The door numbered 104 closed slowly, muffling the entire hustle and bustle of the hospital corridor outside.
Inside the room, the smell of antiseptic was replaced by a soothing essential lavender fragrance, intentionally deployed to relax the tense nerves of patients.
Charlie stepped inside and found a middle-aged man with glasses, wearing a doctor's white coat, sitting behind a large wooden desk.
In the corner of the room, there was a plush long sofa—a distinctive piece of furniture that was always present inside a psychological therapy room.
"Please have a seat, Charlie-sensei." The psychologist greeted him in a tone of voice intentionally adjusted to sound friendly. He caught a brief glimpse of Charlie's teacher identification file. "I am Doctor Yamamuro. How are you doing today?"
"Good morning, Doctor. I am... well, you could say that. Still trying to process everything." Charlie answered while seating himself on the long sofa.
To deceive the medical examination, Charlie intentionally slouched his shoulders slightly, squeezed both his palms over his knees, and directed his gaze downward with a somewhat dim look.
This was a classic gesture of someone who was hiding deep post-traumatic anxiety.
In fact, with the wealth of life-and-death experience he possessed across various worlds and his levels of power, Charlie's current mentality was perfectly normal.
However, in this ordinary world, a teacher who remained calm after experiencing a terrorism incident would instead be considered a suspicious psychopath.
Charlie had to play the role of an "ordinary normal person."
Doctor Yamamuro nodded understandingly, his fingers tapping a pen quietly.
"That is highly natural, Charlie-sensei. Experiencing an armed terrorism attack in a school environment that is supposed to be safe is a soul-shaking anomaly."
"Can you tell me, what did you feel when you first heard the sound of gunfire that day?"
Charlie drew a long breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled it slowly—as if he were gathering the courage to recall that dark memory.
"At that time... I was inside the staff office." Charlie began to speak, his voice intentionally made to tremble slightly at the end of the sentence. "When the sound of that gunfire rang out, my heart felt as though it stopped beating. All the teachers panicked."
"Out the window... I saw people falling. My mind suddenly went blank, Doctor. There was an immense sense of helplessness, as if death could pierce through the walls of the room at any moment."
Doctor Yamamuro listened intently, occasionally noting something down on his paper.
"A sense of helplessness in the face of extreme danger is a valid self-defense response. Then, how about your sleep these past two days? Have you experienced nightmares, or frequently woken up in the middle of the night?"
(My sleep was highly sound, I even briefly became a human hug pillow for a high school girl.) Charlie thought with amusement.
However, on the outside, he put on a slightly tired facial expression and rubbed the nape of his neck.
"I had a bit of difficulty closing my eyes during the first few hours, Doctor. Every time I closed my eyes, the image of that white van and the police sirens started spinning again. But after midnight passed, I was finally able to fall asleep due to being mentally exhausted, even though it didn't feel very sound."
Doctor Yamamuro nodded repeatedly, showing his professional empathy. He laid down his pen and looked at Charlie with a more personal gaze.
"Charlie-sensei, from what you have told me, you are experiencing what we call an Acute Stress Reaction. Your soul is undergoing a defensive shock. However, you do not show signs of rejecting reality, which means your self-healing mechanism is working well."
The psychologist then pushed a tissue box near Charlie and gave a warm smile.
"Your task this week is merely to rest. Do not force your brain to forget that event instantly. Admitting that we are 'not fine' is the first step of recovery. I will schedule one more evaluation session for you next week, how does that sound?"
Charlie let his body loosen up slowly, creating a visual illusion as if a heavy burden on his shoulders had just been lifted after sharing his story. He looked up and turned a thin smile that appeared sincere.
"Thank you very much, Doctor Yamamuro. Hearing your explanation makes me feel a bit more relieved and not feel 'strange' all by myself."
"You are welcome, Charlie-sensei. Take care of your health." Doctor Yamamuro concluded while signing Charlie's recovery recommendation letter.
As soon as Charlie rose to his feet, shook the doctor's hand, and stepped out from that therapy room, the anxious and tired expression on his face instantly vanished without a trace in a single blink of an eye.
The moment the wooden door of room 104 closed tightly behind him, Charlie was directly welcomed by the figure of Elena, who was leaning casually against the corridor wall. The woman folded both her arms in front of her chest, staring at Charlie with a meaningful, playful sparkle of her eyes.
"Oh dear, Charlie~ Your acting inside just now was truly extraordinary." Elena praised, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. "The tired expression, the anxious hand gestures... everything felt highly natural."
"I bet, if you chose the profession of becoming an actor, you would definitely win an Oscar ten years in a row without any competition."
Charlie rolled both his eyes lazily upon hearing that praise. He stepped past Elena without stopping his pace.
"Don't start talking nonsense. Hurry up and get in there, now it is your turn to be called by the doctor inside."
Elena puckered her lips slightly, complaining in a staged, spoiled tone.
"Ah, you truly are unpleasant and rigid as usual, Charlie."
While exhaling a sigh of resignation, Elena turned her body and extended her hand to open the doorknob of that psychologist's room.
"—!!!"
However, right on the next second, before Elena's fingers had time to touch the surface of the doorknob, a danger alarm suddenly screamed with immense volume inside the consciousness of the two of them.
In that exact instant, Charlie and Elena's facial expressions turned highly ugly.
The hairs on their necks stood up, and a bone-chilling cold suddenly crept along their backs.
For individuals with a power level of the caliber of the two of them, intuition or a bad premonition was not merely metaphysics or mere imagination, but rather an early warning that detected the arrival of a threat.
Danger was lurking, and it was near them.
Without needing to exchange words, the two Saviors instantly knew what they had to do.
Their focal point was directly fixed on the single most precious name: the protagonist and heroine.
*WHOOSH!*
In the blink of an eye, Charlie and Elena reversed direction and instantly darted like a storm toward the west wing corridor of the building—the place where the mental counseling rooms for the Seijo High School students were located.
For the sake of chasing time that rolled in a matter of milliseconds, the two of them were forced to deploy supernatural speed that was far beyond the limits of normal human reason.
Their bodies moved like flashes of light splitting the air, creating high-powered wind waves that blew away the document papers all along the corridor reception desks.
At this crucial point, neither Charlie nor Elena had any more time to care about the matter of exposing supernatural power in front of the public.
After all, all the eyewitnesses who were currently staring at them with gaping looks would not necessarily remain in a state of life or death a few seconds from now.
It took less than three seconds for them to traverse the distance of hundreds of meters inside the winding corridor.
And then...
*BOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!*
Exactly when Charlie was just able to see the silhouette of Mahiru's flaxen hair at the end of the corridor from a distance, a highly devastating tectonic jolt suddenly exploded violently from various corners of the building's foundation.
A series of high-powered C4 bombs that had been intentionally planted secretly in the main pillars of the hospital exploded simultaneously in a single command.
The resulting thumping sound was so deafening, producing a giant shockwave that directly shattered all the window glass into sharp shards and ripped the concrete walls into thick debris dust.
The event took place far too quickly. Before the patients, nurses, doctors, the Seijo High School students, or anyone could realize what was actually happening, a soaring blaze of red and black fire directly consumed the building structure.
*BOOM!* *BOOM!* *BOOM!*
In a count of less than five seconds, that chain explosion succeeded in collapsing the entirety of that multi-story hospital building, dropping thousands of tons of concrete to the ground, and flattening it with the earth in a billow of thick smoke that shut out the morning sunlight.
👨🏻💻Support me by reading on my Patreon: Patreon.com/cw/transenden or bit.ly/4uObLvf
☕Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/lovefanfiction
🛍️Benefits:
🎁Access 210+ chapters: [Anime Crossover: Making Money in Classroom of the Elite]
🎁Access 50 chapters : [Sharingan from the Start: Infinite Death-Seeking in Demon Slayer]
🎁Access 30 chapters: [Journey to Planar Word]
🎁Access 130+ chapters: [Infinity Reincarnation]
📜Update Schedule:
📨Translated Fanfiction: 3 chapters per day
📨Original Fanfiction: 1-2 chapters per day
👍🏻Thank you so much for your incredible support, everyone!👍🏻