SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Bruce’s hand settled on the back of her head.

“I will.”

She held on a second longer. Then she let go, stepped back, and gave him a small, certain nod, the kind of nod that said go on, I’ve got my end of this.

Bruce looked at her for one more breath.

Then, quietly: Vaelith. Axiom.

The residence dissolved around him.

Axiom received him in its cool, cathedral-quiet hush, the Labyrinth’s ambient light breathing around its walls, its formations acknowledging his presence and settling at once.

Bruce let out a long, slow exhale.

His gaze lifted back to the prompt that had been quietly waiting at the edge of his vision the entire time he’d been on the calls, the entire time he’d held Lily, the entire time he’d crossed between kingdoms and conversations.

[Do you wish to begin your Trial?]

[ Y / N]

Bruce reached out.

His finger hovered for half a second, not from hesitation, but from the small, deliberate weight a person gives to a moment they want to remember the shape of.

Then he pressed [Y]

And then world ended.

Not violently. Not with the rushing sensation or pull he’d come to associate with teleportation and trial entries. It simply stopped. Axiom’s cool hush, the ambient hum of its formations, the low warmth of its light, gone. Not dimmed. Not faded. Erased, as though someone had reached behind the world and turned it off.

Then even that was gone.

For a long, suspended moment Bruce wasn’t sure if he still existed.

There was no darkness. Darkness required something to be dark, somewhere for light to be absent from.

This was something else. The complete absence of every category his mind reached for. No up, no down, no temperature, no pressure, no air against his skin, no skin against anything. No sound. Not silence. Silence was the shape sound left behind. This was the absence of the shape itself.

No time. He couldn’t tell how long he had been there. A second. A year. Past and future were concepts requiring a frame of reference, and the frame itself had been stripped away.

’Void.’

The word surfaced in his mind with the heavy, inevitable weight of something true. Void: the thing that had existed before existence, pure, total, unqualified absence. He was in it. Or somehow he was it, briefly, because there was no other to distinguish himself from.

’What the fuck is this.’

There was no Akashic prompt. No briefing. No trial instruction. He’d walked into trials before, and every single one had come with at least a scrap of guidance, even if the scrap was deliberately cryptic.

This one had given him nothing. Just the [Y] and then absence of matter.

He tried to move. There was nothing to move. He tried to speak. There was nothing for sound to travel through.

He tried Heal, just to reassure himself his body was still functional, and the skill responded the way it always did, instant, obedient, silver threads of mana weaving themselves into him. He could somehow feel his body in this nothingness, using heal he’s able to survive in nothingness where even oxygen is absent.

He didn’t know how he was able to survive, since surviving in nothingness was not theoretically possible but he was able to survive.

Something that might have been panic rose in him, but he ground it back down with the brutal efficiency of years of medical discipline. Panic was a chemical event. Panic required adrenaline.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t that, what he was feeling was multiple times greater than simple dread, it was a mix of dread, hopelessness and a primal feeling Bruce couldn’t quite describe.

And if he confused the two he was going to lose the only edge he had, which was the fact that he was still thinking.

’Observe,’ he told himself. You’re still you. Observe.

But there was nothing to observe. And that was worse than anything he’d ever encountered.

Zorvak, Adoni, the Cthulhu and the Elven invaders, all the invaders he had fought, none of them had been able to make him feel this way even though some of them gave him great gap in strength.

But then he noticed the void compressing to a point smaller than anything to ever exist. A single geometric instant, dimensionless, infinitely compressed, and containing, he couldn’t understand why he could perceive this but he coul

Bruce’s mind flinched away before the thought finished forming, because the rest of that thought was everything. Every star. Every galaxy. Every breath, every death, every ocean, every species that had ever lived or would ever live, every atom of every world, all of it folded down into a point smaller than a quark.

And the fear he felt increased a thousand times more than before. It was heavy.

The weight hit him in a way he hadn’t known something could hit. Not pressure on his body, he didn’t have one here. This was pressure on whatever he did have. On his awareness.

The point was so absolutely laden with the sum total of cosmic potential that simply being near it as an observer felt lethal. Like standing next to a blade that was thinking about cutting.

For the first time since entering the trial, Bruce felt something he could clearly identify.

Fear.

Not the clean fear of combat. Not the controlled fear of a surgeon opening a patient whose survival wasn’t guaranteed. This was older. Pre-verbal. The part of the brain that had been a prey animal long before it had been anything else.

You are going to die here.

The thought arrived fully formed, not in words but in certainty. He was in the presence of the thing that everything came from, and it did not care about him, did not know him, and if he interacted with it wrongly, if he interacted with it at all he would simply cease.

He just watched.

And then he began to move.

Not voluntarily. He didn’t know why his body was moving without him willing it.

He began to resist it, very trained reflex went hard against the motion, he used every method in his posession but he could do nothing he could only watch as he was being moved into that point of void singularity.

He tried anchoring himself with mana density, with his aura which could now solidify and is multiple time stronger than before now that he’s half SSS but it was all useless because there was no medium for it to compress through.

He didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow.

It occurred to him, with an unpleasant chill, that whatever was moving him wasn’t acting on him at all. It was acting on reality, and his reality happened to be attached.

He was still working through the implications when

BANG!!!!!!!!!

The point detonated.

No. ’Detonated’ was the wrong word. Detonation was something that happened inside an existing reality.

This was reality’s first moment of existing. The point simply was, fully and completely folded, and then in the next instant there was no point because there was everywhere, and the everywhere was screaming outward with every form of energy his mind could name and several it couldn’t.

Light. Heat. Time. Space. Cause. Effect. All of it erupting outward in all the directions that now existed because the eruption was inventing them.

Bruce was caught in it. But the power moving through him

He’d tanked blows from beings several tiers above his own. Adapted to things beyond human imagination, but none of them compared to the raw cosmological output passing through the place where his awareness sat, like a river passing through a ghost.

Then he realised that it was the force that moved his body against his will back then that that made this possible. It was protecting him.

The realization did not make him less annoyed. He suspected that force to be from the Akashic Codex and it seemed this force just wants him to watch.

’Fine,’ Bruce thought grimly. ’I’ll watch.’

Using heal to enhance his eyes to the point that he could observe things in a quantum level

The first microsecond after the eruption he saw it.

Pure energy, so hot it hadn’t cooled enough to be anything yet, just a soup of undifferentiated possibility screaming outward at speeds that shouldn’t exist. And then, as the temperature dropped from inconceivable to merely impossible, the first things separated out. Quarks. Gluons. Flickers of mass winking into existence.

He watched it happen. But then he thought of something that made him frown as a surge of excitement coursed through him.

’Is this? Is this the Big Bang?!’

Back on Earth, as a surgeon, he’d considered himself broadly scientifically literate. Cosmology had always been one of his quiet interests. He knew the big bang theory. He knew the numbers. He had also, privately, never entirely believed it. It had sounded absurd. Everything compressed into something smaller than anything? The universe exploding into existence?

How does that any sense.