He could stitch blood vessels just a few millimeters across. Then, after that surgery, his hands could never hold a scalpel again.
Lost and adrift, he enters the full-dive online game Noonday, a brutal world that only checks whether you've completed an action and leaves everything else to the player's own body. Some rely on gear, some on luck, and some on cheats. He relies on nothing but his hands.
Exploiting blind spots, pinpointing enemies by sound, the heartbeat's pause before a backstab: while the entire server marvels at the name "Scalpel," no one knows that the person behind the screen is slowly losing the use of his hands, inch by inch.
The more "people" he kills, the more lives he saves. This is a path to godhood, and a path of farewell to a pair of hands. When the sensation in his fingertips finally fades to nothing, he has one last strike left: for a fraction of a second, for those who can never come back, and for a dawn he will never see with his own eyes.
