbed hold of her in a panic.
Tears surged from Daisy’s eyes as she reached out toward her daughter and wailed, “Charlotte—!!!”
Charlotte knew: if she herself refused to leave, her mother certainly would not agree to leave Osnabrock either. But hope was like a flame that needed someone to carry it on.
Mrs. Hedelin had handed the spark to her mother, and she too hoped her mother could become the researchers’ hope.
As for her…
She had chosen the path of joining the Hedelin Medical Academy and heading to the front lines alongside Mrs. Hedelin.
“Charlotte, is this really okay with you?”
Ye Tang asked.
She had not anticipated beforehand that the quiet and refined-looking Charlotte would choose to leave her mother’s side, let alone that she would jump ship directly.
“Ever since you tore the corset off my body, Madam, I knew that one day I would help you. …Of course, I didn’t decide to go to the front lines just to help you.”
Charlotte clasped her hands behind her back and smiled. “I want to block any plague that might strike at my mother from the front. I hope Mother lives longer than I do, I…”
The sea wind gently swayed Charlotte’s short hair, clipped to shoulder length. Charlotte turned back at the sound of “Hey—” from behind her.
Two automobiles pulled up to the harbor, one after the other. Claudia drove the first car, with Gloria and Cinderella seated in the back. May drove the second car, carrying students from the Hedelin Medical Academy.
Charlotte ran toward her classmates and friends.
Ye Tang smiled, as if she had heard the words Charlotte left unsaid.
“I will fight side by side with my companions.”
In the year 325 of the Osnabrock calendar, in March, Tartafu, along with seven other nations, launched a war against Osnabrock.
In the same month, the Hedelin Medical Academy disbanded. Twenty-eight ladies vanished from their homes one after another.
In April, at the frontline in Kaspa, someone spotted a team of women dressed in white.
The woman at their head raised the flag in her hand high. That white flag bore the emblem of the Hedelin Medical Academy: a microscope encircled by two stalks of wheat.
The women in white treated patients without regard for nationality or skin color. Wherever they passed, even the Plague Knight seemed hesitant to strike easily.
At first, enemy forces had tried to kill this strange medical team along with Osnabrock’s army.
Yet the Osnabrock troops, who had previously been quite fearful of battle, miraculously erupted with a fearless spirit for the sake of this medical team.
Countless soldiers charged ferociously into the fray, determined to defend this medical team to the death. And this peculiar medical team created another miracle behind the forbidden city—
Osnabrock was strong in national power. Even its more remote cities were wealthier than those in surrounding nations.
Because they had failed to take Osnabrock’s cities after prolonged sieges, many soldiers in Pulheli’s army successively contracted the Spanish Flu, fell ill, and died. Pulheli’s commander ordered the corpses of their own diseased dead to be hurled into Osnabrock’s cities via catapults.
From then on, the Spanish Flu erupted on a massive scale within Osnabrock’s cities. Relying on this tactic alone, Pulheli’s army swallowed three cities on Osnabrock’s border in succession.
Bastia was the next target of Pulheli’s army.
“—Use your own bodies as ammunition to serve Pulheli loyally! Surely Pulheli’s soldiers will take pride in our victory upon seeing our army’s triumph! Hurl them! Keep hurling! Keep throwing these corpses over Bastia’s walls!”
Pulheli’s commander gripped his saber and bellowed orders to the soldiers around him.
Brothers and friends who had been sitting with him just two days ago, gnawing on hardtack, now lay lifeless in the catapult baskets. In the next second, they would smash bloodily against the enemy walls or the ground inside the city… This filled Pulheli’s soldiers with guilt, sorrow, nausea, and disgust.
A young soldier, still just a boy, met the lifeless, open eyes of a corpse in the basket. He immediately clutched his mouth, knelt on the ground, and vomited, tears and snot streaming down his face.
Seeing this, Pulheli’s commander stormed over in fury and kicked and beat the soldier’s back viciously.
“Stand up! Stand up for me! How can Pulheli’s soldiers be so weak! You useless trash! Stand up!”
The teenage soldier huddled with his head in his arms, not daring to resist. He knew he would die. Either at the commander’s hands or like these corpses in the baskets—dead from the Spanish Flu, then shattered to pieces after death, reduced to a mass of mangled flesh.
…Dying at the commander’s hands might be better, at least? He wouldn’t have to be used as ammunition and flung away.
The assault on Bastia had lasted a month and a half. In the first twenty days, Bastia had indeed fallen into turmoil. But on the twenty-fifth day, that white team raising the white flag appeared.
To welcome that team, Bastia’s forces suddenly turned ferocious. After the team entered the city, the atmosphere in Bastia changed completely.
The current Bastia… was more than holding its own. Simply by defending the town, they had already gained the upper hand in the war.
—Among the forces attacking Bastia, soldier casualties had already exceeded two-fifths of their total numbers. Every day, men died of the Spanish Flu in the trenches, in the tents. Some soldiers who died of the Spanish Flu never even saw the enemy; only in death, turned into ammunition, did they first contribute to killing the foe.
Yet the power of this human ammunition visibly waned. And Pulheli’s officers had no idea why.
…
“Mrs. Hedelin, the medicine you brought is indeed effective.”
Bastia’s governor looked gratefully at Ye Tang, dressed all in white. He now truly felt fortunate to be aligned with Duke Wilson and to have heeded the duke’s advice beforehand—not to spare any cost in protecting the Hedelin medical team.
“But you know, medicine is finite.”
Ye Tang did not blink.
“Y-Yes…”
The governor nodded hastily and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. “The brewery you said needed requisitioning—I’ve already sent people to requisition it. My men will bring the brewery staff over shortly.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, Governor.”
Ye Tang had chosen Bastia for good reason. The supplies of the Hedelin medical team were not infinite. Alcohol consumption alone was enormous, and such liquids were hard to transport and store. Without securing an alcohol production line soon, they would run out.
Next were gauze and clean dressings.
This was wartime; amputees were far too numerous. Many medics and doctors bandaged soldiers without regard for hygiene—they didn’t even wash their hands, nor check if the gauze and dressings were clean or if the wounds had been disinfected before applying them. As a result, deaths from infection far outstripped those from blood loss. Whether soldiers survived depended entirely on their personal immunity.
Ye Tang had no antibiotics, but she could enforce strict control over the medical environment. The reason Bastia’s mortality rate had plummeted was that Ye Tang had led the Hedelin medical team in a comprehensive overhaul of medical hygiene practices.
Bastia was a high-yield grain region, with no shortage of breweries here. Ye Tang planned to produce alcohol on-site and further promote aseptic medical procedures.